Learnings from this week
It had been a great week. Its a short week and longer weekend at DIGICORP this time. We celebrate "DIGICORP Employee Day" on this Friday. The concept is we make sure that employees get one long weekend during the period of March - August. In Gujarat, we usually do not have any holiday during this time, so we tend to give some relief to our team:)
Anyways coming back to the topic of the post, during this week I have learned many things, I would like to share some of the interesting things with you.
1. Getting effective advice on programming and project management
I am facing some issue with improving output of the team under me. I decided to surf internet and search for the solution. There were some specific questions in my mind and I wanted experienced persons to give answers. Which website should I visit?
You can go to stackexchange. Its a wonderful site. Actually it is a group of sites where experts provide their opinion to your questions. The key differentiating factor as compared to other forums is the strong content management policy. They take utmost care that content does not get duplicated. They have effective voting system for each question and related replies.
If you are a programmer you might have heard about stackoverflow. This site is one of the sites under umbrella of stackexchange.
You can check out the question I have asked in Programmer's Section and see the quality of reply I have received. Based on reply, I have read about some of the Agile software development methodologies (Lean and SCRUM). I am planning to implement one of them to my team in next sprint.
2. Loosing Weight :)
I have been playing around this question for almost 20 years now.
In past, my fundamental approach was to do a crash diet and lose weight. I only had one meal in day and sometimes I used to skip that too. With this approach, I have been able to maintain my weight in range of 65-75 kg. There were two problems with this approach.One, I had to be very conscious on what to eat. The other, my weight will reduce almost 8 kgs in a month with crash diet and I will gain the same in another two months. The one month of crash diet sometimes seemed killer. I still believe that fasting for a day in a month or twice a month is of great help. But crash diets do not help.
From last 6 months, I have been trying a completely new approach. I am having two meals in a day. The only thing I have been able to do is not to cross the upper limit of 75 kg. Right now I am on the higher limit of 75. I am trying out some advices from the book "Don't Lose Your Mind, Lose Your Weight". During this week, I came around a nice blogpost, it talks about the same.
You can also check out the Founder's Library post by the same author, if you want to know things related to startups its a great resource.
Looking forward for some weight reduction in next couple of months and for sure a big NO NO to gain now :)
3. Google Charts
You all might be aware of this component from Google. I am working on a product, iPlanner, a tool that helps analyst do slicing and dicing of the data simply and more effectively.
We needed some cool library of charts which can be integrated with .Net.I found Google Charts, which was giving most of the charting features, that I required. I started researching on how it can be integrated with .Net. I was not well aware that Google Code components can easily be integrated with .Net. Further searching, I found a snippet from CodeProject.
If you have any other cool charting library for Silverlight do suggest me. In next month, we are planning to include a lot of charting features in iPlanner.
Hope you find these learnings helpful in someways. Please share any other comments on the above topics.
