September 2011
2 posts
“The brick walls are there for a reason. The brick walls are not there to keep us...”
– Randy Pausch (1960-10-23 – 2008-07-25)
Interpreting: "Oh I am never going to work with...
Throughout our lives we have this sense of Deja Vu, of meeting people/personalities and you get this feeling man I wish never ever work with this person again. But heres a perspective, our experiences make us who we are. Instead of taking flight response and shunning to person, work with them for just once. You will learn a thing or two about human nature and dynamics of dealing with it.
I call...
August 2011
2 posts
Lessons from doing Business with Indian SMEs
Its been two years, since Fafadia Tech is pursuing its passion for helping small and medium enterprise becoming more efficient reliable and competitive. Following are some of the insights I would like to share with the world with having some success and many failures over course of almost two years.
SMEs are man power & cash constrained
SMEs are afraid of complex systems
SMEs care more...
Learning Erlang
Its been couple of years since Joe Armstrong’s book has been lying in my bookshelf. Since I have time to upgrade myself time to learn little erlang programming. One of the things that attracted me towards learning erlang is the fact that it allows hot swapping. I can’t think of practical application but sure seems like an interesting feature. On the side-node Facebook’s Thrift...
July 2011
3 posts
Building Company == Revolutionary Culture
Culture defines who we are, what we do. Its the essential DNA that dictates behavior when exposed to risk, taking action necessary to grab opportunity. Running a company over two years, I still have a dissatisfaction towards not having spent enough time thinking about the culture of company and figuring out competitive advantage.
When I look at companies I respect the most, it seems central...
Interesting content from Quora: 2011-07-14
Since its raining heavily in Mumbai, I decided to take some time off from routine work and surf Quora. I must tell you, its a great site for discovering content. I used to use FriendFeed, Hacker News, TechCrunch for content. But I would guess I am spending more and more time on Quora.
Why doesn’t the iPod have a stop (■) button?
Beyond the famous Bob Metcalfe Ethernet napkin sketch (and...
Summary: David S. Rose on pitching to VCs
So found this cool recommendation on Quora on list of must watch videos for Entrepreneurs. I am going to post bullet point from the talk
Single most important thing while pitching to VCs: YOU!.
18mins ideal dropoff for VCs pitch.
Integrity, Passion, Experience, Knowledge, Skills, Leadership, Commitment, Vision, Realism and Coachable are things that VCs look at.
Garbing attention and taking...
June 2011
2 posts
My new about.me profile →
Asking the right question
Some one on Quora asked Whats the best launch strategy? Robert as usual had an amazing insight. Summary of his answer was ask the right questions.
How do I make a product so strategically important that Steve Jobs buys it within a month.
Wow! Simply amazing, why didn’t I think of this before.
Seems like reduction, that I had learned in Algorithm’s class. So I guess its the art...
May 2011
4 posts
Living example of passion and belief
Mumbai trains are always amusing, considering that average mumbaikar spends 1/3 of their professional working time in trains things get pretty interesting. Today I boarded a train from Vile Parle at 8.48 around Andheri I met this gentleman
Prof. Sandeep Desai hes an engineer, MBA graduate from NMIMS and was a Professor at S. P. Jain Institute of Management and Research. What a stranger like me...
Keynote awesome iPad app
Creating a presentation was never so simpler. Now I can use my iPad to show-off what Fafadia Tech is cooking. This was a humble reminder from Apple on how simple and elegant solutions are derived from truly understanding your users.
On use of Mockups for better communication
Like many software developers out there we use Balsamiq, and there is adjoining community that keeps crunching out better stencils for everyone. So why use a mockup, well for one it helps better communication. Low cost of chaining/tweaking things ahead of time since doing it after implementation are difficult. Apart from that, I feels a great tool that even customers are happy to see of how the...
Python links
PyPy 1.5 is released. PyPy is alternative to CPython implementation. Although to be honest I thought Unladen Swallow would make it to CPython branch.
Its back to basics with Have you read your python docs lately?
Tamarin - Django application for parsing logs in S3
April 2011
10 posts
When in doubt, make fool of your self
Take it as a complement when some one says: You don’t make any sense. I am pretty sure, thats not a common thing you hear. But consider this when Galileo discovered that earth wasn’t at center but sun was, people laughed at him. Similarly lot of entrepreneurs like Elon Musk, Mark Zukerberg, Steven Spilberg, Thomas Edison and Steve Jobs are known for being revolutionaries. I guess...
2 tags
Rapid prototyping with Google App Engine
I have been extensively using google app engine for most of our mobile project, even our Fafadia Tech’s main website runs on GAE. What appeals to me is the simplicity of it use. You basically write models and controllers use Datastore as models. And simply run appcfg.py update <some_dir> and you’re done. So need to install,configure and deploy. It gives you a nice interface for...
Thoughts on Data and Governance
No I am not going to be talking about Wikileaks style data, I am talking about an innovative initiative called Code For America. Whats interesting about this project is how effectively crowd-sourcing has been leveraged. They are getting hold of students, entrepreneurs and web professional to make data available to public in general.
