So I just wanted to mention here about the updates to these repositories so far since the last time I wrote about them.

dotvim

The biggest change to my Vim environment is that I switched from vim-addon-manager with vim-scripts.org to Vundle, thanks to Anirudh’s comment on my previous post.

The second major change was the discovery of Solarized which was an amazing color scheme that I just have not been able to live without ever since I first saw it seven months ago.

A great side effect of this was discovering iTerm2 for Mac. I now use iTerm2 solarized dark theme + vim solarized theme with dark background for the console version and vim solarized theme with light background for the GUI MacVim version. I’m absolutely adoring it and I find it very pleasing and easy on the eyes.

Other changes in dotvim include incorporating stuff related to CoffeeScript, Ubuntu Upstart, nginx, etc. whose syntax files are not part of the default Vimfiles, not in a git repo, etc.

dotvim is at https://github.com/swaroopch/dotvim.

dotbash

After realizing that people have tried using dotbash and found the installation process cumbersome because the bash-it, by default, asks the user to approve every plugin that they want installed and they found it annoying. I replaced the default install script to install all the plugins (except recent buggy ones) and made installation much more simpler.

Again, after realizing that people are using dotbash and subsequently they were surprised that it overwrote ~/.gitconfig and other files by default which basically nuked their git email addreses and added mine and ended up me being listed as a “guest” committer on their repositories, I got rid of the username-specific stuff in the repository.

And also it is merged and keeping up with the master branch of the bash-it repository.

dotbash is at https://github.com/swaroopch/dotbash.

As always, looking forward to feedback on whether others find this tweaking of the development environment useful and feedback on how to improve it further.

Two favorite nuggets of mine so far are from JWZ and Brad Fitzpatrick who are definitely two of my programming heroes:

About taking things apart

Seibel:

Is there a key skill programmers must have?

Zawinski:

Well, curiosity – taking things apart. Wanting to know what’s going on under the hood. I think that’s really the basis of it. Without that I don’t think you get very far. That’s your primary way of acquiring knowledge. Taking something apart and looking at it is how you learn to build your own. At least for me. I’ve ready very few books about computers. My experience has been digging through source code or reference manuals. I’ve got a goal and, alright, to do this I need to know what this thing does and what this thing does. And I’ll just sort of random-walk through that until I find where I’m going.

How to improve oneself

Seibel:

Do you have any advice for self-taught programmers?

Fitzpatrick:

Always try to do something a little harder, that’s outside your reach. Read code. I heard this a lot, but it didn’t really sink in until later. There were a number of years when I wrote a lot of code and never read anyone else’s. Then I get on the Internet and there’s all this open source code I could contribute to but I was just scared shitless that if it wasn’t my code and the whole design wasn’t in my head, that I couldn’t dive in and understand it.

Then, I was sending in patches to Gaim, the GTK instant-messenger thing, and I was digging around that code and I just saw the whole design. Just seeing parts of it, I understood. I realized, after looking at other people’s code, that it wasn’t that I memorized all my own code; I was starting to see patterns. I would see their code and I was like, “Oh, OK. I understand the structure that they’re going with.”

Then I really enjoyed reading code, because whenever I didn’t understand some pattern, I was like, “Wait, why the fuck did they do it like this?” and I would look around more, and I’d be like, “Wow, that is a really clever way to do this. I see how that pays off.” I would’ve done that earlier but I was afraid to do it because I was thinking that if it wasn’t my code, I wouldn’t understand it.

After reading this book, I started seeing the patterns about Israel being high tech hotspot, for example consider just two pieces of news in the last 3-4 days: Apple buying Anobit, an Israeli company, for $500 million as well as building a research center in Israel and Cornell won the bid to build a university in New York city… in collaboration with Technion university of Israel.

What is important

This book taught me the importance and inter-play of:

• Entrepreneurism
• Venture capital
• Being committed to own business and country at same time
• When people are pushed for survival, only then do they show the zeal for entrepreneurism and trade – otherwise nation becomes lazy
• Size of country does matter
• Government policies
  • For example, the world’s richest man has to go to a different country to develop new nuclear energy technology.
• Immigration
• Technology as future growth
• Multiple fields learning
• Defense Forces
• Liberalization and freedom of speech

To highlight in a bit more detail, I have picked a few quotes and insights from each chapter:

0. Introduction

• Story of Shimon Peres and Shai Agassi pitching Better Place to auto manufacturers – Better Place is re-thinking electric vehicles by making fuel stations swap out your battery with a charged one instead of pumping petrol or diesel into the car, highly ambitious, executed first in Israel, now in China, etc.

