Radha Popuri's blog

Higher Order functions in Scala

2013-09-29T21:19:00.003-07:00

The other day I was experimenting with functional programming in scala and the concept of first class functions.

A programming language is said to support first class functions if

Functions can be passed as parameters to another function.
Functions can be returned from another function.
Functions can be assigned to a variable in the same ways as any other first class object or primitive data types can be assigned to a variable.
Functions can be defined within another function.

A corollary to this is that first class functions in a programming language lead to the language supporting closures since it has to clearly define what variables and values are being referred to by inner functions.

Exploring all these things in Scala made me write some sample code to demonstrate these concepts.

Below is a scala function which demonstrates all these concepts.

// 1.Takes a function as input,

// 2.creates a nested function and assigns it to a variable,

// 3. applies the input function to input variables

// 4. returns a function

def firstclassfunc(inputfunc:(Int)=> Int, inputparam:Int): (Int,Int) => Int = {

//val innerfunc = (x:Int, y:Int) => inputfunc(inputparam+x+y)

val innerfunctionliteral = (x:Int, y:Int)=> { inputfunc(inputparam+x+y) }

def anotherinnerfunc(x:Int, y:Int):Int = {inputfunc(inputparam+x+y)}

val innerfunctionvalclassrepresentation = new Function2[Int, Int, Int] {

def apply(x: Int, y:Int): Int = inputfunc(inputparam+x+y)

}

val innerfuncdefvalpartiallyapplied = anotherinnerfunc _

val innerfuncdefvalinstantiated = anotherinnerfunc(1,2);

// All of the below scala mechanisms work. As long as we can return a function that can still has accept //two free variables, it seems we conform to the parent functions' return type definition of (Int,Int) => Int

return innerfunctionliteral

// return anotherinnerfunc _

// return innerfunctionvalclassrepresentation

// return innerfuncdefvalpartiallyapplied

// return anotherinnerfunc(_,_)

// return innerfunctionval

}

Big Data - Now and the future

2010-08-23T17:12:00.000-07:00

Data, data and more data !! The era of big data is upon us. Tera byte data sets are slowly becoming common place and exa and peta byte data sets are expected soon.

What are the underlying trends that caused the explosion of big data - or more aptly semi structured big data? On the web, the first one is the rise of Web search and the second one is the rise of social networking.

Search companies like Google needed a way to index the entire we b on their machines. Google came up with the concept of MapReduce - a data processing framework on commodity machines to do this cost effectively. Open source implementations of MapReduce- named 'Hadoop' soon followed to solve these data processing issues. Social networking also required that the Facebooks and LinkedIns of the world , store huge amounts of user generated data coming in at a very high rate. They then had to index it, analyze it and generate insights from it to drive further user adoption and virality. A lot of this data was semi-structured( did not fit in a database neatly) and required a lot more computation to generate insights, than the traditional BI model.
This is leading to the rise of the so called Big Data Stack at consumer internet companies and it has five major components

Big Data Storage : NOSQL databases - Cassandra/Voldemort, HDFS, HBase
Big Data Indexing and index storage : Lucene, Katta or NOSQL stores like above; Zoie (real time indexing from Linkedin) ; Bobo for faceted search
Big Data Processing and Analytics: Hadoop, Hive, Pig
Big Data Workflows: Oozie( Yahoo), Azkaban(Linkedin), Cascading(Chris Wenzel)
Big Data and Big Log transportation : Chukwa, Flume, Scribe etc
Big Data Intelligence : Mahout (A Machine Learning framework -that can run on top of Hadoop)
Big Data Sharding: Gizzard ( A middleware sharding framework developed by Twitter)

(The exact use cases of the above stack and the variations at various internet companies merits its own discussion and is outside the scope of this article; I will address this in another post.)

Traditional Fortune 500 enterprises have long relied on an enterprise architecture stack consisting of RDBMS and BI software running on high-end servers; However, there was no good way to handle unstructured and semi structured data until recently. As more ideas like user generated data percolate from the consumer internet into the enterprise, enterprises are beginning to see the same big data issues that were first experienced in consumer internet space. There is also a growing realization that data can now be processed cost effectively to generate hidden insights and drive competitive advantage.

