Evolving Technology

Technology is the lifeline of the current day world. The characteristic of today’s technology is that it’s too wide, too deep, too advanced; in simple words, it’s vast.

                Coming closer home, software is no exception to the technology landscape mentioned above. Software, in itself, is a vast field and the evolution of software is unfolding at an unprecedented pace. The laser-sharp human intelligence, the competition to be disruptive and the mad money being poured into the space is not making things any easier.

                Coming even closer home, the application development is no exception to the technology and software landscape. It is expected that engineers know all the vast number of technologies; if not know, then at least be able to learn them at a lightening pace. To add to the woes, the code quality, the design quality, the architecture quality and the functional quality are expected to be nothing less than the best.

                Whether the above scenario is excitement to you or causes stress, pretty much defines what future holds in its arms for you, as an individual. If you can ride the wave of technology evolution, it holds the potential for your evolution, as an individual.

                The humans, as a race on our planet, understand the universe the best and it can only get better. Whether we can sustain the technological advancements and somehow balance it with the environmental concerns will hold the key to our future. Probably, the only question is ‘how long will we survive’?

Knowing Technology

“Entry barrier is always high. Making Knowledge enticing enough, interesting enough and simple enough” – The main roadblock in knowing technology is that it isn’t enticing enough, interesting enough and of course, it’s highly complex. Artificial intelligence as a topic is quite hot and quite attractive, but beyond the definition or probably an overview, isn’t enticing enough and is difficult enough to delve further and deeper. And probably, there is no easy trick to make it enticing enough, interesting enough and simple enough.

“Take up a challenge” – Doing a certain action and being successful requires perfect ingredients. You should have enough resources to take up and successfully complete a challenge. Choosing a correct goal is the most fundamental step of taking up a challenge. ‘SMART’ goals stand for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time bound goals.

“Evaluating Options” – Being at the cross road of taking up a challenge, the different options that are cropping up are building a small starter NLP(natural language processing) library, a small starter in-memory java database and a small starter programming language.

“Finalizing the option” – In the current context, I think the most enticing option that I can start with is a small starter java in-memory database, which will present me with the challenges of knowing a database technology and learning the java to a deeper level. However, I would like to receive opinions, suggestions, ideas, inputs and anything else that will help me finalize the challenge I enroll to. Please be generous and provide your thoughts to me.

“Reaching out further” – Whichever challenge I enroll to, I think I will be reaching out to quite a few of you guys. Hopefully, this will help me know technology better and I believe I will have to count on the knowledge and experience available to keep moving ahead in the endeavor.

Courting Technology

Insanity Is Doing the Same Thing Over and Over Again and Expecting Different Results.

                                                            - Albert Einstein (probably)

Technology is for a purpose – We live in an extremely advanced world today and just thinking about all the technologies that exist, forget acquiring of knowledge all of them, is something of a daunting task. So, how to start dating the technology? Well, I don’t know!! Probably a step to nowhere – but what is a technology? Each technology is born for a purpose and continues to live and evolve only till it continues to serve the purpose. If you want to know a technology, know its purpose and if you want to create one, find a purpose.

Approaching technology – Stealth technology in fighter aircrafts, Stem cells in biotechnology, Large Hadron collider in atomic physics, artificial intelligence in computer software, hyperloop in transportation are just some of names of what is happening in the technology sector. If you want to know a technology, understand what it does and more importantly, what it can’t do, yet. The amount of investment gone into technologies is humongous and the level of complexity is beyond comprehension of the vast majority. In line with the “Pareto principle”, probably it’s time to devise the “Super Pareto principle” now – “1% of people handle 99% of complexity of this world”.

Only extreme actions can lead to extreme results – Being a software professional for quite a few years, I believe I am enough educated in terms of technology but for sure, nowhere close to understanding the best of the breed  technologies. Living in the cocoon of the profession is neither going to take me any closer. Knowing how the technology does what it does is like knowing how the god created the world – it’s extreme. It is the first mammoth step to falling in love with technology.

Loving is devoting – A technology is not as easy as making friends or loving your spouse. The shear complexity of the technological advancement makes it incomprehensible. Loving technology is probably like Thomas Edison inventing a bulb. To create a technology then probably is equivalent to landing on Mars. But, what’s life for, if not for attempting magic. The intelligence needs to be expanded, devoted and probably exploded to fall in love, this time with technology.