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  Why I Quit My Job to Start a Tech Company

Back in November of 2006, before NY Mag and TimeOut put startups on the cover, before the “tech bubble”, before Twitter and Foursquare were popular, before working at a startup in NY was considered a reasonable thing to do, I was a private equity investor for a $1.6 billion fund called Quadrangle Group. It was just my third year out of college and I made a little over $250,000. For a Brazilian immigrant who spent most of his childhood kind of worried he would have to do physica...

   Start,Company,Creative,Innovation,Techno     2011-08-16 08:38:35

  Configure a PHP web server on CentOS

Are you used to use cPanel or Plesk on VPS for your PHP website management? If for some reason you don't want to use them? What can you do? How do you maintain your website? How do you access Emails, use FTP to upload files or use phpMyAdmin to manage your databases? You may need to configure all these services yourself on a VPS without cPanel or Plesk or other similar apps.But to configure all these services on a Linux server is not an easy job. You may spend many nights but still fail to get s...

   Cron,Linux,CentOS,Email,FTP,MySQL     2012-07-08 06:01:56

  Top 5 Reasons Not to Use Hadoop for Analytics

As a former diehard fan of Hadoop, I LOVED the fact that you can work on up to Petabytes of data.  I loved the ability to scale to thousands of nodes to process a large computation job.  I loved the ability to store and load data in a very flexible format.  In many ways, I loved Hadoop, until I tried to deploy it for analytics.   That’s when I became disillusioned with Hadoop (it just "ain't all that"). At Quantivo, we’ve explored many ways to deploy H...

   Cloud computing,Hadoop,Analytics     2012-04-17 13:43:26

  Seven Ways to Boost Employee Morale

Do your employees drag themselves into work? Is office laughter a vague memory? Your employees' morale may need a boost.After all, low morale can lead to poor cooperation, low productivity and increased turnover -- and ultimately hinder a business from reaching its goals.Since employee morale can quickly build or break a company's success, effective leaders often keep a close eye on it and enlist simple and creative approaches to strengthen it. Here a few tactics to think about adapting for your...

   Employee,Working, active,Attitute,Passion,Encouragement     2011-10-09 07:37:36

  Program Or Be Programmed

On Thursday night I gave a talk at NYU Poly and in the Q&A a young man asked me for advice for "those who aren't technical". I said he should try to get technical. The next morning I met with a bunch of Sloan Business School students doing a trek through NYC. A young woman asked me the same question. I gave her the same answer.I don't mean that everyone should become a software engineer. I do mean that everyone should understand software engineering (or whatever technical...

   Program,Technical,Basic knowledge     2011-11-10 10:31:02

  It’s Not Too Late to Learn How to Code

Coding is sort of like a superpower; with it you can create things that millions of people see. You can change the way people behave, the way they think, and the way they interact with others. This is beyond awesome, but I’ve also met a lot of people that think that this ability is inaccessible to them. I’ve met a lot of “non-technical” people who seem to think that this superpower is only bestowed on those fortunate enough to have it come easily to them at a very early...

   Tips,Coding,Preparation,Interest     2011-10-17 11:26:38

  Why do so many technical recruiters suck?

It’s Tuesday, I get a call from an unknown number.  There is a little hesitation, but I finally pick it up.  My number is listed on my business card and I feel like I should get these calls unless I am in a meeting.- Hi, is this Mike?- Yes, speaking….- Hi Mike!  How are you today?- Fine…- I am calling from XYZ Co, and we deal with recruiting and staff augmentation.  I was wondering if you are looking for software developers.We are in San Francisco and itâ...

   Recruitment,HR,Sucks,Tech recruiter     2011-11-13 08:22:02

  Why isn't all internet traffic encrypted?

The biggest problem is that you must be able to verify that you're encrypting to the correct key. Without it, encryption would be practically useless, as anyone could perform a man-in-the-middle attack on the connection and remain undetected.In typical SSL/TLS, as well as other protocols using X.509, this verification is performed by "certification authorities", which are explicitly marked as "trusted" by web browsers and operating systems. Unfortunately, these CAs usual...

   Internet,Traffic,Encryption,Decryption,Security     2011-10-15 15:03:37

  Three things you should never put in your database

As I've said in a few talks, the best way to improve your systems is by first not doing "dumb things". I don't mean you or your development staff is "dumb", it's easy to overlook the implications of these types of decisions and not realize how bad they are for maintainability let alone scaling. As a consultant I see this stuff all of the time and I have yet to ever see it work out well for anyone. Images, files, and binary data Your database supports BLOBs so it must be a good idea to shove ...

   Database,BLOB,Log,Image     2012-05-02 04:44:25

  new expression vs operator new in C++

In C++, there is a new mechanism for memory allocation and management. When we want to initialize an object, we can use new expression to get enough memory for storing an object and also initialize the object. When we want to create a new object, we can use new expression, for example: Obj *obj=new Obj; Basically, what the new expression does is to allocate enough memory for storing the obj object, in addition, it will initialize the object with some intial values. Also, there is an operator new...

   C++, new expression, operator new     2012-08-12 11:42:39

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