1. Persistence

• Story of "Fraud Sciences" company pitching to Paypal to use their fraud detection service – Paypal ended up buying them so that the competition doesn’t get them – idea came from founders who were soldiers in the Israeli army hunting down terrorists – they found hunting frauds easier.
• Chutzpah
• Israeli attitude and informality flow also from a cultural tolerance for what some Israelis call "constructive failure" or "intelligent failures." Most local investors believe that without tolerating a large number of failures, it is impossible to achieve true innovation. In the Israeli military, there is a tendency to treat all performance – both successful and unsuccessful – in training and simulations, and sometimes even in battle, as value-neutral. So long as the risk was taken intelligently, and not recklessly, there is something to be learned.
• Story of how Intel’s chip design vision changed purely because of doggedness of the Israeli Intel office to convince higher-ups and how that eventually saved the company

2. Battlefield Entrepreneurs

• As usual in the Israeli military, the tactical innovation came from bottom up – from individual tank commanders and their officers. It probably never occurred to these soldiers that they should ask their higher-ups to solve the problem, or that they might not have the authority to act on their own. Nor did they see anything strange in their taking responsibility for inventing, adopting, and disseminating new tactics in real time, on the fly. Yet what these soldiers were doing was strange. If they had been working in a multinational company…
• Company commander is also the lowest rank that must take responsibility for a territory. As Farhi puts it, "If a terrorist infiltrates that area, there’s a company commander whose name is on it. Tell me how many twenty-three-year-olds elsewhere in the world live with that kind of pressure… How many of their peers in their junior colleges have been tested in such a way? How do you train and mature a twenty-year-old to shoulder such responsibility?
• In the Israel Defence Forces (IDF), there are even extremely unconventional ways to challenge senior officers. "I was in Israeli army units where we threw out the officers," Oren told us, "where people just got together and voted them out. I witnessed this twice personally. I actually liked the guy, but I was outvoted. They voted out a colonel." When we asked Oren in disbelief how this worked, he explained, "You go and say, ‘We don’t want you. You’re not good.’ I mean, everyone’s ona first-name basis… You go to the person above him and say, ‘That guy’s got to go.’… It’s much more performance-oriented than it is about rank.

3. The People of The Book

• Almost every Israeli trekker in Bolivia is likely to come through El Lobo (restaurant), but not just to get food that tastes like it’s from home, to speak Hebrew, and to meet other Israelis. They know they will find something else there, something even more valuable: the Book. Though spoken of in singular, the Book is not one book but an amorphous and evolving collection of journals, dispersed throughout some of the most remote locations in the world. Each journal is a handwritten "Bible" of advice from one traveler to another. And while the Book is no longer exclusively Israeli, its authors and readers tend to be from Israel.
• Israeli wanderlust is not only about seeing the world; its sources are deeper… there is another psychological factor at work – a reaction to the physical and diplomatic isolation. Until recently, Israelis could not travel to a single neighbouring country…
• For the same reason, it was natural for Israelis to embrace the Internet, software, computer, and telecommunications arenas. In these industries, borders, distances, and shipping costs are practically irrelevant. As Israeli venture capitalist Orna Berry told us, "High-tech telecommunications became a national sport to help us defend against the claustrophobia that is life in a small country surrounded by enemies." … "Today, Israeli companies are firmly integrated into the economies of China, India, and Latin America. Because, as Orna Berry says, telecommunications became an early priority for Israel, every major telephone company in China relies on Israeli telecom equipment and software…

4. Harvard, Princeton and Yale

• Innovation often depends on having a different perspective. Perspective comes from experience. Real experience also typically comes with age or maturity. But in Israel, you get experience, perspective, and maturity at a younger age, because the society jams so many transformative experiences into Israelis when they’re barely out of high school. By the time they get to college, their heads are in a different place than those of their American counterparts… In the military, you’re in an environment when you have to think on your feet. You have to make life-and-death decisions. You learn about discipline. You learn about training your mind to do things, especially if you’re frontline or you’re doing something operational. And that can only be good and useful in the business world… This maturity is especially powerful when mixed with an almost childish impatience.
• When an Israeli man wants to date a woman, he asks her out that night. When an Israeli entrepreneur has a business idea, he will start it that week. The notion that one should accumulate credentials before launching a venture simply does not exist. This is actually good in business. Too much time can only teach you what can go wrong, not what could be transformative.
• The military gets you at a young age and teaches you that when you are in charge of something, you are responsible for everything that happens… and everything that does not happen," Lowry told us. "The phrase ‘It was not my fault’ does not exist in the military culture.

