I don't watch TV that much - but I'm glad I did today and caught a glimpse of a bit of US history in the making for this year's Olympics.

The news is all about Paul Hamm, the 21 year old US gymnast who made a big blunder in one of the events - everyone thought that he's out of the competition for Gold, and he himself have admitted saying to his coach that the best that he can do is to go home with a Bronze.

His coach, Miles Avery, replied: "No Way!"

Hamm performed spectacularly on his next two events and ended up taking the Gold, after beating the Korean gymnast by a mere 0.012 (Hamm got 57.823, the Korean got 57.811).

Avery explained later that errors ... are not the end of the day. What you must do is to keep fighting, keep going...

I caught a glimpse of two scenes: when Paul fell at the vault, crashing into the judges - with that look on his face knowing that it might be over for him, and when he's about to do the horizontal bars - on which he needs to get a near perfect score in order to edge-out the Korean.

The man knows what he had to do, and he focused on getting it done, and he did get it done.

~ Just a little something from the Athens 2004

Clear Decks

Our problem is that we get comfortable in the security of what has worked in the past. But Paul says, “Brothers, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus.”

Matthew 13:44-46 [ is an example] of bold responses to opportunities that come our way:

The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field. When a man found it, he hid it again, and then in his joy went and sold all he had and bought that field. Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant looking for fine pearls. When he found one of great value, he went away and sold everything he had and bought it.

This is consistent with something you often hear from financial advisors: if you want to prosper, the first thing you need to do is get rid of your clutter... Go through everything you have and clean out whatever you are not using or no longer need — sell it or give it away.

Ultimately, all we have — our money, possessions, time and talents — belong to God. He has the right at anytime to call on us to use those for His purposes or even to leave them behind in order to do a new thing.

...

There are those that simply do not care - or perhaps they think too highly of you.
There are those that are too stubborn - or perhaps they think nothing of you.
There are those that are too stupid - or perhaps you simply don't get them.

They're all the same.

They annoy you.
They drain you.
They make you want to eat yourself inside-out.

But still, you got to be better.
You got to be smarter. You got to be faster. You got to be stronger.

Nobody said that it's gonna be easy.
Nobody said that it's gonna be a free-ride.
If it is so, then everybody would be you,
doing what you do, getting what you get.

And if that's the case what's the big deal about being born you anyway?

You'd be just like anybody else.

But don't you know that in you lies a special gift ?
that's totally yours and yours alone ?
Your unique contribution to the world ?
Without which the world wouldn't be a better place

So why don't you get up,
stand up, speak up, think up.

and make things happen.

You know where you have to be
You know who you have to be
You know what you have to do.

Now do it.

passion

Rome, 1960 - Throughout her childhood, all Wilma Rudolph wanted to be was a normal kid. As a toddler, double pneumonia and scarlet fever kept her bed-ridden while other kids played outside. When she was just four years old, she contracted polio, which crippled her left leg and forced her to wear a heavy, metal brace wherever she went.

For seven years, she and her mother made weekly 100-mile treks for treatments on her leg and her brothers and sisters took turns massaging it daily. Then, when she was 11 years old, Wilma could finally walk without the brace and her hope of being a normal kid was finally in sight.

But a strange thing happened. Rather than just keeping up with the other kids, she outran them. At 16 she won a Bronze medal at the 1956 Olympics. At 20, Wilma Rudolph became the first American woman to win three gold medals in one Olympiad. It turned out that her dreams of being a normal kid never came true after all.

passion

Mexico, 1968 - Out of the cold darkness he came. John Stephen Akhwari of Tanzania entered at the far end of the stadium, pain hobbling his every step, his leg bloody and bandaged. The winner of the marathon had been declared over an hour earlier. Only a few spectators remained. But the lone runner pressed on.

As he crossed the finish line, the small crowd roared out its appreciation. Afterward, a reporter asked the runner why he had not retired from the race, since he had no chance of winning. He seemed confused by the question.

