Navaraga Blog

It has been a year since I started writing this blog. And almost 4 months since the last post. What a 4 months has it been! Even if you don’t consider the severe windstorm that uprooted a lot of the evergreen trees in the Seattle area and caused prolonged widespread power outages. Even if you ignore the snow falls, icy roads, school closures. What a 4 months has it been!

The second round of design gained momentum and is working well. Since we are building a lot on the cutting edge, there isn’t an established way for doing many of these things yet. So we resort to rapid evolution: design, use, build on what’s working well and jettison the rest fast. A metamorphosis of sorts. How do you know when you are done? At least in this field, when you get the viral effect going for you, and when your system is scalable enough to take on the viral growth. How much snow does it take and what else does it take to start the snowball effect (without the damage)?

How long does it take to get there? It depends on what kind of project/idea it is. How simple and how complex. How much you can get by extending existing systems and how much you have to build on your own. Mixing metaphors, it is a little like the gestation period for mammals. Approximately, half a month for a hamster, a month for a dog, a year for a donkey and a couple of years for an elephant. And then there are good elephants and bad donkeys Can you tell which is which from a sonogram? What you if saw them at 7, 14, 21, …?

Thus go the lyrics for St. Elsewhere album. I finally ran across a Lyrics site with a very familiar look and feel, but with no annoying popup ads; not sure how long that will stay. This album joins others (and online radio stations) for entertainment for the coding binge for the rev 2 of the project. We are going to do three quick revs, (built in luxury for redesign from scratch), to use the learnings from one rev for the other, to avoid locking into one prematurely and falling victim to the second system syndrome. With a lot of sampling from rev 1 and a lot of new code, rev 2 is showing a lot of promise. Sampling sure worked superbly in the album above. Excerpt from the New York Times article about the creators of that album:

he understands a critical truth about the creative process: good art can come from the minds of many, but great art usually comes from the mind of one.

Now, if you only put a lot of minds (capable of great art) together …… just kidding

Since the last post, a while ago, Veni, vidi, Vici. Not quite Vici though. We went the traditional routes with newspaper and online ads for recruting in India. Surprisingly, I didn’t hire any programmers there. I found several capable of “good art”, but decided to wait for ones capable of “great art”. But there was a good response for the other categories and we got some, IMHO superb folks. We went on a vacation to Italy and I’ll dip into the photos from that trip for a while. A little surprised with how much of a self-contained cosmos it was, open and closed, clearly open to the throngs of tourists (outnumbering the residents in some places), but it was hard to find non-Italian newspapers, magazines or non-translated movies in theatres. Some of the important landmarks of human history (from Pantheon to Pompeii), were reminders of how “life, liberty and pursuit of happiness” as an unalienable rights of every human being (not just some men), is a very recent concept (which isn’t even widely prevalent around the globe today). Given how much the country has achieved in about half a century though, may be it carries lessons for others. Overall, as Gene Hackman says in The Birdcage, “the foliage was beautiful”.

Thankfully though, in the modern age, concepts are easy to spread around. Might be hard to practice, but easy to copy. A blast from the past, 1859 in fact, Oliver Wendell Holmes says in The Atlantic

Form is henceforth divorced from matter. In fact, matter as a visible object is of no great use any longer, except as the mould on which form is shaped. Give us a few negatives of a thing worth seeing, taken from different points of view, and that is all we want of it. Pull it down or burn it up, if you please.
…..
We have got the fruit of creation now, and need not trouble ourselves with the core. Every conceivable object of Nature and Art will soon scale off its surface for us. Men will hunt all curious, beautiful, grand objects, as they hunt the cattle in South America, for their skins, and leave the carcasses as of little worth.

Nevermind photography, that Oliver was referring to. Internet for sure is accelerating this phenomenon.

Especially with the Internet though, it is all in your mind. It is all in your mind, on [the] line, as CeeLo sings soulfully in St. Elsewhere. Retreating back to creating mindscapes to bring you something fresh online… for your mind, if you please.