5. Where Order Meets Chaos

• Although Singapore’s military is modeled after the IDF – the testing ground for many of Israel’s entrepreneurs – the "Asian Tiger" has failed to incubate start-ups. Why?
• There is a can-do, responsible attitude that Israelis refer to as rosh gadol. In the Israeli army, soldiers are divided into those who think with a "rosh gadol" – literally, a "big head" – and those who operate with a rosh katan, or "little head." Rosh katan behavior , which is shunned, means interpreting orders as narrowly as possible to avoid taking on responsibility or extra work. Rosh gadol thinking means following orders but doing so in the best possible way, using judgment, and investing whatever effort is necessary. It emphasizes improvisation over discipline, and challenging the chief over respect for hierarchy. Indeed, "challenge the chief" is an injunction issued to junior Israeli soldiers, one that comes directly from a postwar military commission that we’ll look at later. But everything about Singapore runs counter to a rosh gadol mentality.
• In Israeli’s elite military units, each day is an experiment. And each day ends with a grueling session whereby everyone in the unit – of all ranks – sits down to deconstruct the day, no matter what else is happening on the battlefield or around the world. "The debrief is important as the drill or live battle," he told us. Each flight exercise, simulation, and real operation is treated like laboratory work "to be examined and reexamined, and reexamined again, open to new information, and subjected to rich – and heated debate. That’s how we are trained." In these group debriefs, emphasis is put not only on unrestrained candor but on self-criticism as a means of having everyone – peers, subordinates, and superiors – learn from every mistake. "It’s usually ninety minutes. It’s with everybody. It’s very personal. It’s a very tough experience," Dotan said, recalling the most sweat-inducing debriefings of his military career. "The guys that got ‘killed’ [in the simulations], for them it’s very tough. But for those who survive a battle – even a daily training exercise – the next-toughest part is the debriefing." …
• Finally, Eiland leveled a criticism that is perhaps quintessentially Israeli and hardly imaginable within any other military apparatus: "One of the problems of the Second Lebanon War was the exaggerated adherence of senior officers to the chief of staff’s decisions. There is no question that the final word rests with the chief of staff, and once decisions have been made, all must demonstrate cmplete commitment to their implementation. However, it is the senior officer’s job to argue with the chief of staff when they feel he is wrong, and this should be done assertively on the basis of professional truth as they see it.
• Large organizations, whether military or corporate, must be constantly wary of kowtowing and groupthink, or the entire apparatus can rush headlong into terrible mistakes. Yet most militaries, and many corporations, seem willing to sacrifice flexibility for discipline, initiative for organization, and innovation for predictability. This, at least in principle, is not the Israeli way.

6. An Industrial Policy That Worked

• The history of Israel’s economy is one of two great leaps, separated by a period of stagnation and hyperflation. The government’s macroeconomic policies have played an important role in speeding the country’s growth, then reversing it, and then unleashing it in ways that even the government never expected.

7. Immigration

• Israel’s economic miracle is due as much to immigration as to anything. At Israel’s founding in 1948, its population was 806,000. Today numbering 7.1 million people, the country has grown almost ninefold in sixty years. The population doubled in the first three years alone, completely overwhelming the new government. As one parliament member said at the time, if they had been working with a plan, they never would have absorbed so many people. Foreign-born citizens of Israel currently account for over one-third of the nation’s population, almost three times the ratio of foreigners to natives inthe United States… Israel is now home to more than seventy different nationalities and cultures.
• Ask yourself, why is it happening here?" he said of the Israeli tech boom. We were sitting in a trendy Jerusalem restaurant he owns, next to a complex he built that houses his venture fund and a stable of start-ups. "Why is it happening on the East Coast or the West Coast of the United States?" A lot of it has to do with immigrant societies. In France, if you are from a very established family, and you work in an established pharmaceutical company, for example, and you have a big office and perks and a secretary and all that, would you get up and leave and risk everything to create something new? You wouldn’t. You’re too comfortable. But if you’re an immigrant in a new place, and you’re poor," Margalit continued, "or you were once rich and your family was stripped of its wealth – then you have drive. You don’t see what you’ve got to lose; you see what you could win. That’s the attitude we have here – across the entire population.
• Crucially, Israel maybe the only country that seeks to increase immigration, not just of people of narrowly defined origins or economic status… the job of welcoming and encouraging immigration is a cabinet position with a dedicated ministry behind it. Unlike the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service, which maintains as one of its primary responsibilities keeping immigrants out, the Israeli Immigration and Absorption Ministry is solely focused on bringing them in.
• In the beginning of the 1960s, Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu demanded hard cash to allow Jews to leave the country. Between 1968 and 1989, the Israeli government paid Ceausescu $112,498,800 for the freedom of 40,577 Jews. That comes out to $2,772 per person.

