Reckoning..

Specialization is for insects

2011-07-15T09:55:00.000+05:30

Heinlein - Specialization is for Insects

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

-Robert A. Heinlein

<--snip-->

Similarly, in my view :

An engineer in an internet company should be able to think of ideas, build prototypes, translate feature specs (or discussions) into workable components, design architecture, write good code, review code, monitor servers, scale applications, analyze logs, plan capacity, design databases, implement and use caching efficiently , tweak web servers, tweak databases, build fast, release faster..

Will Google+ spoil the Facebok IPO party ?

2011-07-07T09:07:00.006+05:30

Google has been highly successful in creating a tremendous amount of buzz (not wave !) around Google+, it's social networking product.At least my view is that the gates were only semi-opened for users to create this hype.
While the Google variant of social networking too would ride on vanity and time-kill capabilities that users can harness like Facebook, in a bunch of ways, it is different - Circles and Hangouts.
Basically, the biggest gaps in FB were unwanted wall flooding and unintentional network expansion - the former being a function of the latter.
With Circles. Google+ brings in the opportunity for people to recreate their networks with the right people and separate them into water-tight rooms for selective information dissemination.
Which is cool because that's how it is in real life.
Hangouts is another capability which lends from real to virtual .. it's a morphed incarnation of groups and only better, because one can create dynamic groups with different set of people, on the fly.

So,will these be strong differentiators for Google+ to eat up a sizable chunk of the FB share and take the sheen out of their IPO plans ?
It's highly likely. Because of the hype that Google has created, complimented by the fatigue that some users have started to feel in FB.
Have a look at this, when FB was launched, it's traffic was a reciprocal of what Orkut went through :
Can Google+ give it back to FB in the same way ?
I just looked at Google trends to see if there's a decent number of searches being done for Google+ and check this out, the trend in the bottom reflects FB and + in reciprocal trends !

It will be an interesting battle to witness..

Who robbed my day ?

2011-04-19T18:42:00.002+05:30

I get up in the morning and decide a bunch of things that I need to accomplish. But when I reach work, there's a different (read absolutely ad hoc) plan waiting to unfold on me.

What are these forces and how do they rob my day and trick me into sacrificing my plan for theirs ?

UI specs

2011-02-18T11:12:00.004+05:30

As a product person, most often than not you end up iterating a lot over the interaction and use cases for an interface or a set of interfaces on the website.

It is not always possible to figure out and visualize the entire interaction without any visuals in sight. However, it's a good idea to have a skeleton sketched in one's mind and translated in a doc. Which could then be beefed up. This definitely reduces iterations because if there is a structured doc that one has to fill, you end up thinking a tad more than usual.

I just made a rough template that could be used :

Being Geek - Must read

2010-09-15T18:01:00.007+05:30

The book's cover grabbed my attention instantly. That's me ! Gotta read this one .. is what I said to myself.

The first page made me connect and smile. Through the course of the book I realized that I might believe that I have successfully transformed myself into an management person, but truth be told, I have still not lost my religion !
The book puns on how the structured mind expects every body else in the professional realm to follow a structure too.And how unmet expectations lead to confusion and
frustration. The book comes to aid as a guide to help navigate through this unknown territory.
Dwelling a little too much on how to go about a presentation was a drag but overall, the writer makes one realize that the unstructured world is not difficult deal with.
There are people who follow patterns and can be dealt with in counter patterns. Simple as this formula sounds, it depends too much on one's will to go that mile and enforce an intersection of these patterns.
Must read.

