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Now that I've been around the block a few times, I think that Fonzie's counsel applies equally well to people's careers. When's the best time to leave? Of course, the answer is different if you are a founder, or you are treated like one. You would carry what I call the founder's fardel - The company is as much a part of you as you are of it, and you relish the burden on your back - Like Hotel California, "you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave". But for almost every one else, I think this is what I've learnt: The best time to leave is when you've done a great job, you've delivered on your commitment, you're having fun, you're proud of yourself, and you have successfully and fearlessly made yourself redundant (or almost).

Continue reading "When is a good time to die? (Farewell 33Across)" »

Another fantastic year at 33Across. We have come a long way since our early Power-point days. We have accomplished amazing feats and as Eric said at our recent all-hands, we have continued to hit the ball outta the park. We have had our ups and our downs, petty squabbles and grand confluences. But in the end, we've all come to truly appreciate what we have.

So here's to a great year in celebration and anticipation. John, Mike and Sree - We missed you last night and hope you can make the next one.

Here's the 4-second video that FRC wanted - as one of us said, ultimate proof that the 33Across engineering team always over-delivers :-)

Happy 2010 all!

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Here is the best of totally unintentional communal poetry. It's written by folk who didn't have the slightest suspicion that they were contributing to the effort, and shamelessly plagiarised by me.

Read on, and sue me if they don't rival with the best koans you know. After you've read the first one, see the picture below to reveal the secret behind the poem, and the names of the authors, themselves unaware of their worthy words.

And here's the secret to the origins of this poem.

Continue reading "Unintentional Poetry" »

Can you process the entire Facebook network from a PC in your garage?

In today's agile world, software projects typically demand strategic choices over a plethora of possible solutions to most problems. Some solutions are appropriate for some problems and some aren't. It's important to choose a solution for all the right reasons, and it's doubly important to not choose it for all the wrong reasons. Human factors complicate this issue because inappropriate solutions to some problems are appropriate and good solutions to other problems. And these "other" problems are sometimes faced by reputed technology companies, who lend "celebrity" status to the solutions. This leads the young engineer astray, and coerces them into thinking that just because Google or Microsoft have found great success with a particular paradigm, they ought to as well. Further, within most companies, there are bound to be a number of non-engineering execs whose bandwidth is almost completely soaked up by non-engineering matters. It is consequently easy to get their buy-in for adopting such technologies using that unfortunately untrue magic phrase, an egregiously extant engineering enchantment and the mother of all modus ponens if I can call it that: If it is good enough for Google, it ought to be good enough for us". It behooves every company to have at least one theoretically and practically savvy engineer to protect precisely against this kind of thing happening. And to support decisions that are data-driven, rather than driven by subjective matters such as coolness and esthetics. At worst, data-driven decisions are at least likely to prevent general resentment among staff - one person's sense of beauty may not always be another's. On the other hand, a truly creative idea or proposal is bound to find general support in the numbers. Those that shirk experimentation, calculation and testing are the prophets of faith that every organization should strive to avoid hiring into engineering, in preference to those that support the voice of empirical reason.

In this article, I want to focus on two specific cool technologies that frequently go hand-in-hand: Google's Map-reduce (e.g. Hadoop), and Cloud Computing (e.g. EC2). For whatever reasons possibly including those I've mentioned above, temptation is high among many engineers today to use these sledge hammers to crack nuts. As an illustrative case in point, I'd like to take one of our typical problems and talk about how we address it at 33Across. Our customers often express amazement at how we manage to process their gargantuan data sets and produce results in short order, seemingly with ease. We are often asked probing questions that try to get us to divulge our core data-processing techniques. Needless to say, I won't be describing any of our proprietary procedures or secret sauces here. But a great deal can be said without going into such matters. Most of what we have done to get where we are at is simply to follow published information you can find in any decent computing journal on occasion, but most of the time in good Computing-101 texts. Before we dive into using a framework that has any overhead associated with it, we always do quick back-of-the-envelope calculations (not unlike Rapleaf's nice analysis of whether to host or cloud) to determine if it will really be worth it.