8. The Diaspora

• AnnaLee Saxenian is an economic geographer at U.C.Berkeley and author of The New Argonauts. "Like the Greeks who sailed with Jason in search of the Golden Fleece," Saxenian writes, "the new Argonauts [are] foreign-born, technically skilled entrepreneurs who travel back and forth between Silicon Valley and their home countries." She points out that the growing tech sectors in China, India, Taiwan, and Israel – particularly the last two countries – have emerged as "important global centers of innovation" whose output "exceeded that of larger and wealthier nations like Germany and France." She contends that the pioneers of these profound transformations are people who "marinated in the Silicon Valley culture and learned it. This really begain in the late ’80s for the Israelis and Taiwanese, and not unil the late ’90s or even the beginning of the ’00s for the Indians and Chinese.
• The new Argonaut, or "brain circulation," model of Israelis going abroad and returning to Israel is one important part of the innovation ecosystem linking Israel and the Diaspora.
• Peres (in the Israeli Defense Ministry) had tried to buy thirty surplus Mustang aircraft for the Israeli Air Force, but the United States had decided to destroy the planes instead. Their wings were sliced off and their fuselages cut in two. So Schwimmer (one of the non-Israeli Jewish Diaspora)’s team bought the cut-up planes at cost from a Texas junk dealer, reconstructed them, and made sure they had all their parts and were operational. Then the team disassembled the planes again, packed them in crates marked "Irrigation Equipment," and shipped them to Israel.

9. The Buffett Test

• No sooner did the richest man in the world leave Israel than the second-richest, Warren Buffett, showed up. The most revered investor in America had arrived to visit the first company he’d bought outside the United States… Iscar, the Israeli company Buffett bought, has its main factory and R&D facilities in the northern part of Israel and was twice threatened by missile attacks – in 1991, when the whole country was targeted by Iraq’s Saddam Hussein during the Gulf War, and during the 2006 Lebanon War, when Hezbollah fired thousands of missiles at Israel’s northern towns. "Doesn’t this constitute catastrophic risk?" we asked Alice Schroeder, the only authorized biographer of Warren Buffett. Buffett’s view, she told us, is that if Iscar’s facilities are bombed, it can go build another plant. The plant does not represent the value of the company. It is the talent of the employees and management, the international base of loyal customers, and the brand that constitute Iscar’s value. So missiles, even if they can destroy factories, do not, in Buffett’s eyes, represent catastrophic risk.
• During the 2006 Lebanon War, just two months after Buffett acquired Iscar, 4228 miles landed in Israel’s north. Located less than eight miles from the Lebanese border, Iscar was a prime target for rocket fire… One rocket did slam into Tefen Industrial Park and a slew of rockets landed nearby. And though, during the war, many workers did temporarily relocate, with their families, to the southern part of the country, Iscar’s customers would never have known it. "It took us a brief time to adjust, but we didn’t miss a single shipment," Wertheimer said. "For our customers around the world, there was no war.

10. Yozma

• Every year when I tried to review the success of these small companies, it was disappointing," said Erlich. "While they may have succeeded in R&D, we didn’t see them succeed in growing companies." He became convinced that a private venture capital industry was the only antidote. But he also knew that in order to succeed, an Israeli VC industry would need strong ties with foreign financial markets. The international connections were not just about raising funds; aspiring Israeli VCs needed to be mentored in the art of business mentoring. There were thousands of venture capital firms in the United States that were involved in the nuts and bolts of successful tech start-ups in Silicon Valley. They had experience building companies, understood the technology and the funding process, and could guide first-time entrepreneurs. That’s what Erlich wanted to bring to Israel.
• That’s when a band of young bureaucrats at the Ministry of Finance came up with the idea for a program they called Yozma, which in Hebrew means "initiative." The idea was for the government to invest $100 million to create ten new venture capital funds. Each fund had to be represented by three parties: Israeli venture capitalists in training, a foreign venture capital firm, and an Israeli investment company or bank.
• The real allure for foreign VCs, however, was the potential upside built into this program. The government would retain a 40 percent equity stake in the new fund but would offer the partners the option to cheaply buy out the quity stake – plus annual interest – after five years, if the fund was successful. This meant that while the government shared the risk, it offered investors all of the reward. From an investor’s perspective, it was an unusually good deal.
• The ten Yozma funds created between 1992 and 1997 raised just over $200 million with the help of government funding. Those funds were bought out or privatized within five years, and today they manage nearly $3 billion of capital and support hundreds of new Israeli companies. The results were clear. AS Erel Margalit put it, "Venture capital was the match that sparked the fire."