However today's CIO's lack the tools needed to manage this data. Even though this new stack and frameworks are getting mature, the skillsets currently needed by the IT staff to handle these new frameworks is very high. And every CIO is pressed on budget and under pressure to deliver value to their business using minimal staff. I think we will see a lot of tools and processes develop around big data ti ease the transition to the enterprise.

It should be an interesting space to watch!!

Current perspectives on Scalability - A buffet from various Internet scale companies

2010-01-29T17:35:00.000-08:00

FaceBook:
Dark Launch
Use(functional) concurrency supporting languages basd servers for applications which map to a parallel environment more.
Use straight forward HTTP web servers for req-response style requests.
Use C++ whenever efficiency/logging is required.

Develop/use NOSQL based approaches(Cassandra) for semi-structured/unstructured data that can tolerate relaxed consistency.

Develop your own Storage system (which does not require all the metadata and inode entries generally required by general POSIX systems) for photos to get rid of expensive CDN's.

Scribe - Their own distributed/reliable Logging System.

Do not use too many fine grained services - I have seen this problem in companies where too many fine grained services, then result in a drop order on deployment day (pretty painful).

No service private schemas ( Then how do they make changes to databases in an isolated way).
Swim Lanes

Business Skills for Technology executives

2010-01-21T12:40:00.000-08:00

I was reading one of the blog posts from AKF Partners the other day, where they talk about the business skills that need to be acquired by Technology Executives.
It is pretty coincidental, that I started on this exact quest some time ago.

The approach is pretty simple.
1) Got to personalmba.com recommended reading list http://personalmba.com/best-business-books/
2) Read one book on each topic - whenever you have time
3) So far I understood Competitive Strategy, Positioning and a very basic way to read financial reports and a number of other skills too.
4) I felt this was the best approach in Silicon Valley - short of a full time MBA program.

An Architecture to learn from:FaceBook Chat

2010-01-19T14:47:00.000-08:00

Many times a programming language is just a tool.. Sometimes it is a differentiator

At Facebook , they have used Erlang mostly for its lightweight concurrency and its actors model concurrency( ErLang calls them Channels; Scala calls them actors)

This has real implications in terms of how many machines Facebook has to buy to support chat; I am sure they cut their hardware requirements by at least half from what they would have needed if they went with a traditional request/response model; Shows how a good architecture means real money saved for hight traffic sites.

If you want to learn how Facebook uses Erlang as a differentiator, go through this presentation
There is a pdf somewhere also which explains the architecture in more detail.

My only question is this : Could a java based NIO approach have delivered similar/same results for Facebook; Is Java threading model so heavy and the semantics of shared memory so ill suited for Facebook chat?

Ramping up on Scala

2010-01-19T14:44:00.000-08:00

I was getting up to speed on Scala on and off, but never made a concerted effort to get the entire hang of it.

Yesterday I finally got hold of Martin Odersky's Programming in Scala book and going at a good pace.

I would love to use more and more functional programming features in my future career.

-Radha.

Competitive Strategy: Analyzing your career and any industry

2009-08-14T15:45:00.000-07:00

I am into an in-depth study of Michael Porter's competitive Strategy book , as part of my effort to understand a number of business concepts.

I have already gone through a number of marketing books such as
Positioning (Ries/Trout), Seth Godin(All Marketers are Liars ) etc.

However Porter's book is in a different class of its own. It gives you a framework to analyze any industry using a five forces framework of suppliers, buyers, threat of new entrants, substitutes and industry rivalry.

Some of the stuff is common sense and it seems this stuff is more applicable to late-stage or mature companies - than startups.

I am doing an analysis of two entities based on whatever I learned by studying this framework.
The first is that of a Software Engineer's career in USA.
The second one is of my current employer's industry.

Will be following up soon with posts on these subjects.

