SD Best Practices India: Day One, Part Two

What have I so far learned in India? Well, for starters, I wouldn't last 5 minutes on a motor scooter in Hyderabad or Chennai. I admit it -- I'm an amateur, no matter what I thought before arriving in India. Which is why I don't understand why the boss was actively encouraging to "Rent a scooter, have some fun. Helmets? Who needs helmets?" Do you think she was trying to tell me something?

Other things I've learned:

• Political leaders in India are serious about making the country a world leader in high technology in general, and software development in particular. In Chennai, for instance, community leaders just announced that they will be establishing 24 high-tech industrial parks over the next 10 years. Five will be built immediately. The area, which has a population of about 6 million people, currently only has a couple of industrial parks.
• The ratio of men-to-women at the sessions in Hyderabad and Chennai remains in favor of men (that is, lots more men than women). But in an admittedly scientific analysis, there seems to be more Indian women attending the technical conference than you'd see at a similar conference in the U.S. This was confirmed to some degree when I learned that currently, far more women than men are enrolled in computer science programs at universities in India. (Likewise, the medical professions have more women than men enrolled.)
• The coffee in Chennai is killer caffine. Love it. Even better, there are no Starbucks, although U.S. coffee giant plans on establishing its first forays in Mumbai or Delhi by the end of this year.
• This has nothing to do with India, other than I learned it here. In his early morning session (which was again packed wall-to-wall), Scott Meyers mentioned that, according to research, if you are looking for errors in source code, you will find more errors if you print it out and examine on paper than you will if you examine it on-screen.

Okay, another Scott Meyers story. In the same early-morning session, Scott referenced Hugh Thompson's bringing down info/entertainment systems on airplanes.

Scott granted that he wasn't on the airplane -- and that he was glad he wasn't. So see, it just wasn't me.

Posted by Jon Erickson at 02:20 AM  Permalink