technology

Stupid, Inconsistent, Smart or Sound-Smart?

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While doing a head count of what I do and what I’m good at.. I got this list:

Programming Languages

– QBasic, Visual Basic, Fortran77, Fortran90, C, Java, PHP, SQL

Design Softwares

Photoshop, Fireworks, etc

Now, streamlining it down to the ones I use mostly:

JAVA, PHP & SQL.

My destination:

A lot of dudes have this same problem (though I don’t know if its really a problem though), you know that feeling when you seem to be ‘gifted’ in so many areas, and what follows? Indecision!

Imagine having an interview and you’re asked “What language are you good at?”. And you go on mentioning all available ones on planet earth.  Dude, you’re so not it! The question was “”What language…?” not “What languages…?”.  This has really been a stumbling block in some people’s lives, I’m not excluded.

Solution? So simple! There’s always a favorite, no matter the number of available choices.  Just pick one! Be consistent with ONE, stop trying to be sound-smart, its a stupid act (permit me to say that).  Also makes you irrelevant in some cases.  You, thereafter, tend to lose some expensive chances just because of a simple “Smart”.

If you still feel being Jack of all Trades and Master of none is what pays, get a life!

Hard code

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Have you ever felt discouraged while programming? Did you get to a stage where you feel there isn’t a way out? Has headache become part and parcel of you when you hit a dead-end while coding? I feel you pain, pal.

But afterwards, did you hear of a way out? Did you get to know hoe to think outside the box? Were you able to hit a lifetime solution? Are you in search of how to break out of this completely? Do you have an idea of how to soften HARD CODES? If yes, please let me know, so we can both share it.

The Social Network Chicken And Egg Problem

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I got this interestin post from coders lounge
    Hey Seun,
    You don’t know me. I’m just a fan of yours. I’d like to know how you solved the “chicken and egg” problem and succeed with nairaland. Networks like nairaland, fb, twitter are only valuable when there’s a community on it. Therefore nobody wants to join, unless there are already a bunch of users. So how did you gain traction?

 So, you want to start a poultry farm.  You need eggs to make chickens, but you need chickens to lay eggs, so what do you do?  How do you solve this problem?  Simple:

    Buy lots of chickens. The chickens will lay eggs, which will develop into new chickens.
    Buy lot of fertilized eggs and incubate them. They will develop into egg-laying chickens.

To get a social network going, you just have to bribe or beg people to join your social network until it’s big enough to sustain itself. If you’re evil, forcing or tricking them to join also works:

    In ‘The Social Network’ Mark Zuckerberg bootstrapped a social network by hacking into student records and creating accounts for students without their consent, effectively forcing them to join.
    Some dating sites solve the chicken and egg problem by paying a bunch of beautiful female models to join the site and participate.The models attract a lot men to join the site (a form of trickery really), and this attracts more women.
    With Twitter and Quora, employees of the company were the first to start using the sites heavily, then their friends and family, then attention seekers, geeks and celebrities, and finally regular people.  In effect, Twitter and Quora employees were initially paid not just to develop the respective sites but to use them and post on them regularly.

Until your social network takes off, you’ll just have to bribe or beg people to join and participate. I did that.

Worthwhile Experience

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You see, I’ve come to believe something in this life.  There’ s a huge difference between success and excellence.  A computer scientist working as a high ranking military official, that’s success, huge one.  But is there satisfaction? Yes? No?  Whatever the answer may be, it’ll indicate whether computer science was really a passion of yours or you went into it due to pressure.  Excellence is this: You do what you love to do, I mean that good talent of yours is used by you, either income comes in rapidly or slowly, you’re happy.  Friend, I learnt from the famous Indian movie “3 idiots” that, when you follow excellence, success will run after you.  The summary is that, do what you’re good at.  So what will you go for? Success or excellence? I am running after excellence, and believe me, it’s been a Worthwhile Experience.

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