Why use cool things - Rohit Yadav

During the last round of a recent interview, the HR person asked me why I like to do x, y, z and my answer was: all of them are cool; s/he failed to understand and said — you just don’t do things just because they’re cool. I got the job anyway :P let me tell you why you should do anything if it’s cool. Doing cool things gets you amazing experiences, skills and even knowledge, with which you can accomplish awesome things. And the fact that you can change and adapt, helps you survive.

It’s amazing to know how, which, why and what tools people use to accomplish a certain task. When I see something cool, I would give it a try. For example I used to use an (ugly) OS developed by some North Atlantic company which must not be named, but about four+ years ago I attended a Linux workshop and saw some cool stuff you can do with it, so I switched to Linux!

Let’s take another example of how people use Twitter. These days most of us are on one or more social networks, but it’s interesting to know how, why and what networks we use more. Many of my friends are on twitter and only some may use it. Various reasons can be because; it’s short and simple; their friends are on it; many public figures are on it; easiest way to share and communicate etc. etc. Many tweet using their favourite desktop/mobile/tablet app, via the main website while some simpletons use command-line tools.

I prefer to use bitlbee for tweeting with irssi inside a screen and other tools such as vim, git, cmus, mutt etc. in tmux. Usesthis.com has a great collection of interviews around the same questions. So, how, what and why do you use some cool things to get your stuff done?

Why use cool things March 25, 2012