Isaac Mosquera's Blog

• 2013-04-01

  The ‘Busy’ Trap

  What a great post.  You’ll probably decide not to read the whole thing because you’re too “Busy”

• 2013-03-19

  With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility

  We Funder is a new YC startup that is going to disrupt the way we invest in companies.  It allows anybody to give money to a startup in exchange for ownership.  Historically, the law required you be an “accredited investor” for which most US citizens don’t quality.  The JOBS Act, which will be fully rolled out by 2013, allows anybody to invest in a startup with as little as $100.  However, as Voltaire said (and not Spiderman) “With great power comes great responsibility”.   This is a great opportunity for startups to receive funding from sources that didn’t exist before but also this allows for evil founders to take advantage of unsuspecting investors.   Hell, it happens to the best of us already.  

  

• 2013-03-15

  Why I Hate Recruiters

  Because of shit e-mails like this: 

  

  His e-mailer forgot to replace “«COMPANY_NAME»” tag in the e-mail.  So we’ve obviously never met nor “working with someone” in my “sphere”.  I get about 3-5 of these a day and sometimes calls throughout the day.  It’s just pure spam and I hate it.  In no way is this guy providing any real value to anybody and the candidates they have are usually terrible.  I’ve never found anybody worthwhile through a recruiter and it’s probably because the smart engineers stay away from people like you.

• Marissa Mayer, You’re Not Solving the Right Problem

  You’re trying to solve the wrong problem.  This problem isn’t that you have employees who love to make ideas happen and collaborate but can’t because they from home.  You have employees who genuinely don’t care about the outcome of the company and are probably not excited about working at Yahoo!  Your change has instead made your employees infuriated with you instead of excited to work for Yahoo! In the short-term I this policy change will hurt Yahoo!, This is why:

  1.  The employees who were unproductive from home will now be unproductive in the office.  They’ll be disgruntled at the sudden policy change and seethe working at Yahoo! creating distractions for the people who were in the office previously.  These parasitical employees will ultimately leave but not until they’ve found their next cushy job and hurting Yahoo! until they do so.

  2.  The employees who were productive from home will now be less productive in the office because of the everyday distractions in the office.  There are numerous reports which show that working from home can make you more productive.  Some will become disgruntled employees and ultimately, many of these types of employees will leave too.

  3.  In the memo that was leaked it stated “And, for the rest of us who occasionally have to stay home for the cable guy, please use your best judgment in the spirit of collaboration.”.   When someone makes the statement “use your best judgement” it assumes that they were not already.  Such a passive aggressive statement during a bold change of policy.  It sounds like this is a nice way of saying “I know when you stay home for the cable man you’re probably just taking the day off”.  Wether it’s true or not it sounds like she distrusts the entire company.

  

  Bottom line is that Yahoo! has an talent problem not a work from home problem.  Interestingly enough, although Google and Yahoo! have the similar work from home policies, according to Forbes: 

  “Google’s 53,861 employees generate $931,657 in revenue per worker, 170% higher than Yahoo’s $344,758 worth of revenue per employee.”

  There are many successful companies who use “Work From Home” as a policy to attract the best workers.  Ironically the grass-roots growth company 37Signals recently wrote an entire book on how to make it work called Remote on they make it work for them.  I’m sure this WFH fiasco will increase their book sales.  They should send one to Marissa.

  That said, I dont discredit the sentiment of the memo.  I believe that being in the same room with my colleagues makes me more productive when solving a particular problem, but I also know that it makes me less productive otherwise.  How much does one outweigh the other? I’m not sure but there needs to be a balance there somewhere. 

  The changes that Marissa Mayer is making isn’t going to help Yahoo! attract the talent you need.  I don’t know anybody in the valley who is actively seeking a job at Yahoo, while there are many who are still excited about Google, Facebook and Twitter.  That needs to change and the leaked memo won’t attract smart engineers.

  If you’re employees aren’t producing you need new employees, you’re not going to “beat” them into shape.  You need to fire the underperforming employees and teams.  The end result will look same but you would’ve pissed off less people and saved a whole lot of time.

• 2013-03-06

  What Latency Means for Throughput

  As an engineer we’ve always talked about latency but we never knew exactly how that calculates directly to throughput.  You can calculate exactly what that means for you by this nifty calculation:

  65535 / L = KB/s

  where L = latency and KB/s = throughput

• 2013-03-04

  LAUNCH Live!

  Watch the LAUNCH live.  Currently watching Chamath Palihapitiya right now, if you dont catch him live, definitely watch it later, great conversation.

• 2013-03-01

  Loop Recognition And Performance in C++/Java/Go/Scala

  I’ve started to really look at Scala as a nice replacement to the verbosity and complexities of Java and it’s ecosystem.  This paper done by a Google researcher which shows the performance of the different languages.  Scala looks very impressive from this benchmark.

• 2013-02-28

  I Safely Lost 6 Pounds in Less Than 1 Week

  If you came here looking for a magical weight-loss diet in this post, sorry, but this post ain’t it.  It’ll probably just tell you something you already know but  I lost 6 pounds in less than 1 week and I feel great.  I went from 205.8 last friday and today I weigh 199.8.  I have more energy than I ever have before and feel more productive.  If this isn’t a “magic bullet” weight loss secret then what’s the point of this post?  

  Read More

• 2013-02-27

  Finally, A Good Web Framework For Java

  Finally, there is a good web framework for java/scala called Play.  Java was my first web language and I used it for many years before switching to Python.  Since then I’ve fallen in love with Python’s simplicity and concise language constructs.  It opened my eyes to how Java and it’s associated frameworks were so needlessly complex and verbose.  I might’ve lose 3x performance but I gained 10x productivity.  

  That all changed recently when I came across the Play Framework.  Play is built on top of Akka, a toolkit for building concurrent distributed applications.  The framework makes it easy to build real-time systems because all IO is asynchronous.  At Socialize we used gevent + python to make all our IO asynchronous and have seen enormous throughput gains because for most projects the applications is mostly waiting for a response from a database.

  The Play Framework is still new but has already gained support from major websites like LinkedIn and Klout.  I’ve yet to get my hands dirty with Play but in the coming days I’ll write a review of my interactions with the framework.

• 2013-02-26

  What a great quote from FB Engineer Makinde “it’s more about the process of breaking down problems than coming up with complicated algorithms”.  

  Also, Will.i.am needs to stop randomly showing up in my tech videos and conferences.

• 2013-02-25

  Sony’s Failed Press Event Isn’t a Failure

  There’s been a lot of tweets and blog post’s around Sony’s failed press release.  The best part is they got us talking about their press event and not their product since they had nothing to substantial to show.  I’m not sure if this was on purpose, but either way it’s brilliant.  They got us talking about their non-existent product; Isn’t that the purpose of a press event, to get everybody talking?  And that’s why Sony’s failed press event isn’t a failure.
  

• HBase VS Cassandra

  A great technical description describing the differences between cassandra vs hbase.  

• 2013-02-22

  How Simplify Your Architecture For Real-Time Counters

  As I discussed before, if you’re not using redis you’re way behind.  In this post I’ll discuss in detail how redis simplifies real-time counters.

  In many applications there’s typically the requirement to have counters.  For instance:

  1. How many subscribers does this article have? 
  2. How many views does this article have?
  3. How many users does this app have?

  We’ve solved this problem in the past with batch processing tools like MapReduce or log analysis but what happens when we want to something in real-time?

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• 2013-02-21

  

  Exactly.

• 2013-02-20

  Steve Job’s response to an insult.   My favorite quote is his response is “You have to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology”