Facebook and Google Plus Rants --- Profitable Software Business

Recruitment on Facebook

When our team grows, of course, our receptionists and canteen staff will have PhD's and know Hadoop, Cassandra, MapReduce, R and lots of Big Data statistical packages.

But for the time being, others have been making good money with Excel!!! Yes, Excel!!! In Myanmar, in Singapore, and in New York (and in Wall Street ) !!!

From Hadoop to Excel, the space is a bit very wide. Our team hope to score some nice goals.

Any one, who has learned Excel or Hadoop or WHATEVER for 2 or 3 days, are encourage to join us! For the time being, we accept candidates without PhD, so hurry.

Adaptability, Flexibility or even Luck, but not the Ability to Predict

One of my friends gave university tuition while he was still a university student. Only very good students could do that. And I also did that. But then, since he has far better social skills than me, I sometimes asked him for advice. On one occasion, I said, "Some of my students do not like my best works/essays at all. What do I do?" He replied, "That happens to me too. What is good for me, they may not like it. Some shoddy works, they liked them a lot."

That lesson still stays with me. So, for my software business, I rely more on my adaptability, flexibility or even luck than on my ability to predict. So, though I have 20,000 features in mind, I intend to fight with 2 or 3 features first. ;-)

Software Development Business

Ancient China: population--> training to be soldiers --> forming into corps--> launching wars

Modern software follow similar steps.

1.  You create commodity software or use them for free. 
2. You turn them into building blocks(Lego-like pieces) of your application.
3. You weave. mesh, gel  the Lego pieces into useful apps. 
4. Then you sell these apps.

Easy Winning , as in TOEFL, IELTS

In 1995, I checked 7 TOEFL/IELTS brands, not books, and knew right away it is easy to do World Best classes there.

Last 3 days, we checked 5 world best online education sites' database schemas and became relieved and happy. Data models, domain models are heart and brains of web software. Our team is happy in this area.

How High-tech do you want to go?

I am starting a "very-very-very-hi tech" software company. And I am recruiting ordinary programmers (though I won't reject anyone as "over-qualified.") These 2 facts are not contradictory.

A CFO of Dell once asked, "How much techno do you need to own to compete? "

As students, you yourself might have asked, How many books do I need to read to compete well in the exams?

Even in high-tech business, you can compete well without relying on technology. Let's see.

Recruitment on Facebook

I predict 100 Instagram's from Myanmar and Singapore each. And when you predict something, you must also know when/how it can go wrong.    

Instagram came from another bigger app by Kevin Systrom, called Burbn, according to this month Fast Company magazine. Burbn is a clone of all popular app features at that time.

Singapore programmer Chang Sau Sheong, in "Cloning Internet Applications with Ruby" book, has done a Burbn like app already. There are many equally capable developers in Myanmar and Singapore.

But will they reduce their bigger clone app into a smaller, more useful app like Instagram? If they do, my predictions will be true. If not, well we will get 200 clone apps, including 2 of mine ;-(

Recruitment on Facebook

You can pay for 6-dollars-per-hour staff with 3 or 4 days of training. But to become a McDonald, you need a system.

Do I have a system to play in big league of software with ordinary programmers?

I think so. I'm recruiting. Let everyone know. No experience required. No commitment required. Only these requirements - you live in Singapore, you can read and type. You can work about 4 hours per week at home and 1 hour per week at our place. If you are over-qualified, that's better. We are not afraid of any talent

Recruitment on Facebook

I admire the source code of Django, Tornado, NLTK, boto, etc. As many of world greatest coders in history advise, their logic/code is "dumb" and therefore good. When I coded shopping cart, CRUD etc, my logic/code stayed "dumb" and good.

But when I moved even a bit farther, e.g. FSM with Pygame, an expert system etc, my logic/code became "clever," complex and unstable. I've thought about and studied this for years.

Our team is training to be a world leader in software -- both biz-wise and techno-wise.

Anyone interested in becoming better programmers are welcome. We are humble to learn and generous to share. Love and Thanks to all.

Some Unsued Assets

1. Good reading and note-taking, domain modeling, good and fast understanding of requirements of an industry, good and fast understanding of a user's job/task/process/activity 
2. Clean, small, flexible code/software.

If salesforec.com is not that combo, what is that?

If Flickr is not that combo, what is that? If Evernote is not that combo, what is that?

I have given you proofs, please join us. Even if with half a man, we will get to our goal. But, still we want you. Join us!

Facebook and Google Plus Rants --- E-learning

E-learning is a truly virgin soil. No one has conquered it. It is at a free-for-all Wild West land grab stage.

E Learning Web Sites

http://highscalability.com/blog/2013/4/1/khan-academy-checkbook-scaling-to-6-million-users-a-month-on.html

    But YouTube is not interactive and a big part of what they want to do is present a learning tree to users, give quizzes, manage results, etc. So they first tried a self hosted Java based site, which was crushed under the load. ...

  The more control you get the more likely you are to shoot yourself in the foot and do something wrong ...

  They don’t carry pagers, don’t worry about replication, don’t have to restart instances, and don’t apply OS patches. There are a lot of things they don’t have to do with GAE. ...
  
  Khan Academy has successfully leveraged App Engine to scale to millions of users without hiring a single sysadmin or spending too much time worrying about anything ops-related ...

    To deploy the site, any developer (or our friendly CI bot) can simply run our "deploy.py" and wait a few minutes, then get back to spending time on the product. We haven't had to think once about whether or not the database can handle the write load we throw at it; the App Engine Datastore is uniquely worry-free in that regard. ...

  Offload as much work as you can to somebody else ie. GAE.     ....

