Being lean and blond

Some background

This happened a while ago, long enough so that the main characters can not be easily identified. Except for me, of course. It is okay, I can take it. I am blond. And I am lean. No, I am not Paris Hilton in disguise. I am a freaky-geeky kind of blond.

Some time ago I was given an opportunity to work with an offshore team from India. It was a very valuable experience from which I learned a lot.

What would you do…

… if someone messed with “your code”!?

Toby was on vacation for a week. He came back to work on Monday, somewhat earlier than others, still jet lagged. He was all ready to dive back happily into the piece of code he was working on just before vacation (the post-it note was still standing untouched on the wall, under ”In progress”).

Toby synchronized the code, looked for all the familiar class names… and got stunned! All of his nice framework blahblah handling classes were in a different package. No, in a two, wait, three different packages! WHAT!!!

The basics – respect

Abstractions can be hard to explain

“Respect” is one of those terms that everyone is familiar with, and none asks for closer explanation on it when used. Still, sometimes it is good to know what the other party really thinks by something.

Words are just means to describe the concepts in our brains that may be quite complex composition of feelings, attitudes and other abstract categories. It can be hard with those abstract categories.

Just think of it – it could be easy to explain to an alien or, let us get more realistic here - a child what a “vase” is. It is a very concrete object with purpose of holding water and flowers, can be made of different materials, but is made mostly of glass or ceramics, and can take different forms and sizes, but is always concave since it is supposed to hold water etc. Also, an explanation by visual examples would do.

But explain to a child (or that alien, just for the sake of the example, let us have my imaginary alien involved) what “respect” is. Abstraction requires more complex explanations on different levels.

An attempt to explain

When LittleMissLisa talks about respect,