Munich. Says not just any one, but Huey Lewis, on Munich’s Hardest Hits. Munich? If it’s the same old back beat rhythm, it is beating loud on this Internet radio station on ShoutCast. I wonder what Huey would say on Radio Friko, Poland.

When it is really late at night, and I’m alone in this office, these radio stations keep me pretty good company, when it gets quiet in this mixed residential and business neighborhood. Really really quiet. Until a loud street cleaner drives around the building. Or until… I hear some footsteps inside this small locked building. First time it happened, around 2 A.M., I looked outside my window into mostly darkness. I see some light glimmering from my car parked outside, but I didn’t see any other cars, especially of the tenants upstairs (dental employment agency), who are extremely unlikely to be arriving at this hour. I hear more door slams, no responses to my hello’s. Should I take the cordless phone with me, be ready to dial 911? It is hooked up to the VOIP service and I remember reading some lengthy notice (even longer and more arcane than the End User License Agreements or typical Privacy Policies) on how the 911 service can work as expected (required by law), but usually have some gotchas and might not. I did have to reboot the phone once a week to keep it working. What if this is the time it doesn’t work? The fax line (POTS, Plain Old Telephone Service), where 911 should work, does not extend that far. This has been a pretty safe neighborhood. I had written off a couple of incidents I heard when I rented this place, as being rare with some bored high school kids vandalizing on their way to the apartment from school, than a robbery. Anyway, whosoever came in, should have seen me in this brightly lit office through the open blinds in the window. What’s all that sound and no hello? I turned down the volume on the Internet radio station, walked over and of course find a janitor hurriedly cleaning the bathrooms. She answers my question quickly while busily finishing off the cleaning. They had parked their vehicle outside Skin Bio, a tenant of a nearby building. I wondered if she was in a Nickel and Dimed predicament. I respectfully get out her way. A couple of weeks later, at a similar time, I heard an additional voice. Couldn’t tell if it was a supervisor or a co-worker. The brief sentences had a commanding tone to them. Nameless faces. Slipped away into the darkness. Leaving shiny clean bathrooms, for when the morning comes. The beat goes on. There is a weak but strange sense of connection to humanity at large, listening to the radio stations from around the world, where you hear rush hour traffic updates, when it is dark here, or you hear ads in a foreign language, interspersed among some popular rock songs. Life, in all of its gory and glory. I get back to coding. I just want it to work when the morning comes. Preferably shiny clean.

p.s. Prospective employees: You are not required to work really late. I’ve done that a couple of times, but the other employees weren’t here with me at that time. I was eager to complete three different frameworks I was coding, so I can set the foundation and hand them off. Heads down, I have and we have, made very good progress in June… I’ll describe another time, the software development process that works for me.

and after an intense debate, passed a resolution. Then I printed it on an official looking letterhead. I walked over to a nearby bank and got it notarized. Then carried it over to a nearby FedEx to send it by overnight to our CPA in Hyderabad. Our CPA would have to hand deliver it to the bank in Hyderabad. That completes the paperwork to have the bank account setup in the name of the subsidiary in Hyderabad. May be the Indian government doesn’t want the one person boards to get lonely passing resolutions ad nauseum. Or wants to add up some spice for some lively debates. They require at least two members on the board. That aside though, the logistics got drastically simpler.

Northwest Airlines has cut down the travel time drastically between Seattle and Hyderabad with just one stop over in Amsterdam. And Amsterdam, the free city since the 1200s, (that’s approximately what the inscription says on a T-shirt in the airport store), I guess wants to make the passage through the airport anything but free and easy. The immigration and emigration in Hyderabad and Seattle were a breeze compared to the detailed individual grilling of all the passengers, both ways. All the passengers, from wherevever, on their way to Seattle, or from where ever to Hyderabad.

