Govinda Dasu is a researcher who is building tools to help intermediate developers learn design patterns and architectures from professional code. According to his research and pilot studies, the ability to apply software design patterns and architectures is what distinguish experts in the field. And experts are what the world needs more of.

Govinda became interested in this topic because of his life story, his work on startups and his time traveling the world. Govinda grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area and traveled to India and other majority world countries. He saw brilliant people all over the world, and witnessed the lukewarm growth of IT outsourcing through his lifetime. This made him deeply curious.

More than half of the world lives in South Asia, Africa, and Latin America, and yet why do we see so few global tech companies coming out of those regions? Especially, when 60+% of the world has access to the internet. Maybe it has to do with the fact that those regions do not have enough software experts or venture capital.

Hence, Govinda works on how we can create more experts—the kind who are well versed in software design patterns and architectures. Here are some links relevant to Govinda’s work:

1. G. Dasu’s HCI research
   • industry-driven educational conditional cash transfer for online tech workers
   • AST parsers as “guard rails” to ensure programmers push quality code
2. RALE-rnd: a fork of Northweestern Delta Lab’s Isopleth, prepared for a study comparing how novice developers study professional code using graphical and debugging tools
3. Scaffolded Exercises
   • a tool to help intermediate level developers learn about Javascript data value transformations from professional examples
4. Knowledge Maps
   • a tool to help novice CSS developers learn about granular techniques from professional examples
5. RALE Modules
   • a tool to help intermediate level developers learn about Python design patterns from professional examples
6. Thea
   • a mental-health focused pomodoro productivity timer for remote workers
7. Defining What Makes a Professional Tech Worker – part 1 and part 2
8. Chat-based Work Sessions for Productive Remote Work Communities
9. The Sangeeta Sudha apps provide Carnatic music translations on iOS and Android. This is a collaboration with his father Prof. Sridhara Dasu, grandfather Damodara Dasu, and aunt Santa Dasu.
10. govindadasu.com is an academic reflection of the food, recipes, culture, temples, music, stories, interviews, weddings, events, travel, places of interest, of the Telugu Niyogi community and the North American Telugu diaspora.

Govinda plans to add my dissertation on “Process Management for Learning from Professional Source Code” to this website when it is complete.