  At a group size of 2 - 5 people don’t focus on scalability issues. Focus on features. Make your product great. Get people coming back to it.     

   Keep things simple both technically and in the product until you know absolutely what you need to build. A lot of the features they’ve built to solve and edge case turned out to cause real problems in the long run. It’s hard to turn things off once you build them.    

  Be lazy. Use other people’s tools. Until your business is doing really well don’t be afraid to use other people’s work
 

E Learning

I watched the Khan app just 1 or 2 min and reached that conclusion. I regretted my hasty conclusion. Now I have seen
 http://www.khanacademy.org/cs/depth-first-traversals-of-binary-trees/934024358
and
https://github.com/Khan

And I arrive at the same conclusion, with a higher degree confidence. I have a blog, but why bother promoting my blog.

Superior E Learning and Feature Release

A current online learning app typically has about 500 features. Combine the best/top 5, you get about 900.

I can easily think up 20,000 features.

But will users find all of them desirable? e.g. Vary your lessons according to learner's learning/cognitive styles? What does NLP say about a student looking up/down or right/left? We can capture user's eyes and gesture with Kinect, or some other game SDK's, but should I?

So, I number such features Feature Number 10,001 etc. What does Vygotsky say, Shaolin monks say, Feynman say, James Watson say, Carl Jung say ...... ?

Ok, Features Number 12,001 and 3 and 4.

A journey of 20,000+ features starts with 3 features, huh, so lonely! So exciting!

Whatever it takes, anything within morality bounds, ... I can and will dance, sing, talk, cajole, threaten, plead, .... code, test, deploy, design, debug, refactor, prefactor, re-architect, .. ok ... ok till it becomes World Class!

Facebook Rants --- Black Strategies and Futility

Black strategies are self-defeating and so we need not study them.

Black Strageties and Futility

Cao Cao, Sima Yi, Sima Yan, Wu Qi, Sun Tzu, Sun Bin,Unrestricted Warfare, Mao Guerrilla warfare and protracted wars,

Bar Me Sayadaw, Maha Thiha Thuya,  Bayint Naung, Bandoola, Alaung Phaya, Sin Byu Shin,

Grant, Sherman, RMA, Network Warfare, General Rdigeway, Geoege Patton,Gen Marshall

Sumerian wars, Biblical wars, Alexander the Great, Hannibal, Scipio, Fabius,

 Machiavelli, Han Fei Tzu, Chanakya the so-called Indian Machiavelli, Clausewitz, Napoleon, Gen Manstein, General Guderian, General Rommel

Georgie Zukov, Prince Kutosov,

Nobugana, Hideyoshi, Admiral Togo,

Duke of Wellington,  Lawrence of Arabia,  Liddell Hart, General William Slim, Gen Montgomery, General Templer,

Moshe Dayan, Vo Nguyen Giap ....

And on business side ... I don't want to carry on.

Don't read them.

Just have love. Just have faith. Even be naive and innocent. You'll be alright.

Facebook Rants --- Leadership

The Technology Pope?

Do not challenge the status quo, do not struggle with a force that is not innovative, free-spirited or individual.

It's far wiser to follow wise to be orthodox, conservative

Leadership --- Direction, Charting

clueless is right,
because there's nothing wrong
with taking a position and creating options in a very dynamic situation.

slow is right,
because viewed at the correct level, every variable, every system slows.

high road is the only road
because it is obvious.

unstoppable leading this way ..

Leadership - Charting, Direction

clueless is right
slow is right

high road is the only road
everything has returned

I report for duty

unstoppable

this way.....

Facebook Rants --- Teaching and Honesty

When a teacher says her/his subject is tough, maybe it is tough for them. So be helpful to them

Teaching and Honesty

1. Prof Noam Chomsky on BBC: If we don't know enough, we call it linguistics, metaphysics etc. When we know enough, we call it physics.
2. Richard Feynman: If we can't explain it to intelligent high school students, we don't really understand that subject.
3. Another Nobel winner in Physics: we call this course 'advanced', because we don't know about it really.
   

So, please, teachers, be honest.

Is your subject difficult?

So, kids, if your teacher says 'this is tough,' feel sorry for him/her and be helpful!

True Peace in the World for Small Business Owners - Part 1

Suppose Qin Shi Huang, the first Chinese Emperor who built the Great Wall, and Hitler were alive and running fast food restaurant chains and were after your small fast food joint, I'd still ask you to relax.

True they had far better eyes and ears and spies.

True they had far better brains and advisers.

That's exactly there where the fun begins for you and me.

Qin Shi Huang knew every road and driver in his land, he knew very boat and boatman in his empire. He knew all about medicines, diseases, weather, and seasons. Still he'd go to the South China Sea and died.

Mr Hitler knew even Tibet and Myanmar. So he definitely also knew about Russia, her weather, her roads, rail lines and Russian tank production figures. Still he'd go to Russia in winter and fell.

They could not trust their own eyes and ears and spies and their own brains and advisers.There, the fun began in history and the fun begins for you and me at any point in history. They even used their hands in very similar ways, funny!
 

True Education, According to Matsushita

"In educating people, the most important thing you can teach is not facts, not knowledge, but human dignity. This will awaken them."

I am quoting direct from Velvet Glove, Iron Fist and 101 Other Dimensions of Leadership.

A comparable quote may be Antoine de Saint-Exupery's "If you want to build a ship, don't drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea."

Quand tu veux construire un bateau, ne commence pas par rassembler du bois, couper des planches et distribuer du travail, mais reveille au sein des hommes le desir de la mer grande et large"

When we convince a kid s/he is a worthy, unique, enough, ready human being,

When we inspire a kid about the richness of life,....
...
I don't think I need to say more.