Tasks range from simply massaging data to creating...
Building better products
There are tons of discussion on what makes a great product person, but what I believe it really boils down to approach and personality. Following are qualities I think are important that I have seen in great product people
Good Better Taste: Not only critique but a strong personality and intuition on what the client/user is going to like.
Great Communicators: Its all about convincing people,...
Book Review: Only the Paranoid Survive
Flipkart.com is a great way to shop book Amazon style in India. They accept COD too along with credit cards. Which is great if you know what book do you want to buy.
This books is great, take in note that this book was written pre Google and Youtube era. It talks about Strategic Inflection Point things that make underdogs bigger, stronger and better. Groove talks about changes in following...
Mobile Technology for rural India
I believe in next 3 years following are some use cases where mobile technologies can be disruptive for bringing social change. Partially whats fueling this grown is penetration of mobile handsets in India and 3G networks that is rolling out.
Early Warning and Emergency Response: Lot of damage control in Japan wouldn’t be possible had they not installed Early warning systems. Each year many...
Mobile innovation for Asian Markets
According to UN India has more cellphones than toilets. I agree thats the scene on grass roots. These days you get entry level Android phone from Micromax for a little over $100 What implications this has on India markets are as follows
Tighter integration of mobile into our day today life. I mean not just getting SMS of you kids score card, tracking your kids in real time via there phone would...
7 habits
Tons of materials has already been written on 7 habits. I think I got to at least a habit before I can have 7. The one thing I always lacked in my life was consistency. I could perform awesome I could perform to peak and then go down…
So with spirit of developing at least one habit, for next 30 days I am going to blog each day. But heres something I learned from a great guy
Show up on...
Lets just keep the customer happy, shall we?
Across Project Managers, Sales and Marketing and most of time Owner alike suffer from Complyaria — I just made this word up. It means complying when its really require to tell truth or set expectation right.
I believe its really a flawed philosophy, because for any company what that translates to is: I am going to get my part done easily, next guy/team will cover up for me. I think...
Who fires the CEO/Owner?
Well the customers do! In Seth Godin’s words its the CEO’s job to set the Agenda. But our upbringing gets in the way:
We are taught to take things in our own hands as opposed to empowering people and trusting them to do the job
We are taught to micromanage than to create agile environment where people collaborate
We are taught to blame than take responsibility for power
We are...
October 2010
2 posts
How many year(s) of experience you have?....
Relevant follow-up question would be in what?
Everywhere you go in India, there is a *big* emphasis on years of experience one has. While it might be a great way to weed off some from huge sea of candidates, it doesn’t make sense at all to make hiring decision purely on this factor alone.
My argument is simple, it just doesn’t translate to how good a person is for a given position....
Things that will help Geeks turned Entrepreneurs
Its been more than a year since I have been running a business, would like to share some lessons I learned during this period
Begin with an end - most would interpret this as having a vision/goal. But let me clarify, lets say you have written the best piece of code on this planet. Next logical question is whom are you going to sell it to? Do you have a marketing plan, a research that justifies...
January 2010
4 posts
Entrepreneurship from Streets
Checkout these amazing videos from YouTube
a picture is worth a thousand words, but these videos are just priceless.
UX Lessons from Hunch and Craigslist
UX being one of the many parts that important in success of any web-application. However lets take two extremes of UI designs: Hunch and Craigslist. While some people would say Craigslist is not a comparable example in terms of UI to Hunch, I would request them to reconsider. Specially if you read this article from Harvard Business Review you will begin to have second thoughts.
While we are at...
Location based services, GPS in India
I will be posting a series of blogpost on this topic. My interest in doing so is to gather some concrete evidence on current state of LBS and GPS in Indian markets. Generally data is used to supports human hunches — nevertheless I am going to share an intuition of mine.Following are some factors that I have seen playing role in slow development or smaller penetration of technologies alike
...
Catching up with Java once again
Its been a long while since I have written any Java code, but as technology progresses there are lot of innovations happening in this space, worth mentioning are
google-collections - Its Google’s replacement for Java collections. Has lot of datastructure built in, cant wait to write some code that uses them and test it against Java’s collection
protobuf - Yet another Google’s...
October 2009
2 posts
So you want to be an Entrepreneur?
Lately you have been reading lot of VC blogs, following them on Twitter and obsessing about how you make your startup lean. You spend hours debugging Erlang code, debating why Vi is better than Emacs on StackOverflow. And you code, sip some caffeine, code again… You work like one hell of a code monkey 17hrs a day, 7 days a week and things just work fine for you. But why am I discussing this...
Business of Software
Engineers including myself have taken lots of basic courses including maths,physics,data structures etc while getting ‘formal’ education. What I really wished I had studied and learned more of was Business and Economics. I wish I know how demand and supply worked? how do you read financial statements? why do we pay taxes? what are deductibles? Well I guess its never too late.
And for...
September 2009
1 post
On Change!
There are truly remarkable stories out there about Change! Right from Obama, Evan Williams to mythical David and Goliath. Really, they are inspiring, scary and something that beats sense and reality despite you dislikes. The more I read about these success stories, I see some common patterns/traits/skills that needs to be developed. Some of the skills are naturally ‘hard coded’ into...
