14 Mar, 2010

Crowd Sourcing – Harnessing the power of the people

Posted by Bhavin Turakhia | (8) Comments

Most of us have heard of the NetFlix million dollar competition (read here, here and here)  that lasted 3 years, attracted 51,000 contestants from 186 countries, all competing AND co-operating to build a better recommendation engine for NetFlix so that users of NetFlix can get more accurate movie suggestions. The winners – BellKor’s Pragmatic Chaos – a team from AT&T research took the $1 million prize by providing the winning algorithm. The innovations and ideas generated on this subject during the course of 3 years was a feat unachievable by any single corporate research division.

Crowdsourcing (as coined by Jeff Howe of Wired Magazine) has been gaining considerable traction as a feasible, scalable, practical and even cost-effective method of getting stuff done – whether it is design, development, ideating, problem solving and more. We are not unfamiliar with the concept – everyone who has ever used Wikipedia has used a product of crowdsourcing. Over the last several years, many web applications and portals have emerged that have taken crowd sourcing to the next level by webifying the process and making it accessible to the masses. Taking a page from Auren Hoffman and Joe Kraus’ articles – it has never been a better time to be an entrepreneur. What used to take millions of dollars, swanky offices, expensive 64-way sun solaris boxes, and an elite team, can now be achieved by a single person with a smart idea. Think about it. All you need is a great idea. Dont have programmers? Make your way to TopCoder or Rent-a-coder and hire a just-in-time team. Need to give your brand visibility? Head over to crowdSpring or 99 Designs and get a logo and a look from hundreds of contributors for cheap. Need servers? You can now run on the same scalable infrastructure that Amazon and Google run on. From design and marketing, to development and deployment – you can avail the best of the resources realtime without offices, infrastructure, capital or people. Crowd Sourcing and Cloud Computing will take innovation and starting up to a whole new level.

Enough of a digression though – having spent a better part of my Sunday researching Crowdsourcing – here is a compendium of resources for your benefit -

Articles

Videos

Books

Crowdsourcing websites

24 Feb, 2010

My Todo list – the most powerful weapon in my productivity arsenal

Posted by Bhavin Turakhia | (32) Comments

One of the simplest differentiators I have found between individuals who are successful and those who are not – is the former always maintain an organized todo list for everything in their lives. This sounds extremely obvious, but is by far the most powerful tool in my arsenal. Here is a random list of thoughts concerning my practice of maintaining a todo list for myself –