The truth about innovation

2010-06-22T08:19:00.006+05:30

People care more about what new they can do as opposed to what problem they can solve.
It's true.We are so smitten by the novelty of things that we staunchly believe innovation to be"creating something new".If it's new, it's cool !
But if you really go subcutaneous on every innovation - they are solving some problems or addressing unmet needs.Picking up some examples from day to day life :
# cup holders, power windows, remote locking, windshield sprayer in cars
# laptops, lighter laptops, smaller laptops, even small laptops with better battery
# modular kitchen
# ziploc bags
# hand blenders
# multiple doors, external display in refrigerators
# split a/c units
# the iphone

.. to name a few. Now just as you scan this short list, what is the most interesting but common thing that strikes you ? Each of these features / products shakes the industry, becomes the coolest thing around and then goes on to be the de-facto standard or even a hygiene factor if you will.
And that's the beauty of solving a problem.Innovation and coolness become an easy beneficial side-effect.

I mean Apple did not go on and say, let's make an incomprehensible portable music device or a ground breaking telecommunication device .. they saw a domain that had some pain points and some unmet needs.I mean Nokia has been making phones for years, for crying out loud and they launched hundreds of models..

It's not what new you create, it's the how that is the separating line..

Google TV - dwarfing IPTV

2010-05-21T14:42:00.002+05:30

The Google guys are at it again. Google TV Promises a rich web and TV experience with quick ability to find what one's looking for.
I'd like to see the remote (or keyboard though ;-)

Lucid Lynx is in the house

2010-04-30T16:21:00.003+05:30

Thanks to Sameer, I was able to get the Ubuntu 10.04 iso and install the much awaited upgrade.In a wink, this is what's new :
couple of smooth new themes
better icons and all
Gwibber for staying connected to one's social graph (would have liked something for blogging too)
quick boot up
Ubuntu One - free 2 Gigs in the cloud
RythmBox - (on the road to) itunes killer - that allows searching & buying music online
ipod support
Pitivi video editor

Looks good, runs smooth. Everyone behind it - you guys rock. Long live open, long live Free !

Steve jobs says Flash is passé

2010-04-30T10:59:00.002+05:30

Finally clarifying why Apple does(will) not allow Flash to run on iphone,ipod and ipad - Jobs says that Flash was invented for PCs with mice and not phones with touch. It's a thing of the past and can not let low powered devices live it up as opposed to HTML5, CSS and JS combined.
Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen responds in non-descriptive disagreements.
No doubt Adobe is the one losing out on traffic/usage opportunity - either they should address the reasons laid down by Jobs or prove him wrong by running sweetly with Android on the phone

Linkedin recommendations - MAS

2010-04-28T06:59:00.002+05:30

You get a linkedin message saying foo has requested for your recommendation.You hit the link with mechanical compulsion, land on the page, see the profile of the person and ponder - hmm what should i write ? Now being objective and candid is the obvious (and ideal) way to go about it.But, then you get this thought, if I write a complete +/- report on the person, how would that be reciprocated if (when) i seek her/his recommendation ?So you just go for hyperbole +ve attributes.

If you look at the recommendations in your network(Indian graph), most of them tend towards flattery.And the flattery would be working both ways ! So, essentially it is a sort of mutual admiration society. I scratch my back, you scratch mine.

Chrome for Mac

2009-12-10T09:37:00.003+05:30

Finally here. Thanks Google for keeping your promise of informing me of the launch. The browser works like a charm - swifter than Safari as well as firefox.
More once I have taken a deeper look..

Go with the flow

2009-11-17T11:35:00.002+05:30

Got into a discussion with a colleague who was talking about a book he's reading - Flow. From what he summarized, the book talks about why one should be living in the moment and not worry about anything else.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (Author) is honest about the fact that this concept has been much written about.
I agree.
So the challenge is not understanding why one should be in the moment and not worry about anything - it's the how ? which is hard to find an answer for.
I believe that we apply Newton's third law of motion in everything we do - we expect a reaction (a positive one at that).
Now if we stop doing that and this is not new - Lord Krishna said this
in 1000 / 1400 B.C.s
Everything seems simple.
Like Nike has been saying for years .. "Just do it" ! :-)

Presenting a new idea (ideas)

2009-11-07T14:42:00.006+05:30

You get up in the morning , get a brain wave, reckon it's a stupendous idea and spit it out in a quick email to your seniors and peers.

