Smriti Tuteja

This article is a re-post of a wonderful article that I just came across on Funkatron. It is a great piece of advice for developers, the points are evident to all but still we somehow manage to look past them. Have a look, they are worth considering:

• Empathy is your most important skill. Practice it with everyone you interact with, and everyone who interacts with your work.
• Humility goes hand in hand with empathy. Be open to the possibility (likelihood, even) that you are wrong. Know that you will always be learning and improving. Accept and own up to mistakes immediately.
• The less you fear being wrong, the more confident you can be. You are wrong about many things. You know very little about most things. Everyone else is exactly the same way. Embrace it. Always learn, always question, always adapt and grow.
• Understand what you do well, and what you don’t.
• If you have a job you enjoy that pays pretty well, know how lucky you are. We live at a time where the demand for developers exceeds the supply. Not everyone is so lucky.
• Refuse to participate in tribalism. We are social animals, and being part of a group gives us confidence, but warring over technology choices distracts us from doing good work and practicing empathy. Build communities with what we have in common, and embrace the diversity that makes each of us unique. Make them safe places for anyone who is interested in participating.
• Make people’s lives better with your skills.
• Don’t worry about how many people use what you make. Empowering 5 people is incredibly special. They will remember what you did for them.
• Make the community around you better. You don’t need to go to some Magic City of Tech Genius to do important work. It doesn’t matter where you are – what matters is the difference you make in the lives around you. And this is the Internet, so the people “around you” could be on the other side of the world.
• Share what you learn with the people around you. Ask them to share what they have learned with you.
• Your choices of technology and technique matter, but only so far as they serve what you make with them. As a musician, I ran into tons of people who had great gear and loved to argue about equipment, but barely ever finished a song.
• View absolute statements with extreme skepticism.
• Dismissing a technology without a sound, reasonable argument is lazy and prone to error.
• Be extremely careful about participating in X vs Y arguments. They are rarely worth your time.
• Be liberal in learning about new technologies and approaches. Be conservative in using them.
• Set aside a little time each week to learn about new tech. Even just subscribing to a weekly aggregation newsletter (like PHP/Python/JavaScript Weekly) can bring up cool new things to explore.
• If you go to conferences (and you should if you can), try to catch one or two talks about technologies you have no experience with. Look for beginner/intro level presentations about a language you’ve never learned, or a platform you have no experience with. Even if you never use it in production, exposure to different approaches and techniques will make you a better developer.
• Any technology can be the right choice depending on the needs of the project and strengths of the team.
• Never assume you know why a decision was made unless you were in the room when it was made.
• Always keep two groups in mind: the users and the rest of your team. They are the ones affected by the decisions you make.
• Poor communication will kill the effectiveness of the most talented team. Work hard at effective, structured communication and documentation.
• Reserve your loyalty for people. Not brands. Not companies. Not technologies.

Bright minds exist everywhere and technological expertise is an abundance, what usually falls short is the correct recognition, strengthening and harnessing of these skills. The NASSCOM IT service council has thus taken up an initiative to enhance technology skills by providing a platform to showcase them. They are inviting and rewarding highly skilled people in the technological domain for their efforts and expertise. The initiative called TechNgage is aimed at encouraging Indian technologists to become world class techies and stands by the objective statement of ‘Celebrating technology and technologists’.

NASSCOM is looking for working professionals, entrepreneurs, innovators, students or anyone who is driven by the passion for technology. The theme for TechNgage 2016 is Your city - Smart and Secure and aims at the development of a technological solution to make the city smart by enhancing the quality of services in domains like healthcare, water, education, waste management, transport, energy and citizen services. A smart city is essentially the one with a superior quality of all these services and hence healthy and viable living conditions.

The contest comprises of 3 rounds viz. the online phase, offline phase and a 12-week challenge. You can know more about the contest at http://www.nasscom.in/techngage/.

There are cash prizes worth INR 30 lakh to be won but there is much more to the prizes than just the cash. The winners will be awarded as NASSCOM technology fellow and NASSCOM technology explorers at a ceremony that will have eminent people from the corporate, academic and government sectors. It is a great opportunity to receive the recognition and visibility that you have been waiting for. That is not all, there are other perks like an all expenses paid week trip to Silicon Valley with a pre-arranged tour of the top companies, one-year blanket pass to all major NASSCOM events, access to premium research reports and an opportunity to buy a tech gadget worth INR 1 lakh. Well, that is some great exposure and an awesome opportunity to learn.

Register for the event at the earliest, it isn’t an opportunity to be missed.

