Random Musings

Way back when I just set out in the IT world, I attended an interview for an open position as a Programmer/Analyst (I hardly see any opening bearing that title anymore).

The Interviewer asked me, amongst others, to explain my understanding of the concept of "Portability" in relation to software development.

To be frank - I did not know the answer but I thought I could pull a fast one by just explaining it within the concept of the gramatical meaning. So, I replied that it was when a piece of software code was "small" and "compact". The Interviewer kept nodging me on as if I was on the right track.

To my surprise -I did not get the job but of course, my response was way wrong but the interviewer gave me false hope with his body language. Moral of the story - don't try to adjudge the outcome of an interview based on the body language of the Interviewer - it could just be a red herring.

Why do interviewers always ask - "where do you see yourself in the next 5 years" - question? Not sure anybody will respond in the negative - well, who knows - I may be wrong since I always responded with the expected answer (I think ?) - grow with the company and advance my career to boot.

My first Eureka moment in software developemnt -specifically Windows platform - getting introduced to Windows Messaging - it is the coolest concept ever - it is pure magic. It is telepathy of programming. it is a radio based concept - transmitter/receiver or speak/listen. It helped a lot with shaping the state of event based programming as well as the seperation of concerns in the OOP based MVVM design pattern in the 90s and 2000s.

The concept of Promise was another turning point. It was not really new - just a glorified background processing concept or asynchronous programming. Probably more apt when making API calls and not sure of when you'll receive a response back and do not want to make a process blocking call.

The Factory concept - IT folks sure love showboating - always coming up with acronymns and terminologies that may confuse the uninitiated or obfuscate its real meaning- which is exactly the point. Anyway, factory in software development is just another fancy concept of describing a function that returns an object.

Latest fad in town - RNN/LSTM/CNN - all related with some kind of network composed of nodes that tries to decipher the pattern inherent in a set of input values and its corresponding output values. RNN - recurrent neural network, LSTM - long short-term memory and CNN - convulutional neural network. If you have not guessed it by now - it is all about AI.

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