Alex Stetsenko

Few days ago I ran into another interesting parable:

I once went to a circus and saw a huge elephant tied to a small pole with a rope, just standing there. So I wondered why is the elephant so obedient and doesn’t break away from the stick with all of its enormous strength and mass. So they told me this story: once when the elephant was very young, it was tied to the pole the same way. Naturally, it didn’t like that and tried to escape, but try as it might, the rope and the pole were too strong for it. So the elephant eventually gave up.

Later on, when it was older, the elephant still believed it could not escape from the rope, and remained standing in the same place, despite the fact it could then easily escape.

Interesting, ha? It is said something like past performance does not guarantee future results. Which usually means being successful in the past does not imply success within another company or just in future. However this parable is a wonderful example of the opposite. So it is important to realize what one may now be capable of doing regardless past experience.

It’s almost like being Agile: fail early and then start a new sprint. 🙂

Last month I attended AT&T Mobile App Hackathon. Although our team did not make it to present an app it was absolutely fun experience.

First of all it was interesting to learn what’s going on in the world of mobile development. For instance turns out not many prefer native development especially for Android. Also the choice for non-native app development is not just limited to PhoneGap or Titanium. There are many more less known (for now) tools and APIs like appMobi or apigee.

Second, I had a chance to work on text to speech and voice recognition features for Android which I may incorporate into next generation of SAT Vocabulary.

Third, there was no free Wi-Fi. However on the bright side everyone had a chance to try out AT&T 4G Mobile Hotspot device. And it was absolutely awesome and fast which makes you want one. Kudos to AT&T actually since T-Mobile devices were showing no signal at the ATDC location.

The top three apps were:

• Four Corners – allows multiple players to scan a QR code to join a team in a game. Players tap on their own mobile device, which the impact is seen on the game board on a larger shared screen.
• YouJuke – social music selection.
• Food Porn – shows beautiful pictures of a food near you and gives you directions to it. It does nothing else and has absolutely no social networking whatsoever by design.

Looking forward to attending more events like that. Also AT&T is planning other hackathons in DC, SF, Boston and Orlando during October-December of 2011.