The War Against Obesity

After reading a interesting article on gastric-bypass surgery, also known as 'stomach stapling', I thought of my good friend Dr. Ahmed who is currently a very prominent figure in the obesity intervention community. He operates out of London and is frequently called upon as an expert in the space.

The article cites a study showing patients who have undergone surgery to treat their obesity have shown significantly higher incidents of addiction in other areas such as alcohol, drugs and cigarettes. Are these people tragically trading one vice for another?

From the article:

...candidates suffer from binge-eating disorder and display addictive personalities, therefore after their weight loss surgery, they may replace overeating with a different substance... Patients documented noteworthy increases in the amount of substance use (a combination of drug use, alcohol use, and cigarette smoking) 24 months after surgery...

The good Dr. Ahmed and I shared many a good laugh while he was studying his craft at Stanford, or 'cutting', as he referred to his surgical skills. He thought of his mission on this planet as doing what he could to bring about victory in the global War Against Obesity. He called himself merely a foot-soldier on the front lines of the battle. Fighting the good fight one laparoscopic gastic bypass surgery at a time.

As tribute to my friend, his fight, and the good people he is helping, I wrote a short poem in his honor... My wife thought it was amusing, so here we go:

An Ode To The Warrior...

They seek him out, to ease the pain,

To stop the mass they gain again...

Poke the holes! 

Drain the fat! 

Sew them up....

... and that is that!

Bellies shrink,

...yet how they drink!

More, then more, struggling, stop. 

Will other vices rise to top?

Hunger falls 

into Abyss....

All the while, their saviour smiles...

Our good doctor delivers BLISS...

Keep cutting my friend! Victory will be hard fought but is not out of our reach!

Building Enterprise Mobile Apps? Try this...

One of the better resources out there on mobile development and the mobile market in general is Simon Judge's Mobile Phone Development site. In it, a multitude of topics are covered regarding building and delivering mobile apps efficiently and effectively. 

One insightful posting from Simon discusses the challenges on inter-dependencies on systems as they relate to mobile app development. You can read the posting Saving Mobile Development Time, Effort and Cost here. In the post, he mentions:

In mobile, dependencies tends to be the server side, embedded data, UI graphical assets and sometimes localised text. The problem is that these are often not ready when the app is developed causing placeholders to be used. When the actual items become available there are often problems to be resolved that might have been more efficiently been resolved when the code was actually designed/written.

I couldn't agree more, and this is a prime example of where the new trend of Service Virtualization can have a tangible impact on the delivery of your mobile apps. By using the capabilities that an SV solution provides to abstract away the back-end server side components that most enterprise mobile apps rely on, development and test teams are unlocked, and able to execute in parallel while those back-end pieces, web services or data models are being built and finalized. 

With all of the complexity and lack of mature tooling that mobile developers and testers currently have to deal with, having the ability to remove the constraint of off-device systems should be greatly appreciated.

This is something that many large enterprises we talk to are looking to take advantage of.