Idle/Random/whatever Thoughts of a Demented/Idle/Whatever Mind

Ten startups, forty top-tier investors, and more than one hundred strategic connections forged in a single room. As Ruhbir , one of our volanteers and startup founder who pitched, aptly noted, the event successfully compressed twelve months of traditional ecosystem networking into a single evening. This was the high-impact reality of the inaugural Xoogler Demo Day in India. The initiative began almost entirely by chance. After attending several casual Xoogler meetups in Bengaluru, the appetite for a structured startup showcase was clear, yet the structural execution remained unmapped. The definitive turning point occurred during a weekend community gathering at Cubbon Park organized by Samvidha . Over lunch, I proposed the concept of a Demo Day to Sachin , a fellow founder sitting next to me. Sachin immediately recognized the potential, loops in Samvidha, and the momentum instantly shifted into high gear. What followed was an agile WhatsApp group that quickly evolved into a rigorous op...

1. How Major Indian Apps Are Bypassing Google’s Policy to Spy on Your App Drawer? - Report reveals that many major Android apps on the Google Play Store are allegedly bypassing Google's privacy policies to access a list of other apps installed on users' devices. Apps like Swiggy, Zepto, and HDFC are among those seemingly "peeping" into users' app drawers. While some argue this access might be needed for core functionality (like fraud detection in banking apps), the report suggests it's being used for fingerprinting and user profiling. Analysis of AndroidManifest.xml files shows apps use methods like querying by package name or intent signature to extract this data. Concerns are raised about apps like KreditBee, which appear to be profiling users based on the presence of specific apps, including those related to religion and astrology. The report questions Google's enforcement of its policies and the lack of user consent or awareness regarding this data co...

1. Why you should never use !! in Kotlin - Using double-bang operator(!!) is a bad practice; multiple alternatives cover every other possible case. Using it is a hack and a shortcut that will backfire while not saving you much time at the time of writing using it. You shouldn’t use it unless you're writing a short personal script. My Take : The double-bang operator (!!)  which throws null pointer exception in Kotlin might very well be considered " Billion Dollar Mistake ." While it offers a concise way to assert that a variable is not null, I believe it's preferable to have slightly more verbose code that explicitly handles nullability and avoids potential runtime exceptions. Null pointer exceptions have plagued programmers for decades, and introducing a feature that can easily lead to them seems counterproductive. I'm uncertain whether all Kotlin linters currently check for excessive or inappropriate use of the !! operator, but if yours don't, I strongly re...

 1. Booleans are a trap : Booleans, while seemingly simple, can introduce complexity and limitations into domain modeling. When used to represent complex states, booleans can lead to unclear code and potential errors. To avoid these pitfalls, consider using enums or enum sets. These approaches provide a more expressive and maintainable way to model complex states in your applications. My Take : I wish I had learned this earlier in life. When working with Google Docs, I realized the limitations of booleans. Expanding boolean-based behaviors often led to adding more fields, making the system complex. Enums would have provided a simpler solution. The problem wasn't just the booleans themselves, but also the need to pass them through multiple layers of the stack, often requiring additional parameters. Another important aspect of enums is the inclusion of an " enum not specified " state. This state explicitly indicates that an enum value hasn't been set, which can be usef...

1. Why Founders Need to Focus More on Sales and Marketing - Harvard Business School senior lecturer Mark Roberge argues that every aspect of being an early-stage founder involves sales. But many founders lack an understanding of how to incorporates sales into their ventures. This talks about how to hire for early sales roles, design compensation, and lay a strong foundation for a growing sales team. Hiring the right salesperson is crucial, as they should be skilled in both product knowledge and customer interaction. Scaling sales requires a strategic approach, considering factors like product-market fit and customer retention. The sales compensation plan can be a powerful tool for aligning sales behavior with business goals. While AI is making strides in automating certain sales tasks, the human element of building relationships and understanding customer needs remains indispensable. My Take : IMHO a startup is like an elephant from the story of blind men and an elephant . There are d...

 1. Open UI :   An GenAI tool test and prototype our next generation tooling for building powerful applications on top of LLM's. My Take: This integration is incredibly exciting! While I haven't had the chance to test it myself yet, it feels like a major leap forward in developer workflows.  I can see a future where more IDEs incorporate similar tools, eliminating the need to constantly switch back and forth to ChatGPT. This would streamline the development process and potentially lead to the creation of even more powerful developer tools.   2. New Vaccine Strategy Breakthrough :  It discusses how it could eliminate the need for yearly flu shots . The vaccine uses a modified virus that cannot suppress the host’s immune response. This allows the immune system to fight the virus using small RNA molecules . The strategy was successful in protecting mice from a lethal dose of a virus. The researchers believe this strategy could be used to create vaccines for many ...

I just quit Google after almost 7½ years. When I had joined Google in 2016 I was exploring to start up with a travel planning, sharing and booking platform. But then when I got the chance to join Google I told myself that I will stay for 3-4 years and learn how Google's culture makes it build products that people love, at scale. Also, their engineering culture was something I had heard a lot about and thought this is my best chance to learn about and implement it in my startup. But then I managed to overstay at Google for various reasons.  There are various posts talking about what is wrong about Google here , here and here . But I wanted to look at its positives and I hope companies adopt it rather than a toxic culture which is brewing everywhere. Here are a few things which stood out for me (in no particular order): 1. Blameless postmortems : Blameless postmortems are a powerful tool for learning from incidents and improving system reliability. The key aspects of it are   a...

