Rebooting… coming back online
Its been a while since my last post. I hope to chronicle my last decade. Lets see if I get the time. Meanwhile… go checkout my wife’s skincare website and the youtube channel in the meantime.
Karan Kurani
CTO - DoctorC // Previous - Shoutt, Funzio, Gree, Cornell
Latest posts
Being good in > 1 things is easier and more valuable than being excellent at 1 thing
Note - This guideline is most useful for the bottom 99% of the practising software engineers. So if you are part of the remaining 1% - you can safely skip the this post. There is a surprisingly easy hack that you can apply to increase your value generally in life. Pick up more skills. It sounds obvious when put on paper but there is one subtlety which makes it a “hack” in my opinion. For this…
Why you should not have Managers in your class name
And why you should be careful about anything that ends with -er. Before I go any further, please go and read Steve Yegge’s blog post on the overuse of Nouns in Javaland. Most coders I know do not give naming things the importance it deserves. It is highly critical to get the class/method name right the first time. The name will affect the way you structure your code base, think about it further…
“The Privilege” of Long Shots
My life has largely been defined by long shots. Definition of a long shot - “an attempt or guess that has only the slightest chance of succeeding or being accurate.” A few big ones which have affected my life - Looking at my fascination with computers, my parents got me a computer way back in 1996 in India. They spent majority of their annual income to get me that PC. That one thing has defined…
Predicting medical chronic conditions with Machine Learning
Original post here. Note - Some parts of this post requires some familiarity with basics of Machine Learning. These terms should be understood in a technical form - Binary Classification, Accuracy, AUC, Biased Dataset TLDR - It is possible to build a system to predict medical chronic conditions with ML. The path to actually building an ML system from scratch is long and winding and will probably…
What’s the right time for your startup to build in-house tools?
In a startup, there are always 100 different things that need to be done at any given point of time. There are umpteen ways you can accomplish those tasks. Many of them can be solved by using tools that other companies provide. Some of them clearly require something to be custom built internally in your organization. And then there are some, often pesky, things that are in the middle. You can…
What all the REST API tutorials forget to tell you
TL;DR - A client side model is not equal to a server side model. Therefore, a REST call made by the client can involve several objects of different types on the server. Remove the thought that there is a need for one-to-one mapping between an object of client side and server side. Once it is decoupled your design becomes simpler. Earlier in the year, I was going trawling through the internet…
The terror after a successful fund raise
Ok. So we recently closed our seed round at DoctorC . Since this was the first time ever we had raised money successfully, a lot of “Congratulations!” were rolling in. Its supposed to be something to celebrate. Right? But all I felt at the end of it was… uneasiness. Uneasiness at the fact that a bunch of really smart people have given you their hard earned money to go build an awesome company. You…
How an airhorn helps boost our company morale
At a small startup like ours we like to celebrate our successes. Earlier in the year, when we were just getting started, the number of orders we used to get were few and far in-between. We wanted to know when an order was booked - as soon as it happened. This was a problem. Our office is a converted bungalow, its split across 2 levels and has rooms on each floor. Thus, we did not have open space…
Spreadsheet Driven Development
At DoctorC we like to move fast, but not break things all the time. To do this while maintaining a break neck speed of a startup, we came up with a methodology which we use to experiment with new features. Neehar christened it SDD (Spreadsheet Driven Development). We kinda arrived at it while following one of the tenets of the gospel of Paul Graham - “Do things that don’t scale.” Here is how it…
Making the hardest decision of my life
Its been 5 months since I made the hardest (so far) decision of my life. In June 2014, I moved to India to work on a startup. On the surface it doesn’t sound that hard. But I want to back up a bit to set the context. I had moved to US from India in Aug 2010 to do my master’s at Cornell. After that, in 2011, I joined a gaming startup Funzio . It was an amazing experience where I grew a…
Why you should not buy Apple's Time Capsule
My time capsule randomly died on me with a power failure. It would not turn on. Since Apple is such a reliable company and known for good customer service, I expected that they’ll have a look at it, try to fix it and if it cannot be saved then get my data out of it. After talking with their service I was told that they do not service time capsule. Period. It doesn’t matter what the…
Google Fiber - The Future Isn't Incremental
This article is on top of HN right now. It delves into how Google is bringing competition into one of the most entrenched part of tech industry in America. As I was reading it one point really stood out as a bit… meh. The relevant point was this These companies have a point. Even Grande CEO Murphy admits that most consumers don’t need to go that fast. He added that even if they…
Company Culture
Different companies have different “culture”. Everyone knows what it feels but I haven’t come across anyone who has quite put a finger on what the term “company culture” encompasses. I am a freshly minted co founder and this thought has been nagging me for a while. I wanted to have some sort of non nebulous definition of it so that I can understand it. Once I understood it, I can actually work on…
Google as an abstraction for programming
I am part of the generation of programmers where Stackoverflow and Google were already alive and thriving when I first started programming seriously. My coding workflow has Google tightly integrated into its loop. The primary reason is I don’t need to remember the exact details of implementing… anything. Here is what a (totally made up trivial) typical flow looks like - Hmmmm. I have these user…
Don’t get too comfortable
I was catching up with friends while vacationing in India and I found out that one of them had quit his job a few months ago and was “… figuring out what to do next.” I was very surprised to hear that he had made that decision. He was absolutely brilliant at his job and was progressing quite nicely in his career. He said - I was doing well and I felt that I was getting in a comfortable position……
Be Selfish And Make The World A Better Place
I recently read Scott Adam’s Book How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big (Affiliate Link) . Its a very different book in terms of the style of writing and how it presents the “life lessons” that the author learnt. I would highly recommend going through it just to have a feel of the way its written if not for anything else. One of the more striking things that resonated with me was to…
Whales, Cars, Law, Technology and You
I don’t remember exactly where or when, but I came across a fact which boggled my mind. Why were whales nearly hunted nearly to extinction? Cars. Sperm whale oil was particularly useful as an automatic transmission fluid and US was importing around 55 million gallons of oil each year in the 1970s . After knowing the fact though, I had a realization that I should’ve guessed that there…
Why compiled Go programs give a warm fuzzy feeling
If you have used Google Go in a real world project/application, you will feel all warm and nice after your code can be compiled and your application runs. It usually runs almost flawlessly - or only requires a few minor tweaks before its ready for production. I have felt it many times while building stuff in Go and never felt similar in other languages. And I always wondered why this happened only…
Mansi Gandhi: Moving to India: Finding the $400 Apartment
Mansi Gandhi: Moving to India: Finding the $400 Apartment : mansigandhi : This is part of a series of posts about moving halfway across the world to bootstrap my startup, Shoutt . In my earlier post, Moving To India - Cutting Costs , I talked about my aim to find an apartment under $500 including utilities. The Hunt Hyderabad is a growing metropolitan. In the…