Sometimes people jump and say wow ! but most of the time, I bet people throw back questions which shred every fiber of possibility in the idea.

I propose a slight variation in the approach of bouncing new ideas - huddle everyone you want to share the idea with and present this deck of 7 simple slides :

Presenting new / lateral ideas in your company

View more documents from Vibhore Sharma.

Royal Enfield Bullet classic 500 disappoints

2009-11-05T17:22:00.006+05:30

I had sadly sold my bullet a few years back but the rides and sounds of it have been haunting me since. So, I wanted to buy one again, but then I got to know aout the possible launch of the classic 500 in November and thought why not wait for it !
I have been waiting for it for months and finally, it was launched yesterday, I called the dealer and asked him to give me a test-ride asap.
Well, I did get lucky but not happy, as I was to find out.

First the good points about the classic reborn :

- awesome design
- good ergonomics
- well done chrome
- beautiful and look-enhancing rear tyre
- unbelievable pick-up - i almost made the front tyre jump 2 feet
- lower height and spring seat makes the seating position better

Now, the bad points that make me still vote for the 350 standard

- the thump is dead (although the dealer said that with the off-roading silencer it is there - will go again when those silencers come)
- the ride does not feel like a bullet - it was more like a sports bike (maybe some people like that)
- it feels lighter
- the push-button start makes it sound like a kinetic honda !
- there is no pressure release lever

All in all, i was quite disappointed by the lack of feel in the bike. The bike looks amazing, truly a classic and full credit to the Royal Enfield team for that.
But they have failed to retain the authentic thump and "feel" of the bullet, despite their efforts. I would still like to give the bike another chance, once the off-road silencer comes in.. if it still does not make the sound of the magical 4 strokes like the way a bullet does (a reverberating rhythm that the rider's heartbeat resonates with). I am going back for the standard 350.

Nasscom Product Conclave 09

2009-10-28T17:44:00.002+05:30

Attended the event first time with very little expectations. Surprised to see the turnout in Bangalore.
I guess the timing also was very apt - with the economic situation sort of committing to bounce back, most companies are upbeat. One clear thing that emerged was that the positioning of India is changing (made to ?) in the minds of the west.India is ceasing to be a hub for getting cheap, quick and good back-end development done and transitioning into a focal point for product development of most multi-nationals.
How quickly and smoothly (read fruitfully) this metamorphosis takes place, nobody knows.

Are you being served

2009-08-29T12:16:00.002+05:30

It does not matter what restaurant I like, but if the service quality of even my favorite one is bad - they loose repeat business from me.
This holds true for any product, not only dine-in places. Unfortunately, client servicing is the most "taken for granted" aspect of several businesses. Now that's more cultural than by design. Taking stock of what customers want, listening to them and acting on their inputs is the most crucial bit.

This is what separates the men from the boys, if you will :

1. Product
2. Sales
3. Service

Weakness on any of these dimensions makes a business vulnerable to loosing share of wallet or even market to competition.

More jobless = more entrepreneurs ?

2009-08-01T14:36:00.006+05:30

Not in any other part of the world, but when it's the valley - that's quite a possibility..

Courtesy : businessinsider.com

Bing ! goes Yahoo! Search

2009-07-30T09:59:00.002+05:30

I guess the news of the newly forged live-in relationship between Yahoo and Microsoft would be discussed and beaten to death by the end of this week.I don't blame the people who (including me) would do that - simply because it's the end of an era. It's also because a legendary company like Yahoo is throwing in the towel to call it quits from the race to be the better (best ?) search engine.

It's sad. I first used Yahoo in the late 90's and have loved it since then as a company. But enter Google and Yahoo started to lose it's religion.. they used Google for their own search for a brief period, bought Inktomi , tried for several years to get it right and in the process lost focus on how they wanted to be positioned as.
From a search engine to a multimedia site and to now being a bookmarks commissure - Yahoo seemed to have completely lost the compass.

