Like any average wannabe engineer, I joined a good engineering college under the University of Mumbai and opted for the branch of Electronics and Telecommunication, the most sought after branch by the herd (I still don’t understand why). Each semester typically entailed attending hour long lectures (which would put Professor Binns to shame), blindly copying content as assignments and aiming for high marks by discharging premeditated answers during exams. I ended up working at the great Indian software factory, which provided cheap services to sustain projects based on age-old technologies from going extinct.
By the intervention of fate, I had to leave my old job and got accepted at ERPNext, surprisingly, without any prior knowledge of Python or Hacker News!. Here, I was astonished by the applications of JavaScript, which, I thought, I knew due to the training at my previous job. Soon, I got a taste of server management, payment gateways, web services and single sign-ons. Add to that the feature set of ERPNext and the complexity of WN Framework. I realised that, what I did at my previous job was not even a sliver of engineering. I was reminded time and again, by Rushabh Mehta, that you cannot become a Roger Federer by playing tennis a few times.
After reading about a year’s worth of Hacker News articles, I believe that engineering is a lot like art. Big news! Doesn’t everybody say that. So, let me elaborate. If we consider scientific research and existing technology as the brushes, the plethora of needs and problems as the inspiration and the world as the canvas, engineering is a lot like a multi-painter art extravaganza, where a combination of effort and ingenuity is used to paint the world, one layer at a time. Haven’t Apple’s designs (copied extensively) changed our lives? Khan Academy is going the same way in the educational aspect (Have a look at their new Computer Science course). John Resig’s jQuery has coloured most of the web. And, SpaceX is defying possibilities.
Such inspiring leaps in engineering make me wonder, do I stand a chance to add a relatively valuable stroke on the canvas?