Slowly migrating all my sites onto webfaction, done 2 already, including this, 6 more to go. So, why webfaction? To put it in perspective, I had 6 sites operating off my AWS micro-instance. 3 wordpress blogs, Instasyncer , a couple of ...
A couple of people pinged me and ask me why I am defending NUS in this case, wasn’t I against NUS in the first place? Let me make this clear, I am not against anyone (Oh wait, I’m ...
So recently Derrick Ko (let me make this clear first, he is a good friend of mine. It’s just that I disagree with some of his arguments on this.) wrote this blog post on this guy on NOC who ...
Greg Wilson - What We Actually Know About Software Development, and Why We Believe It’s True (by CUSEC) Takeaways: Implication: work with small batches of code. Ones that can be read in one hour. (Also: maybe this is why OSS ...
Peter Thiel’s latest CS183 class is about secrets. A 0-to-1 startup exists to find secrets (even one is enough) and execute on them. The best secrets are the ones that are both big and true. This is obvious, but ...
“So you’re right, I think. Measuring things in a startup may not be 100% good; it’s certainly no replacement for vision, and too much leaves no space for intuition. But then the converse is true: not measuring things ...
Learnt this while pairing with Mike from Pivotal Labs on Friday. Was too tired by Friday night to blog this. In Ruby, closures are objects. And closures can be passed to functions just like any other object! How crazy is ...
When Rob Pike Met RMS: A lovely little story about Rob Pike’s first meeting with rms.
Long overdued, and only my third post here. So as some people know, I built Instasyncer a while ago, partially for fun, but mainly because I needed it. Long story short, Instasyncer is this awesome (Note: I’m extremely biased ...
We had birthday cake at work today. I didn’t take a picture of breakfast, partly because I was slightly late, and also partly because it looked like something out of a horror movie (though the raw egg, I’ll ...
This is probably going to stop once I get into a comfortable rhythm, but here goes: The Rule of Three states that a piece of code can be copied once, but when it is repeated three times, it should be ...
Breakfast at Viki. I must admit - this is rather better than breakfast at Tembusu.
I met Yipeng’s girlfriend, Hannah, on the train to work today. “Is it normal to feel really tired at the end of the working day?” I asked. “Yes.” she said, and this startled me: “You’ll have to adjust ...
Before I forget, here are some quick thoughts: Pair programming is a great way of getting up to speed on a codebase. There’s nothing quite like seeing another person navigate through code, explaining bits as he goes along. The ...
“Holding all things equal, greater efficiency in a market implies a smaller market. The average AirBnB night costs far less than a hotel night. The average GetAround car rental is less expensive than a ZipCar rental.” - from Collaborative Consumption...
Successful SMB SaaS Companies Have a 2 Step Value Proposition: “The most successful SMB SaaS products typically offer a 2 step value proposition: an initial value proposition to the end user and a longer term value proposition to a manager ...
“Their generation grew up with a computer on their lap and now in their pocket. They were on Facebook before they were supposed to be. Their first phone was a smartphone. They prefer to watch a movie on their laptop ...
Goals are good. Here are mine. Programming Things I want to learn, to improve my programming kung fu. Build a webapp in Haskell Learn Backbone – but what project? Build Antinews - experiment with social filtering Build Top - necessary groupware for N...
One thing that surprises me about incredibly smart people is that they truly believe they can reduce a complex world into a set of discrete principles. (e.g.: Ray Dalio’s Principles, Charlie Munger’s Elementary Wisdom, Peter Thiel’s...
P.S. This post is targeted towards the Talknopreneurs, people who apparently know the ins and outs of running a business despite not having done anything related to starting anything before.P.P.S. To my friends who are business ...
Haven’t been updating my blog recently, cos of exams, and even more recently been working on a side project called Instasyncer. Ever since Instagram came out for Android, I’ve been using it, and damnit, it’s a real ...
The Scarcest Resource at Startups is Management Bandwidth: Suster argues that the best startups have a laser-like focus on a small set of things. His argument applies strictly to pursuing business opportunities. Yet pivoting, by definition, involves ...
One of the biggest problems I had while I was doing Pandamian was that I would read blog posts about startups and take them as The Absolute Truth. So I would tell my co-founders, and teammates: ‘this is The Right ...
Work is an important part of life. I’ve been thinking recently about the way I work - in particular, the way I decide on things to work on. In the past, I usually chose to do things according to their ...
Peter Thiel, in the first class for CS183:
Kolmogorov Complexity – A Primer: Here’s an interesting observation: when browsing HN, I tend to gravitate to posts that have to do with learning new things, as opposed to posts about news items. I built Hacker News Confidence to surface ...
I was stupid enough [1] to vent yesterday on Alvin Wang’s NUS appeal, and stupider to forget that the post could very well go viral, given the attention given to Alvin’s appeal. So this is the last post ...
Alvin Wang’s appeal to get into the Computer Science program at the National University of Singapore, available at http://www.helpalvingetintoschool.com/ is … strange. I was, at first, in support of him: I emailed the NUS Hackers mailing ...
ViKi Instant: I built this in 1.5 days for an internship at ViKi. It was good fun; source code available here.