The company refused to be bought out by MS earlier despite moving like a wrecked ship - made me think that the spirit is still alive but Alas ! Yahoo has finally given up - on search at least. Let's see how MS fares as it's newly found role as a Guardian Angel !

Innovation

2009-05-26T22:01:00.002+05:30

( Top-down , bottom-up or all around ? )

Innovation : a new way of doing something. It may refer to incremental, radical, and revolutionary changes in thinking, products, processes, or organizations. A distinction is typically made between invention, an idea made manifest, and innovation, ideas applied successfully. (source : http://www.wikipedia.org/)
Well, that definition sort of does sum-up what innovation is, however when it comes to practicing or further still - mastering the art of innovation, most organizations hit plateaus much sooner than later.
Now why is that ?
Based on my experiences and consumption of information around / interaction with people around, I have made some observations :

The 3 most crucial components that make any innovation successful are (and I am considering being the first-mover to be an implicit imperative) :

^ radicalness
^ benefit
^ execution

If you are the first mover, you leave a huge gap behind for competition to catch up.
If you are catching up, you better be fast to not only catchup but outdo the leader at break-neck speed.
To outdo means that the benefits your innovation offers, are better than anybody else around.

Self-explicit. Or is it ? If the mantra is so simple, then why are we mostly talking about the same set of companies always ? Why don't we see a dozen new companies across every year that race to the top 20 on this index ?

Source : BusinessWeek

Is it just because these companies have phenomenal leadership at the helm ? Or is it because that these companies nurture a culture of innovation ?

I mean everybody knows that Steve Jobs has an unbelievable and un-quenchable desire to make products that the competition can only just marvel at ! forget outdoing, they can not even ape Apple products properly.
But is it just Jobs alone in Apple that is responsible for innovating ? Is he the one that comes out with ideas ? Or is he simply a terrific leader who inspires innovation !
Take BMW as another example - those guys build tanks that move like the wind ! And they always make it unbelievably better than the last one ! For a company that goes as far back as 1916 - they don't have a Steve Jobs there, or in P&G. And enough has been talked about Google and it's innovation speed.
What these companies have in common is a culture of innovation , better still, they have processes that help nurture/ facilitate this culture.

Operationally what that means is that people are empowered to ideate and implement those ideas and their organizations are willing to take the risk of spending R&D dollars for driving those ideas to success !

Learning to design with TDD

2009-05-21T19:49:00.001+05:30

This stems from a post Nitish wrote about TDD (Test Driven Development) and how developers end up making a sales pitch to their managers for using the methodology.
While discussing the same, we travelled on a tangent (not so far away) viz., what is the prime objective of TDD and are all/most
developers who practise (or try to) it, able to achieve it.
We converged that the true objective of TDD is to arrive at a good robust design that the code in question runs on. As a beneficial
side-effect, you get code that the QA team strugles to look down upon and you end up spending lesser time debugging it -
to arrive at a tangible comparison that must lead to this conclusion deserves a separate discussion (post).Well, truth be told, if we look at the context of the internet, where the LAMP stack has made it so convenient to build websites
that programmers (?) exploit the supreme forgiving nature of the PHP platform to the hilt. Good modelling, robust design and
architecture are milestones that are too far in the future.
So as a coder, I know about OOPs and abstraction to implementation as much as a few key books in college could engage me to read.
But that's just about it. In India at least the schools don't really teach you designing models and approaches.
That begs the question : can practising TDD help bridge this gap ?
Playing with some code and tests with the help of Eclipse pointed the needle to Yes ! But that's java - a language whose developers
are pampered with a number of high quality tools that make it so much fun and so smooth.
If you talk about PHP - the poor Rolex (Eclipse/Junit) replicas like SimpleTest and PHPUnit leave a lot to be desired.
But The possibility of these tools aiding developers ignorant to design pracices, learn by doing, is not bleak at all.
Soon, would be experimenting that and see if the hypothesis is correct.

