Attended Martin fowler's event in Chennai

Lucky to attend event organised by thoughtworks featuring Martin fowler in chennai. I never thought in my life I might get a chance to attend a event having Martin Fowler as a speaker. He gave a talk similar to suiteoftalks that he has been following of late. The areas he covered in his talks include Continuous Integration/Delivery, Strategic and Utility projects and Domain Specific languages, none of this is new if you have been following his blog closely. I was just happy to hear him talk probably this was the first time I am meeting someone in person who has made great contribution to the software community. After the talk I got a chance to have a personal chat with him and raised question about my dilema of whether to move forward to DVCS (git, mercurial) rather than the current source control (Borland StarTeam) that we have, his direct answer was "Depends on the maturity of the team, if the team is mature, DVCS is the way to go".

Hope I get a chance to meet more people like him in the future (Anders Hejlsberg ranks high on that list).

Explaining things effectively

I have always been fascinated how people come up with good visual ways of explaining complex things, this video is one such appreciative work on explanation of quicksort algorithm (link got from blog of my friend Santhosh Ahuja). Being in the software field and involved heavily in recruitment of people at various levels, what I have learnt is it's easier to find people with sound knowledge but difficult to see them possess the art of explaining things effectively (which unfortunately is a key trait needed in a personnel not only in the software field but in other fields as well).

Quicksort Explanation Video