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 startup, things seem great one moment and hopeless the next. And by next, I mean a couple hours later. The emotional ups and downs were …
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 the internship. The individual feedback varies from person to person, but there is a standard set of links/books I share with them to read to …
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 forever. This book reminds me of a LOT about ‘The Last Lecture’ from Randy Pausch. If you haven’t read the book, you should read the …
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 great, but let’s ask the question, why? The simple answer is time. Time is everything in a startup. A startup is designed in a way …
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 me, meeting Vasudha could be in a tech event in Chennai will top the list. We met each other for the first time at DevCampChennai …
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 about how much he admires other founders and why founders are so great. While I was happy to take the credits, I wish I could …
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 keep the email at zero made me check inbox regularly. After a few weeks, I wasn’t sure if I was even doing my job. I …
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 our company hackathon and one of the engineers explained in detail how WebAssembly works. I wanted to build something with WebAssembly and wanted that to …
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 twice, I gave them my +1 and asked them to go ahead. Never ever I imagined this will result in so many users reaching out …
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 Google Sheets still works, it is a lot hackerish. Copying the ID from the document, and managing the ‘Config’ in the sheet is a lot …
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 build a web app using Mysql and Redis. She built a simple task manager and shared this link with me https://aditiflaskcrudapptutorial.herokuapp.com/. My first instinct is …
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 a lot of interesting items going on to make the web page load faster. font-display: swap Instructs the browser to use the fallback font to …
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 onOpen() function. The code inside the onOpen() function executes when the file is opened. For example, following code is an example of onOpen from my …
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 the speech is about he finished the speech. When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of …
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 …