Improve performance of legacy code using Java 5 language features

2008-04-17T14:31:00.000-07:00

Practical Advice for practical programmers

As a senior engineer, you sometimes are thrown into a situation, where you have to come up with some ways to improve the performance of your server side java multithreaded application.
The code was written over a span of 6-7 years and you have only a vague idea of what it does and does not do. More importantly it uses java language features that are old. What do you do?

Before kicking up a profiler and doing memory/CPU profiling - there is something very easy you can do which does not involve all that, provided you can move to Java 5.

There are a number of new classes and frameworks in Java 5 which should improve the performance and reduce the boilerplate code you need to write for a multithreaded application.
Here are some of them.

Replace synchronized collections from your old code with new concurrent collections.i.e. of you have a synchronized HashMap - replace it with ConcurrentHashMap. The Concurrent classes in Java 5 perform fine grained locking and hence provide better scalability.
Identify places where you use Java list class with Queue semantics and replace it with the Java Queue class , introduced in version 5 or 6. Java Queue class is much more efficient than the List class, whose interface supports random access.
Use Blocking Queue (or Bounded Blocking queue), whenever possible.
A common pattern in multithreaded Java applications, is the thread pool along with a work queue. See if you can use Java 5 Executor Task Execution framework.

These are some of the ideas I got so far from reading Java 5 concurrency book by Brian Goetz.
I will keep posting some more patterns to emulate as I come across more of them.

It is not your Mama's Java concurrency anymore

2008-04-14T15:58:00.000-07:00

I have been going through this great book on Java Concurrency by Brian Goetz.
I studied a part of this book two years ago but at some point stopped. This time, I am determined to complete it. Reading(nay, Studying) this book makes you realize how much your language(I mean, programming language) changes/has changed over the years.

Here is the thing about high-tech and software development. You start career in this industry as a programmer/developer and you get used to a certain habits of programming or thinking about your programs. A programming language is essentially a tool for you to produce software. You start off enthusiastically and attain a certain proficiency/ comfort level to get the job done. Unfortunately, you get to use and actually need a very small percentage of the language to build about anything- provided you have sufficient time. This results in a flat learning curve for most programmers in their core language. True, they will be learning the latest zing thing framework - which requires changing another 10 xml files - from time to time.
But essentially, their understanding of their language remains stagnant.

That's when they need a kick in the pants. This book is such a kick in the pants for the average java programmer. This book will make you

1)Understand JMM(Java Memory model)
2) Understand how badly you are lagging the language synchronization constructs..
3)Clear Misconceptions you have regarding the java synchronization constructs.

If you are like me, who try to solve Josh Bloch's Java puzzlers/bloopers once in a while and fail 30% of the time or more, this book is for you.

Happy Reading :)

SDForum Technical Events for February

2008-02-05T16:16:00.000-08:00

There are a number of good Technical events being hosted by SDForum for the month of February.
The SDForum calendar is here
Some good ones I am interested in are

Java SIG -Improving code with dependency injection and aspects (Feb 5th)
Search SIG - Using the Social Graph / Social Platforms to Enhance Search & Discovery(Feb 12th)
Web Services SIG- Mashing Up The Enterprise(Feb 26th)

Vendors get serious about Business Event Processing

2008-02-05T15:00:00.000-08:00

One of the latest trends in SOA is Event Processing - more importantly Complex Event Processing.
However , everyone hates the word "Complex", so IBM and other vendors are simply referring to it as Business Event Processing - even though the technology can be used for processing any kind of events.

So what is really event processing? Event processing is nothing but processing those events that arise in the enterprise and making some sense out of them. Have we not been making sense of them with application integration for the last ten years??

The short answer is NO - because while we might have been integrating applications, synchronizing orders and making enterprises have a consistent view of their systems, we never really derived any higher order meaning from the various events that happen in the enterprise.

We never really understood why something happens.

We never understood what multiple events in isolation meant as a whole.

We never maintained any state regarding those events.

In essence, we never had the notion of time while processing events, except for a very rudimentary event sequencing.

