M.Y. Lessons Learnt

Yesterday, Google released some themes for their Gmail platform … in fact, 30 new themes. Many of them are simply new color schemes but some include beautiful backgrounds. It really spices up my “email world”. I picked the “Mountains” theme as my default Gmail theme for now, but I have to admit the “Terminal” theme is really really cool for old dogs like me. 

It reminds me the good old days back in 1990s when the Pine (Program for Internet News & Email) from University of Washington was my favorite Internet tool.

Try it out !!

Couple of days ago, there was a blog post about how Gmail team improved the loading sequence, trimmed the 24 http requests down to just 4 requests. A few utilities and tips were covered in the post, but I think the key messages they sent across were “the need for speed” and “the obsession of great performance”.

In the good old days, we measured the greatness of a program by how fast it could run, how small the runtime file was and how smart the logic we coded. It’s the obsession of great programming, you know. Compare this to the generation of developers we have now, the first question they usually ask about a new task of programming is “where can I copy it ?”. What a difference ?!

I can understand the merit of DRY (Don’t repeat yourself), but really, there is no shortcut to be a great developer. The only way is - obsess to your work !!