• It requires skill, attention and focus to be able to determine during ANY conversation / any event – items that should form a part of my todo list. I have invariably found that most unsuccessful people fail at this. They either (1) cannot determine in the course of a meeting / discussion something that forms a part of their responsibility, or (2) just don’t care enough to want to deliver their best, or (3) believe that their memory is infallible despite significant number of incidents in their life that have proven otherwise.
• I tend to ensure I always have some way of taking notes at ANY point in my entire day. Given that my laptop accompanies me everywhere (including places I’d rather not talk about ) for over 97% of my awake time – that is my preferred medium for note taking. I also have notepads scattered on every desk, and use the blackberry memo when nothing else is available. I will almost never initiate a meeting without ensuring someone (if not me) is available to persist thoughts/notes/todo items.
• It requires discipline to subsequently organize random notes I may have taken in a meeting into my final todo lists. This is mostly a 2-5 minute activity that I either engage in immediately after the event (when the subject is fresh) OR by the end of the day. This is again an area where many fail. I have seen individuals take notes down on pads they carry with them in meetings, but if the pad is merely an intermediate medium, then not transferring them subsequently to the final persistent format in an organized manner is almost as big a crime as not taking any notes down
• Todo lists are an asynchronous ongoing and continuous activity for me. I almost always ensure that the time interval between thinking something and penning it down in a structured format is under a few seconds or minutes at best. This applies to almost 90% of my thoughts. If I think of something, I jot it down. I firmly believe that ideas are not a commodity and each minute that I spend in thinking something of value, is wasted, if the thought is not captured in some persistent format.
• It requires skill to be able to reprioritize items ongoingly since a typical todo list will almost never end (mine has never been empty since the day it began). I use just-in-time reprioritization as I take up each task. Additionally I juggle and shift tasks around at the end of each day/week/relevant period too.
• It requires discipline to jot down every single item that needs to get done in some persistent form without relying on my memory. However the knowledge that not jotting something down will at the minimum require me to rethink it at some point down the line, and at worst may result in the permanent loss of a valuable idea, is an adequate incentive for me to not only imbibe the discipline but infact enjoy the activity immensely
• The value of a person is the value of the ideas that they execute. Merely thinking an idea and doing nothing about it not only does not create value, but rather destroys it, because now even the time spent behind conceiving the idea was a waste. The only way to guarantee execution is to persist the idea in a queue.
• This kind of discipline also requires a strong desire on my part to want to always deliver my best. If I was ok with mediocrity, then I would be ok with missing out on tasks that I need to get done. Since I cannot settle for anything less than perfection, the only way to ensure that is to ensure I am adept at maintaining a todo list with almost no lacunae. As a corollary this also therefore is the mark of someone who is paranoid about perfection. Someone who does not want to leave delivery to chance will always be adept at organizing their tasks in a persistent manner.
• Maintaining a todo list also requires a good sense of information architecture. A disorganized/non-prioritized list can sometimes be worse than no list at all. Before you begin researching complicated software to manage this, let me save you time by adding that I simply use a plain text editor (Keynote) to maintain my todo list. It allows me to create multiple text files and my entire todo list comprises of a few files organized line by line in an indented tree like point format. I must also add that my list is not always perfectly ordered in descending order of priority. I would say it is mostly in a reasonably rough order of priority such that I can assume that items on top are important and items at the bottom are not.
• A todo list lets me set milestones and creates a sense of achievement as items get knocked off my list. I love that feeling. Infact I can state with certainty that there is a palpable difference between my sense of achievement when I knock an item off my todo list vis-à-vis just wrapping up an adhoc task. The feeling of deleting or cancelling a task from my todo list is considerably more fun.
• Over and above my textual todo list – my email inbox serves as a second todo list for me. Any email that is an action item will always remain in my inbox until it is addressed.
• Paranoid that I am, I also end up managing todo lists for other teams and individuals where my confidence level with respect to them fulfilling this responsibility is sub par. If I think of something – no matter who it relates to – I will typically shoot out an email, or, in most circumstances, add it to the relevant priority log in our internal corporate wiki. This practice again stems from the belief that ideas are always more valuable than the time taken to think them and jot them down, and the only way to capitalize on their value is to capture them in a persistent form somewhere.
• Given that the process of maintaining these todo lists involves managing certain files, and certain web pages on my corporate wiki, I realize that I may end up procrastinating the process of adding items to these lists if the task of adding them were onerous. Hence I use automation to the maximum extent to ensure I never end up feeling lazy. I use a macro shortcut utility called Launchy, combined with some elegant keyboard shortcuts that I have configured, to ensure that EVERY single todo list I maintain including files in our corporate wiki representing tasks for other teams, are literally a few key strokes away – and I literally mean few keystrokes away – I don’t even need to use the mouse to access any of these files. I can access any of these lists with merely a few keystrokes. This ensures that it is always very easy for me to file something in the appropriate place.
• Practice is key. By now this process has become second nature to me. Our brain is interesting in that it makes ANY consciously repeated behavior pattern into a subconscious habit. The word “ANY” is important here. This applies to every behavior pattern. If you consciously make it a practice to maintain a organized todo list, you will find yourselves subconsciously doing so after sometime, and even ensuring others do so. If you however consciously make it a practice to procrastinate taking down notes, or maintaining a todo list, you will shortly find yourselves engaging in the same subconsciously to the extent that you will never be able to spot an idea worth jotting down or a task worth scheduling even when it is imperative to do so.

