I work at a small startup – owned by a medical doctor who is also the CEO of the company. Leaving work one Friday evening, I noticed a book, ‘Learn SQL in a Weekend’ lying in his office. On Monday morning, he had evidently learnt enough SQL to let me know triggers were the answer to all our problems.   This got me thinking, why is it that everyone thinks they can be a developer. I don’t believe reading Gray’s Anatomy (abridged), qualifies me to give medical advice, or scanning through the Wall Street...

About a year ago I felt pressured into buying a PDA. All my friends had them, even the ones who regularly call me up to ask me how to send email attachments. My colleagues at work, had them on their desks and would hot sync them with their computers at work and home and tell me how useful it was. At meetings, I would pull out my notepad to make notes, and every one else would pull out their PDA’s. Well to make a long story short, since I love gadgets, I had to get myself a PDA.

I recently received an email from an elderly aunt, which got me thinking about the state of the English language. The email was peppered with words like ‘u’ ‘yrself’ ‘hv’ ‘luv’ ‘wld’. This is a person in her 60’s, a college graduate, who speaks perfect English, and writes very well. In the days before she found email, I would get long newsy letters handwritten letters, which used sentence case, were grammatically correct, had no spelling mistakes and no abbreviations either.   Using abbreviations on messenger is understandable – I do it myself. Messenger is a...