Verify certificate at https://www.credly.com/go/SlWRSJijt6AWMLFUNc2ywA
Wavelength of thoughts
Have you ever wondered why there are certain personalities with people around them – both who likes and hates them ? Here is my thought… its the wavelength difference.
Some people might be considering you as a genius but for others you might be a fool, or a person who love to ask stupid questions. I observe people and try to stand in other’s shoes usually to find why a particular person is like that. This guy might be thinking much faster, or slower than you buddy!
When we talk in discussions, we tend to think, analyse and articulate next statement in mind, which is a (semi) parallel activity. Your pace of thoughts and articulating skills matters. The opponent might be a fast thinker in the same topic of discussion and while you are at point A, he might be at point D so he might be talking about things which are highly relevant to him but you are not even in point B so you have synchronization problems. Vice versa also can happen, and its nobody’s fault. Give more importance to your listening skills so you can race up to his speed and make sense out of what he says.
Links: Two good learning resources
Haven’t tried their paid courses but free courses are excellent.
- My Great Learning Academy – https://www.mygreatlearning.com/academy
- Solo Learn – https://www.sololearn.com/
Web 3.0 is here…
While reading about Web3, it initially reminded me for no reason the decentralized internet concept discussed in the famous Silicon Valley television series. Well, I thought to write about my learning on the reading of this buzz topic. I started my love for internet with the sound of dial-up internet so I was lucky enough to experience different browsers, sockets, chat apps, HTML, compatibilities and incompatibilities, and various phases of web standards. Initially it was purely technology focused but it has turned to human focused now. Thanks to the evolving Customer Experience (CX) and design thinkers’ priorities and involuntary digital revolution.
Web3 is based on Blockchain
Specifically, the decentralization and, that is the major upgrade we have from Web 2.0. Data volumes, importance and complexities has raised to uncontrollable states now and it has become a need of the hour for the enterprises to keep a log book of what is happening with data. Systems are forced today to check whether you are a human being and not a bot, before allowing you to do any transactions. Captcha, Multi-Factor-Authentication (MFA), Single Sign On, Face Recognition, and what not. Companies are investing hugely to protect their data by securing the systems and we were limited to traditional authentication and role based security based authorizations as enterprise standard. For many years sensitive industries such as Banking sector were reluctant to use Cloud systems because of trust issues and Cloud vendors such as Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services had hard time selling their products to enterprises. Consumer sector is still feared about Alexa being listening to their conversations, and industries are concerned about the data leakage of their IoT devices. With Web 3.0, and the proven architecture of crypto designs such as blockchain is going to significantly change the outlook and the on-premise systems will soon completely move to a decentralized mode.
It’s intelligent
Web 3.0 is expected to be intelligent than the previous generations because now we have figured out what internet can do, and what we want. We have advanced (but still immature in many area) much in data science, analytics and predictions so it is time to have the systems we build also have these learnings available ‘by design’.
Is it just a hype?
No, it cannot be. The concepts doesn’t talk anything unrealistic, but it vouch for the need of the hour.
More reading
Visit https://web3.foundation/ to read more. The technology stack page is very interesting.
Agile-Scrum slides
IBM Enterprise Design Thinking–Notes from co-creator
Framework
The problems and solutions are an ongoing conversation of, the continuous cycle which consist of: Observe, Reflect and Make.
Principles
- Focus on user outcomes (Pur users first. Measure by how we fulfill user’s needs. Know the difference between users and clients.
- Restless reinvention
- Diverse Empowered Teams
Keys
Three techniques for diverse teams to reflect together as we move from idea to outcome.
- Hills – Statements of intent written as meaningful user outcomes.
- Playbacks – Bring stakeholders into the loop in a safe place to ell stories and exchange feedback.
- Sponsor Users – Real world users, who contribute their domain expertise to your team.
