Uttam Kini's Blog

  • The scarcity mindset

    I have noticed a peculiar practice among the older generation of my family. They hate “wasting food”. They will overeat even if it isn’t in their best interests. Most have metabolic disorders and eating more is bad for them. This doesn’t apply just to food. They also hate giving stuff away even if they will Read more

  • On busywork

    The 70 hour work week meme is quite popular on social media these days. It took me 15 years of experience to debunk the myth that I have to work 40 hours a week to be actually “productive”.In the early part of my career, it was simpler. As a software engineer someone told what to Read more

  • Developer productivity

    Thanks to the popularity of generative AI, there has been an explosion of AI based coding assistants.Then there is the recent McKinsey report on measuring developer productivity. Management has again fallen back into the trap of measuring dev outputs (rather than outcomes). They feel that somehow, if they can improve dev productivity numbers using coding Read more

  • Now I am reading books more than ever

    It’s been three months now and I have read more books than what I did in the last one year before that . There are a couple of reasons why 1. I bought a kindle paperwhite three months ago 2. I challenged my philosophy of reading one book at a time I have been reading Read more

  • Pair Programming on a Mac

    I have been pair programming for more than four years. One of the most basic things that you need to do is to find a way to share your screen, keyboard and mouse. The easiest to setup is with two people working on a laptop. It is also the most uncomfortable because you end up Read more

  • Hybrid Mobile App Development : Learning from experience

    Building mobile apps is not a side dish anymore, it has become a part of the main course for businesses. Hybrid mobile apps (Javascript + Native) tick more proverbial checkboxes than pure native apps as far as a sales pitch is concerned for non graphics/game apps. The hybrid supporters will tell you to go read Read more

  • Dilemma : What is the best way to create an object in JavaScript ?

    JavaScript is a powerful but weird programming language. Syntactically it carries a lot of baggage from class based Java and ultimately C++,  even though it is not a class based language. It is an object based language. Everything is an object (like Ruby). The most commonly used syntax for defining and creating objects goes like Read more

  • Build Automation on Windows

    I have heard  people complain that it is hard to automate almost anything on Windows/.Net. It is one of the few things that even I agreed with, until I tried to do it a couple of days ago. To do it you may have to  not do everything that Microsoft tells you to and not Read more

  • Configuration belongs to the environment and not to the application

    Sometime ago I helped a client create an internal .net web application. One of the decisions that we had to make was on having a different web.config file for different environments. On a previous project, I had used xml poke nant tasks to do it. It had worked for us then, so I solved the Read more

  • The pain of using a BPM tool

    If you lookup the term BPM online, you will either find Business Process Management or Business Process Modelling. As concepts they make sense; In business process modelling, you represent your business process graphically, so that you understand them better, implement them correctly and continuously improve them. Business process management is a more high level ‘holistic management approach’, Read more