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Education Entrepreneurship

Banish Business Books

Every book on entrepreneurship seems to follow the same template. Research your market Do some Excel modelling Raise some money Start the business $$$ These are no longer relevant to the current environment, at least not relevant if you are looking to start a small business or a startup. A better book (or video, or a course) would be along these lines: How to get a business idea.

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Education

Information Overload

There is a deluge of knowledge today. On platforms like YouTube and LinkedIn, there are so many thought leaders who could be followed for great insights. But how do you absorb, retain and apply this knowledge? This has become the real challenge. My 2 part system for knowledge management 1.Store and Index. No, I am not building a knowledge base, database, or even write things done (which I should!). I tend to commit things to memory.

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Education Entrepreneurship

Be lucky; always!

Recently, I was invited to share my experiences with my alma-mater. I chose to talk about how fresh graduates can maximize their career success. While several people will ascribe their success or success of others to luck; it is also silently agreed that success is much more than luck. Therefore I prefer Roman philosopher Seneca’s definition of luck. Luck is what happens when opportunity meets preparation. Seneca Therefore I focused on how one can increase their luck by working on creating opportunities and being prepared.

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Education Entrepreneurship

Are employment bonds really needed?

Does a company, be it a start-up or not, need to make their employee sign bonds that state that the employee has to serve the company for at least for a period of X years or will be penalized $Y? I find them to be neither ethical nor legal or even enforceable in a country like India. At INSORCE we have replaced the stick with a carrot and it is working great for us.

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Education

Prototyping

There are different stages of prototyping, which increase in fidelity and time taken to create. Therefore it is important to start with low fidelity tools and move further as the ideas are more concrete. Some of these tools are Story-boarding Creating Paper Prototypes Digital Mock-ups Wizard of Oz Video Prototypes Story-boarding This technique involves rough sketches which tell a story. It should have the stage (people, task being done), the script (actions, sequences of steps) and the outcome (fulfilled motivations, satisfaction).

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Education

How I hire writers

Now with the goodness of Hacker News and reddit. Thank you everyone for doing a great job proof reading the post. Do checkout stackmonthly. A monthly roundup of best questions on stackoverflow.com. Good, creative writers are the backbone of our business. We try to hire and retain the best of them. Our interview process is aimed to make the process efficient and objective. This ensures that we do not have to waste time in our hiring process and get back to real work ASAP.

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Education Technology

HCI: Need Finding

It is the process of observing people to discover their needs, goals, and values. Although the course if about “Human Computer Interaction”, the process of need finding is relevant to developing new products or even new businesses. A good starting point for any new product is to clearly identify an existing problem or need. That’s because finding a big problem and need often yields important untapped opportunities. Observing people also helps build empathy and think from their point of view.

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Education

HCI: Evaluating designs

There are several methods to evaluate a design: Usability studies This could be informal, watch and learn or formal usability labs. They offer good learning and uncover quirks, bugs or false assumtions. it is not the same as user’s using it to perform real work in real environment difficult to compare alternatives experimental bias Surveys quickly gets feedback from a large number of users relatively easy to compare alternatives No need to build prototype, a screenshot or mockup will do.

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Education

Human computer interaction - introduction

I am currently taking the Human Computer Interaction class, and unlike last time, will make notes during the course and not after. What is Human Computer Interaction? HCI is the design, implementation and evaluation of user interfaces. Design Good design is a pleasure to use; it increase efficiency and prodcutivity. Whereas bad design can be frustrating and in extreme cases can even costs lives. Design using Prototypes Prototyping is the single most important strategy for effective design.

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Education Technology

Machine Learning: My notes.

I recently finished the machine learning class offered online by Stanford. It was a great experience. Since I would not be using ML any time soon, I plan to make a few blog posts to capture my learning while they are still current. This should help me recollect the concepts on a later date. If someone finds these notes useful, that is an added benefit. Machine learning Arthur Samuel (1959): Field of study that gives computers the ability to learn without being explicitly programmed.

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Education Others

Coding is like cricket

With the stunning world cup victory behind us, it’s time to reflect on what lessons we can learn from it. I am sure cricket needs no introduction, so let me get on with what I have learnt from mostly watching, and very little playing, cricket. Uncertainty, the name of the game Cricket is the game glorious of uncertainties, and developers' lives are no less uncertain, just not glorious. Both cricketers and developers need to be flexible and adjust to new situations.

