It's All About Object Oriented Programming (OOP / OOPS)

Hello and welcome to next post of the series "Freshers to Professional" blog. In case you missed previous blogs, you can read here.

Part 1 : Because All The Leaders Were Developers Once
Part 2 : Some of the Greatest Programmers of All Time
Part 3 : How to be a Good Developer and Professional

Now we will cover some of the basic fundamentals that you should be clear with, when you start your carrier as fresher. In this post we will see about Object Oriented Programming commonly referred as OOP or OOPS.

This is most important fundament of software engineering now a days. When I interview a freshers of the post of the developers, this is my first question to them. "Tell me Three Main Principles of Object Oriented Programming". When someone fails to answer this question, I do not go further in interview and let them go. In my opinion every fresher should know about concepts of OOP. That's the crux of software development. Now a days no matter what language you use, all of them supports OOP. Be it JavaScript, PHP, C# or Java or anything all of them support OOP only implementation if different and if you are clear with fundamentals of OOP then you can implement in any of the languages. As fresher this is what is expected from you and that's why language like C++ and Java is included in almost all the courses of Computer science.

During my tenure in IT industry, I have interviewed many freshers and very few time I get satisfactory answer on concept of OOP. Some freshers knows only the name of concept but they can not explain it further. Some of them can explain it but with great confusion. When I ask them why they don't know about it, they say "We think it's not important" Now that's the biggest mis understanding. OOP is followed in most of the development in business applications. So you should be clear with fundamentals of OOP.

Why OOP was introduced?

Object oriented programming concept was created because of the need to overcome the problems that were found with using structured programming techniques. In earlier days programmers used to write many lines of code because OOP was not there. With the the OOP number of lines of codes is reduced because it makes your code reusable and easy to maintain. Any business application is going to change over the period of time and these changes should be easy to do. With OOP it is possible now. Major frameworks are built on concept of OOP and when you are using that framework, you should be knows how the OOP is used in there. Then only you will be able to work with it. Major software design patterns like MVC also works on OOP.  So no matter what language you use, OOP is involved in it. So it is required that you understand OOP concepts and use it in your work.

Also there are other advantages of OOP

• Code Reusability
• OOP  provides a clear modular structure for programs
• OOP makes it easy to maintain and modify existing code 

Now lets see the three main principles of OOP.

Abstraction / Data Encapsulation / Data Hiding

Encapsulation is an Object Oriented Programming concept that binds together the data and functions that manipulate the data, and that keeps both safe from outside interference and misuse. Implementation details of a class are kept hidden from the user. The user can only perform a restricted set of operations on the hidden members of the class by executing special functions commonly called methods.

So for the simple example, when you implement a class and define private members of the class, those members will be accessible only inside of the class. If you want to expose some of the functions and members to outside world, it will be declared as public. Here are some of the key things related to Abstraction / Data Encapsulation

• Class
• Abstract Class
• Static Class
• Static Methods
• Modifiers like public, private
• Constructor
• Friend Functions

I will not give details about it as there are tons of articles available over the internet.

Inheritance

One of the most important concepts in object-oriented programming is that of inheritance. Inheritance allows us to define a class in terms of another class, which makes it easier to create and maintain an application. This also provides an opportunity to reuse the code functionality and fast implementation time. When creating a class, instead of writing completely new data members and member functions, the programmer can designate that the new class should inherit the members of an existing class. This existing class is called the base class, and the new class is referred to as the derived class.

Here are some the key things related to Inheritance.

• Single Inheritance
• Multiple Inheritance
• Multilevel Inheritance
• Hybrid Inheritance
• Overriding
• Modifiers

Polymorphism 

Polymorphism is the ability of an object to take on many forms. The most common use of polymorphism in OOP occurs when a parent class reference is used to refer to a child class object. One function with different parameters is also referred as polymorphism. Polymorphism usually comes to picture when we use inheritance and when we have parent and child class relationship.

Here are some the key things related to Inheritance.

• Method Overriding
• Method Overloading

So learn about OOP understand it's principles and other related stuff mentioned above if you want to establish yourself as good developer.

How To Be a Good Developer and Professional

Hello and welcome to third blog of the series "Freshers to Professional" blog. In case you missed previous blogs, you can read here.

