Update : And a mention in the Financial Express

• 2007-10-05 Fri 02:30 PM
  • Arrived at Taj.
  • Registered myself, got the schwag
  • Met Raghu and discussed the presentation he’ll be making on Flex
  • Social networking, the offline kind

• 2007-10-05 Fri 03:30 PM
  • The presentations start.
  • Joe starts the ceremonies.
  • Chris starts the first talk on what Yahoo can do for you. Yahoo APIs, that is.

• 2007-10-05 Fri 05:30 PM
  • On the fly, we three become a team : Pradeep, Raghu and myself.
  • Pradeep and myself know each other from Deep Root Linux projects, after college hours, in PESIT. Raghu and me are colleagues. Pradeep and Raghu met the first time today.
  • We start discussing ideas…
  • WiFi’s good

• 2007-10-05 Fri 07:00 PM
  • Still discussing…
  • “Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.” – Abraham Lincoln
  • Deciding on “Flick Off” – a way of deciding whether to watch the movie or not, a big mashup.

• 2007-10-05 Fri 07:37 PM

  • We finally started coding.
  • I’m looking into Yahoo Pipes.
  • We picked up a new phrase – “Don’t tase me, bro!”

• 2007-10-05 Fri 08:48 PM

  • BeautifulSoup and IMDB…
  • Are we using anything Yahoo??

• 2007-10-05 Fri 10:01 PM

  • Had dinner, met old friends like Supreeth and Shivashankari and also other Thoughtworkers, etc.
  • Someone was belittling ActionScript/Flash, told them about the Flash on C++ talk and how the Adobean ported Quake 2 to Flash, it knocked his socks off.

• 2007-10-05 Fri 10:50 PM
  • Finally gotten somewhere with BeautifulSoup

• 2007-10-05 Fri 11:55 PM
  • La la la…
  • Having fun in the IRC channel…
  • “Flick Off” -> “foff” -> “Foff it, man!” – our new lexicon addition
    • It’s a synonym for “let it go” or “oh forget it”.

• 2007-10-06 Sat 03:13 AM

  • Still awake.
  • Now fetching Yahoo Movies ratings, etc.

• 2007-10-06 Sat 04:32 AM

  • We’re surprisingly all awake at least the 5 of us i.e. including Tejas and Shreyas
  • I’m done with all the scraping and conversion a.k.a. massaging of the data
  • We just need to pull it all together now.
  • Raghu is mostly done with the UI, RandomWalk looking good now, but he needs real data to try it all out.

• Yep, that’s right, these photos are at 4.40 AM

• 2007-10-06 Sat 05:19 AM

  • Waiting for PKG to pull it all together because me and Raghu are done…
  • He’s trying to get my code working in Django but apparently already it’s breaking!

• 2007-10-06 Sat 09:33 AM

  • Had breakfast, lots of laughs.
  • For some strange reason, we seem to be the only ones laughing throughout, everybody else is so serious.

• 2007-10-06 Sat 11:32 AM

  • Now re-architecting our whole design with 4 hours to go!
  • That’s right XML is split up, UI has to change, the whole works
  • Set up a subversion repo finally (yeah, Pradeep, we should’ve done this before…)

• 2007-10-06 Sat 12:00 PM

  • Have to work on getting director data.
  • Things are falling into place
  • Raghu is doing some kick-ass UI and Pradeep is getting the website and interaction all working smoothly
  • Raghu is helping people on Flex, I’m helping people on BeautifulSoup, Pradeep is giving career advice to someone, etc.

• 2007-10-06 Sat 02:16 PM

  • Got working – directors, actors, get_moviedata.

• 2007-10-06 Sat 03:09 PM

  • Got videos, goofs, pictures working.
  • PKG and Raghu are getting the UI and Django integrated
  • We’re using Y! Movies data, IMDB data including profiles and ratings, YouTube, Y! Pipes, etc. Using Django and Python to run the app server and data munging respectively. And Flex for the frontend. The USP is Ely’s RandomWalk UI that we are using.

• 2007-10-06 Sat 05:03 PM
  • We go downstairs and outside, and decide our presentation. We’re cutting down the material to talk so that we can present best in the limited 90 seconds.
    • Active vs passive voice, and all that.
  • We come back and see the hack time is officially over. People were so quiet, that’s when I loudly started counting 13-12-11-… and the other 4 started shouting, and soon the whole crowd joined in, and when it was zero, Shreyas shouted Happy New Year at the end of it… Filo must have been amused.
  • Time to get out of the place, finalize our stuff, and come back at 6.30 for the demo presentations to start. Then the party after that. I’m shutting off my machine now…

• 2007-10-06 Sat 07:06 PM

  • We did the first presentation!
  • Although there wasn’t enough time for my part, we did well.
  • A couple of people told us outside that they were impressed by our hack. That’s good enough for us. Most of all, we three had fun hacking.

