Magic moments

  I have had my fair share of bosses in my everyday job. I've had bad team leaders, pleasant ones, smart ones, and once I had the best team leader .   While all people desire to be needed and respected in a working environment, I have noticed generally two types of behaviors that contribute to someone being a good or a bad team leader. Don't get me wrong, at the end of the day, most of the teams/companies deliver their products, the difference is weather the team members enjoy the office time or hate it.  This desire of team leaders to be respected, needed and liked goes in two directions Leaders who know everything Approximate characteristics of these profiles: They poses great technical knowledge They don't share the knowledge unless explicitly asked. Even then, they provide vague answers and never to the point. This gives them the power of a favor, " if I told you how to do something, then you owe me " They want to be called when no one else can solve the probl

  Quick throwback I have been writing code for a long time. I've been through thick and thin, even before "the internet" and I was rewriting code from paper books. Yeaaa, I've done some things I'm not proud of. Things back then went slow, we waited for Microsoft to come with an update for Visual Basic 5 so I can use my modem from code to call my friends from THE COMPUTER . All was peachy, no sudden changes, no paradigm shifting, OOP was just making a mainstream break through. I'm saying, existing developers were happy. These days There are ten different frameworks for even the smallest of tasks... Hell, a new JS frameworks is popping up every 6 Months. New kids on the block don't even know what an object is these days. Functional programming is making a come back and everybody is constantly letting arrows -> -> ->  (nerd jargon, sorry I had to) Should we keep up with the trends Not with the minor updates, but surely consider the major paradigm shi

  Once upon a project, I had a great colleague and mentor ( Michael Pellaton ) who when asked what he thinks of me, he replied: "Ilija is the kind of person that asks the right questions" . This statement stayed with me a long time after I heard it.  I then remembered my collage days, when I always asked our professors the questions nobody would dare to ask. My peers hated me for that, openly as a matter of fact. My reasoning was simple, either I understand the problem/project or I don't. I can't semi understand something, some abstract concepts maybe, but that is it. If I don't understand the problem or task, I will not be able to come up with a solution, nor I will understand a solution someone else devised. Afterwards, even the solution will appear too complicated, so I don't dare to peak inside. The "black magic box", somehow works, the output is OK. Turns out understanding the problem and getting all the angles of it, is an absolute necessity fo