Part 1 : Because All The Leaders Were Developers Once
Part 2 : Some of the Greatest Programmers of All Time

This blog is about self evaluation. After reading this blog, you will realize  if you have what it takes to be a great developer and if you are have not this symptoms ,you have to find out your Knack.

You Should Have Knack Of Technology.

According to definition in dictionary meaning of Knack is.

• A special talent or skill, especially one difficult to explain or teach
• A skilful, ingenious, or resourceful way of doing something
• A particular talent or aptitude, esp an intuitive one

So yes you need to have special talent and clear aptitude and particular attitude to be a good developer. In short you should have Knack of Technology like Little Dilbert

So yes you should be like Little Dilbert to be a great software engineer.  You should have Knack of technology and if you don't have it then you have to find it or develop it. Next we will see some questions that you have to ask yourself and find out if you have that knack or not. 

Do you like sitting in front of computer for long time? 

This if the first and foremost requirement to be a developer. Because as a developer you have to sit in front of computer and write code of long time. As you will be given a task and deadline to complete it and you have to meet that deadline. So you have to sit for long time and complete it. Sometime you may have to skip lunch, tea or dinner, you should be ready for it. In short it will be your "RACE AGAINST TIME" and you have to win it.

 Do you like to learn new things?

This is another most crucial requirement to be a good developer. Your learning will not stop after your college course. If you think I have studied enough and I will not invest my time to learn something new, you are at the dead end of your career. Because technologies come and go. Nothing is permanent. What is hot technology today will be out of the market tomorrow and something new will come and if you are not willing to learn new thing, you will be out of the race. Take an examples of programming languages.

There was a time where developers were using languages like C, C++
Then comes Java.
Then comes VB.NET, C#.net
Then comes PHP

Earlier there was VB script, then we have JavaScript

Earlier there was Objective C and now we have Swift

Earlier there was no cloud computing, now we have Cloud Computing

So things are constantly changing and if you are not willing to except change then you can not be good developer so you have to learn new things and adopt and survive it.

Can you keep calm in worst condition?

Coding is an art that we have to do with calm and composed mind. You should not be short tempered. Because while coding you may have to face situation where no matter what you do error is not resolved, you are trying for hours to get something working and it's not working as expected, you are not getting proper output. In this situation if you loose you calm and get angry then it will get worse and you will never be able to solve your problem. Do you know one missing semi colon in code can create nightmare for you. In this situation you should not get angry and search for error. Debugging is the process which needs lots of patience. You have to debug step by step and it is real time consuming.

Sometime you may have to face situation like your work is over written due to mistake or it's rejected by your leader or client and he asked you do do it again. In this case you should not punch into face of your leader or client but KEEP CALM AND CODE ON.

Do you think twice before start working?

Whenever some task is assigned to you, you have to think twice and look for the best possible solution to achieve it. Don't just start working on it with first thought come up in mind. It may be possible that you end up with disaster and you have to redo everything. And at start of your career, you could be fired for not performing well and this can ruin your career. So be careful about it and think twice before you start working on it.

Do you listen to others?

It's about being team player. In your career hardly it will happen that you will be the only person working on the project, there is always a team and when you are working in team, you have to listen to others because everyone like to give opinion and you have to deal with it, It may be possible that you gave solution to some task but from your team someone else come up with better solution. so you have to listen to them and understand what your team members are trying to say. So be a good listener, keep your ego aside and be a good team player.

Do you communicate with others?

Communicate with others is as important as listening to others. That is again a quality of team player. Your team members should be aware of what you are doing and what problems you are facing. It's possible that your work is affecting someone else's work. You have to communicate with them and inform about it. Same way if you are working on someone else work then you to ask them first about it understand it and then work on it. This will lead to less errors.

Do you like Algorithms and Flow Charts?

Most of the course on software development includes algorithms and flow charts. When you are studying it you may find it worthless and waste of time but it's actually not a waste of time. Algorithms and Flow charts are key elements of development. When you will be working on any task you have to break down it to smaller tasks and setup the flow as per the domain you are working. For example if you are building online selling website then to place an order there is a flow like

Customer registered

Customer add billing and shipping address

Customer makes payment

If payment is successful, place an order else show error. 

so that's the flow and for that you have to make up a flow chart in your mind and code as the flow. 

