A Bird’s Eye View

We are living in the age of pictures. Just about any event or non-event in our life is being captured in a picture. Even more so, a lot of those pictures are being shared with others. It offers us a way to share a moment with the ones who weren’t there. Living with my wife and children in Silicon Valley, far away from our family in Belgium, it provides us with a way to show what we are up to and in that moment shorten the distance with our relatives.

On the other hand, having a camera-enabled device at our fingertips at just about every moment seems to make us want to take pictures of everything around us. Interestingly enough, one of the most photographed subjects is our food. While I was thinking about this, I recalled an old smart phone parody commercial, which is still very applicable and funny.

Another interesting use of lightweight cameras is in combination with a drone. There are companies working on drones that fly above you and track you while you are in action, such as while you are rafting or skiing. Even better than recording your ski skills from your helmet, have a drone actually record you while you are giving the performance of a lifetime thundering down the slopes.

What about having a small drone with you while hiking to fly out in front of you and provide a bird’s eye view of the road ahead, or more easily orient yourself in the context of your surroundings.

This is exactly what the Synopsys VP Explorer tool offers to software developers — a bird’s eye view of the entire system, both hardware and software, to better maneuver through the many lines of code and identify a particular issue faster. While I have been mainly focusing on the early availability benefits of virtual prototyping in this blog, with the right tool, a virtual prototype also provides additional benefits in terms of debug control and visibility.

So be the adventurer. Log all your activities, events and non-events, and share them with your fellow software developers so that together you can create better software, faster.
Somebody should write a book about this.