Programming fun at startup

This week I saw the movie Dangal trailer and the actor says "If you win silver medal, today or tomorrow people will forget you but if you win Gold medal you will become a source of inspiration".  Also today morning I saw K L Rahul got out on 199 runs and the commentators are complaining about his loss of focus on one ball and he got out http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/sports/cricket/news/india-v-england-5th-test-day-3-rahuls-199-drives-india-to-commanding-position/articleshow/56045818.cms This reminds me of Startups and Finishers, give up too close to the finish line and you wont be remembered but if you finish it you may become an inspiration.

Burnout is very common in startup and it hits you more often when you are at the same startup for 7+ years. Much of burnout is felt when you are working hard but progress is slow and you have high expectations of yourself and the team. I read this excellent article http://andrewdumont.me/avoiding-burnout/ and it felt almost Deja vu to me.  I work from home so it hits even hard to me as I have less people to share it with. Here are the ways I have been trying to curtail burnout and hope it help others too: Workplace :Keep your workplace organized and stick to a routine.  I have an office room at home and I am in work mode when I am in that office. Morning :Keep 1 hour in mornings on something outside work. I read a lot in morning and don't come online or check emails until that 1 hour is done. Workout : rain, heat or winter, I try to walk for 30 min in afternoon as much as possible. This gives you some time for meta thinking and de stresses you from the morning chaos. Man...

A quality of a good Startup engineer is "Finishing what you started". I value finishers more than people who talk good theory and start many things but don’t finish most of them. Most of the time people get excited and start many things concurrently but leave them in limbo or they finish 95% of the thing.  Over 7 years at my current Startup I have observed that in many projects doing first 95% may take you X units of time but its the remaining 5% that demands 10x cognitive effort and time from you. Its this last 5% where people either burnout or give up. Its the finishers who keep the compass pointing to North star, never give up and do what ever it takes to Finish( in indian mythology saam, daam, dand, bhed). Recently One of my respected colleague "Sachin" left for a sabbatical. He was one of the Finishers whom I would hire any day on my team or would choose as a buddy to watch your back.  "Sachin" has a zeal like a Rhino or Triceratops to Finish what h...

Woke up by earthquake at 7:00 AM in morning and then couldn't get to sleep. I took a bath, made my tea and started checking emails and saw that after last night deployment three storage node out of 100s of nodes were running into Full GC. What was special about the 3 nodes was that each one was in a different Data centre but it was named same app02.  This got me curious I asked the node to be taken out of rotation and take a heap dump.  Yesterday night a new release has happened and I had upgraded spymemcached library version as new relic now natively supports instrumentation on it so it was a suspect. And the hunch was a bullseye, the heap dump clearly showed it taking 1.3G and full GCs were taking 6 sec but not claiming anything.   I have a quartz job in each jvm that takes a thread dump every 5 minutes and saves last 300 of them, checking few of them quickly showed a common thread among all 3 data centres. It seems there was a long running job that was trying ...

I have seen my Kid grow from 0 to 6 year and one startup growing from 20 to 150 employees and another growing from 5 to 300+ employees.  A common trend I seen is hanging on to old things.  Not sure if its due to sentimental value attached to things or inability to make hard choices.  My Kid still has his toys that he used to play when he was 1 year old. He wouldn’t let us throw them or give it to someone, I am recently working with him to let go of old things.  Problem with old things is that they are a drag, they just sit around the house and are a clutter. Its the same with old books, I have many of them and one day I need to go and clean them once I read a book,  I rarely read them again so why not donate them to library. A common observation with Startups I have worked is feature bloat due to holding on to old features. Features that are not maintained but are in use by a handful of customers causes drag. Recently I wanted to refactor folder listing code t...

Small shitty things frustrates me, like someone came up with an idea to put epic on each Jira task.  Well its suited for big Tasks that has lot of subtasks but 50% + of my cases don’t require an Epic. I am lazy and dont like to waste my time. I am creating an issue and filled all things and now this process requires me an Epic, total BS.  Yes this is total BS so either the process requires fixing where epic is first required field so I wont invest filling so many fields or this needs to be removed/made optional.