Engineering Principles - TDD - Pair Programming - Continuous integration Consulting vs Startup - Product ownership vs detachment - 10,000 hrs - Mixture of skills Good Software Engineering - Own that skill - Best practices - Clarity

Thought Process - Feature - Write the test - Make it fail - Write a bare minimum, functional implementation - Make the test pass

The two year lookup rule, or The X year lookup rule (fill in X with whatever works for you). This is a rather interesting thought that I got while in a conversation with a well-known C-level exec in Silicon Valley.

The basic idea is that you work your ass off for a goal that you set for your next two years. Then, raise your head up and assess and review your goals.

The beauty of this thought is that it prevents over-planning. As I just spent an year at Stanford -a strong aura that I got from the students there was that they really planned their education and career to some extent. And in that race for achieving more, one might overplan and not figure out what is the best for him/her.

For me, I visit my family every year this time for usually more than 2 weeks. So the X for me is one year. And I think it works pretty well.

Woke up in London yesterday
Found myself in the city near Piccadilly
Don’t really know how I got here
I got some pictures on my phone

• Good Life, One Republic

Maurice Mauser, a student at European Business School, along with some visiting friends from Karlsruhe Institute of technology, had invited me to attend a session with Peter Thiel, the don of Paypal Mafia. Maurice knew me through NUS where he had attended a semester on exchange.

I drove down from work from Palo Alto to One Letterman Drive in San Francisco. That area is actually pretty strange, or rather its location and landscape signifies its riches. Peter Thiel’s office is in Building C at Clarium Capital. The One Letterman Drive entrance is from the congested Lombard street on US Highway 101 and before you enter the gates you cannot even imagine that such a place would exist in the tight areas of SF.

There were 18 students in all and it was to be a one hour session with Peter Thiel in one of the conference rooms. Here is what I remember from it and some of my understandings and thoughts - in very short points.

Businesses : Commodities versus Monopolies Commodities: can be easily replicated, while monopolies not. Google - Monopoly in search but behaves like a commodity and focuses on social network, robot driven cars etc while talking to public.

LinkedIn - $7 billion market capitalization. 2011-2020 - high growth phase and an earning of $1billion while the rest $6 billion from 2020 onwards. Currently : $350million revenue and $15million profits.

MySpace - $580 million marked capitalization in 2005.

Facebook $75 billion

Its always good to have a plan. Not having a plan is the worst plan. Skeptical of Y-Combinator - no plan.

VCs investment - Returns from 1 investment to cover up the sum of the rest of the investment. - Classic venture.

Investing only in long term companies. The ones that are probably the last ones in the game. The ones that will be there till a long time and have mastered the domain. Facebook, the last social network. Spotify, the last music service.

Historical

1. HP Garage - 367 Addison Avenue Palo Alto
2. Computer History Museum Mountain View
3. NASA AMES Research center museum Mountain View
4. The Tech Museum San Jose
5. Intel Museum Santa Clara

Scenic Drives

1. 17 mile drive
2. Point Reeyes
3. Golden Gate
4. California state route one starting from Daly City
5. …

Companies

1. Facebook
2. Google
3. Microsoft
4. Skype

A good way to avoid procrastination and delays in work is to follow a sprint method -

1. List down activities that need to be done.
2. Specify a fixed amount of time in which they need to be done.
3. Once you start a sprint, you cannot add any more activities to the list.
4. If activities have to be added, they go to the next sprint.

On the night of June 6th I was busy coding for Google Summer of Code. I was testing my application on my android device and in between the builds and deployment, I had a few seconds to slack.

A tweet marked with the protolol hashtag caught my eye. It was “ICMP echo request called. He wants a reply back”. And that made me literally Laugh Out Loud. Since I am working on a network scanner for Android for my GSoC project, the networking terms and protocols were just on my finger-tips. I looked for more #protolol jokes and found some even more hilarious. And there went my next 3-4 hrs in building something out of the blue.

I fired up GoDaddy.com and registered the domain name protolol.com. I coded a simple Google App Engine app in python that would fetch the protolol jokes for me from twitter and put them nicely in text boxes with their author. The app would then post them to my Tumblr account after I had manually edited the jokes and removed the “RT, @ etc”. I linked the domain to Tumblr and waited till next morning for the DNS records to settle in. The next 2-3 day I just spent in sorting out the jokes from various sources and properly referencing them.

On the 10th of June, after settling some basic customization with Tumblr, I posted the link to protolol.com on Hacker News, Facebook and Twitter. Within a few minutes, I started seeing a heavy inflow of visitors and a huge number of Jokes submissions.

Here are the screenshots of analytics during those hours

This is around 2 hrs after launching

And after 6 hrs

And this was after 1 day

Now after 2 weeks of launching protolol.com, the visits have reduced to a trickle. I did not want any ads on the website. So I just kept it simple and had no unnecessary push to drive visitors to the site.

Simply put, the jokes are for fun and they are best spread through the social media. So now apart from posting jokes at the website, there is a constant flow of humor through twitter and facebook. And people are still loving the jokes. So after 2 weeks, I have more 700 followers spread across Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr. Protolol.com was just a small stint at “riding the wave” of a popular hashtag and spreading the laughs.