July 2009
4 posts
Do we need Morpheus?
According to Wikipedia Morpheus is legendary greek god of dreams. In the movie Matrix he played as an important role, majorly as a pragmatist mentor to Neo. Why such a divide, and do you really need one?
Following properties of Morpheus makes h(er)im highly desirable:
Good Listener - Reading between the lines, and restating implications are just part of it.
Highly Analytical - They have a...
A wonderful journey comes to an end, yet another...
Today was my last day at Project Playlist. Its been a little over a year, since I oficially joined Playlist. I joined it to quench my thirst of knowledge, and for thrill of working at a startup. I was ~10th engineering hire. Personally Jeremy Riney — founder of the company inspired me. Initially I reported to Ram Prayaga, another great guy taught me a lot. And not to mention countless...
Wrote my first iPhone hello world app.
It was a little bit confusing, since I am not aware of the right lingo. But I must confess, Apple had a decent dev tools. Take a look at this tutorial.
June 2009
4 posts
GTalk countdown code!
So I have been doing a countdown for 26th July. And have been updating it as my status message on GTalk. Nakul, a friend of mine asked me automate it, and so I did. I tweaked this code to update time left till 26th July.
Wamlart effect
Walmart effect is a great book. This book gives a insight into one of biggest organizations in USA. How it effects not only americans but the rest of the world. With an appetite to reduce prices and leverage of selling stuff at volume, they have succeded in “Always lowest price”. But there are negitive implicatios to their actions, they have driven their suppliers out of business,...
Got Mac?
I finally managed to get a 13” Mac Book Pro. And its awesome. Its crisp,simple and solid. Initially there was a little problem in using it. But once you get used to mac way of doing things. Life is all good. I have also ordered a copy of VmWare Fusion. My Sysadmin Steve Tidwell recommended using it. I want to start using this to do Python,Android,Gears dev.
Python 2.x MySQLdb is a piece of s***
Sometimes its just retarded… that python community in general goes by “Battries included” motto. Yet, once again failure to support MySQLdb in higher version is nothing more than classic FAIL. I have been trying to search for solution to getting MySQLdb working with python 2.6, let alone having hopes for python 3.0.
Maybe its sideeffects of late night hacking, but I am eager to...
May 2009
1 post
$10 Well Spent
If you are a technologist, program/product manager or even an executive take a look at Scrumban. Its a no BS book on software development principle. It covers everything from lean,agile and kanban principles/methods. Working at a startup for a year, it has made me realize how even small decisions related to product can have huge impact. In this context this book lays down general guideline on how...
January 2009
1 post
Toying around with PHP
Since I already know python a little bit, I think it makes sense to learn php. Couple of thoughts till now: PHP is relatively less strick in terms of syntax than Python is. At the same time my rant about developing web based application in Python is, there are too many web frameworks out there and sadly none of them are standard.
In python land, there are frameworks like Web.py, Pylons, Django...
December 2008
1 post
Reality Check -- My thoughts
I finished reading “Reality Check” by Guy Kawasaki. Couple of comments: he uses some material from his earlier book “The Art of Start”(which BTW is a good read too!). I am happy to see him expand on some of topics covered in this book. He brings in great entrepreneurs from industry, who share their experiences. Some of my personal favourite chapters from the book are...
September 2008
1 post
Google App engine first impressions
I was one of the fortunate developers to get Google App Engine account. And I am trying to make use of it. I am developing a simple video sharing application. KaveMunn its pretty basic allows you to quickly share a link.
The feature I like the most is its SDK. You develop offline and once you are ready to go, just do an update and your app gets deployed. Thus no hassle of setting up box in...
July 2008
5 posts
Shared Nothing Programming
So recently there is a lot of buzz about shared nothing architectures and databases. And this by is partly because people are realizing thread programming is *hard*. With the race amongst chip manufacturers for fitting more cores on a chip, programmers are realizing that they need to keep up with this change.
Functional programming like Haskell, Scheme and Erlang allow single assignments to its...
Hadoop + MySQL == Killer Combo?
[Firstly I would like to declare my ignorance of Databases, Data warehousing and Data processing. Hopefully I will be better with time.]
So last couple of days I have been working a lot with Hadoop and MySQL. And this is what I have been doing
Take the raw data push it off to HDFS
Clean data using simple streaming jobs in Python
Get the data to local drive, ingest into MySQL
Run queries and...
Time seriers analysis
Temporal aspect of internet is really interesting. Specially when we now have “streaming” data easily accessible via REST apis. Following are some of interesting sources of data which could be exploited for extracting all sorts of knowledge
Search Query Logs(if you are luck enough to get access)
Feeds (RSS,FriendFeed like API)
News 2.0 like site (Digg,Reddit etc)
There could be...
Hello World!
I have tried blogging a lot, in past I have written longers post. But lets see if I can keep up with writing small short posts.
BTW I just graduated out of USC, and I am excited to join small start-up Playlist. It sure is going to be fun and exciting specially with diversity of people they have. So stay tuned!
