My take-away was - never estimate confidently without knowing anything about the task. Because the initial assumptions might be very incorrect. Invest maybe 2-5% of the time to start doing something (ie begin learning Korean to realize that it's a phonetic language, and reading is easy within just 1 day). This will allow you to come up with the right estimate. Thoughts?
That is a very informative post! However, if you are willing to spend $900-$1000 per month on housing, you can technically look at almost every Asian city (perhaps not the very center of the city, but a decent neighborhood). Because $1000 is indeed a lot of money for accommodation when compared to the standard of living in most of the world. I live in Seattle and pay $1500 for 2BR2BA apartment that I share with a roommate in a nice neighborhood (not Capitol Hill - that place is going out of the roof!)
I am from India and I worked in Bengaluru and Delhi before this. I used to pay about ~$500 for a studio 3 years ago. In Bengaluru, you now have tremendous access to Venture Capital (including the Silicon Valley names like Sequoia), great incubators, work spaces, and a lot of talent and IT type crowd. English is no-problem.
On the negative, you must be willing to spend inordinate amounts of time in traffic - you can own bikes just like in Saigon, but the roads have potholes :-D - breathe polluted air, potentially fall sick because of poor hygiene and eating outside food.
I think what they mean is that IT Outsourcing that specifically involved deploying, installing, upgrading, configuring tools and software is being disrupted by cloud, because you don't need to worry about a lot of such things any more. Like bringing up 20 windows machines, and installing SQL Server, .NET Framework, and domain join the machines used to be a 2 day affair, not so with Azure. Nothing to do with outsourced software development. The cloud may actually boost outsourcing in that area.
For a large c/C++ code base, I use an editor called SourceInsight. This is the most invaluable tool for navigating code I've come across in my 3 year career as a software developer. I work in a very large software company, and there are several code bases running into millions of lines of C/C++ code. My previous team had 60,000+ files, with the largest file being about 12k loc.
If you have access to logs from a production service / component, I find TextAnalyzer.net quite invaluable. I take an example 500 mb log dump - opened in TextAnalyzer.net and just scroll through the logs (often jumping, following code paths etc), while keeping the source code side by side. This allows me to understand the execution flow, and is typically faster than attaching a debugger. If it's a multi-threaded program, the debugger is hard to work with - and logs are your best friend. You are lucky if the log has thread information (like threadId etc)
I'm a developer with Azure. Most of the developers still have individual offices (a few folks are also 'doubled up' in individual offices because of space constraints). Only some teams have moved to an open-space office layout.