11. Betrayal and Opportunity

• Like many small states, Israel preferred to buy large weapon systems from other countries, rather than devote the tremendous resources needed to produce them. [Especially from France. In 1969, France changed loyalties opting for rapprochement with the Arab world.] The Israelis quickly pursued stopgap measures. Israel decided that it must move quickly to produce major weapons systems, such as tanks and fighter aircraft, even though no other small country had successfully done so.
• The most ambitious project of all was the Lavi fighter jet, using American-made engines. [Even though the project was eventually cancelled], the Israelis had made an important psychological breakthrough: they had demonstrated to themselves, their allies and their adversaries that they were not dependent on anyone else to provide one of the most basic elements for national survival – an advanced fighter aircraft program. Second, in 1988 Israel joined a club of only about a dozen nations that had launched satellites into space – an achievement that would have been unlikely without the technological know-how accumulated during the Lavi’s development. And third, it helped jump-start the high-tech boom to come. Yossi Gross, one of the Lavi’s engineers, went on to found seventeen start-ups and develop over three hundred patents.

12. From Nose Cones to Geysers

• The companies where mashups are most common in Israel are in the medical-device and biotech sectors, where you find wind tunnel engineers and doctors collaborating on a credit card-sized device that may make injections obsolete. Or you find a company that has created an implantable artificial pancreas to treat diabetes. And then there’s a start-up that’s built around a pill that can transmit images from inside your intestines using optics technology taken from a missile’s nose cone.
• Some of Gross’s companies combine such wildly diverse technologies that they border on science fiction. Beta-O₂, for example, is a startup working on implantable "bioreactor" to replace the defective pancreas in diabetes patients. Diabetics suffer from a disorder that causes their beta cells to cease producing insulin. Transplanted beta cells could do the trick, but even if the body didn’t reject them, they cannot survive without a supply of oxygen. Gross’s solution was to create a self-contained micro-environment that includes oxygen-producing algae from the geysers of Yellowstone Park. Since the algae need light to survive, a fiber-optic light source is included in the pacemaker-sized device. The beta cells consume oxygen and produce carbon dioxide; the algae does just the opposite, created a self-contained miniature ecosystem. The whole bioreactor is designed to be implanted under the skin in a fifteen-minute outpatient procedure and replaced once a year.

13. The Sheikh’s Dilemma

• Cultural commitment can be central to the success of economic clusters, of which Israel’s high-tech industry is a case in point. A cluster, as described by the author of the concept, Harvard Business School professor Michael Porter, is a unique model for economic development because it’s based on "geographic concentrations" of interconnected institutions – businesses, government agencies, universities – in a specific field. Clusters produce exponential growth for their communities because people living and working within the cluster are in some way connected to each other. As Porter says, the "social glue" that binds a cluster together also facilitates access to critical information. A cluster, he notes, must be built around "personal relationships, face-to-face contact, a sense of common interest and ‘inside’ status." Margalit would point out that Israel has just the right mix of conditions to produce a cluster of this kind – and that’s rare. After all, attempts to create clusters don’t always succeed. Take, for example, Dubai.
• Attracting new members to a cluster by offering a less expensive way to do business might be sufficient to create a cluster, but not to sustain it. If price is a cluster’s only competitive edge, some other country will always come along to do it more cheaply. The other qualitative elements – such as tight-knit communities whose members are committed to living and working and raising families in the cluster – are what contribute to sustainable growth. Crucially, a cluster’s sense of shared commitment and destiny, which transcends day-to-day business rivalries, is not easy to manufacture.

14. Threats to the Economic Miracle

• What if Israel’s economic miracle were simply built on a rare confluence of events and would disappear under less favorable circumstances? Even if Israel’s new economy is not just the product of happenstance, what are the real threats to Israel’s long-term economic success?
• A diminished supply of venture capital dollars [in view of the worldwide economic crisis] could mean less "innovation finance" for Israel’s economy.
• The problem according to Ben-David, is that while the tech sector has been surging ahead, and becoming more productive, the rest of the economy has not been keeping up.
• As the New York Times’ Thomas Friedman put it, "I would much rather have Israel’s problems, which are mostly financial, mostly about governance, and mostly about infrastructure, rather than Singapore’s problem because Singapore’s problem is culture-bound.

