My Readings & Learnings

The productive muslim =================

Know your time , keep a way to know how you are spending your time 

Cut down unproductive things 

Work on “Uninterrupted time chunks. ” eg:  90 mins. ie. Focus on one task at a time 

Pray the Sunnah Prayers before and/or a!er Prayer

Remembrance of Allah a!er Salah

Pray Tahajjud

Duha Prayer just before work starts

Supplications before you Sleep

Reciting one hour of Quran each day

Prepare an agenda for every person you’re going to meet

Make a morning routine 

Wake up at 4 AM . “just wake up for 5 minutes" ;) Yup 

Make the Dua(s) for waking up and recite last 10 verses of Surah Al-Imran

10 minutes a#er Fajr in your $rst week into this exercise and read 5 minutes of Quran plus 5 minutes of Islamic knowledge or Hadeeth

Exercise 

Plan your day 

Pay attention to your thoughts

things that neither bene$t or harm us 

these thoughts need to purged to de-clutter our minds

Practice focusing your mind - especially during Salat

Listen “into” your thoughts and don’t let them just wave by unnoticed. A strong Muslim is the one who can control his inner self as well as his limbs

When a bad thought comes, $ght it! And when a good thought comes, act upon it or at least write it down!

6:57 PM, Jan 25 2018, Paris

Avoiding the pointless blockchain project

But before you embark on that shiny blockchain project, you need to have a very clear idea of why you are using a blockchain In many cases, the project can be implemented perfectly well using a regular relational database.

The cases when we need to consider blockchain technology. 1. The database Blockchains are a technology for shared databases(structured repository of information) 
2. Multiple writers Blockchains are a technology for databases with multiple writers. In other words, there needs to be more than one entity which is generating the transactions that modify the database

3. Absence of trust blockchains are a technology for databases with multiple non-trusting writers.

4. Disintermediation The above problem can still be solved by a trusted intermediary, But Blockchains remove the need for trusted intermediaries by enabling databases with multiple non-trusting writers to be modified directly. But the question you need to ask is: Do you want or need this disintermediation? Given your use case, is there anything wrong with having a central party who maintains an authoritative database and acts as the transaction gatekeeper? Good reasons to prefer a blockchain-based database over a trusted intermediary might include lower costs, faster transactions, automatic reconciliation, new regulation or a simple inability to find a suitable intermediary

6:53 PM, Jan 15, 2018 - Paris

Pax Crypto: Russia Proposes First Multinational Cryptocurrency

the Silk Road - was a trading route from China to Eastern Europe, Secured under Mongolian leadership. stimulated free trade between China and EU. 

Vladimir Putin proposed a cyber-initiative for for BRICS and EEU

Connects emerging markets together using blockchain and smart contract technology

Bitcoin could potentially improve trade efficiency among the Member States by replacing other fiat currencies used in trade settlements

Russia’s central bank and finance ministry jointly prepared a bill for the regulation of сryptocurrencies and ICOs which was submitted to the Duma for approval on Dec. 28, 2017. The bill is expected to be adopted in March and finalized by July 1, 2018.
https://www.rt.com/business/414444-brics-eeu-joint-cryptocurrency/

President of the Russian Association of cryptocurrency and Blockchain (RABIC), Yuri Pripachkin, argued: “ICO fundraising should not be limited as they can attract an unlimited amount of foreign investments to Russian projects.”

In the proposed bill 

The bill characterizes cryptocurrency, including ICO tokens not as legal tender but as “other property.”

ICO’s are not banned but regulated. 

cryptocurrency mining and trading are taxed but not under VAT. 

6:48 PM, Jan 15, 2018 - Paris

How to Start a Blog in 2018: New Method That’s 20X Faster

Blogging is an ever growing industry now 

A huge share of marketing spends are in Content Marketing. 

many popular bloggers also become bestselling authors.

blogging to produce a passive income

#2. Spy on Popular Blogs to See What’s Working

you need to study the blogs your audience already reads.

Use Alltop to identify the most popular blogs in your space

Plug the domain names for those blogs into Buzzsumo to find their most shared content. In particular, pay attention to Facebook shares, because it’s driving the most traffic in almost every space right now

Look for patterns that might give you a clue into what kind of content your audience might like. Focus on the headlines, but also click through on any posts that grab your attention and read the whole post.

Use a tool like Evernote or Google Drive to keep a list of headline ideas. Write down any headlines that occur to you while doing your research

Test Your Ideas on Medium (Not WordPress!)