Mumbai battle won

2008-11-30T05:41:00.002+05:30

Thanks to the brave security personnel - the NSG commandos, army and the police. But this marks possibly the beginning if a new era where the citizens of India would want to take things in control and work to make this nation a better place to live in, rather than waiting for the politicians to do so.
Angry people talking on tv panels, peace marches being carried out in various places - this tragedy will not be forgotten like the others. And it should not be. Not because the terrorists struck the elite, who possess the power (by virtue of their networks) to bring about a change, possibly a revolution, but because, this was the last straw. It was outrageous on all accounts. The fact that a handful of people can land in our country with loads of arms and ammunition, enter the financial capital, spread around , strategize an attack and go about their business of spreading terror - unnoticed, unchecked !
There is no guarantee that this would not happen again. Especially because we have nincompoop people like the CM of Maharashtra and Home Secretary who say that "We did not have exact information" and "such incidents can happen in a big city". Preposterous !

Mumbai under Fire

2008-11-27T21:11:00.000+05:30

It is devastating.A country of billion+ has been glued to their tv sets, watching a handful of mercenaries taking the city under siege. Enough has been talked about it over the last couple of days..
Anger, frustration, shock are common responses to the situation. But the agony and pain of affected families can only be understood by some one who has lost a dear one in an un-natural fashion. The only way to console oneself is to blame it on destiny - wrong place wrong time.
The security agencies, - army , police, NSG have done a great job at handling the situation, and lost the best people too. I salute them.
While most news channels are battling it out for being the first one to break a news or get an exclusive piece of information before or after taking gaps to run ads - so out of place. There were some who had eminent personalities speaking their minds about how they felt - Suhel Seth for one was quite angry, visibly.
Then there are opportunists, Mr Advani was quick to jump and comment that the Government is not doing it's job, Mr Vajpayee was swift enough to write/sign an ad published in the newspapers urging voters of Delhi to vote for the BJP (Sic !)
I don't know much about politics, but what I do know is that at times like these, all people ought to come together, brave the situation, and find ways to disallow such incidents pro-actively for the future. Governments have come and gone.. Assam, Punjab, Kashmir .. terrorists, naxals, mujaheddin.. whatever you call them, these people have been hitting this country time and again .. there have been people like Mr. Rebeiro and Mr. Gill who have found means to suppress /regulate and even eradicate such evil ideologies.
They must have done a lot of things right.This is a wake-up call for the country and there is no snooze button no more.
I am trying to think hard about how civilians like me can help in getting the house in order.. it's difficult for the law-enforcement agencies when people are not happy even with a security gaurd outside a mall frisking them (the rigor of frisking is questionable alright). When we are insisting to get our way by bribing - be it a traffic offense or anything else.
For starters, we should :

respect the law and be more sincere in abiding by it
stop giving bribes
be more watchful of activities around (not being snoopy in people's personal lives also)
report inapt security / measures in public places we visit
Am thinking of more concrete and radical steps that could start off some sort of a revolution driven by the people to take things that matter - in their control, if not in control then have a strong viewpoint in unison and make the governments and the bureaucrats and politicians, etc bow down to it and work towards them.
It's time to REBOOT INDIA.

OpenSocial disenchants

2007-11-08T16:10:00.001+05:30

I am not really a keen user of socaial networking sites, but I believe that they intrinsically carry a lot of potential to alter/compliment most business models on the web.Like I mentioned in an earlier post, the biggest challenge right now is that social graphs are locked inside sites that own them and thus expanding/harnessing them across these various sites is not a possibility.
I was actually hoping OpenSocial to solve this problem but was disappointed to find out that it is nothing more than a means for developers to build apps which are cross-portable on various social networking sites.
So I guess we are still a long way from USN (Unified social network) or to and fro data pollination on the social graphs.