• 2007-10-07 Sat 8:45 PM

  • Awards presented.
  • Everyone gets a Y! bean bag!

• 2007-10-07 Sat 9:15 PM
  • ‘Thermal and a Quarter’, India’s most famous rock band, start playing.
  • I’m not really into this music and definitely need some rest, so we just exited the building and headed home.

— Yahoo! Hack Day motto

The talk was supposed to be an introduction for a day-long session on Open Source Hacking which was organized by few enthu students trying to get other students interested.

I started making the presentation on the midnight before Friday, so I didn’t have a very polished presentation, but I had something reasonable. The title of the talk was “How to make money from coding (or Why Open Source)”. That should get their attention.

15 minutes before the talk, there were 2 students in the hall. I wanted to start the talk on time and decided to start without much crowd anyway. My sore throat was troubling me and I was coughing every two minutes. Anyway, I started off with a funny anecdote. It flopped. Oh boy.

Then, I decided they’re not warmed up yet, and recovered quickly. 15 minutes later, the 225 seater hall was full. Phew.

An hour later, they were still all there, they were asking lots of questions and they seemed genuinely interested. I hope the students do take FOSS software seriously, if not for the freedom and open source aspects, at least for their own career aspects which I detailed out in the talk. (And I’m sure once they’re hooked, they will later “get” the freedom and open source aspects.)

Why do I say that? Well, it comes down to the first question in the Q&A session – “How to get into Yahoo!?”, and I replied “Well, do you want to know how I got into Yahoo!?”. A unanimous yes. I told them the MySQL story, the Python story and few other tidbits. Now, they’re really listening. I pointed out that I didn’t have any special skills, just the knowledge of these two open source software got me the job at Y!, and it saved me from a service industry job (no offense meant, just a personal preference).

Next question: “Any regrets in college life?”. It caused a flashback

in my mind on Atul’s words

“There are two times you innovate in your life – one is when you are a student, the other is when you retire.” Back then, I didn’t believe him. Now, I do. So, I told them “I haven’t yet regretted not scoring well in college. This is the only ‘free time’ you have, so use it well.” I got lot of smirks and “oh, please, we have so much to study” looks. I said “Two years later, I’ll see how many of you come back and tell me I’m wrong.”

Then, after the session ended, a few electrical students said they wanted to get into the software industry and don’t know where to start. I told them that some of the best programmers I’ve known are from a mechanical background, so that’s okay. You should prove your skills, that’s all, your background shouldn’t matter, although it may be difficult to get your first job because you’re not a computer science student. Then, a telecom student. I was happy about this guy because he said he wanted to remain in the telecom domain but learn coding really well, I said that’s a very good decision he’s taken and told him to see open source projects such as Asterisk and OpenMoko. He said “I’m in my final year, just 8 months to go, am I too late?” I said “8 months is a really long time, you’re not late, you just have to start now.” (8 months is a long time when you think about it, but it seems to fly away so soon).

After that, students headed towards the computer lab where I gave a crash course in using subversion. I had to get back to work, so I didn’t stay for the rest of the day, but I heard there was a “good response” from the students.

In the end, I don’t know if anyone was inspired about FOSS or not, but I did see that few students absorbed the fact that knowledge and projects are going to get them good jobs, not just marks (of course, you do have to have a decent score), and working on FOSS projects is one way to achieve that.

P.S. If you’ve read this far, and you’re interested in learning how to contribute to open source software, then you’re in luck, because the foss.in community event is coming up soon. You can start right now by reading Atul’s latest post on foss.in.

Update : A related must-read article is “How to Get a Job Like Mine” by Aaron Swartz.

Many of these ideas were pitched in by Shivashankari, one of the most passionate yahoos I’ve ever seen:

Note: More schools means a need for more volunteers, especially with the Summer Camp in progress. So, if you’re interested, do take a look at the Parikrma website.

It’s been a great two and a half years. Sadly, it’s time to move on.

I was just recollecting today about how much history I have here and how many things I’m leaving behind. Moving on is not easy, especially when you’re smitten with your first company.