For our whirlwind trip of only 5 days in Hyderabad, including the weekend, we got off to a slow start (a lot of effort with little results), and just when we thought that we’ll have to come back in a few weeks to wrap things up, things really picked up on the last day. We had trouble with the broadband connection. When I called the customer support though, the call got routed to someone in Oklahoma with a strong American accent and they weren’t very familar with the Hyderabad scene. It was really hard to get the problem fixed. Just kidding. The local customer support representatives were very responsive. But it still takes time to send the technician over to the cable hub to upgrade some frequencies. Time that we didnt have a lot of. It would have been easier to ward off the sweltering heat, bounced off of and intensified by the white walls of the offices, if only we could get on the net and explore getting another diploma or find a lower mortgage rate while combing through the junk mail.

But things did pick up. We had good disussions with our key person from Hyderabad. And now back in Seattle gaining some momentum…

Here are some photos from our whirlwind trip to Hyderabad very recently…

That promising prospect for office space lease came through. I now have an office at 12827 SE 40th Place, Bellevue, WA 98006. Here is the Live Photo and Google Map. After a new carpet and a full coat of paint (thanks to my family), it is looking pretty nice inside. It is always location, location, location, isn’t it, with the real estate. It didn’t seem to matter as much that this place is right smack in the center of civilization, close to an urban center at intersection of I-90 and I-405, with plenty of restaurants in walking distance, not to mention two Starbucks, one Tullys and a Jitters drive-through, it might as well have been in the Boondocks as far as the Internet Service Provider was concerned. “It is thirteen thousand one hundred and (long pause) thirty eight feet. We might just barely be able to get the signal through. You can get just a basic broadband”. Sure, I’ll take it. I’ll get a fully bonded, enamel strenghtening T1 later on. On being the center of civilization though, I’ll have to admit that Factoria doesn’t hold a candle to Fremont neighborhood of Seattle. Unlike Fremont, Factoria does not have a monument with an inscription proclaiming it to be the center of the Universe.

As a sales person for a telephone company recounted, “we can turn off a service instantaneously. It is just the setting up, that can take days.” Just like life. Days to get a fax line with no frills: 5. Days to get broadband: 12, delayed to 16. Days to get a telephone line through VOIP: 30. Thanks to the complex deregulation of telephone monopoly and the enriching of the English language with obscure acronyms: ILEC, CLEC, RBOC, POTS. After hearing great things about the local Internet Service Provider: Speakeasy with national presence, I decided to go with them and put up with the wait, as they go through two other intermediaries before they can find a copper path to the office. Speakeasy has been great so far. Refreshingly knowledgeable and no-nonsense.

I haven’t heard the dialup modem sounds as frequently as I have when I was playing a Todd Rundgren song in late 90s. It was one of the first songs to be released for digital downloads through windows media from my digital rights management days. I can’t find that song anymore, but it did make the crackling modem noises melodic. After getting used to really high speeds at the Bellevue Regional Library, the interim dialup access has slowed down our external activities limiting the focus on the Intranet side. Talking about “our”, Brian is on board. And Daron is on his way. Recent graduates. No, neither of them is ex-Microsoft. Brilliant, nevertheless.

The whirlwind making of the short film is out of the way as well. Irrespective of how it does in the contest, we are all very pleased with how it turned out. About 20 people (with the top two actors coming from established Seattle Improv scene) came together at short notice and after several hundreds, in total, of man-hours, woman-hours and child-hours, it is done. It made me realize yet again, how many similarities there are between making a movie and doing a software startup for a new idea. If you have a well written script and a talented cast and crew, where people are good at what they do and understand their roles, you have magic. It was crazily hectic. You have unexpected snags, it is easy to lose sight of the forest when you rearrange the trees under a microscope, but when it is all done, when it all put together, tweaking hours on end into the dawn, when you sit back, relax and watch the preview, if you can enjoy it, it is worth it.

Back to the business. I have a script that I’m feeling good about. Pretty good, as a matter of fact. Some of the location scouting is done. Some of the gear is in place. The cast and crew is coming together. We’ll be bringing more talent and filming for a while, a long while, before we take the best cuts and put them together. Until then, as I pull up daily into the parking lot of the new office right behind the McDonalds, I’ll have to look up longingly towards the golden arches at the “billions and billions served” sign.

