Roland Hor's Blog: 2013

Tuesday, December 31, 2013

Always good to read someone else's story on starting up and making money...

7 Lessons We Learned Going from Zero to $30k/Month in Under a Year

Alex Turnbull

Oct 17, 2013

After some early wins and epic fails, Groove launched to the public. We’ve come a long way, but not without some hurdles...

In the weeks after Groove’s public launch, we saw our user acquisition numbers grow slowly but steadily. And while any growth is good, slow and steady isn’t always enough when you have mounting bills and a team that depends on you to keep the paychecks coming.

Over the next several months, I learned more than I ever have in such a short period. We tested dozens of strategies and hacks, and explored hundreds of approaches to try and find the “magic bullet” to business growth.

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This is what I need - a window that stops sound but not air

Redesigned Window Stops Sound But Not Air, Say Materials Scientists

Emerging Technology From the arXiv

July 8, 2013

..the notion of creating a barrier that absorbs sound while allowing the free of passage of air seems, at first thought, entirely impossible....

Noise pollution is one of the bugbears of modern life. The sound of machinery, engines, neighbours and the like can seriously affect our quality of life and that of the other creatures that share this planet.

But insulating against sound is a difficult and expensive business. Soundproofing generally works on the principle of transferring sound from the air into another medium which absorbs and attenuates it.

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Monday, October 14, 2013

Steve Jobs: The Next Insanely Great Thing - wired article before his second coming to Apple

Wired article with on Steve Jobs - before his second coming to Apple

The Wired Interview

By Gary Wolf, February 1996

Steve Jobs has been right twice. The first time we got Apple. The second time we got NeXT. The Macintosh ruled. NeXT tanked. Still, Jobs was right both times.

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Friday, August 23, 2013

Enterprise Sales Tips for Hackers

Useful to know when you are starting out and trying to sell to enterprise

Brandon’s posthaven

Brandon, 8 Aug , 2013

When my co-founder and I were starting out, we came from an engineering background and thought of sales as black magic. Divine the customer's deepest desires, howl a few bewitching incantations, and then—abracadabra—a contract would be conjured. Magic!

Two years of selling served as a painful exorcism. There's no magic to enterprise sales, but there's a hell of a lot of zoology. LTV, field sales, inside sales, CAC, prospects, leads, consumerization, channel sales, … the array of terms is bewildering and there's no textbook that explains how it all fits together.

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Steve Jobs The Lost Interview (Full Film) 2012

This is a great interview with Steve Jobs in 1995 just before he re-joined Apple.

Uploaded by Ivaylo Todorov
Oct 7, 2012

Clearly he knows what he is talking about and the thought process is super lucid. In his first stint at Apple he was very good. After NeXT he became great.
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Business Analysis Using User Stories

This is a great summary with succinct elaboration of what User Stories are in Agile software development.

BAEXPERTS
Nov 8, 2012

User Stories are a great addition to our repertoire of ways of expressing stakeholder requirements.

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Saturday, July 20, 2013

Google Analytics - Multi-armed Bandit Experiments

Multi-armed Bandit Experiments - no wonder my A-B stats look like they do...

Steven L. Scott, PhD, Sr. Economic Analyst, Google
January 23, 2013 | 9:40 AM

This article describes the statistical engine behind Google Analytics Content Experiments. Google Analytics uses a multi-armed bandit approach to managing online experiments. A multi-armed bandit is a type of experiment where:

The goal is to find the best or most profitable action

The randomization distribution can be updated as the experiment progresses

The name "multi-armed bandit" describes a hypothetical experiment where you face several slot machines ("one-armed bandits") with potentially different expected payouts. You want to find the slot machine with the best payout rate, but you also want to maximize your winnings. The fundamental tension is between "exploiting" arms that have performed well in the past and "exploring" new or seemingly inferior arms in case they might perform even better. There are highly developed mathematical models for managing the bandit problem, which we use in Google Analytics content experiments.

