The majority of my readers will know who I am and what I am busy with in my day-to-day life. For the minority – I am a curious software engineer, who is eager to learn exponentially in today’s busy world. In this blog site I share my thoughts and ideas – maybe even discoveries I made – to inspire and lead to growth my fellow citizens around the globe.

I am not trying to sell you anything

I am still young and on my way to develop both my hard and soft skills, so please don’t look for the next-gen Leo Tolstoy or F. Scott Fitzgerald style in my writings. My aim is to make people more aware of what is happening around in tech, and bring awareness about the current trends, that are actually driving today’s world economy.

Despite the fact, that since my early ages I was interested in mathematics and engineering, not only I am a witness of the reflection how these subjects brought positive impact in my life, but also how I can help others with my skills. Some other day in future from the time I am writing this post on my laptop, I pretty much believe, that you will never regret the time spent for reading my posts and benefitting from them.

Just keep in mind, I will always promote the good over evil. In this post I am not trying to sell you anything, rather want you to get inspired by the little story I faced recently and conclusions I made from it.

Backgrounds & drive

For the last couple of weeks I have been slowly turning over the pages of “A little History of Economics”. You might wander straight away: “Wait, you told us you are a software engineer, and now you claim to read economics books?”. Well, let me tell you not to hurry with your expectations. Having a LinkedIn bio “Software Engineer” for me has a slightly different approach in my life.

My inner self tells me, if you claim to be an expert in the field you are claiming, then it should not serve you as if you are in the higher levels of social hierarchy and everyone must pray for you. Absolutely not. If I am entitled to be a “Software Engineer” it means something more than writing code. My goal is to be a philanthropist. I get much more joy when I see that the code I wrote some while ago is now making a person’s life easier by couple clicks, saving him 25% more of his time, rather than getting all of my unit tests pass in the first go.

That’s my drive and that’s my motivation I get every morning.

Getting back to the book, I would say, it’s a compelling introduction to how economics work. I pretty much enjoyed reading it.

Water pipe story

Last week there was a breakdown of the hot water system in the place I live. Being an honest resident, I wouldn’t say management responded quickly enough to this situation. None of us living here had access to hot water.

I assume, due to the high volume of complaints, they started looking for alternatives, such as having a shower in public places, where the bills will be paid by the accommodation, I assume. I never tried this option, though.

What’s more fun is that I could see the water dripping from the roof, whenever I look outside my window, because my room is facing opposite to the ‘incident rooftop’.

Generally, this was the fault of none, I think. As the building is aging now (getting older since 2000’s probably), obviously materials used to build the site become weaker. Despite that, in the recent years UK has faced strong winds and unprecedented freezing weather. That, in fact, got the pipes frozen and you do the physics of what happens when extreme cold and hot meet at the same spot.

Let me take you back to the main story. So there it is – a panic from residents and a long queue of questions down at the reception. Staff has to do something about the matter. It’s been quite a while now. I have asked one of the staff members, Nick, who is a great man – and we have some frequent friendly chats about life – why there is still no hot water, and he replied that he is doing all he can to call the contractors to fix the issue.

Not so long after that, in the evening time, I could hear weird noises outside. I look up the window and see two men laying out the base for scaffolding. I went to sleep. In the morning, boom, all the prep work is done and the team of engineers have arrived onsite before the majority of resident were awake.

I was astonished and motivated by the speed and quality of work done by these people, whom, sadly, I don’t know the names of. This should be a true inspiration for anyone in any field, where you have to be the master of the work you are doing. That’s where the humanity should head for.

Very quickly, hot water was restored and everyone was happy.

Economics book

Earlier in this article, I have mentioned a book named “A little history of economics” by Niall Kishtainy, and it wasn’t for nothing. Niall tried to explain very briefly the first theory of modern economics proposed by Adam Smith in his book “The Wealth of Nations” that is titled as “Division of Labor”.

A story that backs up the theorem says that if one man tries to manufacture a pin, it will take him around 10 days and its long enough for a single pin. However, if a pin factory has only 10 workers that do two or three distinct operations in the manufacturing workflow, the factory would have finished thousands of pins by the end of day 10. For this to happen, every man has to be an expert in his area of work. And that’s, ladies and gentlemen, how we dwell in our modern economy era.

Smith starts off his book by saying:

‘One man draws out the wire, another straights it, a third cuts it, a fourth points it, a fifth grinds it at the top for receiving the head; to make the head requires two or three distinct operations; to put it on, is a peculiar business, to whiten the pins is another; it is even a trade by itself to put them into the paper; and the important business of making a pin is, in this manner, divided into about eighteen distinct operations, which, in some manufactories, are all performed by distinct hands’.

Conclusions

Be who you want to be. Be the expert. Be the professional. And you will get what you are striving for.