About three years ago, I worked on a prototype to demonstrate how event processing could be used in conjunction with our integration broker. It is good to see that these things are now slowlybeing adopted by various enterprises.

BEA has started using Esper as its event processing engine in WebLogic Integration Server and IBM has recently acquired AptSoft.

Java rant from Steve Yegge

2007-10-12T14:14:00.000-07:00

I have missed it all these days but I am rolling on the floor laughing at Steve Yegge's hilarious blog post..err.. Tech News

"you can combine the names of Gang of Four Design Patterns to form new Computer Science concepts that all Java programmers understand, such as the ObserverFactoryBridge, the BridgeFactoryObserver, and the well-known FactoryObserverBridgeChainOfCommandSingletonProxy, beloved of Java programmers everywhere. Java experts at Sun say they're not sure how many combinations there are of the twenty-three pattern names, but there are "definitely a lot of them"

"Man Dies Waiting for Eclipse to Launch
A software engineer in San Jose, CA was found dead at his desk yesterday, apparently having died while waiting for his Java editing program, Eclipse, to finish its boot process."

Man, That's funny..

Concurrent reading - Three great books

2007-09-24T17:27:00.000-07:00

I have been reading two great books concurrently. One of them deals with the process of building a product and the other one deals with how do you make a product out of the working software that you have.

1) PeopleWare - Productive Projects and Teams.

How to build a product - which most of the time boils down to how to build a great team and manage them. I will paraphrase Joel Spolsky's review of the book here, since it correctly summarizes what you will get out of this book.

"As summer interns at Microsoft, my friends and I used to take "field trips" to the company supply room to stock up on school supplies. Among the floppy disks, mouse pads, and post-it notes was a stack of small paperback books, so I took one home to read. The book was Peopleware, by Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister. This book was one of the most influential books I've ever read. The best way to describe it would be as an Anti-Dilbert Manifesto. Ever wonder why everybody at Microsoft gets their own office, with walls and a door that shuts? It's in there. Why do managers give so much leeway to their teams to get things done? That's in there too. Why are there so many jelled SWAT teams at Microsoft that are remarkably productive? Mainly because Bill Gates has built a company full of managers who read Peopleware. I can't recommend this book highly enough. It is the one thing every software manager needs to read... not just once, but once a year".

2) Building a successful Software Business.

This is a book about selling the great product you already built. Everything you need to know about marketing/selling a software product - in fact anything other than building the product itself.

Do you wonder what goes on after you build the product?
Does the word marketing, run circles around your head.
Do you know the various channels through which you can market your product
Want to know how to evaluate a sales pipeline - and factor it into your projections.
What cashflow is and how to manage it.
If so, this book is for you. It is a bit dated(written in 1993) ; However as anyone ever been in business knows - the business aspects of a business don't really change that much.

3) The third book is a great book by Rod Johnson from Interface 21, regarding the development of Java Web Applications - without using EJB.
Ever since I have been looking at EJB from some years ago, I have been wondering

Why all this verbosity?
Why so many constraints on where my objects should inherit from?
Why so much emphasis on EJB and components - instead of pure Objects? What happened to Java being Java?
Why so much repetition, everywhere?
Why so many transfer Objects everywhere?
Why is so much type casting, which defeatsthe whole purpose of Java's strong typing?
Why so much glue code to connect/wire services/components
Why so much emphasis on RMI?
Why do I need to deploy to test a "Hello World"?
Having been trained in C and Assembly during my college days, I was wondering why so much emphasis to dumb down programming and drive everything from XML files.

Then I started playing with light-weight frameworks and understood the motivations of EJB and how things can be simplified. I have been postponing reading this book for a long time and finally got my motivation to pick it up .

Market principles applied to the Telugu movie industry

2007-09-24T16:45:00.000-07:00

Recently I have been reading some books about General and Software marketing, when it occurred to me that some of the marketing principles are also applicable in an entirely different context - the Telugu movie industry and actors.