10 Oct, 2009

Judging Humility in an Interview

Posted by Bhavin Turakhia | (16) Comments

At Directi, one of the most important qualities we value in potential candidates is humility. Infact, in the constantly dynamic landscape that is our industry, the only way to keep up is to know that you don’t know [it all]. Infact I include humility as an important attribute in my document on Skills and attributes that a good developer must possess.

I never really got a handle on how one can judge humility of an individual, until it struck me recently. A technique that has actually effectively worked in the past, but I have never paid attention to it. Humble individuals are always respectful, and do not have an air about them. One of the ways I have been able to distinguish individuals who are not humble are those who feel specific interview questions are beneath them to answer. We have all seen this category. Often I will fire an extremely easy or fundamental or theoretical question in my interview to a candidate – and they will respond with a short answer – accompanied by negative body language or verbal cues or in some cases a direct rebuke that essentially states – “Are you kidding me? Why are you asking me such a question at my level. I am above this type of questioning.”

There are only two reasons (not mutually exclusive) for this type of a response – (1) Ignorance – the candidate does not know the answer to the question and instead of acknowledging it he prefers to go down the path of “this question is beneath me”, (2) Lack of Humility

At Directi -

• no question is ever beneath someone
• all of us know that we have a lot to learn
• none of us feel uncomfortable in acknowledging something we don’t know
• all of us are respectful

So if you want to judge the humility of an individual during an interview – ask a couple of really easy questions – and see how they respond

Do you feel you would fit into our work culture? Apply at http://careers.directi.com

20 Aug, 2009

Bought my first plane and flew to Lake Tahoe

Posted by Bhavin Turakhia | (26) Comments

Just got back from a week long super-active trip to the US – visited our friends at Yahoo, participated in HostingCon, checked out office spaces in San Francisco … and … bought our very first Cessna StationAir )

Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.

We (me and Div) went to Lake Tahoe for an evening, took off from San Carlos airport, had dinner at Lake Tahoe, won some money playing Poker and flew back. Cant wait till we get this baby shipped back to Mumbai – weekend trips to Goa whenever I want

5 Aug, 2009

A Compendium on Swine Flu – Facts and Info

Posted by Bhavin Turakhia | (10) Comments

India has reported its first Swine flu death, and tabulated over 500 positive cases so far (amongst those reported). This is slightly worrisome. I have compiled this compendium of resources as a quick reference for myself, my Company and anyone else who wants to get their facts and figures on the swine flu.

Note: Nothing in this document constitutes actual medical advice. I have not verified the factual accuracy of any source or excerpt. This is merely meant to be a compilation of excerpts from a multitude of sources. Please consult your doctor for actual medical advice.

Background and facts

• Names: Swine Flu, SIV, H1N1, Influenza A, Novel H1N1
• The H1N1 viral strain is due to a new strain of H1N1 not previously reported
• Mortality: “in the US it appears that for every 1000 people who get infected, about 40 people need admission to hospital and about one person dies”
• Current totals – in early July WHO officials gave up trying to count the number of cases. CDC’s Schuchat said it was “more than a million.”
• The United States continues to report the largest number of novel H1N1 cases of any country worldwide, however, most people who have become ill have recovered without requiring medical treatment.

How does it spread

• Novel influenza A (H1N1) spreads in the same way that regular seasonal influenza viruses spread
• Coughs and sneezes of people who are sick
• Touching infected objects and then touching your nose or mouth
• Transmission is human to human – cooked pork products are safe to eat as the virus cannot be transmitted by eating foods

Symptoms

Prevention

• A vaccine is in development and is likely to become available soon – http://www.cdc.gov/h1n1flu/vaccination/acip.htm
• Anyone exhibiting symptoms must stay quarantined and not come into contact with others. They should also get tested immediately.

