What is this blog about?
At Titansoft, we believe in continuous learning. In fact, it is one of the six core values that we strive to showcase in our daily work. If you think about it, any company developing software in the last 5–10 years is continuously learning. If they weren’t, they probably wouldn’t exist anymore. This is due to the nature of our industry where technology is shifting rapidly. So then, why still have it as our value?
We want to remind ourselves to NOT learn reactively, but proactively.
The difference is just a subtle change in perspective but it has deep impact. For instance, learning a new programming language because it seems to be the trending language in the market versus learning a new programming language to understand why it seems to be so popular. The key here is learning out of curiosity.
Honestly, Titansoft had mostly been part of the population of late majority or laggards when it came to keeping up with technology trends in the last few years. We are known as an “Agile” company in Singapore and Taiwan. However, while focusing on organisational agility, we’ve lost some focus on technology which has impacted our business agility, developer motivation and also product innovation. That is the reason for the recent formation of our Research & Development team which focuses on getting in on the early majority/adopter bandwagon.
Ehhh, this sounds like a reactive approach to me…
Probably. The difference is in adopting technologies which add value to our business instead of a resume-driven development approach. Even so, technologies which add value might not be appropriate for us due to our context at this point of time. Take for example, microservices architecture. Although it promises agility which aligns with our core value, we are still keeping it under the trial quadrant of our technology radar. That’s because we have to be efficient at a host of other techniques including monitoring, containerisation and CD first. This is where another of our core value, Being Practical kicks in 😃
How is this related to this blog?
Obviously, while researching on topics which are not yet mature, there will be information we come across which is not well elaborated on, on the internet. This is what we will focus on in this blog, to share our experiences with the community and help the late majority similar to how we received help from seniors in the industry in the past.
Also, we want to set ourselves apart by diving into the decisions we made and how we make use of technology in our context. This blog will definitely not be about tutorials on how to write a todo list app in yet another language.
If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough
I’m not sure if Einstein really said that, but that doesn’t make it any less true. Most of us have probably gone through interviews where we are asked to explain a networking protocol or programming concept or a design pattern. Those interviewers were not looking for textbook definitions; instead, they wanted to know how well the candidate is able to articulate complicated concepts simply. We too, believe this is a vital skill.
An internal goal for writing this blog is to enable our engineers to clearly explain complicated concepts to a wide range of audience. In the process, we hope to reinforce the lessons learnt.
To summarise, we felt a strong need to start writing because of the following three reasons:
- Writing to learn
- Sharing of our perspective
- Contributing back to the community
We hope that this is the beginning of an interesting journey and we want you to be a part of it! 😃