For those who don't know, I hail from a state called Andhra Pradesh in India , and my native language is Telugu. This post is about the various leading actors and we analyze their presence with respect to marketing principles - positioning, segmentation and differentiation.

Let me define the players in this market

Leading Male Actors :- Chiranjeevi, Venkatesh, Nagarjuna, BalaKrishna , various others.

The movie genres are pretty similar to other genres all over the world, with some genres having no parallel in HollyWood. These genres based on audiences are Young/Teens, Family dramas, Action oriented, Young Adult and mature adult.

You can segment the market further by

gender - male vs female dramas

feminist oriented

Ideology driven - religious vs communist vs secular movies

Locale - rural vs urban

Tone of the movie - comedy vs serious etc.

All the leading male and some leading female actors occupy various positions in this multi dimensional market.

Chirnajeevi is considered the megastar of Telugu film industry. He is considered a very versatile actor who can don any kind of role. As such he has a considerable presence in the industry and he occupies a leading market position in almost all segments. His movies exploit all his histrionic talents in various measures - a feat not easily pulled off by other actors. He has produced blockbusters in all the genres he has acted. You can consider him either first or second in all the dimensions (Remember Jack Welch's GE Way)?which is the reason behind his wide appeal. This is the reason Chiranjeevi's movies have a story line which also normally has a wide appeal across all age groups.

Of course, becuase of his wide appeal and positioning, Chiranjeevi is not the best and first choice when a producer wants to make a movie to cater to specific audiences. The presence of Chirnajeevi leaves some few niches big enough to support a number of other players, who specialzie in one or two particualr niches/genres.

Nagarjuna filles one of these niches very well. He started off as a young action hero but over the years has positioned himself as somone whose movies appeal to young/young adult/urban upcoming professionals and young/teenage girls. He used his natural strengths - good looks and styling to position himself. Even Chiranjeevi could not command as much loyalty as Nagarjuna does in this segment at a similar stage of his career. He rarely plays rural characters and supplements his weak comedy skills with the help of other comedians in his movies. Lately he has been donning mythological roles too because of the void in this space(There are not many other actors who can handle a mythological role).

Venkatesh's core base is married women and families with two kids. Again he started off as an action hero but because of the crowded market place, he could not sustain himself in that category. Over the years he repositioned himself with his skillful choice of roles. His movies show him as a protagonist from middle class with family repsonsibilities. Most of his roles have an emotional component to them, and the protagonist always make some sort of sacrifice for the sake of his family - wife, brother, sister, mother, uncle etc.

Then there are smaller segments such as comedy/funny movies. These segments used to be dominated by ChandraMohan/Rajendra Prasad/Naresh and Ali. However this segment has died down with the advent of cable TV and the comedy TV shows and comedy has since then been an integral part of other movies, but not a separate segment anymore.

Geoffrey Moore says in Crossing the Chasm that every market matures to have one Gorilla, Two Chimpanzees and a number of monkeys. I think the same could be said about the actors in the Telugu Film industry.

Coming back to the book which started me thinking along these lines - It is a book named Building a Successful Software Business BY Dave Radin ; More one some of these books in my next posts.

One pitfall of using Scripting languages

2007-08-17T10:51:00.000-07:00

It seems Facebook source code leaked the other day. And for those of you who don't know, Facebook uses PHP. Even though the problem was apparently due to a misconfigured server, it nevertheless exposes the problem with interpreted languages in the web world.
Nick Cubrovic (founder of OmniDrive) has a great post on preventing PHP leakage.

May be this is the reason , a number of enterprises still stick with compiled languages like Java on the web.

Systems vs Products

2007-08-02T15:10:00.000-07:00

Yesterday night I was at the Silicon Valley Product Management Association(SVPMA)'s monthly meet and had the opportunity to hear Adam Richardson from Frog Design speak about managing Systems vs Products. Frog Design is a strategic and creative consultancy, which works with companies to design product strategies and designs products for their clients based on those strategies.

