hari@weblog

I see, learn and rediscover… everyday!
 
hari@weblog

CISO Notes – Part 1

When I started building HackerRank, I was expecting to get promoted (rather pushed) from an SDE to CTO. I was expecting the change and it wasn’t so bad. Since we acquired customers at a steady rate, I had the bandwidth to learn from my mistakes. We were extremely apologetic whenever something went wrong with our customers and made sure we …

Critical Feedback

A very good friend/well wisher pinged this over chat. I’m always glad to listen to the critical feedback (especially from the people I trust). But I was equally surprised by the fact that she was so reluctant to share the feedback in the first place. She had all good intentions (as you can see from the first message). But still …

Terms I learned this year

Yak Shaving Yak shaving refers to a task, that leads you to perform another related task and so on, and so on — all distracting you from your original goal. This is sometimes called “going down the rabbit hole.” Seth Godin has an interesting post about yak shaving – https://seths.blog/2005/03/dont_shave_that/ and even AMEX has an interesting post about the same …

Theme for 2021

I was recently asked this question and made me think what I want What do you want your theme for 2021 to be? Think of one work that you want as your constant theme for 2021 And my answer to the question was to… Have fun! The only reason I was able to survive all the years was mainly because …

Thank you generator

This task/project started with a simple comment from our team. Mindy (who is the EA to Vivek) shared this comment in one of the internal Google documents. It was very unusual to get a coding task from Mindy. Usually, whenever I’m assigned a coding task, it is for some customer or any feature I’ve worked on in the past. It …

3 weeks of Masterlife

It all started with a simple post while scrolling LinkedIn. This sounded very interesting when I read the post. I liked the five categories of sleep, diet, exercise, mind, and productivity. Also, the fact that it was 21 days gave me the confidence that if I can do something for those 21 days, I might be able to continue the …

Leap of faith

Building early-stage products require a big leap of faith on the ideas/products which don’t exist. In fact, I think there is some level of “stupidity” needed to build products at a very early stage. Of course, building products at any stage comes with its own challenges. It isn’t like the early stage is the hardest and life is super easy …

Three management principles

Three management principles I read while browsing the internet (of course over the past few years). I had this WOW reaction when I read about these for the first time. While it totally makes sense, I’ve been doing some of these mistakes earlier (probably even now). These are three principles I try to remember while making decisions, especially in meetings. …

RIP Tony Hseih

Never got the chance to meet him in person, but Delivering Happiness is the one of the best books I’ve ever read. The pure energy and passion about listening to the story from the founder is always something. He is, and will continue to be, an example and inspiration to look to for any founder, especially those who have a …

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 setup process remains the same. In this post, I’m sharing my WordPress setup. Hosting This entire website is hosted at Linode.com. Linode gives a 2GB …

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 done. One more point to add is that it’s been a while since I built something on my own. Trying to solve both problems at …

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 US Airways 1549 into the Hudson River. In fact, the movie Sully is based on this incident. And this is an interesting dialogue from this …

Tenali Rama & HackerRank Hiring

It so happened that a polyglot visited the court of Sri Krishnadevaraya. He told the king that he could read, write, and speak impeccably in 18 languages. He challenged the scholars of the court and asked them to identify his mother tongue. Scholars in various languages were summoned and were asked to hold a dialogue with the guest. Each one …

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 something soon, this is a great read. We’ve done our fair share of things which never would’ve scaled. Looking back, we never actually planned to …

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. But re-looking at the same quote now after many many years, I realize that there are many “10 types” of people. Stack vs queue When …

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 for 10 years and immediately got hooked by the concept. I’m not new to this and have tried to implement this many a times in …

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 kind of book I’ve read so far and something I believe everyone should read at some point. I’m not sure though if there is anything …

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 had created every before my experience at IBM, the only interesting parts about my resume was my Google Summer of Code and other open-source projects. …

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”. It is 42. But what I’ve been pondering is the answer to MY life, meaning and everything. And to make things worse, I find myself …

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 about the top 10 things we’ve learnt/implemented over the last years. Start Small – Starting small when building the infrastructure with AWS. Queues solve most …

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 enjoy teaching a lot. When I just joined the college as a clueless kid, there were some folks who served as a great mentor and …

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 team” and “growth hacking” are all normal in the current business world. I strongly believe the same logic should apply for us individuals too. We …

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 book to Vidhi and ended up reading this again. The best thing about this book is the simplicity and practicality of this book. From the …

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 an amazing lesson for startup founders and you can watch the full video at https://guides.co/g/y-combinator-startup-school/8943 Of course, running a startup with another founder for years, …