The Art of Simplicity (Part 2)

Most of the time, we never realize why some concepts are simple until we think about them. Just consider this example. Have you ever wondered why manholes are round in shape? We could have made them in many other shapes, say squares or real artistic ones.

Not many people had an answer when Venkat asked this question to the audience. For shapes other than round, there is a greater chance for its lid to fall into the hole. But with a round lid, we don’t face this problem. It can also be easily moved by rolling. Also, at the end of a long tiring day, the workman doesn't have to worry in which direction the lid has to be placed to close the hole properly. See how a very simple design helped in solving many issues that could have happened.

Have you ever given a thought why Mona Lisa is considered to be a masterpiece? Along with the fact that it was painted by the famous artist, Leonardo Da Vinci, it is simplicity that always attracts people towards it.

The essence of this keynote was this: Never complicate things too much.

He concluded the session with a very nice story based on Richard Feynman’s quote...

• • • 

Once, I was giving lectures to a bunch of students in the college. I was teaching the same stuff from past one decade. But, for the first time, something strange happened. All the students had nothing to say, after an hour long lecture , other than-

“Sir, we didn't understand anything!”

I was puzzled. I didn't know what had happened. I went back home. I kept  thinking and thinking about it. Then, I went back to read the same topic.

Slowly and surprisingly, I started understanding better. I uncovered many aspects and by the end of  that night, I got a clear picture about the entire concept.

Next day, I went to the same class and started with the same lecture, but with a new insight. Within five to ten minutes, I could make out that every student understood the concept clearly. All students were happy and they exclaimed-

“Sir, why couldn't we understand this yesterday? It is really very easy. ”

“It is simple. I hadn't really understood what I was teaching till yesterday. But now I know.”

• • • 

- summary of the keynote, The Art of Simplicity, by Dr. Venkat Subramaniam (Agile Kerala 2013)


Thanks to +Vaishnavi M K, +Arun Prakash and +Rohit Kumar for your suggestions and proofreading.. :-) 

The Art of Simplicity (Part 1)

It was for the first time, that we were visiting Technopark, Trivandrum. That’s one of the main reasons as to why we reached a little late. Dr. Venkat Subramaniam had already started delivering his keynote on The Art of Simplicity. Here, I am extracting some key points from it (I am directly jumping into the topic since I missed the first few minutes of the session!)...

Simplicity.. Being simple is always distraction-free. One example that we see and use in our day to day life is Google. Imagine, we are in the middle of a serious coding session. Suddenly, some confusion strikes our mind and we decide search for a better implementation or syntax. In the World of internet, there are a lot of things that can distract us. They tempt us to navigate away from our real goal, thereby, wasting a good share of our productive time.

This is where Google comes to help us. In the home page of Google, there is nothing to deviate us from our real intention. Just search, get what you want and leave! The real courage lies in developing such simple and elegant systems rather than complicating it with detailed designs or images.

Simple fails less. If at all it fails, it is always easy to find out the problem and cure it. Simple is always easy to understand.

Simple is always mutable. We neither have to change much, nor worry about anything else before changing it.

Here is a famous quote by Richard Feynman, an American theoretical physicist:

If you can't explain something to a first year student, then you haven't really understood it.

(to be continued...)



Thanks to +Vaishnavi M K and +Arun Prakash for your suggestions and proofreading.. :-)

Agile Kerala 2013: An Awesome Experience

It's only once in a while, we meet people who inspire us. In the last three days, I could meet many of them. We were at Technopark, Trivandrum to attend Agile Kerala 2013. It was the first ever Agile and Lean software development conference in Kerala. Truly speaking, I registered for the conference only because I would be able to visit Kerala and meet some of my friends. Learning was only my second priority.

But after going there, everything changed. It was an unexpected and awesome experience, I must say! Main talks were delivered by Venkat Subramaniam, an Agile Developer and Naresh Jain, Tech Startup Founder & Agile Coach. Both of them, and all other speakers were really good and gave us a memorable experience to cherish. The talks helped all three of us to have a better insight into Agile. 

We were not learning agile, but were experiencing it live!

The best among them was the live pair programming session by Naresh & Venkat. Unlike all other sessions, it was truly unplanned. This helped everybody, even for those who were new to pair programming and Test Driven Development (TDD), to understand the real power and use of these practices. They showed us how TDD helps us to detect and correct problems long before compiling the code...

There are more things to tell than a single post can contain. I'll be posting about the sessions soon.

Thanks to Vinod Purushothaman and Manoj Vadakkan for organizing such a beautiful event. Thanks to all other speakers...

I am quite sure that +Arun Prakash and +Vaishnavi M K experienced the same.. Happy to have you both there...  :-) 

And this is my first personal post other than the summaries. Please do comment and criticize.. I always love to hear feedbacks from you...


All good, all the time,

Yedhu Krishnan