Sometimes we hear this phrase often "I am bored :(" especially from younger folks and children. Boredom, though often seen as unpleasant, actually ser… ...more

Humanity has worked relentless to secure resources and increasing comfort, from hunter-gatherers where most of the time was spent in security food, ag… ...more

A development pipeline involves several tasks to perform, broadly around design, development, testing and deployment. We can draw a timeline of code f… ...more

Existing codebases invariably have some compiler diagnostics, warnings or notes which linger over for ages. These are valuable suggestions when consid… ...more

As engineers or developers, we see problems more than others, there is a high chance of skew in prioritizing what to solve first. The kind of problems… ...more

Humans relate with stories and stories should be simple. However, we might be dealing with quite a lot of complexity to make things work and if it is … ...more

The very moment we write code for a project, we start collecting some sort of technical debt since some decisions start to be frozen in time and rest … ...more

A common problem we often see in software development world is rewrite or improve and maintain existing implementation. Rewrite, certainly is an optio… ...more

In past few decades new programming languages have sprouted and have been adopted with varied success think of go, rust, javascript, python etc. they … ...more

There are mainly two ways to consume software, prebuilt and source forms. Both have advantages and downsides. Consuming only prebuilts hinder's custom… ...more

How many programming languages, different data structures and algorithms, common programming paradigms and patterns does one understands? All these ar… ...more

Yesterday we had discussion about innovating from with-in, there is another pearl of wisdom from Eric when he was asked What is the best piece of advi… ...more

Cisco acquired Webex in 2007 for whopping $3.2B and along with the products they got the mind of Eric Yuan as well. Eric is founding engineer of WebEx… ...more

In software programming sometimes we are faced with situations where we can write logic to recover from an unexpected situation or simply crash the pr… ...more

Assertions are checks for things which should never happen. We add them at places where we think "this is impossible to happen ..." unless we have tha… ...more

Look closely at the daily task list and calendar, there is a certain number of repeated elements. They may follow different cadence e.g. some tasks re… ...more

Open-source has been a successful development process in past few decades we have seen major changes in software industry adopting Open-source has bec… ...more

We talked about products and technologies and how opensource fits in this context. You might be wondering if there are real world scenarios playing ou… ...more

Yesterday We discussed product and technology and their relationship and constraints. Considering open-source as process for developing products might… ...more

Products are built using technology or platforms. They are more than just technology. A product focus is on solving particular problem It needs user t… ...more

We have many distractions in daily life and a lot of them are digital distractions apps dings on the mobile phone, beeps on laptop, beeps on home appl… ...more

Sometimes we find ourselves in situations where you feel that your message is important but it's not being heard or understood as it must. It could be… ...more

Often times when we have a problem, we try our best to describe it to others but then we maybe describing it vaguely or completely wrong. That is unde… ...more

Cicero one of marquee orators believed that appealing to emotions of audience is far more effective than logic and scientific reasoning. As per Plutar… ...more

Often we add a feature or service to enhance products or fix defects to service them in field. In software products the process will often result in a… ...more

Traditionally productivity is defined as 'output / input', however productivity is not always about quantity, quality matters too. In fields like Soft… ...more

Output is immediate, tangible results whereas outcome is long term impact or consequence of action Output focuses on specifics e.g. a specific product… ...more

A lot of times we write the code and throw it at the compiler and see what it comes up with, if it complains, we try to silence the diagnostics, warni… ...more

We learn a wide variety of tools to help us with various tasks. It does take a while to find out which tools are optimal for a task or a class of task… ...more

Developer and Build Engineer roles often overlap, especially in smaller teams, but they serve distinct purposes and have unique responsibilities in so… ...more

A regular output of productivity in software is lines of code. We talk about how many lines of code someone writes on average per day. But a converse … ...more

There are two aspects broadly in any product organization The products itself Enabling technologies to support it If you are part of former, it's ea… ...more

Keep it Short and Descriptive: Start with a brief summary of the change (ideally 50 characters or fewer). For example, "busybox: Fix memory leak in in… ...more

It is crucial for effective collaboration, maintaining the code overtime and understanding the code in general. Well written commit messages help the … ...more

Many of us know systems which are not touched because they should always work. Software is getting into critical infrastructures at an accelerated pac… ...more

Open Source communities are hard to build and unlike 20 years ago, there is a lot of competition with millions of projects on github/gitlab and new on… ...more

If you work on software then you would agree that there are bugs everywhere, more code you peruse more bugs you see. Impelled by our negativity bias, … ...more

When building Linux Distributions, you will be faced with two approaches - ground-up and top-down Each has its own advantages and use cases depending … ...more

A rolling release is a software development model where updates are continuously delivered rather than in large, fixed version releases or time-based … ...more

In last two decades a lot of productivity related software apps, books, and articles have been published, they all tell you about cool hacks to shore … ...more

I have been using a search engine's news portal, and It has recommendations turned on. Slowly it has turned into a clickbait. To a point where I am no… ...more

When drafting an open-source contribution policy, there are several key considerations to ensure the policy aligns with the organization's objectives,… ...more

We used to have devices running embedded software but never connected to other computers or networked in any way, however, this has changed in past de… ...more

