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 our employees (usually one file per person). We are going to automate this using Google Docs, Google Sheets, and Google App Scripts. Step 1: Create …
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 people are bad or not trustable. We slowly lose the honesty and candor as we grow big. We all try our best to avoid hard …
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 to make such adorable videos, that is not the core reason for this experiment. The researchers studied these children years later as a follow-up study. …
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 things I miss the most is reading books and reflecting on the learnings. It is easier to take your time off to read books …
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. More and more interesting people to work with. The scope of the problem to be solved is getting bigger and bigger. #excited! Photo by rawpixel on Unsplash
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 it is both interesting & brutal is that the rules of the game keep on changing. Every 2 or 3 years, almost the entire rule set …
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 June 2009 – December 2011 From Jan 2012 – Today. There were many other smart programmers we hired, fired/quit. They did help us grow …
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 2 – In Progress
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 proud now”. Well, to tell you the truth I wasn’t. In fact, for that matter, I don’t think I’ve ever been proud of anything except …
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 next to you. When you finally find it next to your laptop on your table, with no missed calls from your customers (thank god), you …
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 get a look at this notebook after a long long time and boy, how much I’ve scribbled. Note : Most of the notes is about …
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, this can be done now. The following script removes all your friends from facebook 🙂 Replace and with your username and password respectively. <?php require_once ‘PHPUnit/Extensions/SeleniumTestCase.php’; …
VIM is an awesome editor, but comes with a big big learning curve. These are the the top 3 Vim tutorials from where I learnt to use Vim. 1. http://www.vi-improved.org/tutorial.php 2. http://vim.runpaint.org/toc/ 3. http://www.swaroopch.com/notes/Vim_en:Table_of_Contents If you want to learn more, checkout http://thomer.com/vi/vi.html#manuals
Git reflog saves you from all screw-ups you do while using git. Here is a sample output of git reflog. hari@hari-desktop:/var/www/recruit$ git reflog e458f54 HEAD@{0}: checkout: moving from test1 to e458f54fe99202c82c2690be4fa2fe2d7aa7be32^0 a3281d1 HEAD@{1}: checkout: moving from master to test1 f265802 HEAD@{2}: checkout: moving from test1 to master ef08492 HEAD@{3}: ORIG_HEAD: updating HEAD e458f54 HEAD@{4}: commit: Implement phpunit testcase. 1ecf2c3 HEAD@{5}: …
Want to check if all changes in your new branch is merged to main branch before you delete the new branch. git log feature1 ^master The above command displays all commits which are present in feature1 and not present in master. Note 1: You can also try “git branch -d feature1”. If the new branch is not totally merged, git …
Hiring good candidates is a problem for every single company out there.. no matter small or big. We at interviewstreet attack the tip of the iceberg by filtering good programmers from the rest. People say, it’s a huge timesaver ;-). But enough about interviewstreet, the first problem companies should tackle is to make sure rockstar hackers apply for the job. …
HTML5 seems to be the buzz word now. People around me are excited about HTML5 or already working on something with HTML5. Curious to know what the hell is this HTML5, I started reading something from https://developer.mozilla.org/en/HTML/HTML5. Well, truth be told, I finished the overview in say 15 minutes and didn’t know what exactly to do after that. I was …
More than an year since I’ve quit IBM and into startup world. Too many things to write.. Things moving at such a rapid rate that if I write something today, tomorrow it might not be valid or correct. Makes me stop and think at times whether what I’m doing makes sense, is it the right path or am I yet …
Once there was an old frog who lived inside a deep well. Frog was so happy with his home that he always told his friends who also lived in his well how wonderful the well was. One day, Frog was sitting on a ledge near the wall of his well appreciating the sky when he saw an unexpected visitor at …
We use Git here at interviewstreet. Using Git, branching, testing and reverting is so easy. Almost all commands are simple and easy to remember in Git, except for deleting a remote branch. The command to delete a remote branch “feature1” is git push origin :feature1 Just wanted to note this down.
The problem statement is as follows : The Playfair Cipher encrypts text by substitution of digrams (2-letter groupings). It is traditional to use a 5 x 5 letter scrambled-alphabet key square for the encryption and decryption. Each letter of the alphabet appears once, except “I” also represents “J”. The arbitrarily chosen key word, “CODES” comes first, then all the rest …
CodeIgniter by default won’t allow you to use query strings in the URL. This is how you enable query string in url in codeigniter. 1. Set $config[‘uri_protocol’] = “PATH_INFO” in config.php 2. Set $config[‘enable_query_strings’] = TRUE in config.php 3. Make you sure you have QSA in your .htaccess. For example, RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d RewriteCond $1 !^(index\.php|images|includes) RewriteRule …
I’m a big fan of Matt Cutts (who isn’t) and especially like his 30 day challenges. So, I decided probably I can give it a shot for a couple of months. So, some of the stuff I had in my list are. 1. Learn Hadoop. 2. Read a book every 2 days. 3. Learn a new programming language 4. Go …
This is my second post in the fetch contacts from email account series. In this post, we are going to fetch contacts from a Google account. This isn’t a detailed tutorial, but a quick 2 minute how-to. $this->config->item(‘google_return_url’) is the url of the page to which user is returned after a login attempt. 1. Add the following code where the …
Importing contacts from mail accounts using OAuth is a long solved problem which doesn’t have a good implementation. I googled and googled for a good library which imports contacts from Yahoo/GMail/Hotmail. Finally, I was forced to create one by myself. Here are the instructions on how to get it up and running for Yahoo Mail in your server in 2 …