Finally, he answered:"My country did not send me to Mexico City to start the race. They sent me to finish."

passion

Montreal, 1976 -- After severely breaking his knee during the floor exercise, Japan's Shun Fujimoto ignored his injury as long as possible, knowing such news could shatter the confidence of his teammates.

The injured gymnast continued on to the pommel horse routine, miraculously scoring a 9.5 out of 10. He then faced the rings, which would be his final event of the day. Shun performed extraordinarily, ignoring the inevitable consequences of dismounting from eight feet off the ground. Upon completion of his routine, he hurled himself into a beautifully executed triple-somersault dismount.

When his feet hit the floor, the pain sliced through him like a knife, but he kept his balance. Gritting his teeth, he raised his arms in a perfect finish before collapsing in agony. He was awarded a 9.7, the highest score he had ever recorded on the rings.

After winning the closest gymnastics team competition in Olympic history, Shun joined his team at the podium to receive his gold medal, and he did it without assistance.

~ passion

Sad and disheartened, I thought I had failed
Compared to my old friends my future looked pale.
All my big dreams of success and fame were all dead
And I felt I was nothing, until Jesus said:

“I was in prison, and you came to me.
I was that hungry child you helped to feed.
I was that lonely one you came to see.
As you did it to others, you did it to me.”

So here’s my advice for those who’d be great
Just do as Jesus said, be a servant and wait.
For that great day’s soon coming when Jesus will see.
He’ll say as you did to others you did it to me.

~ Jim Watters.

vocatio

I don't seek wealth - I wouldn't know what to do with it.
I don't seek fame - I don't have the energy to deal with it.
I don't seek recognition - my reward is not in that people know what I've done but ...

in smiles - on the faces of everyone that I see.

in sunshine - shining through in the lives of those helped.

in the knowledge that even when i am forgotten,
when all things i've worked hard at have been lost,
I have done my Father proud,
because I did what I was created to do.

a treasure beyond all treasures

the old man said .. "there are three treasures in this world: that of gold, that of health, and that of the heart..."

"the most valuable of them all .. is that of the heart."

the old man continued slowly...

"when i married the love of my life, i didn't know that she was ill. her father hid from everyone that she has a grave heart condition, he even hid it from his own daughter for fear that it would worry her. she was only told that she was weak, that's all."

"to our misfortune, my wife's heart collapsed in the first year of our marriage. i was shocked as i learned that my wife was terminally ill. it even angers me when i found out that my father-in-law had hid this fact from me. the doctor said that there is still chance for my wife though. we can get her a valve implant, but the problem is that we didn't have the money."

"miraculously, after two months, the government social service helped with funding for the operation and the valve implant. my wife went through the operation okay, and it was such a moment for me, i almost thought that i was going to lose her, only in our first 3 months of marriage. but still, there are still problems for us, the hospitalization and medical fees took a tremendous toll on our finances. and i was only a young army officer back then, i wasn't earning much. after the operation we had to live on the bare minimum.. you can say that we survived on love alone."

"after a year of marriage, my wife wanted to have a baby. i wasn't sure whether this is possible given her condition. even in that first year we were still very cautious. we were living in the same house but we weren't exactly living as husband and wife. so we went to see a doctor for expert opinion on whether my wife's heart condition may prevent her from having a child. the doctor said that she can, but it'd be painful for her. the problem was that ever since the operation, my wife has been taking pills that'd prevent her blood from clotting, this is to avoid the artificial valve from malfunctioning. and these same pills that have been keeping my wife alive, will be deadly for the baby in her womb. so the alternative would be for my wife to take these chemicals via injection directly to her veins, twice a day."

"out of love, my wife agreed to bearing that pain. and she miraculously gave birth to our first daughter. that was in 1979."

"our 2nd daughter was born 2 years later, in 1981."

"it was a miracle i tell you, and i was overjoyed. the doctors were also happy. this is the first time in the history of singapore medicine that anyone as frail as my wive, gave birth, and mind you, gave birth two 2 beautiful girls"

"did i tell you that she was only 45 lbs when she was in labor ? that's 45lbs, not 45 kgs."