I’m gonna miss a lot of people.
I’m gonna miss the amazing parties we’ve had from TGIFs to the weekends at the MGM Beach Resort and at the Bheemeshwari Jungle Lodges camp.
I’m gonna miss watching cricket being played in the alley between cubicles.
I’m gonna miss cribbing about food on the -blr mailing list.
I’m gonna miss watching an India cricket match in the TV room when practically everyone’s watching and nobody’s working.
I’m gonna miss the pranks.
I’m gonna miss getting to learn about and play with Yahoo! products before the rest of the world does.
I’m gonna miss the -random mailing list where everything is discussed, spiced up with amazingly witty sarcasms.
I’m gonna miss days like the hack day.
I’m gonna miss my team, especially the lunch conversations, the coffee conversations, the cubicle conversations, the meeting conversations, how’d-the-interview-screening-go conversations, algorithm discussion conversations, actual work conversations and oh yeah, conversations in general.
I’m gonna miss the purple sofas and the bean bags.
Most of all, I’m gonna miss being a yahoo.

Listening to : “Leaving Home” by Indian Ocean.

You can create your own shortcuts as well. Just login to yahoo search, and run !set dict http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=%s, next time just type !dict anthropomorphize and it’ll take you to the search results page directly. The best part is that this now works from any browser and computer that you use.

To get to know the list of shortcuts you can use, just type !list.

!awesome.

“There are no shortcuts in life, unless you right click and find one.”

The Jayanagar children (who see me every Saturday) visited the M G Road office, and as part of Kalpana’s (one of the founders of Parikrma) plan, another colleague and myself would host the Sahakarnagar children at Aztec / EGL premises.

The kids came at around 1 o’ clock and we took them straight for lunch first. The girls came first and they sat down. The boys came in an another vehicle after a while. The Aztec cafeteria was filled with kids with green color shirts, and everyone was wondering what was going on.

First off, I asked who was the naughtiest of them all, and all of them pointed to a single girl, and I got her to explain what all naughty things she does, hehe. Apparently, she’s the only one who confidently slaps any of the naughty boys! Then, I asked their nicknames, and got to know all the names from ‘mosquito’ to ‘kogile’.

Somewhere in between, I asked them what they wanted to do when they grew up – 3 said nurse, 1 said teacher, 1 said computer scientist (whatever that is), 1 said astronaut (!), and so on. I was so happy to hear that only one of them wanted to become a “software engineer”. Maybe I’m being cynical but I think we have enough drones in Bangalore as it is. These kids can do so much more, and their motivation is very different from ours. When I asked why that paticular girl wanted to become a teacher? She said she liked kids and she wanted to help other kids just like Parikrma helped her. I was asking the wannabe-nurses on whether they have put an injection to somebody else … then I asked the ‘kogile’ to sing, and she sang a beautiful kannada song.

After lunch, we took them inside to the office, and they basically invaded the place. I don’t think anybody was allowed to work , the kids just confidently walked up to people and asked them all they wanted to know about yahoo, internet, and everything in-between.

Some of the actual questions :

• How did yahoo start?
• How do yahoo products happen? (sic)
• How to send email?
• What is your work, anna?

Some toughie questions there. Eventually, they learnt how to chat in messenger and send email. Some of them even got their own yahoo email addresses.

We asked the kids to draw using the markers, and kids love drawing.

Next, we took them to the EGL Yahoo! office next door, and the kids so obediently formed a line and walked towards EGL.

Then, the BESS team took most of the kids to a corner, and started talking to them, and soon took them to a nearby PC and started showing the Yahooligans! site to them. I never knew that Yahooligans site was that good. When the person asked the kids what they recently learnt about, the kids replied they studied the ‘heat’ chapter the previous day, and immediately after a search, they were shown a full 2-3 min cartoon explaining the concept of heat, and electrons and energy levels and all that. I was impressed myself, and the kids had a lot of fun. Next, they wanted to learn more about dinosaurs …

Then, it was time for some more snacks for the kids – from cake to bournvita. And even more goodies!

The kids had prepared to sing a few songs and they sang in good unbroken English.

Then, one of our senior yahoos stepped up to advice a few words to the kids, mainly about the importance of learning, and how we should never stop to learn and improve. The kids explained all the new things they had learnt that day, and why they found it interesting, and in turn he explained why it is important that even the smallest things that they had learnt that day would go a long way in future.

It was time for the kids to leave and get back to their schools, so that they can get back to home in time. The kids surprised us by giving a thank you card to each of the yahoos they interacted with that day.

While bidding them goodbye, the kids warned me that I have to come and visit them at Sahakarnagar one day or I would face the consequences, and I better not take panga with these kids. They’re too smart. For example, my colleague and myself were playing the fool with the kids (well, unsurprisingly, that comes natural to me), and I was arguing that the ‘thank you’ card that I got was better, and when I asked a kid to have his word on it, he said “Both are good”. I never expected such a good diplomatic and yet truthful answer.