Testing

• In early June, WHO and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) acknowledged that a new laboratory test used to identify the virus was about 90 per cent accurate, while rapid diagnostic tests have an accuracy of 50-70%

Cure

• Over-the-counter drugs relieve symptoms, they do not kill the virus
• Antiviral drugs can be used to treat swine flu or to prevent infection with swine flu viruses. These medications must be prescribed by a health care professional.
• Influenza antiviral drugs also can be used to prevent influenza when they are given to a person who is not ill, but who has been or may be near a person with swine influenza. When used to prevent the flu, antiviral drugs are about 70% to 90% effective. When used for prevention, the number of days that they should be used will vary depending on a person’s particular situation
• Most patients were expected to recover without medical attention, although those with pre-existing or underlying medical conditions were more prone to complications

Other References

• http://www.cdc.gov/h1n1flu/general_info.htm
• http://www.cdc.gov/h1n1flu/antiviral.htm
• http://www.cdc.gov/h1n1flu/sick.htm
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_flu_pandemic
• http://www.cdc.gov/H1N1FLU/surveillanceqa.htm
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swine_influenza

1 Oct, 2008

The Game of Business

Posted by Bhavin Turakhia | (5) Comments

I delivered a presentation titled the Game of Business at the Proto.in conference in 2008 and subsequently at IIT Kanpur’s Megabucks event.

Visit our wiki at http://wiki.directi.com/x/BwCK to view the video of this presentation and download the slides. At Directi, we believe that Business is like a game. This presentation covers principles that embrace this philosophy and that continue to be instrumental to the success of Directi.

I finally managed to obtain a copy of the video of the presentation and hence am posting this entry quite late. I believe this is by far one of the best presentations I have delivered in terms of value and the importance I personally attribute of the concepts I expound in the presentation to the success of our company.

Comments / feedback are solicited and welcome

24 Sep, 2008

Time and Resources Analysis of a Recruitment Exercise

Posted by Bhavin Turakhia | (1) Comments

I got around to thinking about the amount of effort that goes behind a recruitment exercise at Directi and I thought to pen down an article which details out a recruitment scenario and the effort / resources involved. The purpose to pen this down was to get an idea of the time, cost and people involvement per candidate. This in turn will enable us to -

1. Set expectations in terms of targets of the number of interviews one can conduct per week
2. Determine direct cost of an interview process
3. Determine the opportunity cost of an interview process
4. Improvise our recruitment process and make it more efficient

The article turned out to be a 1600+ word count multi-page article which I have posted on our Directi Wiki under the Recruitment University

Anyone involved in recruitment should read it. The article is available at – http://wiki.directi.com/x/TwDK

PS: If you wish to apply for a job at Directi, visit our careers portal at http://careers.directi.com

11 Sep, 2008

Availability of Developers by City (Mumbai, Bangalore, Delhi etc) and Technology (Java, C++, C#, AIR, WPF etc)

Posted by Bhavin Turakhia | (16) Comments

An alltime favorite question amongst journalists who interview me as a “young entrepreneur” has been – “Tell us about some of the challenges you faced while growing Directi?” and my patent answer has always been that the only challenge we have faced and continue to face is finding good talent. In our bid for finding talent we are now expanding into other cities over the next few months.

In order to determine tech labor availability across the common metro cities in India I compiled a statistical comparison of the count of resumes available on common jobsites for common software development skillsets in the various cities in India, and the findings are very interesting. This blog post compiles these findings. If you are a tech company in India – these findings can help you make technology decisions concerning city selection and platform selection.

The findings

Below are findings from the comparison of the count of resumes of software developers with 0-4 yrs of experience from various cities in India as compiled from a jobsite -

1. Findings by City

• Bangalore has 2.5 times the number of Java resumes of Mumbai
• In terms of total resumes from each city the ranking is in the following order – Bangalore, Hyderabad, NCR, Chennai, Delhi, Pune, and lastly Mumbai
• As an example, here is the citywise count of Resumes that contained the keyword Java
  • Bangalore – 123,205
  • Hyderabad- 114,561
  • NCR – 85,347
  • Chennai – 82459
  • Pune – 54,086
  • Delhi – 53,256
  • Mumbai – 43,672
• Every city in India has more available developers than Mumbai with the South taking the lead
• NCR has almost twice the number of developers as Delhi

2. Findings by Technology

• The total count of Resumes of developers with 0-4 yrs experience that contain the below keywords across all 7 cities was -
  • C++ – 635,575
  • Java – 556,586
  • C# – 190,872
  • Javascript – 162,343
  • Ajax – 41,219
  • Flex – 8,668
  • Python – 3,429
  • Ruby – 2,099
  • WPF – 779
  • Silverlight – 255
• As you can see Java and C++ are the predominant keywords in Software Developer Resumes
• Flex beats Python and Ruby
• Ajax and Javascript beat Flex/WPF/Silverlight by several magnitudes as keywords appearing in resumes

The results above remain similar in terms of ratio, for Resumes with 4+ yrs of experience.

