Made To Stick

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Made To Stick by Chip and Dan Heath is delightful book about how to have our ideas and thoughts find its way in to the minds of our audience effectively. The key aspects of information that make them click are explained with loads of interesting anecdotes. The authors by dissecting ideas that have stuck strongly with the people bring out the essential ingredients of sticky ideas. There are six principles at work in making ideas last for long.

Simplicity: Ideas must be compact and at the same time have the ability to have a strong impact. The audience should be able to easily find the core message. The core should be profound as well. We shouldn’t bury the core by making our message complex.

Unexpectedness: When we are trying to get our point across to an audience we need to break their expectations. We should shatter their current understanding, surprise them and pull them in. Curiosity and interest needs to be created by filling out gaps in their understanding. This way we grab their attention.

Concreteness: Avoid abstractions. Concrete ideas tend to be in human understandable terms. While abstract thoughts leave the audience struggling to decode on what is being conveyed, concrete ideas let the crux of the matter quickly stick. The audience would understand the ideas better and remember them as well.

Credibility: People will be ready to hear you out only if your ideas have credibility. Give them an ample set of proofs that would enable them to asses for themselves the credibility of ideas.

Emotions: Our ideas need to touch audiences’ emotions. This way we can make them care for our ideas. The audience must feel, experience some kind of emotions when hearing our ideas.

Stories: If we wish that people act on our ideas, we need to present them with stories that let them picture themselves in the stories. This way people will try to act and try out things as was told in the stories. Stories enable us to imagine. They inspire us.

All these principles are explained in a lucid manner with lot of anecdotes that makes the intention of the book stick in the minds of readers! I enjoyed reading the book and I recommend it.



The Development Process

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Steve Maguire's book Debugging the Development Process is an indispensable one to any engineer who is involved in software development task in any ways. Reading through the book, I was enlightened about the mistakes that I do and the wrong practices that software developers/leads and managers in general follow. I have resolved to put in practice his suggestions. And also its time that I dust Steve's other fine book Writing Solid Code from my book shelf and have it in my work desk for constant reference.

Bijapur

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Thanks to my friend's wedding in Bijapur last week, I had the opportunity to visit the historic city.Gol Gumbaz and Ibrahim Rouza are the most prominent monuments in Bijapur.

More images can be found in my flickr page .


Aramane

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Aramane was disappointing. In the initial moments the crux of the story is revealed and I found it quite interesting and was expecting a good watch. Ganesh is a photographer who tries to get the separated family of Ananth Nag together again. But the screen play falters in presenting the story convincingly. Ganesh tries to shoulder the movie by his wit and timed dialogues. His quips most of the time are no doubt humorous, but that alone cannot engage the audience. Gurukiran’s score is average. Aramane can be watched only to get few genuine laughs, thanks to Ganesh’s witticism a la Tamil’s Parthiban. Otherwise it can safely be skipped.