In case you are intrigued by the words, 'current thoughts' well I don't know anyone who has changed their thinking more in the last decade on various different things than me. I think it will be changing as things do and as I evolve as a person. So that's me right now. Starting up on my own venture has been on my mind for a long long time. But it has not really taken any real shape till now. My mom still jokes that I wanted to start adda.com while in school. You know it never started. I had ever since thought of different things but never made them into real life. Closest I ever got was to get a prototype built and showcase it but then again never pushed it. Of late I realise that I have a very crucial element missing which leaves me directionless after some time. I don't have a clear goal and mission for myself while building anything. The only goal at times is to build something. Guess builder culture is ingrained in me. So I gave myself some time to think about ...

Well all this started with this one tweet disruptive, IIM, ninja, passion. leverage, LSD, enterprise. this takes buzzwords to whole next level and more https://t.co/BTKniycDxa — Sathya (@SathyaBhat) March 9, 2015 And finally ended with this one @jackerhack thanks, got it @SathyaBhat @mehulved — 100rabh™ (@the100rabh) March 9, 2015 And I had the entire dump of Hasjobs postings. It was pretty cool of Kiran to send them across to me and saving me the time and effort to scrape that data. At that time I had very little idea what I would do with it. I am aware of R and this was the moment when I thought I could make use of the little knowledge of it I had. So I got on with it. Step 1: Step R on my system. Step 2: Write some code to extract the data and cleanse it Step 3: Generate the counts for words Step 4: Manually pick up the technology words with counts Step 5: Generate the image with language popularity So as it stands the top 5 of required technolog...

With so many things happening for the engineers Bar Camp, OCC and now D Camp . Sure we are going to see the next MS or Google from India very soon. D Camp or design camp was held a Yahoo office in EGL. First presentation was by Muthu from Sun Microsystems. He started with demo on how to use CSS and Javascript. Next how to use it to get ' Your Kind' of a look for your webpage. Then we had the demo for YUI Javascript Library. And the usual corporate bashing was kicked off but Muthu cleverly moved the controversy out by saying that YUI is his favourite thats all and the ultimate call to use is on the developer themselves. Joe Arnold from Yahoo! was next to make a presentation with an unusual title " Learning to Fly ". Rather actually it was a great one. Interesting way to explain how to design, using the Wright brothers experience on how to build invent a plane. Some interesting thought on what it takes to build or rather invent a good product. You need ...

Well last Sunday I again happened to be at the Open Coffee Club of Bangalore. A whole lot of interesting ideas on marketing and all were tossed up. The big question that's always in my mind was answered during this session. Yes what is my ideal startup. I think what would make up my ideal startup would be some ideas taken from Hari and Venkat (Venkat has a startup named OutSmart, so guys be ready to expect something). Here are the something's a startup should do. Be positive about your idea and more importantly show it. Have a long term plan, something like 2 years. Be ready and plan up to flourish in those two years, not just survive. This should be planned before you get your hands wet. Waiting for VC may not be the best bet. Keep ground realities in check. More often than not the power of idea is so strong that one can loose track of customer expectations. Be firmly stitched to that ground. Make employees feel that ...

Last time around I had promised Ramjee about writing a post on Open Coffee Club and my thoughts on how to improve it. So here it is. Well I feel that OCC is a good concept. I think there may be some other similar motived events happening in Bangalore itself. But surely many do not know about it. One thing could be we could coordinate with those people, if any. Another thing is that if we are meeting fortnightly then its better we meet with a theme. Lets plan for whats going to be discussed at the meet. The interested audience would definitely be present there. Also it gives the member time to prepare themselves with ideas and questions before hand. This I think is also necessary considering we are going to meet a lot more often. I loved the one to one discussions that we had as a group after the initial talks. Though they are fruitful but then a starter is required by means of the initial talk. I will give you the example that the introduction laid ground for further discussions at the...

Well this was one event I was skeptical about. I thought may be 10 odd people will turn up. To add to it a few startup people, and probably a VC. But when I reached there, 30mins late, I saw there was a large group. 60 around, thats what Ramjee told me. Anyways after the introductions there was that useless debate on how to take it forward. So many people saying the same thing, in different words obviously. Instead of taking the current thing forward people got lost in future, not very different from what all startup guys look at. Anyways the real fun started right after the event was over. People actually split into a number of groups. There was more of one to one interaction rather than a formal one. I think that was one of coolest thing out of the entire event. Well I did have interaction with a lot of people. Some of those really stuck out. One was muziboo by Prateek Dayal. I think its off to a good start. Probably he does not make mistakes that most startups do, not having a lo...

It was interesting at Bar Camp Bangalore to see so many people being interested in startups. Infact there were many who had already started up. Right from the age of 24 to 42. But are they going to do it all alone. Thats the big question. Yeah you have a couple of friends but is that all thats needed. We had people from Picsquare. These guys were brilliant in ideas. But as told by one of the far more experienced gentleman from Digital Strait, its not just the idea thats pulls you through, its the vision. Lets not get into Mission and Vision statements. I think what is really meant by this is, what are you going to do when the big guys enter your arena. Are you going to sustain yourself or are you going to sell out to those guys. Interesting things. Entrepreneurs are lead into believing that people would just join their startups. Its the in thing. Come on its not the school kids who says he has a blue candy I too need blue candy. Thats outright stupid. You need to tell that I am pay...