We, the youth, are the ambassadors of the 21st century; the millennium when we have witnessed transformations in all dimensions and horizons. Ever since the revolution of technology began and the ‘Digital India’ mission kicked off, almost all services and applications are intended to migrate to the world of binaries; right from astrology to astronomy, horoscope to medicines, technology to business and what not. An amazing paradigm shift is apparent from the very fact that businesses like small-scale, medium-scale and large-scale have been and are migrating to digital platforms. The advent in technologies from multidimensional perspectives has paved the way to all classes of people, right from the naïve technology user to the experienced technology professional, to help adapt and adopt technology. However, not to be rude, 21st century should be titled as the Age of Dissatisfaction.
In the run to bring out new innovations, providing faster access to technologies and end-to-end product deliverables, somewhere the human race has forgotten that these things are being developed to satisfy the needs and not desires. Mahatma Gandhi once aptly forecasted, Earth has enough to satisfy everyone’s need but not everyone’s greed. Man has developed these technologies to help the human community bring peace, comfort and social harmony. While developing these technologies, the intension at the back of his mind should be to bring forth something that would have super-amazing and assertive impact to the lives of the people, the community the nation and the world at large. As quoted by a spiritual leader, “People were created to be loved. Things were created to be used. The reason why the world is in chaos is because things are being loved and people are being used.” This statement has made a severe impact on me and thus compelled me to jot down my thoughts.
To discuss this topic extensively, let’s consider a graph that consists of an X-axis, a Y-axis and a Z-axis. Here X-axis represents the human needs and Y-axis represents the human desires. Having studied software modeling and design, let’s give this a UML spin. The entities plotted in the graph are the actors that are plotted as per their desires and needs. Here I can expressively list out three prominent actors- naïve person, normal person and a passionate person. A naïve person is near to the center as he has less desires and less needs. A normal person has moderate needs but less desires. A passionate person has both more needs and more desires. All the three actors here not satisfied at all and have some sort of desires and the probability of this desires increase with the successful satisfaction of previous desires. Greater the urge to satisfy themselves, greater is the probability of dissatisfaction at the longer run. And because of this the Z-axis comes to picture that is happiness and on it hardly any actor has found the place to plot it.
As a soon-to-be Software Engineer, I have realized that, off late, there are a lot many things that have been developed that help make software development anyone’s cup of tea. There has been a change from the way we used to code earlier to the way we code now. Earlier we used to write 20,000 lines of code entirely on our own. Then came the frameworks. Java, being my girlfriend, I will speak on her behalf and will be loyal to her. Earlier the codes were written extensively on notepads, environments were setup by using global and local variables and then were run on command prompts. If there are 10 java files then all these files had to be compiled collectively and debugged individually. Well, that really tested one’s patience. To overcome this drawback, various frameworks were introduced to the market by our grandfather / father of open source, Apache. Apache Foundations brought forth various frameworks like Ant, Maven, for integration and collective building of files. Then came integrated development environments where all the codes were written and compiled automatically and also built automatically. And then… (my favorite part) came the celebrities with cut-throat competition- development frameworks – Java Server Faces (JSF) with amazing user experience plus robust design, Spring with appreciable Inversion of Control (IoC) and Dependency Injections (DI), Hibernate with amazing object relation mapping capabilities and what not. These things really amazed me. But again technology continued to surprise me when Docker, Jenkins and Bamboo were introduced in the market.
Well, these technologies have proven themselves time and again; especially when faster, integrated and test driven development is concerned. Earlier these were the only things that amazed me until I came to my B.E. (final year) and was appointed to serve as the Chair of the I2IT ACM Student Chapter. In my third year of my engineering I only studied the technologies and did nothing constructive with that knowledge. When endowed with the responsibility as Chair, I realized that more capable than technology is HUMAN BEINGS, because he is the one who has developed these technologies. As usual I took the primary task of developing the ACM student chapter portal along with the webmaster of the chapter. I thought my portal will play the primary role in attracting the most registrations. But it was the people (members) who were the primary drivers of registrations and they brought in around 90+ registrations. While conducting a national level project competition event, I was appointed as the team lead, hence was the overseer on all aspects of the event. Being the person at the helm of the affairs, I was ridden with anxiety, worry and tension about the forthcoming event; after all my reputation and credibility were at stake here. The comforting words of assurance and unflinching support from my team members and juniors laid my worries to rest. And that is when I realized that my girlfriend (Java) never gave me this assurance… ever. And that led me to believe that research is about collaborating with people primarily and technologies secondarily. It is imperative to understand that in this run that we all have been part of, we have forgotten to love ourselves and other humans and have begun embracing technologies / gadgets which do not allay our emotional worries and ultimately only push us to live in the state of anxiety and all-time-tension.
To conclude, I would say that while technology plays a very vital role in our lives – now and in the future as well, it’s a need as well as a desire to use it wisely and judiciously in various aspects like social campaigning, correcting the mislead and unguided lobbies, educating the under-privileged and alleviating the lives of our fellow beings. Then and only then would be all be together on the fast track of the growth of societies, nations and the entire human race.
To be a good human first is the key to be good engineer or a professional!
Author Name:
Harsh Khajgiwale
B.E. (IT)
I²IT, Pune
The author is a graduating student at International Institute of Information Technology (I²IT), Pune, Maharashtra, India. He will be graduating in Summer 2017, and has a genuine passion for J2EE based application development. He developed the open innovation platform for “Kalam Research and Innovation Community (KRIC)” for I²IT and has taken various initiatives to facilitate research and development at academic level among the student community. He aims to apply his knowledge and skills learned to build a career in web based application development.
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