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Adding an additional layer of authentication to websites with HTTP Reverse Proxies

Securism Blog
Walter Goulet, Jan 31, 2012

For my last client engagement, I was tasked with adding an additional layer of authentication to a publicly accessible website without actually modifying the website’s application code or web server configuration. After doing a little research, I came upon the idea of using a HTTP reverse proxy to intercept requests to the website and perform additional authentication before letting end users access the target web application.

If you are not familiar with the concept of a HTTP reverse proxy, think of it as a specialized web server that inspects incoming HTTP requests, forwards them to another (usually internal) web server after any local processing is completed, and makes sure that HTTP responses sent back to the client contain proper host names. The following diagram illustrates the typical processing flow when using a SSL enabled reverse proxy server that is acting as a front end to an internal web server.

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Finding the Next Great Opportunity

Head of Amazon Web Services on Finding the Next Great Opportunity

First Round Capital - The Review
April 17, 2013

With the frequency that you hear “cloud computing” mentioned at conferences and in the tech press, you might believe it’s just a tired buzzword that salesmen use to induce boring people to get excited about buying enterprise services.

James Hamilton wants to convince you otherwise. He approaches technical innovation from a skeptical perspective, with a flair for hands-on empiricism. As a Vice President and Distinguished Engineer on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) team, he’s been hard at work building the basic technology of cloud computing before the first impeccably coiffed consultant first uttered the phrase.

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Lessons from Pixar: Why Software Developers should be Story Tellers

First Round Capital - The Review
Martin Reddy, May 9, 2013

Film Concepts in Software

“ Talk to users in their own language. Use concepts and processes that your users are familiar with in order to communicate software designs as naturally as possible. ”

It's often said at Pixar that “story is king” and that this is the primary reason for Pixar's success. Appropriately then, all films at Pixar begin with the Story Department, where the initial script is developed and expressed on storyboards to refine the look and feel of the film.

In many ways, designing a great software product is like creating a great story. It’s not surprising that modern agile processes refer to “user stories” as a way to capture requirements from the perspective of the user. So very early on we took this concept to the next level and created a Story department in our software group.

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The one cost engineers and product managers don't consider

First Round Capital - The Review
Kris Gale, VP Engineering at Yammer, June 20, 2013

I talk a lot about costs. I believe good engineering is about finding the most cost-effective solution to a problem, whether that cost is measured in dollars, hours, morale or lost opportunities. Some costs are paid immediately and some are assumed as debt. Everyone in business knows this intuitively, but some costs are less obvious than others, so it's important to point them out to your team.

Among the most dangerously unconsidered costs is what I've been calling complexity cost. Complexity cost is the debt you accrue by complicating features or technology in order to solve problems. An application that does twenty things is more difficult to refactor than an application that does one thing, so changes to its code will take longer. Sometimes complexity is a necessary cost, but only organizations that fully internalize the concept can hope to prevent runaway spending in this area.

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Thursday, April 18, 2013

Moore’s Law and the Origin of Life

Life predates the Earth!? If this is true....wow!..

MIT Technology Review

The Physics arXiv Blog

April 15, 2013

As life has evolved, its complexity has increased exponentially, just like Moore’s law. Now geneticists have extrapolated this trend backwards and found that by this measure, life is older than the Earth itself.

Here’s an interesting idea. Moore’s Law states that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit doubles every two years or so. That has produced an exponential increase in the number of transistors on microchips and continues to do so.

But if an observer today was to measure this rate of increase, it would be straightforward to extrapolate backwards and work out when the number of transistors on a chip was zero. In other words, the date when microchips were first developed in the 1960s.

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Saturday, April 13, 2013

The Uses Of Difficulty

The brain likes a challenge—and putting a few obstacles in its way may well boost its creativity.

Ian Leslie
From INTELLIGENT LIFE magazine, November/December 2012

Jack White, the former frontman of the White Stripes and an influential figure among fellow musicians, likes to make things difficult for himself. He uses cheap guitars that won’t stay in shape or in tune. When performing, he positions his instruments in a way that is deliberately inconvenient, so that switching from guitar to organ mid-song involves a mad dash across the stage. Why? Because he’s on the run from what he describes as a disease that preys on every artist: "ease of use". When making music gets too easy, says White, it becomes harder to make it sing.