The main topic was about the management of the technology eco-systems(the technology eco-system around technology products), rather than just the products themselves. Let's call these eco-systems "System "

Some key take away from the talk were

It is not about a product in isolation anymore. These days systems matter more or aw well as products sold in isolation.
Systems are hard to manage because they are abstract. Most products ( at least the physical one or those with some form of UI) are tangible - Whereas the eco-system around a product is abstract.
Systems are hard to manage because they cut across organizational boundaries and functional business units. In other words, a slightly dictatorial approach to building systems works better than the democratic approach. Steve Jobs and Apple are a great example in this regard. Without Steve Jobs, the various functional units inside Apple could not have collaborated to build such a good eco system around the iPod.
Since managing systems is harder than managing products, a company which does it right has built a great barrier to entry. The iPod has built such a good eco-system around iTunes, Mac, music and cool marketing that it is hard to replicate that experience easily.
Product Managers should ask themselves what sort of organizations they are in , in order to pull together the various functional units- top-down vs bottom-up, faith-based vs proof-based organization really matters.
In the early stages of a market, when the user experience has not been standardized, you can have a closed system with high margins. However, once the user experience becomes standardized and the market matures, open and modular systems tend to work better and your profit margins fall. And at the far end of a mature market i.e. when the user experience of your product overshoots the expectation of the market is when you run into the Innovators' dilemma.
All the stages mentioned above are fuzzy i.e. think hard about what stage of the market you are in.
Feed the system vs product mind set right into your MRD, at the very earliest stages of a product development. Once it becomes a PRD, it is very hard to change the product mindset to a system mindset. May we should call this a SRD??

In essence this was great talk.
Thanks to SVPMA organizers/volunteers who made this happen.

SOAP and finally some REST !!

2007-07-17T14:36:00.000-07:00

Since I work in the EAI/Web Services field, I am not new to the REST vs SOAP debate; For a while, I have been thinking that it is more of a choice in a web service design
Fortunately I came across a very good article on the REST vs SOAP debate yesterday and now realize that the issue is much deeper than that;
It seems to me that debate falls along the lines of other common debates between - practicians vs theorists, generalists vs specialists, strongly typed interfaces vs weakly typed interfaces , KISS vs complicated , bottom-up vs top-down and so on.

Why is it that we in the Software Industry always seem to have to deal with so many philosophical arguments, unlike other industries? I guess this has to do with Software being much more malleable , than , say most metals.

Networking in Silicon Valley

2007-07-02T17:39:00.000-07:00

If you are in Silicon Valley, there are a number of avenues to meet interesting people in Technology. You can attend events on a number of topics of your interest and they don't cost that much to attend. Here are some of the organizations which I attend whenever I get time.

a)SD Forum - www.sdforum.org

SD Forum is very much useful when you want to keep in touch with the latest Technical trends in the industry. They have various SIG's (Special Interest Groups) which you can attend and many startup founders present their technology in the relevant SIG's.

They also serve as incubator to companies and I heard that Sugar CRM incubated in SD Forum offices.

b)TIE (The Indus Entrepreneurs)
c)SVPMA(Silicon Valley Product Management Association)
d)Churchill Club

Compilers courses separate the men from the boys

2007-06-28T15:35:00.000-07:00

Steve Yegge has a recent post on the importance of compilers in a computer science curriculum.

"One reason many programmers don't take compilers is that they've heard it's really, really hard. It's often the "capstone" course of a CS program (OS often being the other one), which means it's a sort of "optional rite of passage" that makes you a Real Programmer and puts hair on your chest, regardless of gender or chest-hair preference."

"Designing an effective undergrad CS degree is hard. It's no wonder so many ivy-league schools have more or less given up and turned into Java Certification shops."

Sad but it seems this is true. Compilers course is very hard and I know it damn well, having taken this under Prof.Wei Chung Hsu in my Masters at the Univesity of Minnesota. We designed a small compiler for a language appropriately named C-- ; Our compiler could produce MIPS assembly language instruction set , which we would optimizie in the final phase for reducing redundant loads and stores , which we would then run though a MIPS simulator(SPIM, I believe) for execution.
In fact, one reason I took the course was that I wasn't happy with the way compilers was taught in my Bachelors, and I knew that I would never get a chance to learn them again in my professional life.