Same way for the difficult task you have algorithm, which is nothing but a plan to solve the problem and you have to create that plan. If you don't like algorithms then you will not be able to solve complex problems.

Do you know how to search on Google?

In the era of internet and Google, there lots of websites and forums and blogs where developers like you and me write about the problems we are facing and others in the communities give solution to this. I also maintain a blog where I write about problems  I face during my work and solution of it on 

Hiren's Technical Blog

So it's possible that problem you are facing is already faced by someone else and there is solution already but you have to search it and find it. For this you should know how to search effectively on Google and find out solution and save your time.

Do you consider worst outcome while coding?

This is one common problem I have seen in all the developers. When they are working on some tasks, they just consider the best outcome and assume that all the inputs will be available. But this is not the case always, you have to make sure that you consider worst scenario as well and handle it properly. Do not assume that you will have all the possible inputs. If you don't consider worst scenario there will be lots of problems.

Do you take responsibility of your work and do not blame others?

As I mentioned, it's team play and in the team whenever something goes wrong, blame game starts. Nobody would like to receive criticism and try to blame others when project failed. But as a good ethical developer, you have to accept your mistake and take responsibility of your work and be open about it. There is no shame in accepting your mistakes. 

If your answer is Yes to above all the questions that means you are going to be a good developer. If your answer is NO for some questions that means you need to improve in that area but if your answer is NO for all the questions, I am afraid that you are not qualified to be a developer.  Go for other career option.

Some of the Greatest Programmers of All Time

Hello and welcome to second blog of the series "Freshers to Professional" blog. In case you missed previous blogs, you can read here.

Part 1 : Because All The Leaders Were Developers Once

This blog is again going to be a blog for motivation. A programmer is a person who writes the computer programs. There are those few who have contributed beyond what a single programmer usually does in an entire lifetime. They gave us reason to achieve something. In this blog we will take a look at some of the Greatest Programmers of All Time. Some of them are not with us right now but we can not forget them. These programmers are pioneers of the IT industry. Their contribution can never be forgotten. They are legends of IT industry and are role models of many aspiring programmers like you and me. Let's see some of the great programmers of all time.

Dennis Ritchie - Father of Digital Computing

Yes he is the one the best programmers of all time. He is the inventor of C language and Unix operating system. Today most of the programs and technologies uses C language and  Unix is the base operating  system, from which all the OS like Windows and Mac is created. We can say that without him all the companies like Apple and Microsoft would not exist today. Entire software industry owe a lot to this man. He is truly a father of digital computing. He won prestigious Turing Award for his research and development of Unix and also won National Medal of Technology. Unfortunately he is not with us right now but his legacy is still going on and he will be remembered forever for his contribution.

Ken Thompson - Co Inventor of Unix

Ken Thompson is an American pioneer of computer science. Having worked at Bell Labs for most of his career, Thompson designed and implemented the original Unix operating system. He also invented the B programming language, the direct predecessor to the C programming language, and was one of the creators and early developers of the Plan 9 operating systems. Since 2006, Thompson has worked at Google, where he co-invented the Go programming language.

Other notable contributions included his work on regular expressions and early computer text editors QED and ed, the definition of the UTF-8 encoding, his work on computer chess that included creation of endgame tablebases and the chess machine Belle.

Grace Hopper - Inventor of COBOL and the Word "BUG"

Grace Hopper was an American computer scientist and United States Navy Rear Admiral.In 1944, she was one of the first programmers of the Harvard Mark I computer and invented the first compiler for a computer programming language. She popularized the idea of machine-independent programming languages, which led to the development of COBOL, one of the first high-level programming languages. She also popularized use of the term BUG (already established in other technical contexts) which frightens all the developers. There is an interesting story about how the word BUG was invented. 

In early days when computers were so big and they were using big hardwares, US navy was using such computers and Grace Hopper was managing one such computer. One day computer was not working and she opened it to check it and found out that one bug was squeezed and dead in computer hardware and that stopped computer. While she was removing dead body of bug his superior came in and asked what's going and she replied "I am removing BUG" and since then word Bug is used for hardware and software failures.

Bjarne Stroustrup - Inventor of C++

Bjarne Stroustrup is a Danish computer scientist who is credited for the creation and the development of the widely used and highly successful C++ programming language. He not only invented it, but also evolved it, all by himself, by writing its early definitions, producing its first implementation, formulating its design criteria, designing all its major facilities, processing extension proposals for standards committee and its standard textbook.

