tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37189560859118589622026-05-31T00:17:59.239+05:30On hacking and startups <br> by <a href="#Profile1">Sidu Ponnappa</a>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11938300811286150164noreply@blogger.comBlogger169125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3718956085911858962.post-55744565576614281182017-06-26T19:33:00.001+05:302017-06-26T19:33:25.470+05:30

https://medium.com/@ponnappa

Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11938300811286150164noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3718956085911858962.post-28648824064892404502016-07-14T13:16:00.002+05:302016-07-14T17:01:17.464+05:30

I first heard of GO-JEK toward the end of March 2015, from a VC firm we had close ties with. At the time, I was running C42 Engineering, a web engineering consultancy that specialised in working with fast growing startups. The firm in question wanted us to meet their portfolio companies in Indonesia and see how we could help. By early April, I was in Jakarta for a quick, two day recce. I was

Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11938300811286150164noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3718956085911858962.post-40298361807647317292014-08-20T13:50:00.000+05:302014-09-08T14:17:00.474+05:30

A couple of weeks ago, the engineering college I graduated from invited me to join an industry panel to give the graduating batch some advice about careers and dealing with the real world. Too little of it, in my opinion, focussed on the single most important problem you need to solve in a modern career: The rapid pace at which your professional skills and your employer's business models are

Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11938300811286150164noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3718956085911858962.post-28722725360317894522014-03-25T18:50:00.003+05:302014-03-25T18:51:55.398+05:30

Our B2B beta is live at BureauBuilder!&nbsp;BureauBuilder is Shopify for online matrimony. BureauBuilder provides a SaaS alternative to self-hosted PHP Scripts that are commonly used to set up online marriage bureaus or matchmaking websites.

Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11938300811286150164noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3718956085911858962.post-85605077757473797352013-10-03T18:24:00.002+05:302013-10-16T14:59:13.704+05:30

Update (15 Oct 2013): Our landing page is up! Welcome to TrustedRishta.com. We've been fascinated by relationships and marriage in the Indian context for several years now. So when we decided to do a new product a couple of months ago, we started researching this space to understand if there were any major pain points that a startup could address. Let me quickly summarize for you what we

Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11938300811286150164noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3718956085911858962.post-46270188812202300192013-03-21T07:20:00.002+05:302013-03-21T07:29:21.212+05:30

The Onion just published a post that satirizes the desire to chase one's passion while being stuck doing something else for a living. I've re-written a portion of it from the other side as an experiment, just to see how much greener the grass really is. Turns out it doesn't read all that differently. See if you can spot the differences. I have always been a big proponent of following your

Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11938300811286150164noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3718956085911858962.post-45359560633134130912012-09-07T10:05:00.001+05:302012-09-07T10:23:40.858+05:30

This is a mail that I recently sent out internally that I thought might be useful to a larger audience. I haven't polished it much, so it's rather specific to the context of this particular project. Here are a few rules of thumb that I've come up with over the years for simple client side javascript - i.e. your typical web application that is not a GMail style single page app, but still requires

Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11938300811286150164noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3718956085911858962.post-42140105672756468182012-06-18T19:30:00.001+05:302012-07-11T18:36:43.981+05:30

If you need to make money for any reason whatsoever - food, housing, fun, whatever - you're in business. Being employed is simply a lower-risk lower-return business that utilizes just one individual - you. It's all in the mindset I've come to realise in the last couple of years that in our new, globalised (and depressed) economy, job security is even more a thing of the past than one would

Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11938300811286150164noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3718956085911858962.post-54985235285588457042012-06-04T14:43:00.004+05:302012-07-11T18:37:33.385+05:30

When you ask people for tips in their area of expertise, they often gloss over the most basic things they do because, you know, it's obvious. They live and breathe this stuff, so it doesn't occur to them to call it out. I've been a programmer since I was six, and some of these basics were the hardest to learn when I made the transition to being an entrepreneur. Here are six of the most basic

Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11938300811286150164noreply@blogger.com14tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3718956085911858962.post-91809077126319046222012-05-16T12:27:00.001+05:302012-07-11T18:40:27.536+05:30

I had no intention of writing about this meme because I'm biased&nbsp;by the fact that we're building a platform to allow programmers to teach programming, but then Jeff Atwood wrote his "Please don't learn to code" post. I'm sitting at home, grumpy because I'm ill, so this was all the excuse I needed to get this off my chest. Frankly, I don't care if Mayor Bloomberg should learn to code,

Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11938300811286150164noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3718956085911858962.post-79292256681420394152012-04-14T02:48:00.001+05:302012-04-18T20:34:02.155+05:30

Even if you’re talking about unit testing, the only way I’ve found tests to help design is by ensuring that I don’t regress when refactoring. That’s a very valuable attribute, probably the key attribute of testing for me, but I file that under “don’t create bugs”, not under “helped me design”. From the comments by DHH on his own blog post. This tells us that DHH &nbsp;fails to grasp how the

Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11938300811286150164noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3718956085911858962.post-8472112205968667952012-04-05T03:15:00.014+05:302012-11-23T20:23:15.837+05:30

I've lived in Bangalore since I was three - we moved here in 1987 after my father retired from the public sector that year. Bangalore, then, was known as a retirement city, famed for its pleasant weather and abundant greenery. The Indian economy was still closed, most of the jobs were in the public sector and salaries were low. Top executives in the public sector earned less than Rs. 60,000 a

Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11938300811286150164noreply@blogger.com16tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3718956085911858962.post-29453313963314982152012-03-23T12:24:00.000+05:302012-03-23T12:24:16.841+05:30

I'm speaking at RubyConf India in Pune this year for the third year running! You can find out more at my Lanyrd profile.

Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11938300811286150164noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3718956085911858962.post-88843858238370080452012-03-05T17:32:00.002+05:302012-05-06T14:48:24.732+05:30

Here are two longish emails that I should have converted into blog posts. I'm lazy, though. Whatever. Here they are. Switching from a solo contractor to being a development company (full thread) Luke, &gt; I like doing a range of stuff, for example managing client So is it fair to say you enjoy managing entire projects, and that this is what is motivating you to consider starting a company?

Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11938300811286150164noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3718956085911858962.post-91997403679049391502012-01-17T17:58:00.000+05:302012-01-17T17:58:23.650+05:30

Niranjan and I paired on a talk titled "Rails services in the walled garden" at RubyConf 2011 in New Orleans. The video has been out for a bit courtesy the awesome folks and Confreaks, and we've (finally) posted it up on the C42 blog. As always, we'd love your feedback.

Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11938300811286150164noreply@blogger.com0New Orleans, LA, USA29.951065799999991 -90.071532329.795776299999993 -90.3285233 30.10635529999999 -89.8145413tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3718956085911858962.post-32494300647507515982011-08-02T21:09:00.000+05:302011-08-02T21:09:28.510+05:30

There are many small, new Ruby consultancies all over the world that do stellar work. There are many, many more that don't. How do you tell them apart? Tejas and I paired on a blog post that tries to answer this question over at the C42 Engineering blog. Do take a look and tell us what you think.

Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11938300811286150164noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3718956085911858962.post-19495803403778935332011-07-11T03:55:00.000+05:302011-07-11T03:55:11.296+05:30

Two of my colleagues and I will be speaking at RubyConf US this year. Srushti, lead developer on the Goldberg CI server&nbsp;will be pairing with Brian Guthrie of ThoughtWorks to deliver a talk titled "Ruby Software Continuously Delivered and Exhaustively Explained." Niranjan and I&nbsp;will be pairing on the second talk titled "Rails services in the walled garden." This will be our second year

Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11938300811286150164noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3718956085911858962.post-5300732760684899622011-07-05T16:57:00.000+05:302011-07-05T16:57:19.117+05:30

My colleague Srushti, lead dev on the Goldberg CI server project, recently wrote an article on pipelines in the context of Continuous Integration. Do take a look.

Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11938300811286150164noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3718956085911858962.post-32429308166266203332011-06-22T21:43:00.000+05:302011-06-22T21:43:39.976+05:30

I've just posted an article in response to Bill Taylor's post 'Great people are overrated' over at the C42 Engineering Blog. Do take a look.

Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11938300811286150164noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3718956085911858962.post-82413034957120111452011-05-23T13:39:00.010+05:302011-05-24T15:42:57.738+05:30

We've come a long way since that evening in December 2009 when a handful of colleagues spent an evening drinking Highland Park and trying to figure out what they should be doing with their lives. Everyone wanted to do a start-up; nobody had any big ideas. We also knew that raising money for a product startup in India is quite hard at the best of times, so we figured we'd do this by the book -

Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11938300811286150164noreply@blogger.com22tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3718956085911858962.post-80199217810336867132011-02-22T18:14:00.000+05:302011-02-22T18:14:24.459+05:30

The video recording of our talk at RubyConf X at New Orleans last year has been released. You can watch it over at the C42 Engineering blog.

Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11938300811286150164noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3718956085911858962.post-75669294024457703342010-12-05T04:22:00.004+05:302012-05-16T15:31:22.819+05:30

Here's a snippet from a recent comment on a oldish blog post of mine: "However, in this post there is one thing that touches a raw nerve. The whole point about whether the person does coding in his free time. Why would you care? In fact, the point of free / spare time is to do activities you don't do at work. Today, I've an MBA and am far removed from the tech world, but I'm involved in

Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11938300811286150164noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3718956085911858962.post-73260698106635151182010-10-05T19:08:00.000+05:302010-10-05T19:08:58.380+05:30

My proposal for RubyConf X has been accepted, so I'll be in New Orleans in November. If you're going to be there, do say hello. Looks like the two major conferences I'll be speaking at this year are both RubyConfs :)

Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11938300811286150164noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3718956085911858962.post-48744884741117083702010-01-06T02:33:00.006+05:302010-01-06T02:45:21.394+05:30

I'm not sure why I didn't do this long ago, but better late than never, what?

Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11938300811286150164noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3718956085911858962.post-49006280865968750282009-12-21T18:32:00.003+05:302009-12-21T18:51:58.512+05:30

The Call for Proposals for India's first RubyConf in now on. For information on where and how to submit your proposal, please check the website.This is a significant milestone to reach when setting up a conference for the first time. There are many people who deserve much appreciation for making this possible, not least all the enthusiastic members of India's Ruby community. A heartfelt thanks to

Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11938300811286150164noreply@blogger.com0