Monday 5 October 2015

Soft Skills - How to teach yourself

I have started reading Soft-Skills-software-developers-manual book and liked it, it is has lot of valuable information that can help in better management/planning of software development career.

All the chapters are well written but i liked chapter - "How to teach yourself" so much that i wanted to write blog about it and keep it for my future reference.

This chapter starts with what is typical learning strategy and i have to confess that i also use this simple and no so effective learning technique

- Pick a book
- Read it cover to cover and practice examples/samples given in it.

Problem with this approach is that it takes time and we might focus on lot of things that is actual not required upfront when you start working on it.

Sounds so much like water fall method :-(

John Sonmez shares his approach and it is worth reading it.  His 10-step process is pragmatic approach to learning.

- Step 01 - Get the big picture
This is about having 50,000 feet overview of topic that you want to learn , this will help in knowing how big is the topic and what are the sub topics under it.
This can be done by doing internet searches .

- Step 02 - Determine Scope
Once you know how big/complex is the topic then decided scope of your learning

Step 03 - Define Success
Since you know your scope , so it must to define success criteria , this helps in having clear picture in mind of what it will look like when you are done.

Step 04 -Find Resource
This is pretty simple given we can get tons of information from internet, find all the resource that will help like blogs/books/videos/podcast/training material etc.
You don't have to get hung up on the quality of resource, it will be filtered later.

Step 05 - Create Learning Path
This is very important part because there is natural progression for learning, so learning path should be like that, some examples can be taken from books how topics are split based on complexity

Step 06 - Filter Resource
By this time we know what are we going to learn and in what order, so filter resource that you have collected to fit your need.

Step 07 - Learn enough to get started
This is one of the step in which most of us get too much involved and loose the track. You have to avoid the temptation of going too much deep in this part. Learn only enough so that you can get started and explore the things.

Step 08 - Play around
This step is about learning by trying/experimenting things and then referring reference material to get answers of your question.

Step 09 - Learn enough to do something useful
This step is for doing deep dive and learn as much your want so that. You have to keep eye on success criteria while you are learning, so that your are on right track.

- Step 10 - Teach

Books mention below quote for this step

Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve
me and I learn.
—Benjamin Franklin

I highly recommend this book , it is worth spending time on this book to learn stuff that will help in building successful career.

Thursday 1 October 2015

Lazy Array Initialization

Lazy object initialization is one of the important strategy to avoid upfront allocation and it can become little tricky if multiple threads are involved.

Some of the language like scala has language level support for lazy variable and compiler generates thread safe code for you but in java some coding is required to achieve this.

ConcurrentHashMap of JDK7 does upfront allocation of segment object and it adds to memory footprint of empty collection but in JDK8 lazy val strategy is used for initialization to save some memory for empty collection.

So what code is used to do allocation in thread safe way ? It is simple but it has some fine details that is worth looking at, below is code snippet that is used in ConcurrentHashMap


It has check on array length because that is written after memory allocation is done.

Code used in blog is available @ github