Author: akbar

Ramblings on Ideas, Creativity, Technology, and Spirituality.

It’s all about principle

Today I had a wonderful meeting with David as a part of our weekly meetings. It was such an amazing process of learning for me. David is this highly motivated guy who can nicely charm anyone into his inspirational talk. We were talking about BDD(Behaviour Driven Development) and took a small task and broke it down to a BDD format. If you look it up, there are no books yet on BDD. The very little literature is some blog posts and some observations on websites. But it’s an outgrowth of something called TDD – Test Driven Development.

So, anyhow all during the meeting I keep on thinking that I am going to come across some book that will tell me exactly how to do BDD. But today I realized that doing or implementing BDD based upon a book or a blog post is nothing but working on a ‘practice’. It doesn’t mean that I actually grok the ‘principle’ behind BD. So this whole process I underwent with David really helped me to see the principle behind it and just work on it. Our own implementation of BDD will be our own ‘practice’ of the general ‘principle’ – which is perfectly ok.

But I just had to know that and learn it. Realizing that is such a powerful experince to me. I am thankful for the learning.

The Producer’s talk

In his great book called – The Now Habit – Niel Fiore describes how producers differ from procrastinators. Here are 5 common sentences that needs to be replaced in procrastinator’s language.

  1. I have to ==> replace with ==> I choose to
  2. I must finish ==> replace with ==> When can I start?
  3. This is so big ==> replace with ==> I can take one small step.
  4. I must be perfect ==> replace with ==> I can be human
  5. I don’t have time to play ==> replace with ==> I must take time to play

This book has such a unique take on procrastination. Everything he talks about how and why people procrastinate – I can relate to. I have a plan setup for the next one week. I will be following the techniques taught in this book and see how I fare.

Project Rhino

I have a great opportunity at work to hone my Javascript skills. We are productizing an amazing and simple piece of web software and it pretty much involves converting basic Coldfusion, inline javascript code to make it a pure javascript library. It is going to be fun and I am excited that I would learn javascript the proper way and use it in a object oriented fashion. I like to call it my own little ‘Project Rhino’ –

A new start

I have always went back and started things around. And this time around it is happening once again with blogging. There have been many changes in my life in the past 3 months. Very deep personal changes. I think I am a new person and with a whole new outlook on life. This is going to be a new start for that new life. I am going to choose to be honest and direct in here. This would be my new home for my thoughts, ideas and digital life.