Saturday, October 23, 2010

Life lessons from programming :)

Because I had this magic attraction to IT and geeks since early youth (and still trying to find the logic behind the magic :) ), I was so happy to find on Dragos Roua's blog the "7 Life Lessons from a Self-Taught Programmer". In a nutshell, here are the lessons and how I see them:

1. Bugs are on you - if it doesn't work, most of the times it's you. It's not a bad thing, that's the catch :) but you have to find it in order to get things right.

2. You have to face a problem, detours are not an option - we don't like everything we have to face, but, although learning that life's a bitch might help to some extent, it's a fact that one cannot live a perfectly neat life. Bad things happen, one cannot avoid them. They didnt' invent the perfect program to set our lives with (at least not yet :D). But the shortest way to restore peace in one's life is facing the problem and solving it. Any delay, detour, lie to one's self that it might just go if we don't think about it...won't work. Ever.

3. Today's problem is tomorrow's laughter - always. Moreover, once we collect experiences and succeses, problems will not look as bad as they used to.

4. Good focus builds good things - just doing things in order to be done and get rid of is not going to provide the solution on the long run. Sometimes I feel the need to let my mind chill between tasks just to reset it and make it work to the fullest again. It might come not so handy when one's in a great hurry, but in the end the good focus will pay off.

5. If you feel it, do it - I used not to do that and thus accumulate many frustrations. But once one gets the taste of it, life will look oh so different :)

6. Be neat - oh, yes. Being neat can be a quality as well as a misfortune. Being neat might seem to take a lot of time and be of not such big importance (since the big picture is good), but this is a false impression. The little mess one lefts behind would errode what's been built and eventually lead to disaster.

7.There's more than one way to skin a cat - I used to get very upset when the solution I thought was good didn't work at the end. It's an exercise for the self to free one's mind to get the right ways to solve things out (and to understand and accept that sometimes the others'minds can give you the solution :) ).

These were my ideas around the 7 lessons - I bet each one of us has his/her own version - play around the lessons and see what you get :) for me it was a good exercise for the mind.

Friday, October 15, 2010

TEDx Bucharest - Things that make me think twice if what I've known about myself is actually true

1. One can choose to live his/her own life or let life live him/her (Oana Pellea)

2. One can look at the world through the eyes or through the mind (Adrian Bejan)

3. One can curl back to bed in a cold winter day... or get up and go run the North Pole Marathon (Andrei Rosu)

4. One can invent the device of the future or re-invent the mechanism of learning through helping the others learn (Arnoud Raskin)

5. One can be unhappy by expecting the world from oneself or lower expectations in order to get the most out of life (Eric Weiner)

6. One can skydive for the thrill of it or skydive to help communities without access to communication means (Roland Hermann)

7. One can go with the flow or stop and get acquainted to one's self (Oana Pellea)

... and these are just a few things that made me lower my head and promise myself that next time I'll think again before saying "I cannot do it".