Category Archives: Business

Business, life

The Best Motivator?

It’s not money… Once you get above rudimentary cognitive skill –> Rewards don’t works the way you think they should. It’s the opposites around.

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Business, life, webdev

Java Posse Roundup 2010 – Suggested Books

books
With so many great recommendations…
I felt it was right to share it with the world. Here are some of the books that people in the Java Posse Roundup 2010 recommended you to read (quickly).

Agile Books

Testing Books

Complex Event Processing


Version Control

Scala

JavaScript

Career Books

Business

Software Projects and Their Teams, Groups, Processes and People

Release It! writing and maintaining software from an operations perspective

On Intelligence by Jeff Hawkins – How a new understanding of the brain will lead to the creation of truly intelligent machines

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Business

The Web Is Shifting

Here is another lighting talk I’ve planed to this year Java Posse Roundup. Unfortunately, I didn’t have time to give it. So in order to share it with some girls that might find it interesting – Here you go:

The web is becoming more sociable than searchable, research firm Hitwise said that the two sites accounted for 14 per cent of all US internet visits last week. Facebook’s home page recorded 7.07 per cent of traffic and Google’s 7.03 per cent. You may  read more about the fact that Facebook got more unique users in the USA then Google all last week… so it’s clearly the direction that the web is moving. I only wonder, what are people doing all this time on Facebook.

Facebook is like a Starbucks (You know… friends don’t let they friend drink there) where everyone hangs out for hours but almost never buys anything. The revenue gap between sites like Facebook and Google should narrow over time.  Cost-per-click search ads are extremely good at harvesting intent, but bad at generating intent.

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Business

Startup Best Practices

Here is the presentation I’ve used in my lighting talk at the Java Posse roundup 2010

There are just few ‘lessons’ here. IMHO, the important ones.
Over the past 15 years, I’ve been in start ups and swat teams in side big companies. There are lots of good things that I’ve learn, but also, lots of bold examples to how not to run things. In the end of the day, it’s all about peopleware and open commutation. But like any other aspect in life, lots of other methods you can use in order to be better and excel.

Disclaimer: In some of the slides I took some ideas from Rework book.

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Business, life

Good Books I’m reading now

It’s mainly a post to my presents (not that they are going to read it).
Hey, after all these years that you thought me the love of books. Here is a short list of what I’m reading when I don’t have time (usually around midnight). In this list I’ve included some recent books I’ve read:

  • What the Dog Saw: And Other Adventures. After Outliers, Blink and Tipping Point anything that Mr. Gladwell will write – I promise to read (as quickly as I can).
  • The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable – it’s very good book on a simple topic. We know NOTHING on the stock market.
    “Assuming more order than exists in chaotic nature” – Our brains are wired for narrative, not statistical uncertainty. And so we tell ourselves simple stories to explain complex thing we don’t–and, most importantly, can’t–know. The truth is that we have no idea why stock markets go up or down on any given day, and whatever reason we give is sure to be grossly simplified, if not flat out wrong.
  • Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions
    In a similar way to the Black Swan – it contain lots of answers on how can we recover from an economic crisis.
  • The Intelligent Investor: It is the best book I’ve read about investing. The greatest investment advisor of the twentieth century, Benjamin Graham taught and inspired people worldwide. Graham’s philosophy of “value investing” — which shields investors from substantial error and teaches them to develop long-term strategies — has made The Intelligent Investor the stock market bible ever since its original publication in 1949.
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Business, life

Forget your MBA

It’s a great talk that David Heineimeier Hansson gave in Stanford last week. For those of you that are not developers (or geeks) – DHH, is the creator of Ruby on Rails and partner at 37 Signals. This company build (with Ruby on Rails) some very useful/powerful/popular colaboration tools. All are using this ‘strange’ business model of getting money from users that like your product 🙂 The main thing he claim in this talk was that planning is guessing, and for a start-up, the focus must be on today and not on tomorrow. I would add, focus on monitization and not only the product/technology. In a new industry, don’t plan, work like Nike saying: ‘just do it’. It’s not 5 year plan that you need, but rather 2-4 weeks.
Another very important point, tune your skill for the real world and not the academic style.
He is a great speaker and worth an hour of your valuable time.
Here is a link to get the mp3 version so you could listen to it on your next run/car ride/commute etc’.

