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 …
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 …
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 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. …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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. …
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 …
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 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 …
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 …
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 …
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, …
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 …