The Nine Circles of Hell: Front-End Development for Sharepoint

My condolences.

If you’re reading this book, it can logically be assumed that you’ve been tasked with completing a project that involves working with Sharepoint; in fact, it’s probably safe to make the assumption that you’re a front-end developer who stumbled upon this text after hysterically Googling “MICROSOFT SHAREPOINT SOME1 PLS HELP,” tears streaming down your pudgy cheeks, fat fists wildly bashing the keyboard of your MacBook Pro.

a quick-start guide
by J. Ky Marsh
jkymarsh.com

All is not lost, my friend. I found myself in exactly the same position some time ago; well, aside from the crying, anyway. What are you, some kind of wuss? Christ.

The fact of the matter is that up-to-date, clear-cut information on front-end development for Sharepoint is frighteningly difficult to find. Sharepoint itself is chock-full of bad practices and front-end code taboos that will leave you scratching your head (and potentially crying, since you’ve apparently shown a propensity for doing that, Nancy).

Furthermore, Sharepoint’s default front-end code (that is, the HTML, CSS, and JS that are used by default within a fresh install of Sharepoint) is so horrific that you’ll likely begin immediately assessing how to rewrite or overhaul the existing code in a desperate attempt to bring it in line with modern web development standards.

Don’t panic. I’m here to help.

It's been a while since I was hiring at a startup, and recruiting at a startup is very different from hiring at a big company

By Ken Norton

Group Product Manager, Google

At Yahoo! Search, it seemed like we were constantly hiring. I did an average of 5-8 interviews a week. It was a never-ending drumbeat of resumes, interviews, and offer letters. Now, I wasn't always the hiring manager. I only hired a handful of product managers in my time there. But somebody was always hiring a product manager and I was usually on the interview team.

HUMAN beings are social animals. But just as important, we are socially constrained as well.

By JEFFREY P. KAHN
Published: March 15, 2013

...lifesaving social instincts didn’t readily lend themselves to exploration, artistic expression, romance, inventiveness and experimentation — the other human drives that make for a vibrant civilization.

To free up those, we needed something that would suppress the rigid social codes that kept our clans safe and alive. We needed something that, on occasion, would let us break free from our biological herd imperative — or at least let us suppress our angst when we did.

We needed beer.

Every year the Man sends me to Hazardous Waste Operations and Emergency Response class. These HAZWOPER classes are almost always taught by firefighters because they routinely deal with emergency responses to hazardous materials.

Wednesday, November 28th, 2012 | Posted by Adrian Simmons

Every year the Man sends me to Hazardous Waste Operations and Emergency Response class. These HAZWOPER classes are almost always taught by firefighters because they routinely deal with emergency responses to hazardous materials.

...most of the examples of what not to do when knee-deep in an emergency dealing with hazardous materials comes from the hard lessons of other firefighters. More specifically, they come from the gung-ho firefighters who charge into a dangerous situation, make said situation worse, and other firefighters have to spend time and energy rescuing them instead of dealing with the main problem.

Because I’m a nerd, and I’ve taken this class a lot over the years and my mind wanders, I immediately saw a parallel to the wizards of JRR Tolkien’s Middle-Earth.

Patent trolls want $1,000—for using scanners

I know that patent trolling happens, but this seems to be going a bit too far....

by Joe Mullin - Jan 2 2013, 10:30pm MPST

When Steven Vicinanza got a letter in the mail earlier this year informing him that he needed to pay $1,000 per employee for a license to some “distributed computer architecture” patents, he didn’t quite believe it at first. The letter seemed to be saying anyone using a modern office scanner to scan documents to e-mail would have to pay—which is to say, just about any business, period.

If he'd paid up, the IT services provider that Vicinanza founded, BlueWave Computing, would have owed $130,000.