WordPress Setup
I set up my first website using WordPress way back around 2007 or 2008. I was amazed by the simplicity to install WordPress. My website was up and running within 2 minutes. Even now, the …
Time Tracking
I’ve always wanted to track how I spend my day working on various projects. More often than not, I’m usually wondering how my day or week just got over while I feel nothing significant was …
X factor
I’m a huge fan of planes, learning about accidents of planes (both Air Crash Investigation and National Geographic Investigation are my favorite). Among all the aircraft crisis, of the best is the landing of the …
Doing things that don’t scale
Startups are all about doing things that don’t scale. In fact, there is an interesting and famous article by Paul Graham on the same topic. http://paulgraham.com/ds.html. If you are an entrepreneur or planning to start …
10 types of people
I’ve enjoyed the above quote when we were in college. It sounded geeky and fun to share the quote from partially technical folks and make them go in awe. It sounds super silly now though. …
Experiments with digital detox
This whole idea triggered from the blog post from Ishani about Digital Detox. Especially I liked the Ted talk What I Learned from 10 Years of Digital Detox. I can’t believe someone could do this …
Sapiens
This book was recommended by Geetanjali & Manas. We decided to read a book every month. This is a massive book. It took me two months to finish this book. This is a totally different …
Resume
Last week, I had to find the resume I created when I was in college. It was funny and weird to look at it after so many years. In fact, since this was something I …
Three principles
Meaning of Life This is something I (and I’m sure many others) have been pondering for many years. We all already know the answer to the question for “The answer to life, meaning, and everything”. …
AWSome Builders
This is my first tech talk after a long while. It was fun to have an open conversation about the various steps we took to scale our infrastructure and reduce the cost. The discussion was …
Happy Teachers Day
Happy Teachers Day to everyone out there. Coming from a family of many many teachers and inspired by dad, I was very sure I’ll become a teacher later. While that surely didn’t happen, I still …
Growth
All good companies (including ours) focus on growth and make sure they allocate a budget for their growth. Without a clear focus on growth, it is impossible to run a successful business. The term “growth …
Atomic Habits
This book was first recommended by Ishani while she was reading this. In fact, I loved this book so very much that I completed this book even before she did. Months later, I recommended this …
Johnny Gaddaar
The main reason for me to write about this movie is a talk I’ve watched by Max Levchin. I’ve uploaded the 3-minute video where he talks about picking the right co-founder. The entire talk is …
Neutral State
Startups are crazy! Things look so positive one minute and everything goes to negative next minute. Same way, things look so fucked up one minute, and then there is the ray of hope. In a …
Advice for a junior software developer
Every year, I work with a smart bunch of college kids during their summer/winter internship at HackerRank. While I’ve learned a lot of things from them, they usually ask for feedback/advice at the end of …
When Breath Becomes Air
This book was recommended by another colleague. This is written by Paul Kalanithi, an American Neurosurgeon, about his life and illness, battling stage IV lung cancer. Top three thoughts about this book I might remember …
Hiring great people
The following is an excerpt from one of the documents we follow in our hiring process. It’s obvious we want to hire great people. No sane person will advise otherwise. There are different definitions of …
Decade
You remember some events in your life forever. Things that happened 10 years ago feels like it just happened yesterday and you can even remember the room, people, and the whole scene of action. For …
Founder Stupidity
Founders are core to the company they create. They are supposed to smart, great in problem-solving, and at some level should be able to visualize the future. I recently had some one talk to me …
Inbox Pause
I follow Inbox Zero to take control of my inbox. Initially, it was great and ‘felt’ very productive. But later at some point, it became an addiction to check email very often. The urge to …
WebAssembly 101
WebAssembly has been there for quite some time. While I understand the overall idea, I never had a chance to build anything production-ready so far. I had a chance to play around with WebAssembly during …
Certificates
We recently launched certificates in HackerRank. When it came to the decision to who will sign the certificate, our engineering team asked me if they can use my name and signature. Of course, without thinking …
Mail Merge to PDF Files – V2
This is a follow up of the post I’ve shared earlier to create files earlier at https://sp2hari.com/mail-merge-to-pdf-files/ While the first version of the post I made for creating multiple PDF files from Google Doc and …