To know more about the Parikrma foundation, read this Wharton Journal article and the official Parikrma website.

I just finished reading ‘The Search’ by John Battelle. What an amazing story to read. Learning about Bill Gross and his IdeaLab alone was worth reading the book, and he still keeps ideating, like Snap.com. Heck, even Picasa came from IdeaLab.

There are many tidbits from the book that were interesting, such as about Louis Monier:

It was Louis Monier who took AltaVista from concept to executable code … “I’ve always been interested in big, nasty problems,” Monier told me. Search provided one of the nastiest. Not only do the numbers scale to the near infinite, there was a very real need for good search in 1994. “Search engines at the time were just terrible,” Monier recalls. “Yahoo was a great catalog, but it had no search. So I set about to work on the crawl.”

About Stanford:

Stanford’s 6,200-acre patch of rolling California woodlands is the most productive incubator of technology companies the world has ever seen. Nestled between the silicon factories of Intel and Apple on one end and Sand Hill Road’s venture capitalists on the other, Stanford is a place where students have already dreamed of starting their own companies or going to work for a pre-IPO start-up. And Stanford’s computer science department, where Yang and Filo hung their hats, is perhaps the most prodigious start-up incubator of them all.

About Yahoo:

Another reason Yahoo succeeded was its sense of fun – a characteristic that would come to define not only Yahoo, but nearly every Internet company seeking the fickle approval of the Web public. Yahoo pioneered some of the Web’s earliest social mores – including, for example, links to competitors’ sites in case a searcher could not find what he or she was looking for, and listing “what’s hot” prominently on its home page, thereby driving extraordinary amounts of traffic to otherwise obscure sites.

Thanks to practices like these, the company captured the public’s imagination early and often, garnering a slew of adoring press notices familiar to anyone watching Google’s rise to prominence over the past few years.

About how a mathematical curiosity led to PageRank:

Page didn’t land on the idea of Web-based search at the outset; far from it. Despite the fact that Stanford alumni were getting rich starting Internet companies, Page found the Web interesting primarily for its mathematical characteristics. Each computer was a node, and each link on a Web page was a connection between nodes – a classic graph structure. “Computer scientists love graphs,” Page tells me, referring to the mathematical definition of the term. The World Wide Web, Page theorized, may have been the largest graph ever created, and it was growing at a breakneck pace. One could reasonably argue that many useful insights lurked in its vertices, awaiting discovery by inquiring graduate students. Winograd agreed, and Page set about pondering the link structure of the Web.

About Google’s geeky sense of humor and control:

On April 29, 2004, Google filed what certainly had to be the most unusual S1 – the formal public offering document – in recent memory. At filing, Google declared it would sell $2,718,281,828 worth of its shares – a seemingly random number, which was, in fact, the mathematical equivalent of e, a concept not unlike pi that has unique characteristics and is well known to serious math geeks. By manipulating the actual offering to provide this knowing wink to nerd humor, Google was in effect declaring: the geeks are in control.

Perhaps, the most interesting part of the book for me was the last chapter – ‘Perfect Search’. Battelle profiles what could be the future of Search.

When it comes to search, as with the Internet itself, the most interesting stuff is yet to come. As every engineer in the search field loves to tell you, search is at best 5 percent solved – we’re not even into the double digits of its potential. And search itself is changing at such a rapid pace – in the past year important innovations have rolled out once a week, if not faster – that attempts to predict the near future are almost certainly doomed.

I’ve been working on the Yahoo! Buzz Index for the past 2 years, and many a time I’ve been asked (by friends and colleagues) why I haven’t changed teams yet. But I often ponder to myself – change to what? Being a rabidly information-hungry internet user (well, I’ve calmed down off late), I always found search engines remarkable and Buzz does a lot of analysis on search, it’s quite fascinating, and the sheer volume of data is equally interesting. I’ve had my share of ups and downs (and some very steep downs), but it has been interesting.

We do a lot more than what Google Trends does, however Buzz has a more practical business model in which the interesting insights are kept for the paid customers and the interesting stories are written for the public.

Isn’t it striking on how the ability to search for what you want (and relatedly, blogs have become an important factor in this) has made us more knowledgeable? All the articles on productivity that I came across have really helped me improve in my professional and personal life. My problem has always been converting thoughts into actions, but GTD and the ready-fire-aim approach are helping me improve, but that’s a whole different story. Search has helped me find lyrics of so many songs. Search helped me research about the places I travelled to and want to travel to. Search has helped me discover some hands-on activities that could help me teach the Parikrma kids to explore and think about science, the earth and the human body. I could go on, but just count the number of times you use a search engine in a day, and you’ll know what I mean.

