Nanda Firdaus

It was 9PM in the jammed street when I read a group chat in my phone. The conversation was good as usual. My friends talked about something hot or funny joke to the group and I just became a silent reader. Nothing different in that time. Until one of my friend brought Friendster to the topic.

For those who don’t know, Friendster is a popular social network in early 2000. It was similar to Facebook, but currently the site has changed to a online gaming platform.

Those chat reminds me about my junior high school. The time that I were like a hipster or alien because I didn’t follow the trend and had my own interest. Back then, I didn’t have a friendster account nor any online game account. Internet connection was very expensive for me to afford because I had to save my money to upgrade my computer.

The same reason is applied for Friendster account. As internet connection was very precious for me, I used it for accessing programming site like programmersheaven.com. I remember the time that I angry to my friend because we scrambled a school’s computer. I want to open programmers heaven, while she wants to open her friendster account. What a nice memory.

I watched this inspiring video on Google Culture Day in Traveloka.

It’s been a long time since the last time I wrote in this blog. Kinda busy and lazy to write something.

So, it’s been 3 weeks since I started working in Traveloka.com as a Data Analyst. I feel great working here because I surounded by many great people and most of them are the best talent in Indonesia.

My first project in Traveloka is fixing the tracking system of Marketing Division. It will become the foundation for data scientist to analyze the data, because they will produce a wrong insight if the raw data is wrong. Well, it’s kind of “garbage in, garbage out”.

So, why it is really important for us? Today I just read an article about one of our biggest competitor. They are a leading hotel booking site and have a worldwide market. They just open an office in Israel for research and development. Israely branch will help them analyze a very large amount of data to help them decide the best pricing for each hotel around the world. It is a really complex process because they consider many aspect such as season, event, recent condition of the place and many other things. That’s really cool and I have to admit that we are many steps behind them. However, we still believe that we could catch them and win in our own country.

My supervisor told me an interesting story about the hotel industry in Indonesia. Do you know that the hotel pricing in Indonesia is driven by the big online hotel booking site? And ironically, they are just a foreign company that open an office in Indonesia. They force the hotels to rise their price, so they can get a higher margin from the sales. If a hotel gives a lower price than their recommendation, they will get mad to the hotel and force them to rise the price. It is possible because they have a big impact in hotels revenue, so they can drive the hotels in anyway they want.

Today I have finished my thesis. Woohoo!!!

Well, I have to say that it’s not that hard to do your thesis. Well, maybe because I got an easy topic so I didn’t get a lot of trouble to do it.

I took a topic in database, which is a topic for computer science major. My research is about comparison of vertical and horizontal scaling. I measure their performance and analyze which one has a better performance. In this research I use PostgreSQL as the DBMS. Well, I’m very grateful that I didn’t take the IS topic because I have to do an interview and write thicker report if I take the IS topic. My friend Gaby wrote almost 500 pages of report and lely wrote about 350 pages of report. I think that is scary for my printer, budget, and for the environment. :p

If you want know how thick are their, just compare it with my 77 pages thesis report:

I'm feeling old now. Lol. Finally I will do my thesis writing. Time flies so fast. Actually, Fasilkom let me graduate just by taking some course and get 144 credits, but I choose the hard way (don't ask me why). :')

This afternoon I met Mrs Ika to consult the topic of my thesis. She offer me a topic about NoSQL. Wow, what kind of food is that? Well, it is a new kind of paradigm about database. Some people think that typical relational database cannot meet their needs for big data. It is not scalable and have bad performance in some cases.

So, I accept her offer and I will do research about NoSQL. Yeeaay!

She told me to explore this new technology before go deeper to the research. I have to choose which database that I will use in my research since NoSQL has many option, like MongoDB, Cassandra, Hadoop, CouchDB, etc. Ok, it's a little bit geek here, let's forget it. :p

From now, I have to decide what is become my focus in this thesis. I think Mrs Ika want to prove the advantage of using NoSQL compared with the relational database. Well, I think I can focus on performace or scalability. Which one will I choose? I don't know. I have to do my research first. ;)

I've just read an article about it and couldn't resist to post it. You can read the full article here.

We often think too big when we want to create an application or a web or a product. We are dreaming about many cool features and possibilities of our application. And we keep dreaming without action. Sometime we give up before even try. Why? Because we don't know how to create that BIG application.

It is better for us to start small when we build our project. We can narrow down our market. When we just focus on a specific market, we have a higher opportunity to satisfy their needs. When we ready to create more features, we just add it and expand the ability of our product. The simplest example is Facebook and Mark. Mark focus on a Harvard Campus when he creates Facebook. After he realize that Facebook is a next big thing, he start to perfected it and launch it for larger market. With specific market, we can verify that our idea is needed by our customer.

We can also get a personal feedback from our first customers in specific market. If we make a mistake in our product, we can still fix it before we launch it to larger market. It can reduce the amount of bad review or complaint.

That sounds arrogant, but it’s true. You have to surround yourself with best people you can find around you. I didn’t say that you cannot be friend with everyone, but with whom you spend your time everyday will decide what you will become in the future.

From many sources that I've read, being friend with passionate and positive people is good for us because they can motivate us to perform as good or better than them. We will have their spirit and have a high standard like them. We can also learn from their experience or success story. It really worth to surround yourself with many person better than you.

If you think you have become a great person, you can try to make people around you to become better. It feels good when you can be useful for people around you and help them reach their success. Maybe you won’t get any credit or money, but I believe God will give something good to you. :)

Well, that’s just my random opinion. I make this post just to practice my english. :p

Mungkin banyak diantara kita yang sering berusaha, namun hasilnya selalu saja gagal. Ada diantara kita yang bahkan menyerah sebelum memulai karena tidak yakin dapat berhasil melakukan sesuatu. Ada pula yang kelihatannya hanya melakukan sedikit usaha, namun sudah bisa mendapatkan apa yang selalu gagal kita dapatkan. Semua hal tersebut adalah hal yang wajar dan sering kita temui di kehidupan kita.