When we don't see the sun, we see other stars

What are your motivations for creativity?

- I want to make a change.
- It makes me happy! It is a need of my mind.

How to be creative for a thing?

There are two steps:

- See the thing as every people see it

- Think about a new different thing from it

How to think about a new different thing?

There are two ways:

- Forget all things you have already known.

- A whack on the side of your head. ;)

This was what I have learned from the following great book:

source: Amazon.com

Well! A physical whack on the side of your head is needed sometimes but the meaning behind is that you need to break these 9 following locks on your mind. Remove them!

The lock #1: "The correct answer"

We all learn from schools that there is only one correct answer to a question. For example, a proposition is only true or false in Algebra. In reality, there are always some answers to a question basing on a point of view. For example, number 6 becomes number 9 if you look it in the opposite.

The lock #2: "That is not logic"

There are two kinds of thoughts: soft thinking and hard thinking. Soft thinking focuses on finding a relationship among things. On the other hand, hard thinking focuses on the differences between things. The metaphor is a technique of soft thinking which needed for creativity.

The lock #3: "Follow the rules"

Sometimes, creativity is not always a contribution but a damage. However, in order to create a new model, we need to break an old model. Break the rules!

The lock #4: "Be realistic"

Answering the question "if...then what happens?" is useful somehow. For example:

- Imagine if what other people (your inspirational ones) will do in your situation. E.g: I sometimes say to myself when I face an issue: "What will Mr. A do in this situation?"

- Imagine if you are what you think. E.g: Imagine you are a paper; what are your characteristics to make you more convenient for users?

- Imagine an idea which is obviously not realistic. According to this idea, you can come up with a better realistic one. E.g: original idea: the Government will give money for whom put trash into trash bins. Improved idea: every time people put trash into trash bins, they will receive a random fun from the trash bins.

The lock #5: "Play is frivolous"

"If necessity is the mother of invention, then play is its father". There is no doubt about it!

The lock #6: "That is not in my field"

Specialization is necessary in most of the cases; however, bringing a knowledge from a field to another field is really useful as well.

The lock #7: "Don't be silly"

Actually, a comedian is smart. He/she always thinks in different ways. It is like a movement of a car, sometimes it needs to go back in order to go straight.

The lock #8: "Avoid ambiguity"

People avoid ambiguity because it results in the misunderstanding in communication. However, just keep listening to your dreams and playing with it.

The lock #9: "Mistakes are wrong"

In most of the case, a mistake can result in a very bad situation. However, a mistake sometimes helps you come up with some new approaches.

Reference:
[1]. Roger von Oech, A Whack On the Side of the Head

Comments

Strategy Design Pattern

For example, I have a program with an Animal abstract class and two sub-classes Dog and Bird. I want to add new behavior for the class Animal, this is "fly". Now, I face two approaches to solve this issue: 1. Adding an abstract method "fly" into the class Animal. Then, I force the sub-classes should be implemented this method, something like: public abstract class Animal{ //bla bla public abstract void fly(); } public class Bird extends Animal{ //bla bla public void fly(){ System.out.println("Fly high"); } } public class Dog extends Animal{ //bla bla public void fly(){ System.out.println("Cant fly"); } } 2. Creating an interface with method "fly" inside. The same issue to an abstract class, I force the classes these implement this interface should have a method "fly" inside: public interface Flyable{ public void fly(); } public class Bird implements Flyable{ //bla bla public void fly(){ System.out.pr...

MS SQL Server Views

"Creates a virtual table whose contents (columns and rows) are defined by a query. Use this statement to create a view of the data in one or more tables in the database. For example, a view can be used for the following purposes: - To focus, simplify, and customize the perception each user has of the database. - As a security mechanism by allowing users to access data through the view, without granting the users permissions to directly access the underlying base tables. - To provide a backward compatible interface to emulate a table whose schema has changed." [1] Beside that, our team used view in order to improve the performance of our web apps when a database has a very complicated relationship between its tables by using ORM Frameworks such as Hibernate. Example code: --create CREATE VIEW placeholders AS SELECT EMPKEY AS empkey, CONNUMB AS connumb, EMPNBR AS empNbr, ACEEMPN AS empFirstName, ACEEMPFN AS empLastName, EMPNAM AS empFullName, ...

Performance of a Data Structure

Why data structures matter The fact is that programs are all about processing data. Data structures are referred to how data is organized which affects the time of executing a program. How to measure the performance of a data structure In order to measure "how fast"/efficiency/performance of a data structure, we measure the performance of its operations. There are four basic operations including reading , searching , insertion , and deletion . A pure time consuming is not used for the measuring because it is not reliable depending on the hardware that it is run on. But instead, we use the term time complexity which refers to how many steps an operation takes. An example of how a single rule can affect efficiency Let's compare two data structures: Array and Set (with N elements). 1. Array - Reading : 1 step (because the computer has the ability to jump to any particular index in the array) - Searching : N steps (the worst case with linear search) - Inserti...

How I did customize "rasa-nlu-trainer" as my own tool

Check out my implementation here Background I wanted to have a tool for human beings to classify intents and extract entities of texts which were obtained from a raw dataset such as Rocket.chat's conversation, Maluuba Frames or here . Then, the output (labeled texts) could be consumed by an NLU tool such as Rasa NLU. rasa-nlu-trainer was a potential one which I didn't need to build an app from scratch. However, I needed to add more of my own features to fulfill my needs. They were: 1. Loading/displaying raw texts stored by a database such as MongoDB 2. Manually labeling intents and entities for the loaded texts 3. Persisting labeled texts into the database I firstly did look up what rasa-nlu-trainer 's technologies were used in order to see how to implement my mentioned features. At first glance rasa-nlu-trainer was bootstrapped with Create React App. Create React App is a tool to create a React app with no build configuration, as it said. This too...

Why Functional Programming Matter

What issues do we concern when implementing and maintaining systems? One of the most concern is debugging during maintenance: "this code crashed because it observed some unexpected value." Then, it turns out that the ideas of no side effects and immutability , which functional programming promotes, can help. Shared mutable data is the root cause Shared mutable data are read and updated by more than one of the methods. Share mutable data structures make it harder to track changes in different parts of your program. An immutable object is an object that can't change its state after it's instantiated so it can't be affected by the actions of a function. It would be a dream to maintain because we wouldn't have any bad surprises about some object somewhere that unexpectedly modifies a data structure. A new thinking: Declarative programming There are two ways thinking about implementing a system by writing a program. - Imperative programming: has...

vhandit

Search This Blog