15. Conclusion

• In twenty-five years, Israel increased its agricultural yields seventeen times. This is amazing," Peres told us. "People don’t realize this," Peres said, "but agriculture is ninety-five percent science, five percent work."
• Peres seemed to see technology everywhere, and long before Israelis themselves thought in such terms. This may have beeno ne of the reasons Ben-Gurion backed Peres so strongly; the "Old Man" was also fascinated by technology, he told us. "Ben-Gurion thought the future was science. He would always say that in the army it’s not enough to be up to date; you have to be up to tomorrow," Peres recalled.
• What makes the current Israeli blend so powerful is that it is a mashup of the founders’ patriotism, drive and constant consciousness of scarcity and adversity and the curiosity and restlessness that have deep roots in Israeli and Jewish history. "The greatest contribution of the Jewish people in history is dissatisfaction," Peres explained. "That’s poor for politics but good for science."
• This theme can be traced to the very idea of Israel’s founding. The modern state’s founders – or national entrepreneurs – were building what might be called the first "start-up nation" in history.
• At eighty-five, Peres still has the chutzpah to think up and advocate new industries. As they do in Israeli society, the pioneering and innovative impulses merge into one. At the heart of this combined impulse is an instinctive understanding that the challenge facing every developed country in the twenty-first century is to become an idea factory, which includes both generating ideas at home and taking advantage of ideas generated elsewhere. Israel is one of the world’s foremost idea factories, and provides clues for the meta-ideas of the future. The most careful thing, as Peres told us, is to dare.

Summary

This book has been instrumental in illuminating my mind about nation-building, about why startups are essential to a nation’s survival going forward and how much of a role the ecosystem plays.

I have been liberal in taking quotes from the book, but believe me, I haven’t even covered half the book in these quotes, so please do go read the book now!

I have to mention a special thanks to Sameer Guglani for recommending this book to me. I can already see that the "Morpheus gang" has the seeds of a cluster.

Update on 29-Dec-2011: See this article on why one VC has the opinion that Chile is not a great startup place – the interesting part is how culture of the country plays a big role in the entrepreneurialism of its residents.

Update on 12-Jan-2012: Many more hubs being kickstarted and hope to thrive : Las Vegas ‘Downtown Project’, Startup Chile, Tech City in East London.

Update on 22-Jan-2012: A very interested article by New York Times titled “How U.S. Lost Out on iPhone Work – Apple, America and a Squeezed Middle Class”.

For example, consider Stellapps which is developing an automated cow milking system!

To get a taste of what I’m talking about, definitely watch this talk at Google by Prof. Ashok Jhunjhunwala (the good stuff starts at 17 min 13 sec):

I paid for and tried Missing Sync ($39.95), but it would refuse to sync music complaining that there is no space even though there was clearly 10GB of free space, even support couldn’t solve this issue. And there were other annoyances like having to install an ugly calendar app for calendar syncing instead of it syncing to the default calendar app already on the phone.

I finally settled for SyncMate ($39.95) for syncing contacts, calendar, bookmarks, photos, folders, sms and calls, and iSyncr ($3) for syncing music and playlists.

I just wanted to put this out there for other people like me who miss the smooth syncing between iTunes and iPhone and wish they had the same with their Android device.

One such initiative that utilizes SMS and IVR is NextDrop which gathers water supply information from the valvemen and spreads the information to residents of those areas.

Why does this matter? Because outside of major cities, water gets delivered once in 5 days or once in 15 days, and on those “water days,” someone (usually the women) has to stay back and ensure to collect enough water for the next 4 or 14 days. They usually don’t have enough water storage capacity for that many days and end up having to collect as much water as possible in vessels and pots. So, as you may expect, it is critical for someone to be at home on “water days” and even keep back children from going to school on those days. This is such a loss.

A valveman releasing water to an area by opening the valve

This is where NextDrop comes in and tries to solve this information asymmetry and hopefully solve corruption problems as well. NextDrop is running its pilot in Hubli, Karnataka in collaboration with the Hubli Water Board.

You can get a good overview of NextDrop in their winning presentation at the Global Social Venture Competition :

NextDrop was started by a group of Berkeley students including a Ph.D researcher in environmental science who noticed this problem when researching water quality in Hubli, Karnataka and other Berkeley School of Information students. One of the team members, Thejovardhana Kote did his masters thesis on NextDrop and made the initial prototype. Eventually he had to make the hard decision of moving on to something else and he asked me to step in. Since I had just then made the decision of going freelancing, it was perfect for me to earn money as well as make a social contribution at the same time, so I readily agreed.

