For an outside viewer, changes are huge. What follows is not absolute technology-counterpart-comparison but rather area under the drift. Traditional RDBMS to NoSQL, traditional Web Servers to Node and nginx, from typesafe languages to dynamic typing, tradional MVC (spring/asp.net) to full stack scaffoldings (RoR), HTTP/SOAP to REST/JSON, postbacks to async, scaling up to Hadoop, ACID to CAP, proprietary data centers to cloud and the list goes on. Again, this list is not necessarily an absolute comparison of technology counterparts but these analogies have definitely come a long way since Tim O’Reilly did his famous what is web 2.0 definition and table (see below) in 2005.

For computer scientists and software engineers with sound foundation in algorithms, operating systems, database systems (including distributed databases), computer networking and enterprise architecture, the situation isn’t quite hostile. There is no need to feel threatened by falling behind the learning curve due to lack of fundamental understanding and aptitude. However one should definitely be concerned if it’s due to, in Seth Godin’s terms, lizard brain laziness in learning and prototyping about these up and coming changes.

The fundamentals of distributed databases hasn’t changed much; however the ever-networked nature of world wide web has made it more plausible then ever to use them in practice. To draw an analogy from OSI model, majority of delta is happening in the application layer. This learning curve can only be overcome through training activities learning and persistent efforts. The same way we have avoided architectural astronauts and anti-patterns by writing code and optimizing it to solve real business and technology problems, it would be bridged by coding up mapreduce or improve technical vocabulary while idling through yet another View Model implementation. At least that’s how I envision it.

“Once a new technology rolls over you, if you’re not part of the steamroller, you’re part of the road.”

-Stewart Brand

Hearing this, Stephen Soong, a friend and avid sci-fi reader made his own list and promised to let me borrow from his sci-fi collection.  Here is Stephen’s list.

Sports

• The Game, Ken Dryden
• Moneyball, Michael Lewis
• The Book of Basketball, Bill Simmons
• Breaks of the Game, David Halberstam
• Once a Runner, John L. Parker

Adventure

• Annapurna, Maurice Herzog

Science

• Blue Cats and Chartreuse Kittens, Patricia Duffy
• The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins
• The Panda’s Thumb, Stephen Jay Gould
• Pale Blue Dot, Carl Sagan

Religion

• The Old Testament
• The New Testament

Chinese Classics

• Romance of the Three Kingdoms (三國演義), Luo Guanzhong
• The Water Margin (水滸傳), Shi Nai’an
• Journey to the West (西遊記), Wu Cheng’en
• The Deer and the Cauldron (鹿鼎記), Louis Cha

English Classics

• The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
• For Whom the Bell Tolls, Ernest Hemingway
• Call of the Wild, Jack London
• Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut
• Watership Down, Richard Adams

Sci-Fi

• I Robot, Isaac Asimov

Fantasy

• A Dance with Dragons, George R.R. Martin
• Name of the Wind, Patrick Rothfuss
• Mistborn Trilogy, Brandon Sanderson
• Legend of Drizzt, R.A. Salvatore

Graphic Novels

• Watchmen, Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons

History

• Devil in the White City, Erik Larson
• The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, Edmund Morris
• Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond
• A People’s History of the United States, Howard Zinn

Other Non-Fiction

• Freakanomics, Steven D. Levitt & Stephen J. Dubner
• The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell

Other Fiction

• Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins
• The Stand, Stephen King

It was so well said that I am compelled to quote it hear with all due credits.

The math is magical: you can pile up lots of failures and still keep rolling, but you only need one juicy success to build a career.

The killer is the category called ‘neither’. If you spend your days avoiding failure by doing not much worth criticizing, you’ll never have a shot at success. Avoiding the thing that’s easy to survive keeps you from encountering the very thing you’re after.

And yet we market and work and connect and create as if just one failure might be the end of us.

Beautiful!

This is also very true for the cost of inaction in Entrepreneurship.

“You can see a couple of images where I caught the momentary ray of
green light from the Southern pole of the moon which is extremely
difficulty to catch.  I was shooting at 6 frames per second during
this exact time and the images with the rays of green light were
caught in a couple of frames out of 300 images taken”

Great work doc!

So after grueling 18 months, I’ve just graduated with degree of Masters in Computer Science from Graduate School of Computer and Information Sciences, Nova Southestern University.

I’ve taken the following courses taught by these fine individuals; have learned a lot and can’t thank them enough for their time and dedication.

CISC 0670 – Artificial Intelligence – Dr. James Cannady
CISC 0680 – Software Engineering – Frank Mitropoulos, Ph.D.
CISC 0647 – Advanced Computer Architecture- Dr. Jerry A. Smith
CISC 0685 – Human-Computer Interaction – Dr. Maxine S. Cohen
CISC 0630 – Compiler Design Theory- Dr. Amon Seagull
CISC 0660 – Database Management Systems Dr. Junping Sun – Compiler Design Theory
CISC 0615 – Design & Anal. of Algorithm – Dr. Jerry Smith -
CISC 0620 – Modeling And Simulation – Dr. Jeffrey D Kane
CISC 0640 – Operating Systems – Dr. Greg Simco
CISC 0681 – Computer Graphics – Dr. Michael Laszlo
CISC 0650 – Computer Networks – Dr. Wei Li
CISC 0610 – Programming Languages – Frank J. Mitropoulos, Ph.D.

Now I’m applying for doctoral studies in Dept. of Computer Science from University of Idaho as well as GSCIS Nova. I’ll be starting PhD in Jan 2008 إن شاء الله

Many thanks for my family and friends for their support during this time. Thanks for my wife for the surpirse party, my parents for the call and my in-laws and Ken Nign for the gift card to the lovely place that is Borders where you can read books and drink coffee, my two favourite things to do.

And here is Zakariya with his glasses

For more, please visit www.ZakariyaMasood.com

Thank you for your kind thoughts and prayers.

Adnan, Lorry & Zakariya Masood

I decided to name it Euler’s plant after Euler’s identity and now counting how many people who walk into my cubicle can answer what underroot -1 is, so far the count hasn’t been too great.

This is where it currently sits on my desk, right next to Visual Studio and Team System minions.

“Death comes to all, but great achievements build a monument which shall endure until the sun grows cold.”
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

“

Passion is the element in which we live; without it, we hardly vegetate.”

-Lord Byron
 

-Baron Munchausen