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Education

Programming for kids

We spent the long Easter weekend, lazing happily indoors since the weather did not permit going out. I wondered if the time could have been spent better, and started researching if my older daughter is old enough to start programming. Little background My daughter will soon be six and she can use the computer very well for the usual tasks and I think she is a bit ahead of the curve, but that might just be a father speaking :)

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Education

Kid Project: Making paper

I was trying to explain paper-recycling to my daughter, then thought it is best we do it together. Thus came about a weekend project to make paper from waste papers. Although the end result was not that great, I think she understood the concepts. She was super excited and did most of the steps herself, including taking the pictures. Here is a pictorial guide to making your own ‘hand-made’ paper.

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Education Others

3 Idiots - The nitpicking

I watched 3 Idiots yesterday, and could not resist reviewing it. This review is not about how great the movie is. There are several of those on the net. Let me be quick in saying that my family and I loved the film and think it is one of the best movie. It is a good take on the state of education in the country, a subject I feel strongly about.

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Education Technology

Django Flowchart

Based on my current understanding of Django, this is how a user request is responded to. User requests a page Request reaches Request Middlewares, which could manipulate or answer the request The _URLConf_finds the related View using urls.py View Middlewares are called, which could manipulate or answer the request The view function is invoked The view could optionally access data through models

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Education Technology

Week with python & Django

Spent the last week picking up Python and Django. Notes to self and anyone else who wants a quick start on Python/Django on Windows. Most Linux flavours already come with most tools needed for python development. Requirements: Installed ActivePython 2.6 Installed Komodo Edit Installed Python Win32 Extensions (not sure why, but was recommended in some blog post and the project itself does not say much of what it does. Stuff like this gives me the heebie-jeebies.

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Education Technology

What they don't teach you at Engineering school

This is an experimental post. If it doesn’t render correctly, leave a comment. I was brainstorming on the skills a software developer does not learn at school, which are essential for work and some which are needed for career growth. Below is an embedded mind map, followed by an embedded public wave. Please feel free to contribute to the wave. If you do not have a wave account, here is the static version.

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Education Technology

Boo gotchas for beginners

Unlike what I mentioned in my previous post, I ended up trying Boo first. I will delve on the reason in another post. The objective of this post is to document the problems I had getting used to Boo syntax. None of the problems were big, just some missing punctuations :) And I did not face any issues with the significant space. Empty array vs. Empty list An empty list is

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Education Technology

The great runtime shootout

It is becoming more and more obvious that there are just two runtimes left to execute code, the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) and the Common Language Infrastructure (CLI). So, I decided to see how they stack up. Looks like both environments have something for everyone. Here is a list of programming languages available on these runtimes. Can run on CLI using IKVM.NET Can run on JVM using Mainsoft solution Not yet usable Can run on CLR, but is behind the JVM implementation The main reason for the research was to identify a new language I should pick-up.

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Education Technology

Rock SOLID software construction

[caption id="" align=“alignright” width=“297” caption=“Software Developement is not a game of Janga”][/caption] I spent last two weeks deep diving into code written by our contractors and writing some test against the same. This was a pleasant break from my regular duties of an architect. As an architect I am always trying to ensure the code follows pragmatic design principle and I really dig SOLID and TDD. S.O.L.I.D. (a.k.a. S.O.L.D.I.) The charm of Uncle Bob is, he can give a concrete shape to abstract ideas.

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Education Technology

10 programming related podcasts available on iTunes

These are some of the better podcasts on the craft of programming. Hansel minutes - pixel8 - What makes great user experiences? - .NET Rocks! - Herding Code - Pragmatic Podcasts - The Thirsty Developer Podcast - Deep Fried Bytes - Elegant Code » CodeCast - The Java Posse - Software Engineering Radio -

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Education

Tip: Convert an image to text (OCR)

Haven’t there been times when you came across some text that you could not copy or edit? It could be for a variety of reasons, whether it is a scanned copy, or an image containing text, a screen shot etc. I came across a similar situation yesterday, when I was looking for a word list to create a Pictionary for my kid. “Stretch mark mama” had this great list; unfortunately she shared it as an image.

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Education Technology

Playing with Small Basic

Yesterday I stumbled upon SmallBasic, while looking for something else. It is an interesting little project by Microsoft to create an entry level language to teach programming. It is a mix of toned down BASIC and Logo. Since the language (or is it an application) is still in infancy, version 0.5 released recently, I will try not to be too harsh on it. Sample program with obligatory screenshot Showing Flickr Image 1: url = Flickr.

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Education Entrepreneurship Technology

Hello World!

Hi, this is Hitesh. I am here to talk about stuff I like. How do I know what I like? Well I asked myself the same question and like any true geek looked at the data at hand to decide. So I analysed my bookmarks at delicious and the three areas that interest me way beyond others are programming, education and entrepreneurship. Thus the focus of this blog will remain these three areas of my interest.