Code review challenges

2007-11-05T17:54:00.001+05:30

Have tried to capture and compile here the objective of code reviews and the approach for fulfilling the same in a tangible and recordable fashion. Apart from other concomitant benefits of reviewing code like minimizing defects, the primary benefits would easily be the following :

* verify that the code is production quality / release-worthy
* ensure that the way code written by different people follows a standard skeleton
* ensure that each individual programmer continually writes better quality and more maintainable code

But it's not easy - because of the inconspicuous yet overwhelming existence of the programmer's ego or Cognitive dissonance.

I came across an interesting article here that claims to take away the pain from the code review process. And probably a simple checklist like this could make the process more structured.

The other challenge is to quantify change, of course on the +ve side of the number line .. I guess the only way to do that is break down the checklist into much more granular components. For instance, capture design, approach (creative, fast, etc) , unit testing, comments, performance, legibility, maintainability, version control, etc and the degree of all these and have either a boolean or scale rating for each aspect and then progressively track an individual's ratings to see if the methodology needs to be tweaked.

Google signs on as MySQL contributor

2007-11-04T18:43:00.000+05:30

The search giant is spreading it's wings far and wide.MySQL AB announced a few days back that the leading open source database will include code contributed by Google inc., along with some security improvements in the development roadmap through 2009.
That's great news. Hopefully MySQL users world over would get to derive the benefits of several customizations Google has been doing on the db engine.Albeit, the extent and areas of contribution from Google would be interesting because if this move is more strategic than philanthropic, then Google obviously would be choosy about releasing contributions to the MySQL code base rather than opening the flood gates.
Also, why is it that the company has chosen to begin contributing to MySQL only and not any other platform that the company uses and customizes to a great degree for better than optimal performance, like Linux or Apache, etc.Why did the company chose to partner with IBM to train university students on cloud computing ?
MySQL had also announced earlier this year that the enterprise source code would not be available for non-clients.So one is forced to question whether contributions made by Google would also be split amongst the two versions ?

Also, interestingly is there a paradigm-shift in the open source world where in contributions from individuals begin getting overshadowed by those from the big guns ?

Social graph and beyond

2007-11-03T10:40:00.000+05:30

Taking the previous thread forward, presuming we can solve the unique yet common identity problem, how can I use and benefit from my social graph apart from just staying in touch with people and sharing community/work specific knowledge/information.
I reckonOpen Social a project undertaken by Google that involves building "a set of common APIs for building social applications across the web", could be the next big thing.Though the description does not reveal much except that it would enable social networking sites to allow influx and outgo of user and graph centric data.This move makes the possibility of a USN (unified social network) if i may call it,coming into existence look real.Moreover, since data flows two ways on graphs, this could mean that one could relate any piece of data/information on the web to one's social graph.Six degrees !

Ubiquity of the social graph

2007-10-29T10:05:00.000+05:30

Networks - professional or otherwise that started off as fads have the possibility of evolving into very potent tools for the internet and it's users. The metamorphosis that some of the networking sites have gone through could not have been planned (people might claim so !).
If you ask me, the idea of social / professional networks must have originated from the old Web 1.0 (if you please) concepts of discussion boards, mailing lists and communities .. sounds more like an evolution path to me.
Well then, what next ? Shall address that in a bit, right now let's understand the current situation : there are plenty of social networking sites right now being used extensively / sparingly depending on the country you are in.Which is a problem, because if as a user you have to expand / cross-pollinate your networks amongst these various sites, you can not do so unless you register with all of them or ask people you'd like to network with, to move in on one of these sites that you are at. Any which way, you would have to maintain different networks across different sites and these networks exist in a Euclidian paradigm.
So, the solution is simple, have an unique identity for each user that all these sites recognize.Well, it actually is not as simple as it sounds.Although Facebook opening up it's network through apps and MySpace vowing to follow suite, the networks may be accessed but they would remain to be locked-in aat these individual sites.
And as a user, I don't like that.
I'd love for my graph to be ubiquitous,accessible and extensible with ease, independent of the platform (read a specific site).