Enjoy.

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Business

Apple’s new Tablet or the big iPhone

apple's new tablet

Let’s be honest, the iPhone is an amazing device but you won’t say that its killer feature is the phone. I guess that apple, very inelegantly, understood that they now have everything in place to lunch the tablet and to make it a hit. Unlike microsoft that wanted to do it 6-7 years ago without any support to their vision, Apple now ‘have everything’ in terms of:

  • Business model with framework to support it. The iTune and then App Store give apple huge advantage (or you can look at that as very high entry barrier to all the other players in the game like: Microsoft, Dell, HP) when it comes to how people will consume software (who said games? movies? songs?) on such a tool. It’s all in motion and in place. Everyone today (I mean, all the ones that have iPod), know that you can lunch the iTune and there you can get all your: movies, Tv shows, Songs and now even free applications (again who said games? Farm Vil…). It’s easy and it’s working plus, it looks great.
  • The iPhone and it’s ‘know how’ will give apple very important knowladge on how to build this tablet to be useful. Keyboard usage… and other patents will play into their hands so this device won’t be like their 90′ Newton (Yes – I had one :).

I’m not an expert in hardware companies, but it seems that apple as a company (and as a stock) going to do very very well after this tablet will ‘get’ the high end market of ‘netbooks’. Just like Apple is doing with its laptop and their 90% share in the segment of expensive (=more then 1000$) laptop.

Kudos to Steve and his gang.

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Business, life, webdev

Good Developers And The Real World (part 1)

I’ve been programming since I was 6. It was the good old days of Commodor (64 and Vic) and then apple IIe and IIc.

code and more code*Sign* ahh… I was so young and passion about computers back then + life seems to be very good back then.

Everything was black or white. Simple 🙂

Here are my most memorable lessons I’ve remember in the past 22 years of coding:

  1. Always search before you build. There is no point in building the same wheel (anyone, said framework?) again and again and again.
  2. Don’t over design. Build first something that works and solve your problem and later come back and improve: code, performance etc’.
  3. Don’t fall into the student syndrome – In other words, don’t push your work and try to hack something in the last minute. You (=the student and the project) will fail.
  4. Use the right tool for the job – choose a language, framework, design pattern that solve you problem in the best way. Never the other way around. Moreover, don’t get in love with a language (e.g. Java) just because it is cool.
  5. Always backup your code – trivial… specially, after the first time your harddisk is ‘gone’ and you lost 4months (or years) of work.
  6. Learn and then learn and then keep Learning more – You must keep yourself updated with new stuff. In these days, every day/week there is something new you should be on top of. You must keep with the flow of info in order to be better coder.
  7. Change is constant – Your knowledge of technology/programming/life should be similar to how you treat stocks: Diversify.
    Don’t get too comfortable with a particular technology. If there’s not enough support for that language or technology, you might as well start updating your resume now and start your training period. Who said “Java” and who said “Python”?
  8. Open good communication between all the experts in the company or in other words, creative collaboration of domain experts and developer experts.
    This is one of the critical and key success factor to any successful project. You must nature and advocate to open good communication. People should feel comfortable to speak their mind and to point that the king is naked as soon as they recognize it. We all know that the ‘answer’ is some where in the organization and the people that need it should be able to get to the right people on the right time.
  9. How is your web application / software / feature is going to change and help the organization?
    This is one of the most important question you need to ask yourself and push in a direction that will answer it in the best way.

I have a lot more, but I had enough time to write a short post. If you have some more urgent lessons, please feel free to add them here in the comments.