It took me some time to figure out a different domain (SMS, IVR, non-computer-literate users) but eventually I got the hang of it.

The challenge for me was to get the system to a production level and subsequently, I embarked on a rewrite of the system because it was clear one had to be thrown away which I will write about in more detail later.

There are some really interesting stories on the Official NextDrop blog during this time frame:

• This is how water really works.
• And the NextDrop (alpha) Pilot Results Are In
• Oh no, Not Another We Successfully Launched Story!
• So Do People Like the NextDrop Service?
• People Liking Us? That was SO 48 Hours Ago.
• And the Most Important Question- How Do We Collect the Money?
• The State of the Nextdrop Technology

I’ll end with Rohini Nilekani’s writeup on future water challenges for India :

India may have to ready itself for perennial freshwater shortages. The country is among the wettest in the world, with an average annual rainfall of 1170 milimeters and total water resources of around 4000 billion cubic meters per year. Of this total, a little more than a quarter is pegged as usable. With India’€™s high rate of population growth and intensifying water consumption, per capita availability of water, one of many indicators of an oncoming crisis, has declined steadily over the years. Thanks to indiscriminate withdrawal from rivers and underground aquifers, without adequate thought to recharge and regeneration, India could become an officially water-stressed country within this decade, dipping below the common indicator of 1700 cubic meters per person per year. Going beyond a merely human-centric position, it’™s critical to understand that water is a key element of nature in its own right.

1: Amazing ventures such as VillageTelco will further those numbers.

The first person I started freelancing for is Joshua Schachter. Joshua is well known as the founder of del.icio.us, the bookmarking website which made “social filtering”, “tagging” (at the same time as Flickr) and “Web 2.0” common buzzwords.

I stumbled upon his tweet one day that he was looking for remote Python developers for his pet projects, I said “Hey, I’m interested” and next thing I know he is throwing ideas (and he has lots of ideas) and I’m furiously thinking about the fastest way to implement it. Over time, what interested me the most was not the idea itself but rather the evolution of the idea while iterating over prototypes and how Joshua creates this evolution. It has been fascinating to be a “fly on the wall” in this process.

The first project was ClueDB, a “tips and tricks” website, or a “lifehacker, by the people” as I like to call it. Built using MongoDB, Flask, my flask-boilerplate project, HTML5 Boilerplate, jQuery, jQueryUI, Twitter/OAuth integration, and Fabric. Standard stuff.

Joshua started with a simple answers / tricks site and slowly hacked on features. For example, he said “let there be tags” but there was a twist. The tagging would not be done by the submitter of the clue him/herself but by other people visiting the site. “It would be less spammy this way” he said. Boy, was that an eye-opener to me on how a simple social “tweak” could make a big change to the content and hence the trustworthiness of a site.

The second aha moment for me was when he said “let there be votes” :

This was a very interesting scheme of voting where we ask for the direct action by the user and not a simple plus/minus counter which doesn’t say anything about the usefulness of a clue (as opposed to popularity).

Things were going along, and then Joshua said “let there be user profiles” and things were going along again.. and then Joshua said “let there be a page listing all the clues that the user has voted ‘Plan to try it’” and we created such a page. The beauty of this was that now there was a single page that a user can use as a bookmark, homepage or share it with friends – voila, viral and useful at the same time.

Similar aha moments was creating a link called “random clue you haven’t voted” which would encourage the user to both explore more content as well as encourage to vote at the same time, and so on.

The latest project is StackParts.com – a simple catalog of parts for a web stack so that developers can weigh in their options and discover new ones for their next webapp. Built using Tornado, Python, Fabric and YAML files as the NoSQL database .

This project was again interesting for the use of tags to organize the projects and the relationships between them, which you can see in action when you visit any project page on stackparts.com.

There was a good discussion on HN about StackParts and was featured on O’Reilly Radar, and if Wayne Seguin likes it, there must be some value in it.

(As an aside, the site is also a testament to my total lack of design skills.)

And all the while, Joshua is busy with his own startup!

In summary, it’s been a fascinating experience where Joshua is doing the product management and I’m doing the coding.

