I am a lazy developer!

By Neeraj Shinde
http://shindeneeraj.blogspot.com

No, do not go with the word ‘lazy’ here. Because it does not mean what it sounds like. I notice that I have become a kinda lazy programmer since I’ve joined Oracle Corp. But do not be under a wrong notion here, thinking that I do not work at all – it’s just that I have become smarter in my work and save ample time for other activities.

Laziness is complied by smartness. So when I say lazy, it means one who thinks hard and acts smart. Definitely, working smarter fetches more recognition than slogging hard to complete a task. It really doesn’t make much sense to work hard in digging out the cause for the problem just to end up to discover that the problem was not really a problem at all. All it takes is an out of the box thinking approach and a little bit of experience on the subject to quickly resolve issues.

Thanks to the Oracle’s work culture which gives me ample freedom to fix my own problems. Flexible work timings definitely boost the morale of the employees to act smarter. This try to develop the feeling that Oracle’s problems are my own problems and it’s me who is going to decide how to fix them. Every fix, every enhancement is an achievement which is the source of new vigor to face newer problems.

One more thing which I’ve recently learnt is a quicker way to fix problems. I call this an Indexed approach towards problem solving which I bet is the smarter approach for quicker answers. All you need to have is a little bit of sincerity and a great deal of process compliance. Let me explain this! As days go by in the life of a developer, he keeps on encountering numerous issues – the so called bugs the solution to which might be many. Each solution need not be called the best or rather a solution which you would call the best in one context would not be the same in another scenario. A solution is paramount for the customer and that’s why you are paid, right? But what is more important from the developer’s point of view is not the solution; it’s the approach which gains significance in a long term. Indexed approach suggests that a developer should take a note of the approach and the tools needed to implement this approach in order to mould it into a workable solution. A solution is mere incidental and cannot be generalized. One should rather remember the approaches.

Keeping in sync with this methodology, I’ve now started maintaining a personal repository of the tools, scripts, handy queries, documents etc. which provide me a smarter way to build solutions. Indexing refers to the fact that the problem statement itself should suggest you the location of the information needed to build up a workable and possibly the best solution.

That’s why I say, “Knowledge is not knowing everything, it’s all about knowing where everything is stored”.