What is the Biggest Challenge For Programmers?

This video was recorded about 6 years back in 2004 on MSDN Channel 9, where Eric Gunnerson was talking about challenges for Programmers then, around 2004. One of the biggest challenge used to be about keeping up with the pace of technology around you. Not surprisingly, we feel, nothing has changed since then. It is still one of the biggest challenges programmer face.

Ask any .NET developer what do they think about .NET 4.0 and a whole range of other new stuff released this year alone, you can feel the overwhelming anxiety. They are more confused and we should say more scared at the pace of .NET platform evolution, than before. Not surprising at all.

Link to the Video here. Don’t forget read comments on that page.

There are a couple of important aspects  in those comments. Here are some excerpts from the comments:

• It is a good philosophical observation about the way people work when they're abstracted away from semantics, and I think we're seeing now what was originally intended; save your time to worry about the bigger issues.

• The rate of change is indeed a problem. And it is constantly accelerating.

• Will development become something you get into after getting your college degree and after 10 years you will have to "retire" to another profession? Or maybe the cost and effort of acquiring the necessary skills will be so high in comparison to the time you have to leverage it, that it won't even be economical - and it will all be outsourced?

Teaching Online : Digital Whiteboard Vs. Physical Whiteboard

Adios Amigo, Power point. This was the first thing we did, after we noticed that teaching online isn’t as easy as we thought. Power Point presentations (for that matter any prepared or structured presentations) may be good for certain types of information exchange, but we felt, they are not definitely meant for teaching a technology.

We improvise our training programs almost every minute. So we keep our planning and teaching material to the least possible. This will let us fine tune our programs, examples and illustrations based on audience, time of the day or even based on events that happened that morning. With prepared presentation, we really got bored ourselves talking about the same old thing. And as mentioned earlier, Power point presentations proved to be quite rigid. It was quite difficult to let ideas flow and in more than one way forced us to kiss good bye to improvisation.

And we had a terrible experience using a digital whiteboard in place of a normal, traditional, physical whiteboard, call us old school. Even with a Wacom touch pad. It was a whole lot difficult to draw something on digital white board than we ever thought, an absolute thought breaker. So, we turned to what we are most comfortable with. A physical, traditional and old school white board. And we positioned a Logitech webcam to capture the whiteboard and feed the video on the screen in stead of a power point presentation. We felt real good and now back to our free style and lively training session.

We tend to believe that we could actually cover more with a free form, in a way that is more relevant and easily understandable than a fixed form presentation.

Call it old school, but teaching is never better.

Teaching Online : What We Have Learnt So Far

“Unleash Your Career”, was our first ever program on Supercool School, and officially our first ‘exclusively online’ program. We did stream some of our sessions live on the internet, but those sessions were held in a class room environment with some students attending those sessions in person. This was our first fully ONLINE session. We were both excited and anxious on how it would go. But it went quite well. We have also received great feedback about the session.

But, who could judge the quality of your performance better than yourself. So, once the session was over we sat for a review. We watched the whole recording ourselves. We immediately noticed it wasn’t up to our own expectations. We watched it twice just to make sure.  It was in fact quite terrible by our own standards. We made a note of few things that we could immediately improve while some needs a bit more practice and getting used to.

Since then, we have been working on our shortcomings and getting better day by day with each session. Though we believe, there is not much you can learn by just reading this (but a whole lot just by actually doing it), we would like to share a few challenges or hurdles in teaching online, that we noticed.

• No visual cues from participants, left us guessing about how well audience were receiving the presentation.
• Power point presentations proved to be quite rigid. It was quite difficult to let ideas flow and in more than one way forced us to kiss good bye to improvisation.
• It was a whole lot difficult to draw something on digital white board than we ever thought, an absolute thought breaker.
• The only way you can project your passion or enthusiasm in teaching is by projecting all that in your voice. Not an easy task, leave alone effectiveness.
• You can’t move freely. for that matter, if you don’t have a wireless microphone, you are literally stuck to your chair. You may loose body language, most importantly your gestures that convey so much meaning in a class room environment.

In later posts, we will share how a few changes we made in the setup have been helping us to do it much better than our first session and getting much better session by session.