James Gosling - Inventor of Java

James Arthur Gosling is a Canadian computer scientist and an officer of the order of Canada. He has coded quite a number of programs but is widely known for his creation of the highly successful and commonly used Java programming language in 1994 as well as its original virtual machine and compiler.

Donald Knuth - Father of the Analysis of Algorithms

Donald Ervin Knuth is an American computer scientist and mathematician as well as a Professor Emeritus (retired professor) at Stanford University. Knuth has been dubbed as the “Father of the Analysis of Algorithms” as he has contributed to the development of rigorous analysis of the computational complexity of algorithms and systematized formal mathematical techniques for it.

Knuth has also popularized the asymptotic notation and he is also the creator of the TeX computer typesetting system and the METAFONT font definition language and rendering system. He has contributed to several branches of theoretical computer science and has also created the Computer Modern family of typefaces.

Tim Berners-Lee - Father of World Wide Web (WWW)

Sir Timothy John “Tim” Berners-Lee is a British computer scientist who is renowned all across the globe because of his creation of the World Wide Web as well as the implementation of the first successful communication between a Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) client and server via the Internet in November, 1989.

Tim has won multiple awards for his pioneering ingeniousness such as becoming one of only six members of the World Wide Web Hall of Fame and one of five Internet and Web pioneers who have been awarded the inaugural Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering. He is also the holder of the Founders Chair at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.

Margaret Hamilton - Lady who helped Mankind to Reach To Moon

Margaret Heafield Hamilton is an American computer scientist, systems engineer, and business owner. She was Director of the Software Engineering Division of the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory, which developed on-board flight software for the Apollo space program. In 1986, she became the founder and CEO of Hamilton Technologies, Inc., in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The company was developed around the Universal Systems Language based on her paradigm of Development Before the Fact (DBTF) for systems and software design.

Linus Torvald  - Inventor of Linux

Created the Linux kernel and Git, an open source version control system. Winner of numerous awards and honors, including the EFF Pioneer Award in 1998, the British Computer Society’s Lovelace Medal in 2000, the Millenium Technology Prize in 2012 and the IEEE Computer Society’s Computer Pioneer Award in 2014. Also inducted into the Computer History Museum’s Hall of Fellows in 2008 and the Internet Hall of Fame in 2012.

Jeff Dean - Compilers don't warn Jeff Dean. Jeff Dean warns compilers

Helped to design and implement many of Google’s large-scale distributed systems, including website crawling, indexing and searching, AdSense, MapReduce, BigTable  and Spanner. Elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2009. 2012 winner of the ACM’s SIGOPS Mark Weiser Award and the ACM-Infosys Foundation Award in the Computing Sciences.

Well this list is end less. But who can be the next in this list? 

It's YOU and Only You.

Yes now it's your time, to register your name in this glorious list. Have a clear vision, work hard, achieve your dreams and register yourself in the list of Great Programmers of All Time.

Because All The Leaders Were Developers Once

Hello and welcome to my new blog series "Fresher to Professional".  

This blog is for the beginners who are looking forward to start Career as software engineer, programmers, developers, designers. This blog will teach you real skills and attitude you need to be a successful IT professional. During my 10 years of Career I have realized that real trainings are missing when you start and that is affecting your Career in long run. I will share knowledge gained through out my Career that will help  you build your Career to top notch professional level. 

This is the first blog of this series and it's all about motivation. Yes motivation is the kay factor when you are starting your Career because you don't know about future and you must  have heard good and bad things about the Career you are about to start. So at this point either you are excited or you are little bit suspicious about your choice or you are totally frustrated about it. Every computer graduate who is starting a Career in IT must have heard some things which are enough to discourage you. Among it the worst thing an aspiring software engineer has to listen is..

Ahh Just Another ONE

Yes this is one thing which each IT professional has to face at a start of the Career. Whenever you tell someone that I am a computer engineer they will consider you JUST ANOTHER ONE of the heard. Unfortunately it's true. With the booming IT industry lots of people choose this as Career option and lots of computer and IT engineers are  graduating each year. There are lots of colleges, private institutes which offers various courses in IT and there are lots of students who choose it and come out as IT professional and it's increasing each year. So the society think that a COMPUTER ENGINEER is just another one who will start working as developer and will work for long hours with very less pay and lots of stress.  And this is right at certain point of time when you are starting as a fresher you have to work hard, you have to show your dedications, you have to learn new things and most important is you have to make sure that you don't become "JUST ANOTHER ONE".