It is important and can be a show-stopper, so creating good guidelines is an important part of Open-source strategy Use tools to scan Open-source cod… ...more

Governance ensures that the use, contribution, and management of FOSS align with the company's strategic objectives, legal requirements, and operation… ...more

OpenSource software (FOSS) has become an appealing option for various IT infrastructures, offering companies access to plethora of tools and other sof… ...more

In a 2022 study by Linux Foundation, It is estimated that 70-90% of any given piece of modern software contains open source components Did you know th… ...more

Software organizations are not immune to silos, despite their deep technological focus. I have heard silos being attributed to be a people trait, but … ...more

Taking shortcuts in software development might save time in the short run, but it often leads to technical debt and headaches down the road. Skipping … ...more

In one of previous posts I promised to write about Innersource. Today let's discuss Innersource In the rapidly evolving world of software development,… ...more

When an organization wants to use open-source software, a common practice is to take a release and start working with it, initially testing out on ups… ...more

Over time a lot of software has been written, and a common theme has emerged on building on top of existing softwar,e or we shall say reuse, some exam… ...more

Yesterday I mentioned that 70% of total cost of software products over its lifetime is maintenance, so how can you reduce this cost, Using open-source… ...more

Many organizations do not realize that initial development and design costs are a fraction of total cost of the product over its lifetime. In some stu… ...more

Yesterday I was driving on local roads, and I read this inspirational quote on the changeable letter signboard outside the local church Remember the d… ...more

WL Gore, the makers of Gore-Tex has a unique cultural tradition When a project does not work out, they celebrate it with a beer or champagne just like… ...more

In his iconic works Tractatus, Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein said "the limits of my language are the limits of my world" It can be interpre… ...more

Linux came on the Operating Systems scene during last decade of 20th century, how many new operating systems have come after ? RISCV instruction set (… ...more

If you are repeating a task more than once in a week don't worry so much but if the task is repeated daily, you must consider options to automate it, … ...more

Managed package ecosystems accelerate developer productivity manifolds and promotes reuse. Here below is a small list of languages having package mana… ...more

We see a lot of discussions on internet on recommending productivity tools for doing X software in Y framework/language etc. How many have really used… ...more

Before sourcecode management tools like gitlab, github, where did developers keep their coding pearls of wisdom? mostly on their home directory. I hav… ...more

You might have wondered why some programming languages like go, python rust go as far to include package management, buildtools, etc. as part of ecosy… ...more

Concurrency and parallelism are beautiful advanced programming concepts. Hardware continues to evolve and pack more and more compute units made availa… ...more

Writing business plan is a process of crystallizing the thoughts that we have in mind into a document which can communicate the body of work clearly a… ...more

Whenever a new project is started, we have a tendency to read the problem hastily and get on to the computer and start coding it. This is a mistake, i… ...more

How do you see the tools when developing software ? We write correct language primitives and syntax to represent the program logic. To get best out of… ...more

I have seen fabulous computer programmers, who can code any hard problem at hand. However, I have seen few whose code can be understood easily by othe… ...more

I wanted to develop a habit to go for a daily walk, and I will always find a reason to skip more often than not, then I decided to give fewer reasons … ...more

The investments which turned out to be good, I remember vividly and inherently take credit for them however, the ones which did not turn out to be so … ...more

A famous Koan goes like this: Sitting outside the monastery Two monks were arguing about the flapping flag First one said, "Look, the flag is moving" … ...more

I have come across this saying quite often it's easy to start but hard to finish. Asking a bit deeper why is that so ? we will find that when we say "… ...more

We do not say no often, it is in our DNA to build collaborations and communities, therefore any ask upon us is seen as an opportunity to build the col… ...more

Digital age brought the internet revolution and made knowledge spread easily, everyone carries mobile phones in pockets today which makes it available… ...more

At a conference or fireside chats and discussions, one person is and expert who answers everything and other person is performing journalistic duties … ...more

Assume a large software team and a developer commits a piece of code which breaks the build inadvertently, build failure is notices by several develop… ...more

There is a limit to resources, therefore ever-increasing demand for resources is not sustainable. With software engineer's hat on How many times we wi… ...more

Why do we hold back our questions? In human conversations, we exchange information and learn from each other secondly, improve interpersonal relations… ...more

If I asked you, Have you heard of Edwin hubble?, most like yes would be the answer, however if I asked you who is Henrietta Leavitt ? what would you s… ...more

Sometimes, line of questioning a problem can get narrower and narrower and heavens forbid into a rat-hole therefore we must consider broader scope and… ...more

One of the interesting techniques used in Upanishads is neti neti, this is an expression in Sanskrit language which means not this, not that, It is a … ...more

We are going through information revolution, here knowledge work is fundamental building block, cognitive skills are driving this. Leadership has to e… ...more

Closed source is like a painting which no one will see, Open source is the Art that all get to see, appreciate, and criticize and some of it will beco… ...more

Albert Einstein debated Niels Bohr using light-filled box mental experiment on his understanding of quantum mechanics, when Bohr died, someone noticed… ...more

Deluge of information and technology can weaken inner voice Explore your internal compass This newsletter provides tips each weekday to help you in th… ...more