If some Software Engineer/CS student understands compilers, I would rate him very highly.
The only courses tougher than compilers at University CS programs are the ones dealing with Complexity Theory, Turing Machines and automata theory.

2007-06-26T16:26:00.000-07:00

Netscape founder Marc Anderssen may have joined joined the blog world late, but he seems to make up for lost time by coming up with great posts after posts. A must read for anyone aspiring to be an entrepreneur.

If you want to know how to approach VC's , or how to become a VC backed entrepreneur , it is a must read.

Why Research and Product development should not be separated

2006-12-19T17:27:00.000-08:00

Today, I am going to write about research vs product development in Software/internet media industries. And I am going to start from an examination of the current favorite company-Google.

When people write about google, they always write about how Sergey Brin and Larry Page started their company based on an idea, as if Page ranking in itself makes Google the best search engine on the planet. From another viewpoint, they talk about how Google redefined the advertising industry.

I am a Software engineer and the kind of person who wants to understand how Larry and Sergey made their jump from having a clever algorithm up their sleeves, to making it massively scalable and recruiting other great engineers. If you open the hood of Google, and take away all the applications such as GMail, GMaps etc, what you will see is a beautiful, fault-tolerant distrivuted computing architecture built by some great engineers. The group who built this is called the Systems Infrastrucure group inside Google. This is the group that built MapReduce, Google File System, Big Table, SawZall and a bunch of other stuff. This is the layer on which, a number of other google engineers write their applications.

You will see that a number of these papers are written by people from HP's Palo Alto Labs.
Sanjay Ghemawat, Jeffrey Dean, Alan Eustace. In fact, a number of top people in the early days of Google came from HP labs(which was Compaq labs before HP acquired Compaq). And which was DEC labs before Compaq acquired DEC.

Larry and Sergey may be smart but I always wonder how they could recruit so many parallel computing, distributed computing folks in their early days. Imagine you are the founder(s) of a small startup, with no revenue plan in 1999. How would you convince these researchers that they should work for you?

I can only speculate. But I think that the fact that DEC labs had no importance in the eyes of the HP management definitely helped. I can't help noticing that 1999 is also the year , when Carly Fiorina go the top job at HP. So many a top brains at HP labs must have preferred working at Google to a research lab of no importance to HP(Carly was a sales person afterall..).

I think this story has been repeated a number of times before. Successful companies establish research arms to solve their problem of being bogged down by the success of their existing products(The Innovators dilemma) . As time goes by, your product development organization becomes (a) dumber and dumber and bloated and misses the next big thing(b) you research arm becomes frustrated because of your inability to turn any breakthrough into successful products.

Then these researchers take their talent somewhere to solve real problems.

2005-10-04T09:56:00.000-07:00

EclipseCon 2006 will be held in Santa Clara, CA in March.
Joel is a speaker.


Eclipse Con is taking submissions for this year's topics;
If you are interested in submitting a proposal for a long talk/short talk or any other exhibits, please go here.

2005-08-25T13:15:00.000-07:00

After I started my blog, I anted to know which search engines could catch my blog first.
I searched for "Gyaana radha" on Yahoo and Google. On Yahoo, my blog is the first result. On Google, I am not even there!! . This despite the fact that I added my URL to Google a week ago.
This shows that
1) Google hasn't processed my URL yet. and/or
2)Yahoo's ranking algorithm has more keyword based weightage to it then Google's algorithm( which is probably entirely Page Rank based). As far as I know, no one links to my blog yet :-((.

2005-08-19T10:08:00.000-07:00

I will be on a vacation to YellowStone National Park at the end of August;
I have been told that YS is like no other national park both in its grandeur and vastness. Feeling pretty excited!!

2005-08-19T09:34:00.000-07:00

My current job involves with Eclipse-based Plugin devel0pment in java. Here is an introduction to Eclipse