Real & Digital

In my last blog post I rambled on about how a tech engineer must leave College or University with skills and not just knowledge. This of course begs the question - what skills should a young graduate engineer have as they step out into the world. Computer Science has many sub-disciplines and it is not feasible to point out the skills young graduates should have in each case. Instead I picked a few sub-disciplines and asked friends and colleagues with experience in them a simple question. ' If you were hiring a graduate engineer, what skills would you want them to poses "out of the box"? ' IT is a fast changing profession and having the skills relevant for todays technology needs may not be enough to stay competitive next year. So I further classified skills into two categories - Right Now skills, that the tech industry needs from you immediately and Around the Corner  skills that the tech industry will likely need from you in a year or so. Without making t...

Entrepreneurship is great. The idea of brave men and women striking out on a new path, armed only with an idea, passion in their hearts and fire in their bellies is the foundation of free market economy. I grew up reading stories of Henry Ford, JP Morgan and other American 'Captains of Industry' who seemingly by sheer force of will built vast business empires. In my teens and early years of university I was inspired by articles on Gary Kildal, Bill Gates, the two Steve's and Larry Page and Sergei Brin. Control Data, Microsoft, Apple and Google were their 'empires'. The Stories around them were of an idea that mushroomed into Blue Chip titans almost over night. Such stories are loaded with inspirational value, but the tell only a tiny part of the story. Those great ideas often had to find funding to be turned into reality and that money went to pay for office space, support staff, equipment and lots of other things. But above all it went to hiring educated, highl...

REVOLUTION, MOBILE PHONES AND  POVERTY Revolution, mobile phones and poverty. What on earth do these three things have to do with each other. Its easy to see how any two of them would fit together in a real life situation, but all three seems a bit of a stretch doesn't it? Well here's how; mobile telecommunication explosion [mobile phones] in Sub-Saharan Africa over the last 12-15 years has revolutionized almost every aspect of our daily lives [revolution] particularly the lives of the poorest people on the continent [poverty]. Its about this point in an article that you'd expect the author to hit you with some statistics you don't really care much for and won't really help you understand the big picture, but I'm going to try and keep it real. Lets take three aspects of daily life that have been 'touched' by the mobile phone revolution; communication [obviously], commerce and social relations . Communication seems a bit obvious...

I've got  too much going on in my head so I needed an outlet and this it. Real &  Digital will be a collection of my thoughts and opinions in the context of how our modern  lives spill over from the real world into the 'digital sphere'. There's a tonne of stuff going on in both worlds and this is my take on our march towards a digital rich future, while keeping it real of course (pun intended). I outline this in my first post below. ME: REAL &DIGITAL I am actually two different people. How is that possible, you may be asking? Well its really simple and insanely complex all at the same time. You see there’s the real me, fresh out of university, just finding my feet in the ‘real world’ and basically a very small fish in a very large pond. Then there’s the digital me, personified by my character on Facebook, Google+, Twitter, LinkedIn and what ever social network that might be out there. I have a digital character; somewhat charming, somewhat cynical, free t...