Pimp My Architecture

Pimp my Architecture

There were a bunch of great presentations over at InfoQ last week. My personal favorite is Dan North’s Pimp My Architecture, a story of how he rescued a (possibly hypothetical) project from being a “shanty town”.

It’s a bit high level so you won’t be able to get some concrete steps from it, but project managers and tech leads would probably get some good tips along the way.

Learning Proverb

There’s an old Chinese Proverb that everybody knows:

I hear and I forget;
I see and I remember;
I do and I understand.

I find that that proverb still lacks another item:

I teach and I master.

There are some reasons why teaching can help one in achieving mastery in one’s craft. First is that it requires a certain level of skill in the craft before you can even start teaching. Another is that students rarely follow the same lines of thought as the teacher, and in doing so exposes the teacher to scenarios that they never have experienced before.

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Of course this doesn’t mean that everyone who teaches are masters of their craft. There are teachers who continuously teach outdated or incorrect information to their students.

Don’t be like them; continuous learning should always be part of your lifestyle.

What the Wealthy Buy on Pay Day

Ignoring for a moment that this video comes from an MLM guy and that I hate MLMs with a passion, the following video is a must-watch in my book.

Edit: the video was taken down. -_-

Anyway, here’s the gist of things:

  • Poor people waste their money on inexpensive but useless stuff. In the Philippine context, that might be cigarettes or cellphone load.
  • The middle class are worse off: they spend money on stuff that drains them of money. Houses, cars, spending on credit but just paying the minimum per month, etc. Most of them only appear to be rich, but in reality they don’t have any accumulated wealth.
  • The wealthy spend money on stuff that gives them money: investing on stocks, building businesses, etc. They actually avoid buying what the things the so-called “rich” people buy because they know it can jeopardize their financial independence.

It’s nothing new if you’ve read a couple of good financial management books. The good part about the video is it’s short enough to share to “busy” friends.