Observe: Ask each other
Reflect: Ask each other
Make: Consider these questions
A gook book list on Leadership and Management
Became Microsoft Certified Azure Solutions Architect Expert
Why some professional certifications are not trustworthy in some countries?
Read the original article I wrote in LInkedIn here.
I was in a brainstorm meeting to design a new training program for developers, and one suggestion was to have a mandatory certification as part of evaluation criteria. Most of us were not in agreement with the idea but a justification comment from one person caught my attention “certification exams are just memory tests!“.
Microsoft do not conduct Beta exams in few countries and it is clearly mentioned in the About page of Microsoft’s Certifications:
Candidates located in China, India, Pakistan, or Turkey are not eligible to participate in beta exams for security reasons.
In one of the Microsoft Community forums, a Microsoft agent even shown the courage to explain the reason that the fraud percentage in these countries are almost 80%. (sorry, I am unable to trace that page now. May be that comment was removed after some reporting)
“Certification in X is preferred” is one of the usual line in Job Descriptions, but the fact is interviewer do not really give a damn about the certification unless the candidate really showcases the skills. This fate definitely is not applicable for all the exams, I have to admit.
I took my PMP exam at an exam center Dubai, UAE where I felt like I was in a demilitarized zone where I am being monitored by ‘someone’ every microsecond. I was allotted a locker where I was asked to put all the belongings including my watch and belt there and I had to walk though a scanner. I was guided to a cubicle where an overhead CCTV camera was pointing at me like a gun. After about three months of study by spending almost 4-6 hours a day, I also practiced the exam by answering about 1000 questions to get confidence. Surprisingly I did not encounter same question repeated in my actual exam and, the amount of joy I felt when the last screen of “Congratulations” gave was very blissful.
Compared to my PMP, back in my home town, the few other exams I took (mostly Microsoft exams) at local exam centers were very casual. No strict checking of body or ID card, nobody to monitor, no strict adherence to timing etc.
But why?
When I say “certification exams are for testing memory”, what I am trying to imply is that, you get “brain dumps“, the exact exam questions and its answers in your hand in advance so your job is just to memorize those questions and answer options so you might even get 1000/1000 marks.
One of the problem with local exam centers is, along with exam vouchers selling and facilitating the exams, they are also giving, or selling brain dumps too. They use some kind of screen recorders, or other methods to collect questions. There are many people in social media like Telegram, through the exam preparation groups are giving/selling same. But now since the exam providers also allow candidates to attend exams from anywhere, it has become too easy to cheat the exam by collecting questions, or by using another methods like impersonation. There are many websites also provide brain dumps, in the name of practice questions.
See how easy is it to write a program to take screenshot every few seconds so that you can do a second attempt exam by memorizing these questions:
System.Drawing.Rectangle captureRectangle = Screen.AllScreens[0].Bounds;
System.Drawing.Graphics captureGraphics = System.Drawing.Graphics.FromImage(bmp);
captureGraphics.CopyFromScreen(captureRectangle.Left, captureRectangle.Top, 0, 0, captureRectangle.Size);
bmp.Save(path + “\\” + DateTime.Now.Ticks + “.mib”, System.Drawing.Imaging.ImageFormat.Jpeg);
Another cheating method is to use a ‘proxy’ person support. Using some screen sharing software, your friend/proxy can login to your machine remotely and attend the exam while you sit idle in front of the computer.
How to make these exams trustworthy?
Exam process and systems are improving and embracing latest technologies. With the introduction of AI, there are effective solutions available which will monitor candidate’s facial movements, eye contact, body language etc. in addition to improving the exam quality – by intelligent selection of questions or alternate evaluation methods. Also, in addition to multiple choice questions, if we can introduce practical-oriented exams also, then we can make the candidates ready for the industry. Scenario based questions do exist, but those are again memoizable. However, we might have to wait a while more because, at the time of writing this exam also, I can see there are exams which you can easily pass if you have the capability to memorize brain dumps.