coding and tech thoughts

I had the fortune to chat with our very talented PM leader recently and I learnt what it meant to understand a company’s global vision and how the PM leader plays an important task to customize it for his/her team. For instance, my company’s org vision is-- “ The world shops first on eBay because we offer the best choice and most relevance driven by the most powerful selling platform ”

My team, let’s be little more specific, my agile scrum team is ‘pricing and promotions platform”. I initially thought that this is a very narrow portfolio where I would have no impact or not be able to directly deliver or contribute to make happen ‘the CEO vision’ or a grand impact. This is where I was wrong, my PM leader explained me this with an example and helped me translate this to something I could understand, yes it has moving parts, yes its complex and you too would understand it. First let’s quickly revise: Shopping 101

A normal seller behavior is, to probably search for an item on 1 or 2 online shops and then buy the cheapest. Now, if the buyer is presented with a cheap price at the right time then we close the deal. 

Most recently I’ve had quite some failed pursuits because of 

Not figuring out the right plan or 

Getting to a plan to early and without much deliberation or

Worrying of the result too often but not strengthening the plan of action

How to solve these problems ?

This one is tricky since when you settle on a plan it seems the right one but Review the plan at least once and pivot, pivot if the plan seems ashtray 

We all know and relate to the statement that “life is like a game of chess” yet do we all practice that, well I didn’t and I hope you do. If you just think of the immediate next move you’d struggle for the next move. So the rule is thinking your next 2 steps 

I was worrying of the result but not iterating my plan. Stop worrying, that would not help, work backwards from your goal. Yeah, this one is easy said than done.

Every year at the start of the year Harshal gets ambitious and thinks about the future and makes a plan. 

Goal: Be the best 24 year old programmer in 1 year 

1.    Develop strong skills in data structures and algorithms to be both a good interviewer and interviewee

2.    Become theory-complete and develop a portfolio of side projects in big data, machine learning and distributed systems to pursue challenging ideas/projects/domains

3.    Understand the intricacies and internals of programming language’s by choosing one programming language and getting down and deep with it

4.    Hit the gym and avoid junk food. Health is Wealth Too, at least for the year 2016 it is 

Recently, my company organized a hackweek, i.e. a 5 day hackathon. I pulled in some of my friends and engineers who I knew and started throwing ideas to them, some bad, some very bad, some good but already implemented. We had one goal, to do something that is never done before, and something that is disruptive and not just an incremental feature or building upon something existing, we wanted to do something new. As my friend calls it we wanted to do something 0 to 1.

You won’t believe it, 4 of those 5 days, we started with one idea in the morning, coded something by afternoon and gave up on that idea by evening. This happened for all the 4 days out of 5. To be frank I was frustrated and didn’t care about anything, but one of my team member, the Hyderabad guy from the below mentioned posts, didn’t give up, he stuck to the principle of entrepreneurship, “make something people want” and “don’t give up”. He took a walk break and came back with an idea, for me it was too late, I had given up and gone home. This fatigue and tiredness/or frustration clouded my mind and I couldn’t make out that the idea he is proposing, proposing now on the 11th hour is a pure classic disrupt-or, I told him, we will chat tomorrow about it. Then I was struck with another problem founders face, the possession bias, I was adamant to do my own idea and this possession further clouded my thinking, I didn’t realize that the other idea was a millennial ahead of my own idea. This new idea was as simple as an idea can get, I have a number of theories why we won the hackathon.

1. Our idea was a clear implementation of our company vision

2. An idea can’t get any simpler than this one, like they say simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. 

3. Focused on the end-user experience. Making life simple, the idea literally made life simple.

Recently (at office) I had the chance to work with a couple of friends (from Taipei, Shanghai and Hyderabad). We invested lots of time in design, discussions, Proof-of-Concept, research and that resulted in a smoother and quicker implementation(comparatively). But what exactly did we make? We implemented a rule engine and calculator for our company. To give you an analogy, you could say we made a menu card for a sophisticated restaurant that served all the dishes of the world, in all the sizes, in all the varieties and for all the different type of people. You see it, the price for a dish depends on a number of things? Ingredients, Size of dish, Number of people it servers, Quality level of the Ingredients for instance are some of the levers that would determine the price of the dish. That explains why there is calculation involved, another instance to describe this is sales tax, service tax, food tax, currency tax, so many price points and each depend upon different attributes. But why did I say rule engine? Well remember I said this is a global sophisticated restaurant that servers to all the different type of people and culture in the world. Now there would be lots of rules for such a multi-cultural, multi-cuisine restaurant to function. For instance, for the Japan variety of tea, there should be a rule saying don’t put sugar(I heard they don’t), for the Chinese variety of a salad, there should be lots of soy sauce. So you see, there would be many such if-this-then-that rules defining the intricacies of a seemingly same/similar recipe based on some attributes, like audience of the dish, preparation style, ingredients etc. This could be implemented by a rule engine, which is what we did. I’m going to give a brief sneak peek into the implementation of the above calculator and rule engine, and leave the detail implementation for the next post. 

First, we designed our language of representing the knowledge. Here we think how do we represent our recipe-Peking duck in terms of its constituents data/attributes (dishes, ingredients, number of servers, style etc). This leads to the formation of a generic grammar, which can be used to represent anything from Ma Po Tofu to Chicken Biryani or Pulihora

Secondly, we designed the mechanisms of data interaction or the rules. Here we think about things like how we exclude some recipe or pick the right ingredients given the recipe. This leads to the formation of your grammar rules or semantics.

To implement the above we used ANTLR and to keep everything fast we cached all the data into RAM using some interesting data structures. My friend(the Shanghai dude) did a lot of work on bits and data compression, I picked up some concepts from there to implement the in-memory layout. It consisted of RoaringBitmaps from the popular Apache Spark packages and our faithful AVL trees. 

In the next blog post I’ll go more into the amazing open source package ANTLR ,till then stay tuned!

Having spent almost 2 years at my company, I have found some patterns about what works for me and what doesn’t. I don’t want to say that I have worked with good, bad and in-between type of people, but I’ll just say that there are certain people who challenge me to think, with whom I’m able to connect, who play devil’s advocate and who are also the humblest of people I have ever come across. They are passionate about subject’s may it be machine learning, or business or economic impact, and they constantly keep themselves occupied with interesting material. I have noticed that the people who you work with play a very important role in the possibilities that can be achieved and your own growth. I have worked with people who have brought out the best in me and I have also worked with people, the kind with which you don’t want to talk to again. Important to understand is that you have to keep yourself surrounded with the best people-intelligence, success, innovation, opportunity whatever you call it, it is viral, you will realize that you are surrounded with the right people when they bring out the best in you. If you are a coder, they code review you to the extent that what you write is beautiful poetry. So the next time you have competing job offers and are deciding which boat to sail in, don’t just compare the $$, compare the people or team you join, the work you would do and the mission you would be one. 

Now, Just completed my semester at college. I'm a a graduate now!. So moving on, I'm learning some new things. Hadoop Ecosystem and the side projects that have emerged from it like HBase, Pig, hive etc.

P.S:

Just like I described in my previous post, that I’m working on open source modules that can power modern commerce web application’s. It's live