Catwalk, Data Science, Hollywood, Google Images, Haute Couture, StackOverflow, Comfort Zone, Dota 2 and Versace – all these topics are connected and influenced by each other. Read here how and why!

In 2000 Jennifer Lopez's  green Versace dress went viral.

Do you remember that dress? Yes! Everyone does, although 5 celebrities put on that dress before her.

Exotic green silk chiffon printed with a tropical leaf and bamboo pattern on the almost transparent fabric. The neckline was cut very low and held together with crystals around her waist below Jennifer's navel. Sexy!

All the eyes were on her!

The Lopez Dilemma

She broke the internet after wearing the dress at the Grammy Awards in February 2000.

In 2015, Google's former CEO Eric Schmidt admitted that "the most popular search query" was: Jennifer Lopez's green dress. That was the ultimate motivation for the developers to create the Google Image search.

In July 2019...

Let's look back to a story happening this year in July to Jennifer Lopez at Madison Square Garden. She again went through a lot. Dancing all night long, preparing her body for this performance, neglecting her family to achieve this and the show equipment she spends the money for.

Her family and her huge fan base followed her invitation to the concert.

The show started. Full house, full power and tons of fans.

She was in the middle of her concert after a long time in New York with her "It is my party" live-concert. People were excited about JLO's performance... they were cheering, dancing, singing, celebrating, screaming and partying.

But wait – the music stopped, lights were turned off and it was dark! The only tone you could hear was one of the panicked folk.

Another Lopez Dilemma.

The famous Carnegie Hall in New York had no electricity. The show was over after only two hours! The fans were devastated. She rescheduled the concert. She just broke the internet again. The next day  "The Guardian" wrote: “Heart of New York goes dark as Manhattan suffers power outage”!

New York's worst scenario!

This is a result of very bad or no risk management at all. Nobody thought about such a situation happening to the city of New York. No calculations for the worst-case scenario and solutions for that situation at all. We all depend on electricity, the internet, and world-wide connection through these innovations.

After reading this in the newspaper, this situation attracted me. For programming I consult StackOverflow frequently, certain special white papers and forums to stay connect with my developer buddies.

The developer's kit

The ultimate fast survival work kit is the following one: Electricity, internet, StackOverflow, GitHub and your program with packages available online. Of course, as Steve Wozniak confirmed at the WAD 2018 in Vienna, a big bottle of cola, sweets and a sack full of good jokes too!

Comparing to New York's and Jennifer Lopez's problematic situation, all that leads to some problems.

She lost money, the time she gave up on her loved ones and her reputation because of such a very poor situation. The same for the city of New York.

Why are they not hiring an additional data scientist? And a risk manager?

What would be the worst situation ever, a developer has to face?

If something happens with the hardware? Easy! Just buy a new laptop, if can not repair. With the amount of money per job, this is not a real problem.

So far, so good!

If the developer gets sick, you can recover after few days, weeks or months but a good coder can re-code the missing time with efficient codes or checking similar cases in GitHub.

What if, the internet shuts down?

BINGO! This would be disastrous! Losing the connections to the world wide web means no connection to my developer buddies, no forums I can join, discuss or look up.

And here we are...

If the internet shuts down, everybody starting from the content manager to the developer, all of them are losing time, money and knowledge.

Sure, I did not have some computed numbers here or any models but this apocalyptical situation could be real... someday... maybe...

The question is how can we survive?

What can we do to get over total breakdowns? I racked my brain about it. Here are some tricks I use and try to extend, since the only thing I am carrying always with me is my brain:

Cheatsheet

At the beginning of every programming process, I do start at a certain point with a cheat sheet. For example, I found out, that sometimes you simplify most codes to very few basic parts and then read-write and finish 80 % of the work easily.

Recreation

As next, I recreate the basics very easily every time and everywhere I can. After a while, you get bored of Str + V and Str + C and you start to do type in some twist. Voilà – the creative recreation is done!

Memory techniques

I tried tons of memory techniques out and few of them worked fine for me and I just adjusted them for my own brain from time to time. Trust me this is worth any other trick. I am carrying my brain always with me and a human being is just employing 20% of their brain capacity. It reminds me of the movie "Lucy" but I doubt that anybody ever found the key to use the own brain capacity for 100%.

Attentiveness

We know that from real life at some point you lost the connection of e.g. a conversation. One moment we start to think parallel and love to use the trend word "multitasking" but at exactly the same moment we lose the attention, old and new stuff is mixed together. You are confused. Ask more questions. Get more lost. Damn it!

It is more like playing computer games. You get from level to level until you reach the final fight against the supervillain. You lose life power, another dose of the healing power for my Ogre Magi. I need to focus. Fight! Fight! Game over! Damn it!

The same procedure with programming, if you can stay focused for a while, you will get the differences and similarities of any programming language super easy.

Step out of your comfort zone!

The moment you step out of your comfort zone and using all of these techniques any worse situation can be solved. Working through the above steps can save you a lot in any situation. That is why pure coding is awesome but with the some little extra you can grow.

Experiments I started to do when I was in high – school and optimized during the years I realized, the way a cheat sheet is written differs from brain user to brain user. Recreation steps can be optimized. When to recreate? How to recreate? What to recreate?

As well as your own memory technique, which will differ depending on your age. When I was younger I learned a lot by reading, later by writing down things and at some point by listening. Today I have a completely different approach again.

JLO is one of us!

Jennifer Lopez does not know yet but she has a lot in common with developers! She is repeating the steps: Cheat Sheet – Recreation – Memorize – Attentiveness constantly, otherwise show business would have eaten her alive!

A penny for your thoughts!

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About the author: Dilek Demir is a quantum physicist, who loves to simplify and challenge complex structures. Currently, she is working on digital process optimization under the consideration of the social inclusion aspect. Dilek is aiming to reach for the goal of a "paperless" office by building bridges between disciplines and trying to push the knowledge level for no-code automatization by teaching this programming across a whole company.