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“Best” practices – mindset matters



“Sir, can you please switch off your mobile phone or keep it in flight mode during the entire flight?”


The flight attendant approached a young guy and told. The guy did not like what she said, looks like he was busy in a very important call and not in a mood to discontinue the conversation. But she did not give-up and thanks to the federal law, the guy had to hang the call and switch off his mobile. I often encounter such situation during flight, most of these occur either because of electronic devices or fastening of seat belt. These are very trivial matters but can generate greater negative impact during the flight. Let’s take the case of mobile phone or any electronic devices, these devices are equipped with Wi-Fi and may interfere with the cockpit devices causing communication breakdown. The modern flight operating devices are designed to block such interference; however it is highly recommended that the devices are switched off or kept in flight mode. There can be exceptions like the blocking devices are not installed properly or the device produces very high frequency, so it is unpredictable and interestingly the flight attendant cannot call an air craft maintenance engineer 37000 feet above the ground to fix if any problem occurs. Hence it is their duty to make sure that all best practices (or flying protocols) are followed by the passengers to avoid any emergency situation. The guy looks like highly educated and cultured, however at that moment his selfishness or “I need to finish this call at any cost” behavior seems did not care to push 200 people into danger.
So, it is about awareness and attitude that we posses towards such practices. There are lot of such practices that we need to adhere to make things work better and also to help others. I saw people switching off their mobile phones before entering the flight and some shortening their conversations. Those persons know the value behind such practices and they tend to make it a part of their daily life, like we do not forget to brush our teeth in the morning. The concept of best practices in programming aligns with these facts, the fact of making it a daily practice, the fact of helping others by writing clean code and the fact that helps to create a healthy programming culture within a team. Programming is not an easy job; we may found tons of so called “geeks” but very few who falls into those who believe in switching off their mobile phone before entering the flight. The best practices make sure that you do not increase your code maintenance effort, help others to understand easily what you have written and set an ideology for the team by being accountable what you have written. It helps you to establish a long term sustainable programming model that not only educate new joiners but also boosts the programming morale. It helps to avoid any emergency situation caused due to technical debts by providing a well define process of developing software. 

Now the question is how big difference the best practices can make in engineering. We have several side of this problem, I think the most important one is how much are we aware of these practices and what our mindset towards learning and adopting them. We all fly first time, but do we consider fastening our seat belt next time we fly or do we need to be informed by an attendant every time. So there is a difference between awareness and adoption. Because knowledge can be spread across easily by several means such as training, discussions, coaching etc. but inheriting those into work life is the biggest challenge as it needs a professional mindset with adaptive nature. The mindset is an individual characteristic attribute which cannot be controlled by another individual. One’s mindset is controlled by his attitude. Attitude is developed over a period of time and so is mindset. We have to control both in order to incline towards adhering best practices into our working life. It will sound really hard for the first time if you have started fresh because there will be a cultural shift from your traditional programming model to another completely new model. But if we take this as an advantage or challenge we can make up to it very quickly and easily. There is always an opportunity to develop ourselves and we should consider this as one of them. 

These are implicit; the manager does not come and tell you how beneficial will be SRP or OCP, may be sometime but it is our responsibility to create that SOLID culture and get some benefit out of it. In principle it is easy to write a blog or to suggest these kind of cultural shifts, however end of the day it is up to the management and the product team to decide which way to go, but from my point of view we should keep the management team away from this and start programming today in a way that all best practices are examined and followed.  

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