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 …
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. …