Conduct a miniature outreach campaign to the blogs you studied in the previous step. By emailing them and asking them to share your post, not only do you have a chance to start building your audience, but it’s an excellent way to validate your approach. If influencers are willing to share your content, there’s a good chance you’re on the right track. I’d recommend emailing 10-20 of them. 
More at https://smartblogger.com/blogger-outreach/

You’re much better off paying attention to your outreach success rate. You see, influencers are an excellent judge of content. If you can convince 20% of the blogs you email to share your post, and you can hit at least 20% on three different posts, I believe you’re ready to start your own blog.  

11PM, Jan 12, 2018, Paris

5 alarming reasons Ripple might not be what you think

XRP is not Ripple: sell banking software that uses blockchain They have 3 products — xCurrent, xRapid, and xVia

xCurrent is their flagship product. It gives banks the ability to efficiently move money across borders. It uses RippleNet, the Ripple blockchain, but does NOT use XRP. Banks like this software because it allows them to save money and time when sending payments, without introducing much risk or changes to their workflow.

xRapid helps banks improve liquidity when trading in emerging markets. It is the only Ripple product that does use XRP. Banks like it because it helps them free up mountains of money they’re stuck sitting on, but dislike it because it introduces unknowns — such as the volatility of XRP.

xVia is still in development and scheduled to come out in early 2018. It’s similar to xCurrent, but allows entities besides banks (such as corporations and payment providers) to send money through banks. xVia also does NOT use XRP.

Remember that impressive 100+ list of financial institutions Ripple is working with? Guess what, they are all using xCurrent. And xCurrent does not use XRP. Of the 100+ partnerships Ripple has, ONLY ONE actually uses XRP the cryptocurrency. There is just one small “non bank financial institution” from Mexico called Cuallix that is using xRapid.

Given that Ripple is going after global bank payments, their real goal is to replace SWIFT, the 45 year old society responsible for moving money between banks internationally.

R3 is doing the exact same thing as Ripple. They’ve raised $107 million from top venture capitalists and are using blockchain to help banks move money internationally. They’re currently in 70 of the world’s largest banks and the reason you might not have heard of them is simply because they have been doing this WITHOUT their own coin

SWIFT is working with more than 11,000 institutions and employs over 2600 people. To capture this market, Ripple will have to 100x. The challenge here is that there is no reason SWIFT couldn’t develop their own blockchain technology and use their already established relationships to roll it out faster than Ripple can grow.

Stellar Lumens (XLM) was created by the founder of Ripple, Jed McCaleb, in 2014 to solve the problems he saw with Ripple.

11PM, Jan 12 ‘18 , Paris

Why Startups Are Going Remote In 2018

11PM, Jan 12 2018, Paris

How To Pick A Co-Founder

The presentation transcript here

Two is the right number - Think Jobs and Wozniak, Allen and Gates, Ellison and Lane, Hewlett and Packard, Larry and Sergei, Yang and Filo, Omidyar and Skoll. 

The ideal founding team is two individuals, with a history of working together, of similar age and financial standing, with mutual respect. One is good at building products and the other is good at selling them.

Two founders works because unanimity is possible, there are no founder politics, interests can easily align, and founder stakes are high post-financing.

One founder companies can work, against the odds (Mark Zuckerberg,AdMob,salesforce)

In three founder companies, the politics can be tough — gang-up votes, jockeying for board seats, etc. — but it’s manageable

Lastly, I would say that any time you have three people in a room together working on something, you get politics. Then it starts mattering who says it, how they position it and whether they can get two to gang up on the third. 

The CEO also ends up having very diluted authority : because now he not only has to just command the respect of one person, he has to play a little bit of politics and keep everybody happy. So it ends up being a difficult management situation 

Four is an extremely unstable configuration and five is right out. When 4–5 founder companies work, it’s because two founders dominate

You wouldn’t marry someone you’d just met. Date first

Criteria: Intelligence, energy, and integrity

Don’t settle : If it doesn’t feel right, keep looking. A company’s DNA is set by the founders, and its culture is an extension of the founders’ personalities. 

when do I compromise? : I would say it's better to start alone and keep a slot open for the right co-founder to emerge than to pick someone and you're compromising. 

