Author: admin

It’s your job, too.

As a CEO, it is your job to not only create a culture and system conducive to actually making money, but also to lead by example. In my experience, this is where most CEOs fall short. They think they are too good to sell, or that it will tarnish their M.O. as the fearless leader if they bother with something as petty as a sales call.
The Achilles’ heel of the Silicon Valley startup is that people are very good at selling themselves, their vision, their culture, and very bad at selling anything else.
If you are not willing to knock on doors, put your ego aside and hear “no” again and again, and be at the front line of building a relationship with your customer, you’re on a quick path to becoming just another startup or failed company statistic.
In the book I mentioned above, Pink provides a compelling and emotional plea to respect the great art of sales. I respect his work greatly, but I would add a crucial addendum to his thesis. Selling is not just human; it is the life or death of your business.
Source: The Ability to Sell Will Make or Break Your Company, So Stop Underselling It

One policy lesson to be drawn is that convincing low-SES students to enrol in selective universities may not by itself be enough to expand access to top jobs and top incomes. Integrating social networks at these institutions by gender and social background is also important. A number of recent studies (Rao forthcoming, Lowe 2018) provide evidence supporting the ‘contact hypothesis’—that people from different backgrounds become friends when pushed to interact—but results thus far focus on younger children an

Source: How elite universities shape upward mobility | VOX, CEPR Policy Portal

Timeout Limits The timeout limit in serverless architecture refers to the amount of time in which you are able to execute your functions. Most serverless architecture providers give a maximum timeout limit of 300 seconds. Anything that needs to run for longer than this, or which takes longer than this to run, is unsuitable for a serverless architecture setup.

Source: Leveraging Serverless Architecture – DZone Cloud

A comparison with medical degree programmes is informative. Medical degrees are similar to elite business degree programmes in that they admit only top-scoring students and in that earnings for those students are very high on average. They differ in that medical students are very unlikely to lead large companies or have incomes in the top 0.1% of the income distribution. As first shown in Hastings et al. (2013), admission to selective medical programmes leads to large earnings gains for low-SES students. In

Source: How elite universities shape upward mobility | VOX, CEPR Policy Portal

But those are vanity concerns — not business ones.  For the business, my pride doesn’t matter.  So I can’t think things like “if I were a good programmer, I’d do this best practice, or defensively code against that, or have a diligence checklist.”  Instead, I have to frame all of those things through the lens of business value and return on investment. To circle back to an earlier theme, is it embarrassing to push something into production that requires us to hand-type dates instead of using a date picker?

Source: How to Write Software: 5 Lessons Learned from Running Businesses

I’ve experimented with countless time-management techniques, but the results leave me forced to agree: by far the biggest predictor of whether something gets done is whether it’s fun to do. The secret of productivity is simple: just do what you enjoy.

Source: Is the secret of productivity really just doing what you enjoy? | Oliver Burkeman | Life and style | The Guardian

Four roads we call customer service
Road 1: I can learn from you and make things better
Road 2: You’re an important customer and I can bring empathy and care to this moment to strengthen our relationship
Road 3: I can teach you something and make things better
Road 4: Go away

Source: Four roads we call customer service | Seth’s Blog

Winterson offers:

1. Turn up for work. Discipline allows creative freedom. No discipline equals no freedom.
2. Never stop when you are stuck. You may not be able to solve the problem, but turn aside and write something else. Do not stop altogether.
3. Love what you do.
4. Be honest with yourself. If you are no good, accept it. If the work you are ­doing is no good, accept it.
5. Don’t hold on to poor work. If it was bad when it went in the drawer it will be just as bad when it comes out.
6. Take no notice of anyone you don’t respect.
7. Take no notice of anyone with a ­gender agenda. A lot of men still think that women lack imagination of the fiery kind.
8. Be ambitious for the work and not for the reward.
9. Trust your creativity.
10. Enjoy this work!

Source: Jeanette Winterson’s 10 Tips on Writing – Brain Pickings

My work with Dr. Rao reveals similar problems: Employees who start big programs are often celebrated, but rarely those who end old, obsolete and ineffective programs and practices. And managers who lord over big teams and keep adding underlings are rewarded with prestigious titles and big raises—even when their ever-expanding army of bureaucrats adds unnecessary rules and procedures that sap time and energy from people who do the most important work. Instead, the best leaders discourage this addition sickn

Source: How Bosses Waste Their Employees’ Time – WSJ

The Eclipse Foundation recently announced two milestone achievements in September 2018: the migration of GlassFish source code from Oracle has been completed; and the Java EE TCK is now open-sourced at Eclipse. GlassFish Application Server The migration of GlassFish source code from Oracle has been completed. Considered a major milestone for the advancement of Jakarta EE and a new era for GlassFish, the announcement continued to say:

Source: A New Era for GlassFish