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 …
Request War
This contest started as a fun chat with an employee at HackerRank and how it ended up with a coding contest. One of the engineers from our team, Aditi Tayal, has recently started learning to …
Improving font load performance
This post is a result of an article I came across recently. https://csswizardry.com/2020/05/the-fastest-google-fonts/. This is a nice post which in detail about improving the performance of a website when loading fonts from Google. There is …
Suicide
This post is the result of writing a LOT of Google apps scripts and watching a lot of ‘Forensic Files‘ in Netflix. An interesting function I used so far to attach a menu is the …
The Last Episode
I’ve always enjoyed the commencement speech made by Steve Jobs at Stanford. It is everyone out there should listen at least once. You can read/view the entire speech here at https://news.stanford.edu/2005/06/14/jobs-061505/. The best part about …
Mail Merge to PDF Files
Mail merge is a great feature (truth be told, everything that automates a repetitive job is a great feature). One of the tedious repetitive task our team keeps doing often is generating PDF files for …
Creativity Inc
Top three things I want to remember from this book and hopefully follow in work and life. It is not easy to build a team on top of honesty and candor. This is not because …
Lockdown & Mental Strength
Given the current COVID-19 scenario, this is the right time to measure the mental strength of companies and individual members. Here is a good video to understand why mental strength matters. While it is fun …
Books to read – Q4/18
One of the downsides of running a company is that you get caught up with so many problems to solve ‘at this moment,’ that you miss the focus to think long term. Especially one of …
The People & The Problem
9 years since I’ve decided to start on my own. Looking back, not a bad decision after all. Looking ahead, excited only about two things. People I’m working with and the problem I’m solving. …
#define startup
There are a lot of ways to define a startup. Paul Graham defines a startup as growth. This is how I would define it. A startup is an interesting & brutal game. The reason why …
Who built Interviewstreet?
The answer for the above question was always “Vivek & Hari”, but not anymore. To give an idea on from when to when we built things and now who is “actually” building the company. From …
Hiring
Start as if you are going to stick to it for the next 10 years. Hire as if you are going to quit in the next 3 months. Status check: Part 1 – Done Part …
Proud
A few days ago, a website (hmm, not just any website though) happened to mention my name in one of their posts. A lot of people congratulated (for what) and some even said “You should be so …
10 commandments for excellent customer support
If you are serious about customer support, then you will wake up in the middle of the night, search for your mobile phone and your heart should skip a beat when you don’t find it …
My TODO Notebook.
When I used to work from bangalore, I had this 300 pages notebook. I used to carry it everywhere and write my TODOs. I stopped using it after I moved to chennai. I happened to …
Remove all your friends from Facebook.
Very rarely, you will want to delete all friends from Facebook and start a “fresh” facebook account. Now, it’s hard to do this manually. Thanks to phpunit + selenium + a few lines of code, …