My two favorite lessons from this experience are:

“You can’t reason about products – great products are emotional.”

and:

When my wife and myself were planning this month-long road trip – driving from Bangalore to Mysore (so that I could run a half marathon to Mulki (so that the wife can learn surfing in the ocean to Goa, we charted out the course and stay, but I insisted we don’t book any hotels in Goa. “Why?” she asked, and I said I wanted to test travelling the way the foreigners do as I had written earlier. That turned out to be a great idea, because we found the perfect room for us – clean, spacious, reasonable tariff, separate entrance, undisturbed by neighbours, and most of all, we can see the beach and the ocean from the bed! And there was no way we could have ever found out about this place online when the owner was puzzled what “WiFi” means…

This was the view from our porch:

The owners even had a friendly cat:

The best part about having a room almost on the beach was the amazing evening walks after a long day of work and hot weather.

Of course, there had to be a “but.” It couldn’t be all perfect. I had a Reliance NetConnect+ as well as a Tata Photon+ connection. The former hardly worked throughout the trip after we left Bangalore, so I cancelled that. However, even the Tata Photon+ connection didn’t work in our room … after much calls and even a visit from a Vodafone personnel, it seemed that nobody gave connectivity towards the beach! How ironic for me when I said “All I need is my laptop and an Internet connection for me to work anywhere”… so we started searching for rooms in the main market area where we could get connectivity.

I literally held my laptop with the Photon+ USB stick attached and checking for signal at each place we checked out, heh! But the quality and location of rooms were pathetic. So I decided that we’ll continue to stay at our perfect room, so what about connectivity? Everyday morning, I drove 3–4 km to the main market area, parked the car, sat in the backseat, and had access to full Internet connectivity signal as long as the laptop battery lasted! Then, I would go back to the room and continue to work mostly offline – I connected my laptop to the WiFi hotspot from my Android phone and used the GPRS connection for the occasional technical searches I ended up doing. That was interesting for sure.

Two things I relearned – having a deadline (the battery is running out!) made me get more stuff done, and having no internet connectivity is good for your productivity (there, I said the P-word, hadn’t written about it in a long time! )

Another aspect of the trip was the major expense – food. Initially, we ended up going to bad restaurants. Then, we resorted to the simplest trick in the travel book – ask the locals! The best restaurants we ended up going was Bed Rock, Infantaria and Jay Jays.

… as well as Cape Town Cafe which had great salads and fantastic live performances (on Tuesdays and Thursdays):

On days when my brain was tired, we would escape to nearby sights such as Fort Aguada:

Overall, I surprisingly did get a lot of work done and yet had fun in visiting places, enjoying the night life and the general relaxed atmosphere. We had got so used to it that we had difficulty in motivating ourselves to start our journey again from Goa!

After the three weeks were up, we continued our journey visiting places like Ambaulim Falls where I dunked my head in flowing cold water…

… and visiting a colourful Kolhapur, and so on.

Oh yeah, there was an unintended side-effect of writing about this trip – one fine day, my Dad called me up to tell me that I had received a snail-mail from the police that I jumped a traffic signal near Ulsoor on the very same day that we were on the beaches of Mulki, near Mangalore. I consulted a friend who advised me to email the head of traffic police which I promptly did and also included the blog links which had photos of us driving the very same car. A few days later, the Ulsoor traffic police inspector called me and said “nice pics” and informed me that the traffic violation ticket will be cancelled! (It was heartening to see that the entire process was over email and to note that the Bangalore traffic police is actually using modern ways to connect with citizens).

Update: Also see Traveling, Writing and Programming by the awesome Alex MacCaw.

Today’s journey started off with good roads. Me like.

From Gokarna, we headed towards Karwar where we had breakfast, and stopped by the lovely empty Karwar beach:

And passed over River Kali:

The bridge over River Kali continued to become a road which can only be described as cutting through a hill:

And continued on in a beautiful road:

When we reached Palolem beach in Goa, we celebrated with dishes made out of egg (we love egg):

And then headed out to Mapusa where we had accommodation to stay for the weekend.

It was hard to decide whether driving all day long was a major downer to be doing on my birthday or being on a road trip and having fun is what exactly I wanted to be doing on my birthday. Heh. Either ways, end of the 5-day 900+km road trip for now. Time to chill out in Goa!

P.S. It turns out my birthday also happens to be the International Freelancers Day. Go figure.

Immediately, the roads started getting bad. Every few metres, there were potholes and big ones too.

We stopped to have breakfast at Udupi. And after some distance, we suddenly revved into the road next to Maravanthe beach and that was such a pleasant sight!

Lunch in Murdeshwar at the Naveen Beach Restaurant.

Back on the road, the sights make it all worth it:

Loved Om beach at the end of a hard day of driving:

Dinner at Gokarna.

What a day.