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.

Business

Apple’s new Tablet or the big iPhone

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.

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:

Always search before you build. There is no point in building the same wheel (anyone, said framework?) again and again and again.
Don’t over design. Build first something that works and solve your problem and later come back and improve: code, performance etc’.
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.
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.
Always backup your code – trivial… specially, after the first time your harddisk is ‘gone’ and you lost 4months (or years) of work.
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.
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”?
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.
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.

Business, webdev

Yahoo Finance (hidden) API

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!

webdev

Some usefull jQuery Plugin for the weekend

jQuery is making our life so much more productive (e.g. !(‘do less – write more’).

Here are some useful plugins I’ve being using in the past few weeks:

http://malsup.com/jquery/cycle/ – simple, nice and powerful way to throw some nice slides shows.
http://plugins.jquery.com/project/PseudoDiv – This is a div with transparent background. and layout. It gives interective look without attaching any background image.
http://plugins.jquery.com/project/Realtime-Related-Tweets-Bar –
This is a highly customizable real-time Twitter search-driven bar of tweets related to your post. With all the buzz lately about Twitter real-time search. Why don’t you add a real-time tweets bar related to your posts from your twitter timeline or from anybody or even limit it by a geo code coordinates.
http://plugins.jquery.com/project/Jcrop – Jcrop is the quick and easy way to add image cropping functionality to your web application. It combines the ease-of-use of a typical jQuery plugin with a powerful cross-platform DHTML cropping engine that is faithful to familiar desktop graphics applications.
http://plugins.jquery.com/project/floatobject –
Make DOM object float on screen to follow the users while they scroll the page.
This plug-in can be used for floating menus AND Floating headers in long tables

Business, life

Ahh… Yahoo! yahoo! y! y…

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

life

iPhone developers are (not) stupid!

I’ve just finish to read this excellent post from our good/old PPK.

The battle between Native iPhone apps and Web apps is very interesting specailly when Palm Pre and Andriods are moving more and more into the arena of real ‘smart phones’ (well, not the ones with windows on them :).

life

Heavenly: We’re Opening THIS FRIDAY!

Well, I have just so that Heavenly ski resort is posting that:

We’re Opening THIS FRIDAY!

Here’s the news you’ve all been waiting for – Blaise Carrig, Heavenly’s COO (AND co-president of Vail Resorts’ Mountain Division), announced to a small community group Thursday night that we’d be opening for sure this Friday, November 20, 2009 at 9:00am sharp. We’ll access the mountain through the Gondola, doing laps on Cal Trail off […]

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Great!
See you on the snow.