All this has got me more interested in the Search-related domain as a field to work in. And all the money that Search makes is interesting as well Will I ever move on to working on something more in this direction, or will I find something more interesting tomorrow, or will I simply remain yet-another-software-coolie (which seems more likely)? I honestly don’t know, but don’t we all have a search(!) for “that one thing that drives us”?

I’m not saying that Search is the important problem out there in the world, far from it, there are more real world problems like our community, our economy, and quality of life. I believe that knowledge is an important way of empowering people, and Search is a step in helping people to keep finding and gaining knowledge.

I’ve been thinking about all of this, especially, because of Richard Hamming’s words:

Over on the other side of the dining hall was a chemistry table. I had worked with one of the fellows, Dave McCall. I went over and said, “Do you mind if I join you?” They can’t say no, so I started eating with them for a while. And I started asking, “What are the important problems of your field?” And after a week or so, “What important problems are you working on?” And after some more time I came in one day and said, “If what you are doing is not important, and if you don’t think it is going to lead to something important, why are you at Bell Labs working on it?” I wasn’t welcomed after that; I had to find somebody else to eat with! That was in the spring.

In the fall, Dave McCall stopped me in the hall and said, “Hamming, that remark of yours got underneath my skin. I thought about it all summer, i.e. what were the important problems in my field. I haven’t changed my research,” he says, “but I think it was well worthwhile.” And I said, “Thank you Dave,” and went on. I noticed a couple of months later he was made the head of the department. I noticed the other day he was a Member of the National Academy of Engineering. I noticed he has succeeded. I have never heard the names of any of the other fellows at that table mentioned in science and scientific circles. They were unable to ask themselves, “What are the important problems in my field?”

If you do not work on an important problem, it’s unlikely you’ll do important work. It’s perfectly obvious. Great scientists have thought through, in a careful way, a number of important problems in their field, and they keep an eye on wondering how to attack them. Let me warn you, ‘important problem’ must be phrased carefully. The three outstanding problems in physics, in a certain sense, were never worked on while I was at Bell Labs. By important I mean guaranteed a Nobel Prize and any sum of money you want to mention. We didn’t work on (1) time travel, (2) teleportation, and (3) antigravity. They are not important problems because we do not have an attack. It’s not the consequence that makes a problem important, it is that you have a reasonable attack. That is what makes a problem important. When I say that most scientists don’t work on important problems, I mean it in that sense. The average scientist, so far as I can make out, spends almost all his time working on problems which he believes will not be important and he also doesn’t believe that they will lead to important problems.

I spoke earlier about planting acorns so that oaks will grow. You can’t always know exactly where to be, but you can keep active in places where something might happen. And even if you believe that great science is a matter of luck, you can stand on a mountain top where lightning strikes; you don’t have to hide in the valley where you’re safe. But the average scientist does routine safe work almost all the time and so he (or she) doesn’t produce much. It’s that simple. If you want to do great work, you clearly must work on important problems, and you should have an idea.

Back to the book … As a colleague said, this book should be made compulsory reading for anyone working in this field.

Also, special thanks to Rajiv Vyas for sending the book across the ocean to me just because he thought “I might want to read it”! … come to think about it, how did Rajiv and me become friends? Well, he searched for something and chanced upon my blog …

Directions to reach Tadiyandamol : Take the bus from Bangalore to Virajpet. Catch a local bus to Kaikamba, which comes before Kakkabe. From there, you can ask the locals for “raja mane” (King’s house) and you can start trekking. To book food at the Palace Estate, you can contact Prakash at 98804 47702.

The scorching heat was a problem, especially for the first-time trekkers, but we pushed them on.

The view from the Tadiyandamol peak made it all worthwhile. It was simply breathtaking. Many of us were silent for a while, just letting our eyes do the savouring. After that, we started chattering again, taking some crazy snaps and even dancing on top of a stone next to the cliff.

Wallpaper-quality photos:

We had lunch at King’s Palace and the food was just great. I liked the bread payasa.

So can you answer these questions?

• Did I do a bad job of raising my son?
• How can we say that we’re alive?
• When I get off at Bangalore aiport, how much will the elephant ride to my hotel cost?
• Why do dogs eat cat feces??? How do you stop this behavior?
• Does anyone want to give me a million dollors?
• What do we do while we’re dead?
• Why do you think Yahoo started this forum? — the first reply says “P.S. I have personal proof that the creators of Yahoo are the ones who really killed JFK (they also got Jimmy Hoffa)”
• i want gf?
• How to become an animal in your next life?

Be sure to read the answers as well.