Click here to download the raw excel sheets for all cities and technologies >>

The methodology

I had my team conduct independent searches for each permutation and combination of the following -

• Keywords – Java, C#, C++, Javascript, Flex, Silverlight, WPF, Ajax, Actionscript, Ruby, Python
• Cities – Mumbai, Pune, Bangalore, Delhi, NCR (Noida/Gurgaon), Chennai, Hyderabad
• Experience – 0 to 4 yrs , 4+ yrs
• Function – Software Development (or equivalent)
• Jobsites – Naukri, Timejobs, Monster
• Date – 3rd June 2008

The above totals upto a whopping 462 searches . I then tabulated the count of Resumes for each search and put it in multiple excel spreadsheets. You can download the spreadsheets to crunch the numbers yourself.

Based on the above data, Directi and .pw clearly need a presence in the south. The data also demonstrates the lack of penetration of RIA, especially Flex/Silverlight/AIR/WPF, amongst Indian developers.

Hopefully this data can help others make similar decisions. Meanwhile lookout Bangalore/NCR – we are in the process of making an appearance shortly

PS: Interested in joining Directi? – check our openings at http://careers.directi.com

4 Aug, 2008

I recommend reading…

Posted by Bhavin Turakhia | (20) Comments

I have been planning to begin blogging about the books I read, atleast the good ones. I have always been an avid reader and used to devour 2-3 books every month in the days before Directi. Nowadays I do not have the luxury of time, but manage to read one book a month (thanks to my ever-increasing travel schedule and the fact that I am never going to be able to sleep on planes until the A380s with the wider fully flatbeds begin flying to NYC and SFO – which may not be too faraway considering that Emirates has ordered 50 of them ).

Back to the topic at hand – I strongly recommend the below two books which I read in the last few weeks -

Smart and Gets Things Done: Joel Spolsky’s Concise Guide to Finding the Best Technical Talent (Hardcover) – Short and informative guide to recruiting tech talent. I read it cover to cover and enjoyed it thoroughly. While the book focuses on recruiting tech talent, most of the principles apply to any recruitment exercise. I would strongly recommend this to anyone involved in recruiting from functional heads to hiring managers

The Go-Giver: A Little Story About a Powerful Business Idea (Hardcover) – An amazing business parable with a simple, yet profound lesson on how building a successful business is about focusing on giving and not getting - an obviously simple fact, that all of us forget while living in what we have been trained to [wrongly] believe is a dog-eats-dog world. (Directians: We are buying 200 copies of this one so you can get yours from the library pretty soon)

19 Jun, 2008

TechCamp Event: Mary and Tom Poppendieck in Mumbai

Posted by Bhavin Turakhia | (0) Comments

I havent had a chance to post about this before but we have started an initiative called TechCamp, wherein we plan to organize regular technology events, codefests, workshops, activity sessions, training sessions and much more. Given my constant bickering about the dearth of geek events in India, we decided to go ahead and do something about it. The events we organize under the TechCamp banner are open to public, and 100% techie.

Our second TechCamp event is organized in conjunction with ASCI on 28th June in Mumbai. Mary and Tom Poppendieck the proponents of Lean Software Development, and reknowned authors the award-winning book “Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit” will be conducting a workshop on Lean Software Development atHotel Sea Princess.

Find out details at  the TechCamp Wiki and sign up for the TechCamp Mailing list to be notified of future events. Feel free to invite friends and colleagues. Given the limited seating you will need to submit a position paper to attend.