You might have heard about the recent Floods in Orissa. Its a unfortunate event for Orissa and its people. Its one of the most worst flood to hit Orissa ever. It has already displaced 5 lakh people and relief operations are facing difficulties as many areas are totally cutoff by road.
Excellence and perfection are so relative terms that its very difficult to explain or describe your thoughts about them to a second person. Even if you try your best to explain, often you fail to produce the same spark that kindles in you.
The following short story was forwarded to me by my friend Ameet.
Interestingly, the same guy won the 1st prize last year for his presentation Shift Happens. Both of his presentations have a similar theme, they talk about statistics with the motive of generating awareness (or an emotion of insecurity) in the viewer and are thought provoking, I am not too sure about the authenticity of the statistics they bear. Nevertheless the presentation style is awesome. I loved it. (more…)
Linux is so cool. Using Linux or Linux tools can give you tiny moments of joy, just like anything built by geeks, like iPhone, Skype etc.
Today as I woke up, I found that one of the 12 servers we use at BiRhymes was not accessible from India (the ones at the Joyent data center). No, our apps weren’t down, they were up because that server is only used to handle REST calls from MySpace.com so the only person who should access that server is MySpace and of course MySpace has servers in USA. The static files are servered from Amazon S3.
Google understands a few other things most Web companies still don’t. The most important is that you should put users before advertisers, even though the advertisers are paying and users aren’t. One of my favorite bumper stickers reads “if the people lead, the leaders will follow.” Paraphrased for the Web, this becomes “get all the users, and the advertisers will follow.” More generally, design your product to please users first, and then think about how to make money from it. If you don’t put users first, you leave a gap for competitors who do.
There is always so much to do in a startup that people won’t be too picky about your paper qualifications, if you can solve problems for them without screwing up.