August 2008

Stack Overflow Thoughts

August 21, 2008

I received my beta invitation to stackoverflow.com, the discussion form launched by Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky, some days ago. It has been fun playing around with it. For a beta site, it is highly functional, very fast and noticeably free of bugs (I noticed just one formatting problem which disappeared after an hour or […]

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Decision Making

August 19, 2008

There is nothing more puzzling to me about political campaigns than the ever-fluctuating polls. After 18 month of political campaigning, one would think that people would have made up their minds by now. Both the major candidates have significantly differing political views. They have appeared umpteen times on debates on television. All newspapers and blogs […]

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The One Answer Search Engine

August 15, 2008

With regard to my previous post on market entry barriers, one of my friends (who works in research at a large technology company) pointed out that it is incorrect to say that people are entirely satisfied with search results. Google (or other search engines, for that matter) does not provide a direct answer to many […]

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Barriers to Market Entry

August 11, 2008

The big news a couple of weeks ago was the launch of the Cuil search engine. After receiving its 15 minutes of fame, it seems to have been forgotten by everyone. Every once in a while, a new search engine pops up, threatens to oust Google from its throne, and then fades into obscurity. The […]

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The Gospel of Scott Adams

August 8, 2008

Reading a Dilbert cartoon or a book by Scott Adams, one is often struck by how closer they are to real life in the business world than more “serious” business books. It is surprising on one level because business books are supposedly more researched. Yet, on a different level, it is not that surprising , […]

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Procedural Programming in OO Languages

August 6, 2008

A common problem found in code reviews of inexperienced programmers is the use of a procedural paradigm of coding even though they are working with an object-oriented language. Typically, the code looks something like class SomeClass { doAction1ToData(some data structure) doAction2ToData(some data structure) … doActionnToData(some data structure) } Instead of writing objects that encapsulate and […]

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Programmer Test for Interviews

August 5, 2008

A few months ago, I had derided the use of riddles and quiz in interviews. My reasoning was that they measure the wrong things, not how the person would actually perform in day-to-day work. In my company, we have tried to implement what we think is a better way to evaluate candidates, namely, getting them […]

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Barriers to Receiving Information

August 4, 2008

In addition to skills and circumstances, success depends significantly on the information you possess. Without having accurate, up-to-date information, you are more likely to make decisions based on assumptions, or plain hope. Not a good situation to be in. Corporations spend fortunes trying to build good management information systems so that managers can have timely […]

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