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Apple! What comes to your mind when you hear this? The red fruit that keeps the doctor at bay or the high-end phones and Mac computers that make everyone drool? Both I believe, but the latter is definitely the stuff of our dreams. Who knew that a company which started in a garage will become the tech giant of the world someday. There was definitely a lot of sweat that went behind it, a lot of commitment that took it where it is today.



But, there was this day in 2011, the 5th of October, when apple flags flew at half staff, stores were flooded with flowers and notes as the Apple founder passed away. Steve Jobs, the man behind Apple had passed away. Other companies like Microsoft flew their flags at half-staff too. He definitely was a widely respected man.

Is it just his position that commands respect? No. There is much more to Steve Jobs than his designation. His life is an inspiration in many ways, there is a lot that can be learnt from him. But one thing that I observed was common in all his life decisions, something that made him unique. Steve Jobs was stubborn and that is one attribute majorly responsible for his success. How is being stubborn a positive attribute, you may ask?

The following are some instances where Steve Jobs was stubborn:

1) Stubborn to do what he liked: Steve Jobs was a loner at school and didn’t get along well with the traditional way of education. He became friends with engineers in his neighborhood and learnt as much as he could about electronics because that was something that deeply interested him. His deep love for electronics paved way for his friendship with Steve Wozniak who later became a co-founder at Apple. His first job at Hewlett-Packard was merely putting screws for electronics assembly but it interested him deeply.

2) Stubborn to learn: Steve Jobs dropped out of his college merely after 6 months of enrollment but he did frequently drop into classes that interested him. He slept on the floor for he didn’t have a dorm room and sold coke bottles to earn a meal but stayed stubborn to learn. He dropped into calligraphy classes and that eventually formed the basis of the beautiful typography in the first Macintosh computer and later into windows too.

3) Stubborn for spiritual enlightenment: He had a job at Atari inc as a technician when he wanted to travel to India to discover spirituality and without thinking about stability he envisaged on his journey to India. He saved for the trip by living a very simple life while his pre-travel tenure at Atari in Los Gatos.

4) Stubborn to Earn: Jobs indulged in illegal sales of blue boxes made by his friend Wozniak, that manipulated telecom signals to make free long distance calls. The venture was illegal but profitable, Steve Jobs hence exchanged his stubbornness for a learning that electronics is both enjoyable and profitable.

5) Stubborn to succeed: Steve Jobs put all his heart and soul into the company he started with his friend at the garage and the company grew to a $2 billion dollar company with 4000 employees in just 10 years, but there was a time when he was fired from the company and that surely left him devastated but he geared up yet again and started another company called NeXT and dedicated all his passion but NeXT was acquired by Apple and hence he returned to Apple. He also founded Pixar that went on to create the world’s first animated feature film.

Yes, Steve Jobs was stubborn, but that is what brought him success and respect. We salute Steve Jobs for teaching us these valuable lessons and being an inspiration. Today on his birthday we thank him for his contribution and perseverance.

Happy Birthday, Steve Jobs!

“While learning equips you, and practice improves your skills, competition helps you prove your worth”

We at HackerEarth strongly believe in the power of them all. We understand the value associated with learning, practicing and competing. With the same goals, we started our flagship event ‘IndiaHacks’ on January 8th, 2016.

IndiaHacks soon received a lot of enthusiasm and emerged as the largest conglomeration of developers. More than 1 lakh developers across the globe registered for IndiaHacks. It has been an amazing journey so far with tremendous zeal, tough competition, and global participation. The first phase is coming to an end and we are delighted with how the event has unfolded.

As much as we believe in competition, we also believe in preparing the participants and rewarding them for their efforts and triumphs. The phase 2 of IndiaHacks is an offline conference that will be held on 19th March at Vivanta by Taj, Yeshwanthpur. The conference will have experts from various domains of technology to talk about different topics and share their knowledge with the community. The experts will be a part of events such as tech talks, panel discussions, working sessions, hangouts etc. and will speak on a plethora of topics like data visualization, big data and analytics, artificial intelligence, machine learning, deep learning, fintech, competitive programming, robotics, scientific computing, open source, embedded systems programming etc.

It is a great opportunity to interact with them and gain knowledge in various domains.The conference will end with rewarding the best minds across each track.



The tickets to the conference are up for purchase and 100 early birds will receive a discount of 25% on each ticket.

Top 20 teams from each track will receive free entry to the conference. The competition doesn’t end here, there are other ways to win free tickets too.

Click on the link below to know more about the conference, what it has in store for you and what you can do to be a part of it.

https://www.hackerearth.com/indiahacks-conference/