Patiently waiting for the tide to pass!

  I didn't blog for quite some time now not because I was busy but because of electricity issues.  I usually blog at night, when my day is almost over and I feel like reflecting on what happened that day.  Its summer now, the humidity is awful and every air-conditioner in the neighborhood gets turned on at night.  In turn, it means that our poor electricity supply isn't sufficient and thus, we get low-voltages.  Even with an UPS, I'm unable to keep my system running because the voltage remains bad not just for half an hour, but for the entire night.

  Weirdly enough today, I'm on my old UPS and it has managed to survive for a little more than an hour now.  But on other days, I just switch off my system at 9pm to avoid frustration.  Even though there are dozens of channels on the television, I rarely find something worth watching.  But not to worry; if there is anything that I learned in Trivandrum, its that I still love to read books.  Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is what I'm reading currently and it feels good to read books again.  I'm thinking of making it a habit to read books for at least an hour every night.

  The other topic that I wanted to touch upon today was Zion.  As you might probably know, Zion is the local cafe that belongs to my teammate.  For two weeks now, I have been trying to organize proper DotA matches at Zion.  There is no point in mindlessly playing the game like idiots.  We need to get organized, learn, practice, improve and evolve to become the best at whatever it is that we do.  To become the best in DotA, we must first play proper -cm mode drafted matches.  Surprisingly, I managed to pull that off and (most) people are now eager to play -cm and are even asking for it themselves.

  I thought it would be impossible to make em play proper matches and that if they did, they will eventually improve.  Sadly though, I was wrong.  It seems that it was the easier part.  To actually make them think is the tough part.  I'm not sure whether its the effect of World of Warcraft which they recently started playing or its just their nature, but they seem dumb.  There are one or two exceptions like Siva who has improved a lot and properly understood the game.  But others don't seem to understand even the basics.

  Its not even their lack of knowledge and talent that I hate.  Its their lack of ability to think.  I mean, DotA is not a mundane, slow, stupid game.  Its like a game of chess plus teamwork and agility.  You need to think; you need to think a lot in-fact.  You should have the ability to read and understand your situation so that you can adapt to it.  You need to communicate, think collectively, concentrate on whats important, prioritize and keep your nerve.  More than everything, you need the desire to improve.  Sadly, they don't seem to have any of these.

  Finally, I realize now that I really miss my team.  From a eight member team, we are now down to just the two of us, me and Praveen.  Raja joins us occasionally, but that is pretty much it.  To think that these people aren't even as smart as we were two years ago, is just sad.  The saddest truth of them all is that, till these players improve, I can't.

Taste of Teamwork at Work

  At work today, me and my colleagues got our first taste of a team project.  It was only a mock project created for evaluation purposes.  Actually, when we started work, we were under the impression that it was going to be too easy.  The requirements were very simple and were similar to what we had practiced already.  On top of that, we had a lot of members in the team and so, once the work is split among the members, the work-load on an individual would be meager.  It sounds all too good, doesn't it?

  Life is never that simple.  To be more precise, programming is never free of glitches and teamwork is never easy.  Writing a piece of code may sound simple and straightforward once you know the syntax.  But it will throw an error when you least expect it.  The same piece of code that worked yesterday won't work today.  The code that works in one system might not work in another.  google is the god we turn to during such crisis but sadly, we were denied that liberty this time.  So, whenever we encountered an error which we haven't faced before, we felt like a patient with an incurable disease who doesn't believe in god.  You felt doomed!

 Next up is teamwork. A mother takes ten months to deliver a child. It doesn't mean that ten mothers can deliver a child in one month.  Though working as a team helps a lot, it doesn't mean that every work can be shared or that the logic becomes simpler.  In an article that I read recently, the author said that innovation can come only from teams in which the members trust each other completely. To get a simple work done, we may not have to trust each other but we still have to work together. Working together is way more complicated when you have different perceptions, different ideas and even different languages. In a team, it is not enough even if everyone do their work properly; their work should synchronize well with each other's. That is the key.

 Fortunately or unfortunately, I got caught in the middle of the chaos as I was given the job of combining everyone's work together. For me though, the whole experience felt like home. I'm familiar with the confusion, the stringent debugging, the slow code-walkthrough etc. In fact, the whole team was quite happy at the end of the ordeal.  I on the other hand, loved every second of it, but I wouldn't wanna do it for more than 8 hours..