Which state of mind?

The one big difference I find in myself in the last couple of years is that I take the random normal conversations with some of my friends with a pinch of salt. Does that mean that now finally I have a thought process and mind of my own? Or does that mean I am uncomfortable with some of the points that I hear and thus tend to ignore them? What is my state of mind? 

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Unsubscribe

I don't remember how I ended up registering on the wayn.com website. But lately, as I have been on a drive to reduce email overload, I have been unsubscribing from various mailing lists and wayn.com is one among many. But it stands out.

No matter how many times I unsubscribe from their list, I still keep receiving the emails. Funny thing I noticed the last couple of times is whenever I try to unsubscribe, I notice that I am already unsubscribed in their settings. Yet I keep receiving emails from them. Perhaps its a bug. Or perhaps its plain simple desperation.

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Losing touch

For the past couple of weeks, I have been writing a lot of SQL queries as we do a major data update of the db. The update has been fairly painful, requiring a couple of days of manual mapping of old and new data. But what I realized over the last couple of weeks is that I have forgotten SQL and badly. 

Before I dove into the world of startups, I worked at Tesco HSC and I spent a lot of time over there writing SQL queries. Over the years I had become pretty good at it and had learnt some neat tricks such as using a pivot function. The reports I had developed required some complex data processing which meant a lot of temporary tables and a lot of complex sql queries, all while maintaining acceptable execution time. 

But three years later, I seem to have forgotten SQL. I feel my current proficiency in SQL has gone down from intermediate to beginner. But then I think that three years ago, I sucked at CSS and Javascript. I have been spending more time on front end stuff over the last year than back end. Also, I guess the back end stuff that I have had to touch has been fairly simple. So I guess it's OK. 

But it certainly isn't nice to feel that you are losing touch! :( 

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The importance of a good UI

The most popular job board for startups nowadays seems to be the one by hasgeek. There have been other startup job boards around for a while, but the hasgeek job-board seems to have positioned itself as the defacto job board for startups. In fact, I have seen job  posts by companies like Akamai, which is a testament to the popularity.

What were the reasons that in a short span of time it has become the leading job board for startups and geeks? One is of course, it is FREE. This is in contrast to pluggd.in job board which charges you $10 for 30 days. But I have a feeling that the stickiness factor of the hasgeek job board is its UI. Displaying job posts as sticky post-its is something which leaves an impression on the mind of any visitor.

The underlying features are nothing different. The fields are pretty standard and the data you enter at jobs.hasgeek.in is what you would enter at any other job board. Perhaps the ability to tweet the job and spread the word is critical as well, but my hunch is that the decisive factor is the UI. 

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Patience - A key weapon when busting bugs in someone else's code

At some point of time in your career as a software engineer/programmer/developer, you would have come across a situation where you were required to fix bugs or add a feature to an existing code base. Over the past few of months, I have been regularly in such situations as I help develop the newer and slick version of babajob.

A thing which I have noticed over the past few months is my general frustration at how things were implemented previously by different people at different points of time. The real frustration happens when I have to try and resolve bugs which occur because of trying to integrate certain portions of the old pieces with the new one. For this I have to understand  -

1. What feature was the previous developer trying to implement?
2. How was he/she trying to implement it?

If you are able to figure out the second question, figuring out the first one becomes easier as well. But trying to understand how the features were implemented has been a frustrating experience. And once I did understand how it was implemented, it lead to more frustration because I have never come across such implementations before and I always wondered why couldn't this be simply done the way most ASP.NET developers would do it? After all, what is the point of using ASP.NET if your new/edit forms are in .htm pages with javascript which is not jquery or even the retired Microsoft Ajax library. And worst of all, the javascript is not there for ajax calls, but to actually submit the form to a different aspx page!

Of course, over the course of time I have come to realize that the intention in many cases was merely to avoid duplication of code between the web and mobile interfaces. But this could have been achieved in a better manner, a direction in which we are headed slowly but surely.

Coming back to the title of the post, it is very easy to get frustrated by what you perceive as short-comings in the previous implementation. But getting frustrated is unproductive. It makes you lose your focus and concentration from finishing the task at hand and instead shifts your focus to the deficiencies of the previous implementation. As a result, you end up spending more time debugging because you have lost the focus and are unable to spot bugs which you would have had if you were in a calm and focused state of mind.

The best thing in such cases is to just get up and take a 2 min break, drink a glass of water, take a deep breath and try and bring your focus back to what you wanted to achieve.  Be patient and don't get flustered easily.

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Thoughts on the Digital Divide

Last week, I was at a job fair organized by a Micro Finance Institution (MFI) and the target audience were the customers of the particular MFI. Most of them were people from the lower middle class. People vying for the blue collared jobs such as typists, office assistants, drivers, maids, receptionists etc.
It is a humbling experience to meet these people and listen to their aspirations and problems.

I talked to quite a few of them. However, there was one lady whose story intrigued me the most. She must've been aged around 50 and used to work in a factory where she put windings on transformers. She was now looking for any job. Did the factory shut down? Why was she looking for a job that paid her less than the one which she had? Turns out she quit the factory job so that she could withdraw all her provident fund savings to pay a loan which she had taken for her daughter's marriage. No this is not a tragic story from a 70's bollywood movie. By paying up the loan upfront she saved on the interest which would have accrued. Or so she said.

She spoke English very fluently and could speak three other languages and was on the lookout for any decent job. I explained to her how babajob could make her life easier by showing various available jobs in one place so that she could pick and choose the ones she liked and then go ahead. Searching becomes hassle free to quite an extent. Though she did not know how to use the internet or a PC, she understood the benefit and said she would ask her daughter to search for a suitable job.

I think to bridge the digital divide, it is essential to market technology as something which makes life easier and hassle free for the masses. The masses don't care about the internet. They want better jobs. Farmers want better forecast and information. If the internet is seen as something which addresses the day to day problems of these people, then you wouldn't have to ask them to learn how to use the internet. They would learn that themselves!

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Pamphlets/Flyers

When was the last time that you went to any exhibition and remembered an exhibitor for the pamphlets/brochures they were distributing? Chances are very rare. What you might remember is what they demonstrated to you and the impact that demo had on you.

 

If that is the case, then should you focus your energy and resources on secondary materials such as pamphlets? Absolutely, because your customers and users expect your pamphlets or other printed marketing material to be of a certain standard. The better your flyer/pamphlet, the longer is the time before it ends up in the dust-bin. In case you didn't realize, all pamphlets/flyers end up in the waste some time or the other. It might be immediately after handing out or might be months later when the customer is moving to a new place and needs to get rid of the useless stuff.

Remember next time you are putting up a stall at a fair - pamphlets are secondary marketing materials and you are not at the fair to distribute pamphlets. You are there to make an impact on the minds of people whose pain points you are trying solve.

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