Avoid overly rational short-term thinkers, There are bounds to rationality. Partner with someone who is irrationally ethical (Be especially careful with the “sales” guy here)

at least to be fair with other people and honest with other people. So you want to look for people who are honest and fair almost to a fault, where you almost worry about them, rather than worrying about yourself around them 

Build in founder vesting (a.k.a. the “Pre-Nup”) to keep the breakup from getting messy

 as a builder you ought to be able to sell, at least a little bit, and as a seller you ought to be able to build, at least a little bit, and that's one way to tell 

But you should have a general sense that this person is as smart as you, they're as capable as you, they're at least as driven as you, and that they're at least as exceptional of a human being as you believe yourself to be. 

So don't fall into the trap where you say, well, he doesn't seem as smart, but that's OK, he's a seller. He doesn't need to be as smart. Or don't say, well, he's not as hard working, but he's a really good coder, he doesn't need to be as hard working. On the general values, this person should be as exceptional as you are. 

11:30 PM, Jan 9 2018 - Paris

3:45 - 6:15 PM 

Bootstrapping A Decentralized Autonomous Corporation

Shamir’s Secret Sharing Algorithm - Shamir’s Secret Sharing can be used to split up any data into N pieces such that any K of them, but no K-1 of them, are sufficient to recover the original data – you choose what K and N are when running the algorithm. 2-of-3, 5-of-10 and 501-of-1000 are all possible multisignature address is supported in Bitcoin, but each signature makes up about seventy bytes, so 501 of them would make a 35 KB transaction – which is very difficult to get accepted into the network as bitcoind by default refuses transactions with any script above 10,000 bytes The runtime of the algorithm is O(n3), meaning that the number of computational steps that it takes to evaluate a computation is roughly proportional to the cube of the number of participants; at 10 nodes, 1000 computational steps, and at 1000 nodes 1 billion steps. A simple billion-step loop in C++ takes about twenty seconds on my own laptop, and servers can do it in a fraction of a second, so 1000 nodes is currently roughly at the limit of computational practicality if the corporation wants to store private data for non-financial purposes, multisignature scripts are useless

The beauty of secure multiparty computation is that it extends beyond just Bitcoin; it can just as easily be used to run the artificial intelligence algorithm that the corporation relies on to operate Crypto Tokens: A Breakthrough in Open Network Design

Ethereum, introduced in 2014 and launched in 2015, was the first major non-Bitcoin token network. The lead developer, Vitalik Buterin, had previously tried to create smart contract languages on top of the Bitcoin blockchain. Eventually he realized that (by design, mostly) Bitcoin was too limited, so a new approach was needed

Ethereum is a network that allows developers to run “smart contracts” — snippets of code submitted by developers that are executed by a distributed network of computers. Ethereum has a corresponding token called Ether that can be purchased, either to hold for financial purposes or to use by purchasing computing power (known as “gas”) on the network

Tokens are also given out to “miners” which are the computers on the decentralized network that execute smart contract code (you can think of miners as playing the role of cloud hosting services like AWS)

Third-party developers can write their own applications that live on the network, and can charge Ether to generate revenue.

11:30 PM, Jan 9 2018, Paris

Link here 

Somethings to take care while deploying web service 

12 PM, Jan 8, 2018 - Paris

Summing up 8AM - 12PM :

Had gone through couple of articles, the article I read and found interesting is shared in vazra_ twitter handle. Earlier I had read about crypto currency from articles of Nik Custodio, it was comparing apples with digital apples and transaction, and how is it stored In block chain which is a public ledger anyone have access to and there is no central authority.

The new article I read from is about smart contracts, as per him, usually in olden days things are written on rock, which mean it can't be altered or erased with ease, he is saying that smart contracts in block chain is a digital alternative for the same.

He compares contract with a cocoa cola vending machine with another theoretical venting machine “$1000 in $5000 out”, he argues that we will easily trust the former one, and the later is hardly trusted.

He also mentioned some use cases of smart contracts in real life, and demonstrated an example of insurance claiming in ethurium blockchain.

Summing up 3PM - 6PM :

23rd Dec 2017 03:45 PM , Paris 

- At LinkedIn the single homepage is build as separate undependable modules that loads separately as a page, with separate JS & CSS dependencies. - The modules are loaded dynamically to the user considering the user type. - The homepage couples all sub modules and provide it to the user  - In this case for eg. to know the user you will have to call the user request 10 times, if 10 modules are there. to resolve this issue here suggests somethings like “DE-DOOP”, I didn't understand it correctly for the correct spelling what that part of the video again. anyway it’s something related to : Hashmap … Concurrent map etc. So keep it for later when required.  - Int he video Jim shows a demo of how it can be done - If one service is slow, it will make all request pending in the above case  - He shows a method to handle it with using HTTP chunking, ie. streaming data as soon as it is available (but he is not sure if its actually used in production in linkedin as he left there before that ) - This is done in play with Enumerators , iteratee , Enumaratee. 

