Umair Aziz

I was invited by the faculty and student body at FAST NU to judge the Procom.Net 2008 Software Competition. Most of you may not know – FAST NU is one of the best engineering schools we have here in Pakistan. Think Stanford of Pakistan. I’ll let GIKI be MIT and LUMS be Harvard.

Anyways Procom has become an annual tradition at FAST NU where student engineers from all over the country come down to Karachi for a few days and compete in various competitions in programming, software, network design, hardware, circuit design and hacking. The event is conducted in association with a student branch of IEEE.

Some of the smartest people at Creative Chaos participated at Procom in their college days and most of them won or were runner ups. Therefore I’ve always held the institution and the competition in very high regard. When I was asked if I would be interested in coming to the event and judging the software competition – I immediately accepted the offer. It was like winning free backstage passes to a software lollapalooza.

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I’ve been reading ‘The Pragmatic Programmer’ by Andrew Hunt and David Thomas. I don’t think I could have done justice by paraphrasing their observations on pragmatic programmers – so here it is verbatim….

“Programming is a craft. At its simplest, it comes down to getting a computer to do what you want it to do (or what your user wants it to do). As a programmer, you are part listener, part advisor, part interpreter, and part dictator. You try to capture elusive requirements and find a way of expressing them so that a mere machine can do them justice. You try to document your work so that others can understand it, and you try to engineer your work so that others can build on it. What’s more, you try to do all this against the relentless ticking of the project clock. You work small miracles every day.

It’s a difficult job.

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