Well no this is not true, 

We are not JUST ANOTHER ONE, We have potential to make a difference and be THE ONE

Do you know what's your value in IT Industry. Checkout this video.

Well, that's the Steve Balmer, former CEO of Microsoft, and he is praising you by this song, so you can understand how valuable you are.

Yes IT industry is all about developers.

Each IT professional, if trained and guided properly at start of the Career, they can be THE ONE. If you have that killer's instinct to do something different and have will power, dedications and you are willing to work hard, you can be THE ONE and make a difference. Every beginning is the small one and but the end depends on you. You can make it bigger or you can be just another one and finish it like everyone else. Do you know that the current leaders, the technology icons were once a developers or programmers just like you and me but they did something different and today they become the leaders. They started with small things but today they become giant and no one can beat them. Here are few examples. 

The Infosys Team

N. R. Narayana Murthy, Nandan Nilekani, N. S. Raghavan, S. Gopalakrishnan, S. D. Shibulal, K. Dinesh and Ashok Arora

Co-founded in 1981 by 7 Engineers,  after they resigned from Patni Computer Systems.The company was incorporated as "Infosys Consultants Pvt Ltd." with a capital of ₹10,000 or US$250 in Model Colony, Pune as the registered office. It signed its first client, Data Basics Corporation, in New York City.In 1983. Today Infosys is the giant of Indian IT Industry. It's one of the biggest company of India with development center across the India and abroad. Today Mr. N. R. Narayana Murthy is considered as a visionary and an icon of IT industry. Mr. Nandan Nilekani worked with Government of India for many IT projects including Aadhar - UIDAI. 

The Apple Team 

Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne

Apple was established on April 1, 1976, by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne to sell the Apple I personal computer kit. Later they have introduced series of personal computers like Apple 2, Lisa and most successful one Macintosh. In early days of apple,  Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak used work in Steve's Garage with a small team. They really struggled to sell their products and raise money for the new products. Today Apple is the most valuable technology company with products like iPhone, iPad, iPod, Macbook, iMac and one of the successful series of OSX operating system. They created all new market for mobile application developers. 

The Google Team 

Sergey Brin and Larry Page

Just like Apple Google was also started in garage. Larry Page and Sergey Brin dropped out of the college to start internet search website. They worked hard to come up with unique and robust search algorithm. Once Google was founded, there was no looking back for this duo. Today Google is considered as most robust search engine and most valuable technology company. Today they have introduced many products like Gmail, Google Glass, Youtube, Self Driving Car, Google Fibre, Android and they keeps on inventing new things everyday.

The MicroSoft Team 

Paul Allen and Bill Gates

Paul Allen and Bill Gates, childhood friends with a passion for computer programming, sought to make a successful business utilizing their shared skills. They co founded Microsoft as Software Development firm and worked with IBM on creating MS DOS. Later they have introduced their own operating system Microsoft Windows. Which can be considered as most successful operating system in the history. Today Microsoft is one the most valuable technology company. Like all of us Bill Gates and Paul Allen worked really hard in initially days. Bill Gates used to write codes for hours while they were working on MS DOS. Today lots of programmers writes code for him.

The Facebook  Team 

Mark Zuckerberg, Dustin Moskovitz, Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Chris Hughes

Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg in Stanford University Room along with his few class mates. He started it as social networking site for Stanford and today it's worldwide social networking site. He with class mates wrote millions of lines of code for Facebook website and today he is in the list of billionaires. He employs people older than him to work for him. 

So the moral of the story is if you are starting your Career as a developer or programmer, you have a chance to make it big if you work really hard and if you have clear vision. You can also be like these leaders in future. Each start is small one but the end can be giant.  So do not feel that you are less than doctors and managers. You are unique as a computer engineer and you have a potential to make it different and stand out from the crowd and be the ONE. So do not listen to any criticism about yourself, do not believe in all that rubbish stuff, focus on your goal and work hard, you will be successful in your IT Career.  Your start is not small because

Because All The Leaders Were Developers Once