- The same above concept was used in Facebook, as explained in https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/bigpipe-pipelining-web-pages-for-high-performance/389414033919/ - One problem this might have is HTTP status is 200 even , the server side database fails, he handled it with using sending javascript to client from server and show error page instead of checking status code - This won’t work in pages with CDN. As this might need JS to order the pages. The CDN will cache the page which may be an error page as it will still have 200 status code, so this method can only be used for highly dynamic user specific pages such as Facebook and linkedin feeds. - He shows some sample codes in Play which can be easily followed to study play. - He explains some status codes that are commonly used by some companies such as 414 and 418. - Code Available at : https://github.com/brikis98/ping-play

23rd Dec 2017

- 2013 , linked moved to play - JAVA + SCALA - Like NodeJS - Non blocking I/O - In blocking IO, the whole application will get affected by a small delay in one microservice - All modules that are available in Mavan/gradle for Scala are not non-blocking. - While architecting software, consider the time taken for operations , such as disk read will take much more time that memory read.

22nd Dec, 2017. Paris.

by Yevgeny(Jim) Brikman at ScalaMatsuri 2014

My Learnings : 

Linkedin Tried many Frameworks and languages for the mobile backend server when the code is changed from Ruby to Node, the server boxes came down from 50 to 3 (massive reduction in infrastructure)

Play is the best in class in JVM world 

The security slide in the presentation need to be looked again, as it listed out some known security loopholes in play and node. But Play wins in security by 8/10 to 6/10  score. 

There are much less Scala developers than Node

The community is larger in Node

The learning curve for Play is more than that for NodeJS

Play is TypeSafe & Functional where Node is not 

For node you should use cluster plugin to use with Muti-threaded CPUs, where Play is multithreaded by default. 

Its better to use a nginx reverse proxy before the play/nodejs app , and serve static content through that. As a best practice 

Action Points : 

Consider Scala as an option if building financial systems. 

Review the security slide from this talk for NodeJS and Scala Security issues (eg: usage of eval in JS)

22nd Dec 2017 , Paris

By Yevgeniy Brikman

YOU DO IT WHEN YOU CAN’T NOT DO IT

Learnings : 

“Startup is one brilliant idea”, and “Idea doesn’t matter et al..” both the reality is somewhere between these .

It take at least one decade to build a successful startup, if you are lucky.

Crunch base study : Analytics of All successful startups raised 140M in avg and exited at 280M.

100th Engineer at Facebook made more money than 99% of silicon valley founders.

Money is a terrible motivator, Money is an Anti-Motivator for creative work (By Study by Dan Pink)

Extrinsic motivator didn’t help with creative task, but intrinsic motivator do.

When in an interview its asked to Dustin if the Social Network movies is reality, and the response was, “If its the reality it should have shown 2 hrs me and Mark coding… ”

Good Reason to start a startup:

Mastery : The urge to get better at something.

A bit internal drive we all have (eg: A person who loves guitar may play guitar at home hrs and hrs , with out anyone paying him. A programmer keep programming puzzles/side projects to master his skills )

Most of startup life is learning. How to build, how to sell, how to build team, and how to motivate etc etc.

At startups forces you to learn/Adapt.

Autonomy :  Your desire to control your life.

Purpose : Work on something that is meaningful.

Great companies start with WHY

Everyone should join a big company once in life, try to find leaders of the Industry.

How to pick a startup to join :

Look to your network, 2nd degree of network.

Look at the product you are using.

Look at the best VC’s and their funding.

Startups don’t post Job. Reach-out to them and ask if you are hiring.

When you want to start a company : YOU DO IT WHEN YOU CAN’T NOT DO IT 

To have a good startup idea is not look for best startup ideas, instead become a person who will have a great startup ideas.

Action Points :

I am going to look for a Job in some selected large companies(preferably in US). At least for an year.

Read these books and view these talks :

So Good, they can’t IGNORE you.

Dan Pink TED Talk : The Puzzle of motivation.

Simon Sinek  TED Talk : How Great leaders inspire action .

Hello Startup

Founders at work

The lean startup

Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams

On Writing Well

BADASS : Making users Awesome 

Ceativity Inc.

Made to Stick

7 Habits

Hackers & Painters

Bird by Bird

Valve Employee handbook