August 2007

Language and Accent Issues

August 31, 2007

Ouch! I landed on this Wikipedia article on Indian English which had some of the common mistakes in Indian English grammar. After decades of speaking and writing English, it is funny how some of the incorrect English habits (or “grammar tweaks”, as they call it) persists in my speaking and writing. Reading an article is […]

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Posts by Smarter People

August 29, 2007

In the last couple of days, Phil Haack and Guy Kawasaki (separately) have written beautiful posts on subjects that I mentioned in my latest posts. On validation, Phil writes “Don’t Be a Validation Nazi” to follow on his “… How to Validate an Email Address …” post. My article on the subject of unnecessary field […]

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Hiring People

August 26, 2007

If you ask any manager about hiring, he or she would say, “I want to hire the best employees and my hiring process is streamlined to do that.” There is quite a lot of material, if you wish to read, about how to interview employment candidates to find the best one that meets your project […]

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Unnecessary Field Validations

August 25, 2007

I was reading this interesting article from Haacked.com about email validation. The author Phil Haack illustrates how most email validations are really too strict because the RFC (Request for Comments) really had a much liberal interpretation of what characters an email address can have. Although in practice, most mainstream email services (like Yahoo! Mail and […]

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Specialized Requirements Analyst

August 25, 2007

Kalpesh left a very valid comment on my last post on overcoming the inertia against writing requirements, where he said that this task can be better performed by someone “who understands domain of the customers & enough of technology”. I fully agree with this comment as, from experience, I have seen dramatically improved results when […]

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Overcoming “Requirements Writing” Block

August 23, 2007

Here is a fact of life: When given a development task, most developers directly jump into coding with the bare minimum of understanding or documenting the requirements. This happens despite the common knowledge that lack of proper requirements management can derail the project and result in an application that has little value for end users. […]

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Getting Rid of the TV

August 16, 2007

A couple of weeks ago, we moved the TV from the living room to my study room. This has enormously reduced wasted time watching stupid stuff on TV. Otherwise the TV is on all the time. Half the time, you spend watching the advertisements. And the rest of the time — well, let us say […]

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Books, Links and Crazy Coincidences

August 13, 2007

Drat! Josh Kaufman has updated the Personal MBA reading list. Several new books have been added and a few have been removed/updated. I was not making that much progress towards reading all those books, but suddenly it has becoming an even further target. Actually, I am being silly — the Personal MBA is perhaps one […]

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Indian Software Product Innovation

August 12, 2007

This is a follow-up from my previous article, The Rising Rupee-Dollar Ratio”. Whenever there is talk about the growth of the Indian IT industry, there is much lamenting of the fact that almost all the revenues come from outsourced services such as programming and testing instead of from software products. People say and rightly so, why […]

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The Rising Rupee-Dollar Ratio

August 12, 2007

I recently received an email article entitled “Stronger Rupee, Stronger India”. The essay was about the appreciation of the Indian Rupee against the US Dollar since the beginning of the year. The author’s argument was that a stronger rupee was better for India as it would make Indians less dependent on getting low-cost IT service […]

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