Continue reading "Map-reduce, Hadoop and Clouds - When and When Not" »

Just before the holidays started, the students were to do a warm-up exercise in preparation for diving into the deeper wonders of Number Theory in upcoming classes. Here is the exercise, called the Four Fours. Using exactly 4 digits, all of which are fours, and any number of the arithmetic operators Plus, Minus, Times, Divide, Exponentiation, Factorial, Square Root, and Parenthesis, derive each of the numbers from 1 to 50. E.g. One way you can derive 1 is obviously 4/4 *4/4. No doubt there are a number of different ways to derive each number and the goal is to get students to think about this, and to come up with expressions that are different from those of their colleagues.

We, however, decided to turn this little exericse into a game, which as a matter of fact, also turned out to be a good game to occupy young minds during the holidays! Here is how you would play it:

The game has 15 rounds. Each round lasts 1 minute. We tried to cover 15 numbers in the game.

Each round consists of:

1. Host (me): Calling out a different random integer between 1 and 50.
2. Players: Each of them has 30 seconds to write an expression with exactly 4 4s and the arithmetic operators to get this number.
3. We compare answers and points are scored for this round as follows:
   • Zero points - No expression or invalid expression (meaning it doesn't evaluate to the number called)
   • M-N points - Otherwise. M is the number of players and N is the number of other players who have the same expression as you. If your expression is unique, you get the full M points for the round.

Continue reading "The Four Fours" »

Continue reading "Cool Currency" »

Last night, I was at a networking social with the Olympic Opening Ceremony on an enormous screen. But I was there strictly to socialize and catch up with good friends. I could not bring myself to enjoy the opening ceremony, flamboyant and ostentatious as it was, in light of the appalling abuses of human and animal rights in a country where, at the very least, all this money could have been put to much worthier use in improving the human condition!

People might say that it's my loss for missing this magnificent display of oneness and splendor. But I don't see it. Fortunately for me, there is no dearth of interesting alternatives in today's world that can equally well and guiltlessly take up my time. Fortunately, I suffer the ancient Chinese curse. I live in interesting times. I must boycott the Olympics to protest in what little way I can against such appalling cruelty as PeTA exposes.

Continue reading "Deanimizing - A necessary first step to dehumanizing?" »

Fuck! I cannot think of any other word. Sorry.

I don't know about you, but I couldn't watch past the midpoint of this video. I was hoping to vent some in this article, but it doesn't seem to help! Perhaps the least I can do to show my support to PeTA (where I am a member) and to other animal rights organizations is to spread the word.

I bet half the people who wear fur will give it up if only they knew what went into making it for them, just as Erwin Schrödinger hypothesizes in his famous essay that half the people who ate meat will give up if only they had to kill the animal themselves!

The following video is not for the weak-hearted. Click not if you can stomach not. Instead just read the equally compelling but less shocking text at: http://www.peta.org/feat/ChineseFurFarms/index.asp

Again, here is a link to the full article at PeTA's site:

http://www.peta.org/feat/ChineseFurFarms/index.asp

Please support PeTA!

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Ori Brafman asked on Linkedin: What are your best examples of irrational decision-making in the workplace?

I answered thusly, though not to his point:

I believe, perhaps irrationally :-), that we all make two kinds of decisions regularly in our life. Well-founded, data-driven and reasoned decisions are the most common and form the first kind. The much rarer second kind is driven by instinct, gut feeling and perhaps no more than a deep sense of passion and belief in the long-term success of what appears, on all immediate counts, to be unfounded.

Continue reading "Irrational decisions in the workplace" »

How often do you google yourself? Other than for reasons for plain vanity, I think it important to do it often enough to ensure your online identity isn't hijacked. Since I have multiple online aliases, some of which I share with others, I have an automatic system that googles my online avatars every once in a while, reporting any "anomalies".

Imagine my surprise when I found that I had, unbeknownst to myself, given some lame-ass kissing advice on an eHarmony forum. After several email messages to the moderator, I decided to take matters into my own hands and just made a half-decent post myself, pointing out that I if I were to post, I'd have posted something that at least took a few minutes for me to pen, like the poem below:

Continue reading "The kiss you can remember" »