I posted a very brief response to a post on HackerNews yesterday challenging the notion that 8 weeks of guided tutelage on Ruby on Rails is not going to produce someone who you might consider a "junior RoR developer." It did not garner many upvotes so I figured that like most conversation on the Internet it faded into the general ambient chatter. Imagine my surprise when I woke up to couple handfuls' worth of emails from around the world asking me what I did, how I did it, and how I got a job. I'm assuming, judging by the relatively small amount of mail I got from a random ...

After I wrote my last post, a surprising number of people emailed me asking why I decided to join a startup after graduating from Duke. Many of those I heard from face similar decisions today: either they are college seniors choosing between a big company and a startup, or they are recent graduates who work at a big company and are thinking about making the switch. What’s interesting is that most are already leaning towards the startup career path: it seems they just want someone to assure them it’s a rational move. Their friends and family are skeptical: “How can you ...

We’ve all experienced it: The frustration of entering a room and forgetting what we were going to do. Or get. Or find.New research from University of Notre Dame Psychology ProfessorGabriel Radvansky suggests that passing through doorways is the cause of these memory lapses.“Entering or exiting through a doorway serves as an ‘event boundary’ in the mind, which separates episodes of activity and files them away,” Radvansky explains.“Recalling the decision or activity that was made in a different room is difficult because it has been compartmentalized.â...

Anyone seeking to succeed in investment banking in China should live by one rule alone: it’s not who you know, but how well you know them. In China, more than any other country where I’ve worked, the professional is also the personal. Comradeship, if not friendship, is always a necessary precondition to doing business together. If you haven’t shared a meal – and more importantly, shared a few hundred laughs – you will never share a business deal. Competence, experience, education and reputation all matter, of course. But, they all play supporting roles.The st...

Roughly a month ago, I decided to give blogging another try, in earnest. I put out an article most days and up to 3 per day when I was experimenting with new channels.It has been fascinating.That being said, this is not a post about blogging tactics. It’s about what the experience has taught me about startups.Find the customers first, then build for themIt took me a long time to understand YC’s motto that you should:Make something people want.The first time I heard that, I thought it was the single dumbest piece of advice I’d ever received from such a credible so...

If there was one course I could add to every engineering education, it wouldn’t involve compilers or gates or time complexity.  It would be Realities Of Your Industry 101, because we don’t teach them and this results in lots of unnecessary pain and suffering.  This post aspires to be README.txt for your career as a young engineer.  The goal is to make you happy, by filling in the gaps in your education regarding how the “real world” actually works.  It took me about ten years and a lot of suffering to figure out some of this, starting from “f...

This term I've happened to have Friday off, but I'm suppose to teach on Saturday. I might sound slightly frustrating for 9to6 folks, but It's not uncommon for University teachers, when you have a lot of holes in your teaching schedule. However, i do a lot of research without weekends, but this is only because i do love it.Nevertheless, This simple shift of working days has made me way happier and relaxed. I don't know the reasons, but here are my observations about it: You can sleep more and do some fresh papers reading (i do read fresh issue of Time magazine on Friday) in your bed and no...

How’s the life of a billionaire? “Quite strange,” says Bill Gates, who fielded questions from University of Washington students on Thursday evening as part of a lecture on the future of computing.Gates’ talk, at a packed hall in the UW’s computer science building, focused on some areas where he thinks cheap, powerful computing will have a major impact on society, including education, disease, and robotics.Gates recalled spending time on the UW campus as a young man, back in the days when computers were huge, powerful machines locked up in big res...