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Business, webdev

Yahoo Finance (hidden) API

London vis a vis Finance
I was looking for long time after a way to get some finance data from sources like: google, yahoo etc’ without the need to parse long html pages. Than, a friend point me to some simple pipe that fetch this information. From there it was a short step to gain access to this nice (hidden) API was inevitable.

In a nutshell, if you want to get data on some stocks you can use this request:
http://finance.yahoo.com/d/quotes.csv?s=GE+PTR+MSFT&f=snd1l1yr

where some special tags:

a Ask a2 Average Daily Volume a5 Ask Size
b Bid b2 Ask (Real-time) b3 Bid (Real-time)
b4 Book Value b6 Bid Size c Change & Percent Change
c1 Change c3 Commission c6 Change (Real-time)
c8 After Hours Change (Real-time) d Dividend/Share d1 Last Trade Date
d2 Trade Date e Earnings/Share e1 Error Indication (returned for symbol changed / invalid)
e7 EPS Estimate Current Year e8 EPS Estimate Next Year e9 EPS Estimate Next Quarter
f6 Float Shares g Day’s Low h Day’s High
j 52-week Low k 52-week High g1 Holdings Gain Percent
g3 Annualized Gain g4 Holdings Gain g5 Holdings Gain Percent (Real-time)
g6 Holdings Gain (Real-time) i More Info i5 Order Book (Real-time)
j1 Market Capitalization j3 Market Cap (Real-time) j4 EBITDA
j5 Change From 52-week Low j6 Percent Change From 52-week Low k1 Last Trade (Real-time) With Time
k2 Change Percent (Real-time) k3 Last Trade Size k4 Change From 52-week High
k5 Percebt Change From 52-week High l Last Trade (With Time) l1 Last Trade (Price Only)
l2 High Limit l3 Low Limit m Day’s Range
m2 Day’s Range (Real-time) m3 50-day Moving Average m4 200-day Moving Average
m5 Change From 200-day Moving Average m6 Percent Change From 200-day Moving Average m7 Change From 50-day Moving Average
m8 Percent Change From 50-day Moving Average n Name n4 Notes
o Open p Previous Close p1 Price Paid
p2 Change in Percent p5 Price/Sales p6 Price/Book
q Ex-Dividend Date r P/E Ratio r1 Dividend Pay Date
r2 P/E Ratio (Real-time) r5 PEG Ratio r6 Price/EPS Estimate Current Year
r7 Price/EPS Estimate Next Year s Symbol s1 Shares Owned
s7 Short Ratio t1 Last Trade Time t6 Trade Links
t7 Ticker Trend t8 1 yr Target Price v Volume
v1 Holdings Value v7 Holdings Value (Real-time) w 52-week Range
w1 Day’s Value Change w4 Day’s Value Change (Real-time) x Stock Exchange
y Dividend Yield

Simple, right? 🙂

As for historical data you can use something like:

http://finance.yahoo.com/q/hp?s=WU&a=01&b=19&c=2010&d=01&e=19&f=2010&g=d

where the FROM date is: &a=01&b=10&c=2010
and the TO date is: &d=01&e=19&f=2010
You can also get it as CSV file with link like:

http://ichart.finance.yahoo.com/table.csv?s=WU&a=01&b=19&c=2010&d=01&e=19&f=2010&g=d&ignore=.csv

Now, if you want to play with the data you are getting from yahoo! you can run some fun SQL like:

Getting the Standard divination of a specific stock:

SELECT stock, STD(Close-Price) from `historic_prices` where stock = "NFLX" AND date > "2010-01-01" group by stock

This will give you the Standard divination on Netflix (hot hot stock these days) from the beginning of 2010 (and like the meaning of the universe… it’s 42!)

Here is another way to work with finance data from NodeJS.

Happy hacking!

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Business, life

Ahh… Yahoo! yahoo! y! y…

I love this company. And yes – I’ve spent 3 great years there.

 

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