"now, it's been 8 years since my wife passed away. she left me and my 2 girls after 21 beautiful years of marriage."

"she's my true love you see. for if it weren't for love, i don't think we could have survived even the first month of our marriage. i felt cheated back then, i thought i was marrying a healthy woman, only to realize that she had a terminal disease."

"on her death bed my wife told me: .. darling, i've been a burden to you ever since you married me. we've never even gone for a honeymoon in all our times together. for what you've done for me, i am grateful. and i want you to know that i love you. i just hope that our two daughters can take good care of you even after i'm gone... "

... the old main paused ...

"my wife was, is, and will always be that treasure of the heart. for even till now, after she's gone, the thought of her comforts me, and keeps me alive."

... he paused again .. as though wanting to make sure that i'm still listening ...

"and so young man, if you ever find a girl who loves you much, don't ever let her go."

"she's a treasure beyond all treasures."

productization revisited

in my early my university days, i told myself that i'd stay away from software engineering subjects, simply because i thought they were boring. so i instead focused on more exciting stuff like artificial inteligence, distributed computing, automata theory, computer networks, schedulig resource management, etc...

to my great surprise, software engineering now fascinates me tremendously.

in the first few months of working in the company, i made this conclusion: there is a definite relationship between the architecture of a piece of software, and the speed and quality of which that software can be built, deployed, and maintained.

and since speed and quality of software development depends much on the people you have on your team, company policies, and how they actually interact with each other, the corollary is that all these factors influence software architecture. and since the decision of how to maintain the piece of software (by recruiting top-notch Java gurus and pay them 8K a month each, or by outsourcing everything but the user interface to india) is a business decision, you can say that software architecture is also influenced by the model of which the software company decides to operate.

let me run this by you again:

the size of your company, the people you have in your team, whether you have CVS/VSS, whether everyone in your startup team are seated in a small apartment, or whether there are 1000 developers working together on a 7 million dollar project, .. determines what should be the right architecture for your software.

and so here's the next corollary.. as your company grows, and as your team and processes develops, so will the architecture that is right for your software.

when I first joined the company, i looked at the architecture that's been used as the template for all our systems and i silently screamed in agony. the architecture is lean, mean, and enables a small team of highly qualified developers to produce a highly-functional system in the minimum amount of time. development time is minimized because the architecture results in the minimum amount of dependencies across modules, and thus, minimum interactions between developers.

this type of architecture, however, comes at a cost. the softwares developed are hard to maintain, hard to improve, hard to debug, and everyone in the development team has a "don't touch, we won't know what might go wrong if we remove that debug statement" kind of a mentality. improvements to the system is not made by 'improving current code', but by replicating existing system functionality and modifying the duplicate.

this results in a very bloated and pretty much fragile system with a maintenance cost that grows exponentially as time goes by. surely this is not sustainable. if we want to grow our system and have a 'platform for continuous and sustainable growth of innovation', we need to change the architecture.

fortunately i came in at a time when the business direction of the division is changing from a 'customized solution' approach to a 'product-based' approach, in order to grow the company further. so i was put in charge of doing the R&D work of 'revamping' the core architecture of our 'to-be-products'.

mind you that an architectures for software products are much different from architectures for software solutions.

after about 4 months of work, we now have a more 'complex' architecture based on a core-set of plug-n-play modules which will be standard across all of our product implementations (i.e. all of our customers will get the same core set, they can choose not to use some modules, that's fine, the software can still run - this is not possible with the old architecture because everything was so tangled with cyclic dependencies across 3 or more modules), and we also have non-core modules that are built-to-spec, i.e. customized to suit that customers specific needs.

on top of this new architecture, we put in place a product development process that decouples the development cycle of the core modules from the implementation of the software for our clients.

so far i've been involved in various aspects of this productization effort of the company's flagship product. from designing the core-architecture, adding plug-n-play into the modules via inter-module service contracts, to even designing the software configuration management processes.

anyway, it's been fun.. i'm just wondering whether i can write a research paper based on what i've done..