It's time to REWORK !

A couple of weeks ago, while I was talking to my colleague Gourav in his team room, a book lying on his desk caught my eye. The front cover image of a crumpled paper and the title of the book - REWORK - sounded interesting to me. I asked my friend whether I could borrow that book for some days from him and as expected, he happily agreed :-)
Thanks Gourav for this beautiful book !

The book has been written by Jason Fried and David Hansson, the founders of 37signals. (the authors say the book is a by-product :-)



You can read through any chapter of this book and you will feel like - yes, this is how it should be ... The authors speak the truth as it emerges from their practical and sound business experience. As the book review says, you do not need to be a workaholic, you do not need to staff up, you do not need to waste time on paperwork or meetings, etc. ... Those are all just excuses. What you really need to do is stop talking and start working.

The authors touch various aspects in running a successful business such as productivity, progress, competitors, promotion, hiring, damage control, culture, etc. They conclude the book with a chapter - 'Inspiration is perishable.' I am tempted to share some part of this chapter as I liked it the most.

"We all have ideas. Ideas are immortal. They last forever.

What doesn't last forever is inspiration. Inspiration is like fresh fruit or milk. It has an expiration date.

If you want to do something, you've got to do it now. You can't put it on a shelf and wait two months to get around to it. You can't just say you'll do it later. Later, you won't be pumped up about it anymore.

Inspiration is a magical thing, a productivity multiplier, a motivator. But it won't wait for you. Inspiration is a now thing. If it grabs you, grab it right back and put it to work."

Hmm ... worth reading this book my friends !
Ohh ... have you already started googling around this book name ? ... That's what I anticipate from whoever has not read this book before :-)

Enjoy reading ...

My first Android app with Rhodes

Few days back, I attended a free online course on 'Develop Mobile apps on Android phones with Rhodes'. The course was made available on RubyLearning.org by Ruby mentor and evangelist Satish Talim. Though it was a very basic course, I got a good hands on the Rhodes framework. Good learning for me ! :-)

I am not going to list down the steps for building this sample app as these are very well explained in the online course by Satish Talim. Similar steps are also available at Rhohub and Rhodes sites under documentation. So I would request everyone who is interested to learn Rhodes to attend this course. It is definitely a good beginning.

The app that I created was a simple Contact app where you can enter Contact's name, email, phone and country and can perform CRUD operations on the Contact model. I pushed my app to Rhohub via Git. This is snapshot of my app on Android emulator :-



Looks good and simple ! Isn't it? Planning to try some advance things with Rhodes now!

The Secret book by Rhonda Byrne

Another good book that I read few days ago! Thanks to my friend Swati Desai for gifting me this wonderful book which talks about spreading only positive thoughts and energy into the Universe. The book reminded me of the famous Alchemist quote :- "When a person really desires something, all the universe conspires to help that person to realize his dream."

As the book says, the negative thought gets only multiplied in your mind. It is true. When you have a negative thought about a person or his behavior, you will notice it really gets multiplied. You tend to think more negative things about the person which never existed before in your mind about that person. It is of no use to your state of mind and also to the person who you are thinking about. You start to attract your dominant thoughts. You spoil your own life.

Instead why not try to inculcate positive thoughts into our mind? The thoughts full of positive energy, positive attitude and positive beliefs ! As the book says, happy and positive feelings will attract more happy and positive circumstances. It costs zero money from your pocket.

Hmm... it's time to act on it now!

This is the official website of The Secret :- http://www.thesecret.tv/

I have signed up for the the Secret Scrolls on this site. Have you ?

Enjoy reading ...

The Passionate Programmer by Chad Fowler

At the outset I would like to thank my colleague Amit Kumar who gave me 'The Passionate Programmer' book to read. When he handed over the book to me, he said - "Do not only read, but try to implement as well !" That's really true Amit.

While I was going through the chapters, I found that there are many small things that we can begin to implement to make a remarkable career in software development as the book title says. I liked the way Chad has correlated his musical experience with the software development career smoothly. You really enjoy and learn a lot while reading this book. It is a sort of introspection for yourself.

Please also read :-
http://pragdave.blogs.pragprog.com/pragdave/2009/05/the-passionate-programmer.html

I plan to implement some concepts/thoughts from this great book ! :-)

Enjoy reading !