I’ve been looking at renting a place for my business in SoDo (south of downtown, Seattle), Capitol Hill and Bellevue. I was looking for something cheap, safe, with some character, but cheap. The importance of the office space is not that high for me. Online presence is! Most of the people will be scattered in various cities. I’ve been getting a lot done in my nomadic existence thus far (will work with WiFi, 110v is a bonus). Agonizing choices though: Bohemian but run down or Sturdy but staid? Who do you want as your neighbors: Anti-war group that gathers large numbers of people to plan future protests or Casualty claims group. Or body molding? Can you call a glass covered hole in the wall overlooking an adjacent wall, a window? The previous tenants surely found the nealy laid bricks cheerful, especially when the light manages to sneak through the cracks to highlight the cement patches. “Parking? don’t worry about it, just get in here early. It is very safe, we were broken in only once in the last six months. They only took a few computers.”

The place that is promising right now, has the fewest of these drawbacks. Getting this place has become a bottleneck though, as I decided to get a T1 line to this place to bring the service online, than to host it somewhere else. With all the custom software, it’ll be better to have the boxes nearby until the software matures, for gentle nudges or to funnel the emotions.

By the way, the furious coding phase ended a few weeks ago, when the system started working end to end. Thanks for checking on me, PD. The abstract concept is taking life and is even more appealing. Now I know all the sub components, their complexity and what it takes to pull them together for an intuitive experience.

On other logistics, I’ve setup a bank account with WaMu. Somehow, when their employee was leisurely talking on her phone avoiding eye contact with a prospective new client, my experience fell short of the images they projected in their TV ads. But it was just one employee. The manager setup the account (great to see), even if she was a little rusty on setting these up. What was surprising was what she had to do to setup the account: Go online, fill in a bunch of forms, get frustrated with some aspects, just as much as anyone else might do with online activies. The fact that she was a manager might have given her access to some pages, but she was as helpless struggling though the sites to get something done as everyone else. These computers are taking over the world. There might be some opportunies in those online services!

The place in Hyderabad is coming along well too. One of the various phases of the subsidiary registration in India is done. The office is getting furnished. And talking to a few very good people. I now have an NDA form ready. I’m finally committing the verbal descriptions to paper. Ok, bytes. I want to do as much of these activies online as possible.. as soon as the website is up, as soon as the office space is ready…

And as if these aren’t engaging enough, on the hobby side, I’m also pulling together a short film for an upcoming contest. It is interesting to relive the amazing parallels between software startups and film making. The script is done. Talented cast and crew is mostly lined up. Dry run filming went well. Additional gear/place is rented for. The edited version came under the time limits set for the contest. Of course, the life cycle for this movie is much much shorter than the software startup, and thus moving much faster. We’ll have to just wait and see how these unfold.

After a quick but broad scan (bought and scanned through a few dozen books; searched the Internet), I carved out a space for my concept, figured out ways to monetize it and settled on a path to build it. Instead of elaborating it and refining it through presentations and words for what might or might not be feasible or very appealing, I thought I’d just start coding and see where it goes. After about 2000 lines of code, I got most of the framework setup and some components working. When this last major one is done, I should have an end to end system working, however rudimentary. And I can’t wait for it, delaying everything else until that point.

2000 lines of code, like 2000 pounds of material, is not a good indicator of the value by itself. Sand or Saffron? In Python though, 2000 lines can get you pretty far. I once wrote a rudimentary messenger client and hooked it up to an Eliza like program in less than 100 lines, and a bare bones SIP Proxy in less than 50. (That is not what I’m doing now). There are others that have done more in fewer lines, as in this 15 line p2p program. (I am not doing this either, nor using this as a model for code readability. I understand that wasn’t their point:)).

When I have several hours of uninterrupted time though, if I get into a zone and start coding, it is a great rush. When I am in the zone, I can code about 100 lines an hour, which starts working right away. And when I am not, I can barely get 20 going, before tinkering with existing code to perfect it. Or worse, waste a couple of hours, experimenting and ploughing through reference manuals to see if there is a way to do something in a couple of lines, for what would otherwise take 60. But when I get back in the groove, it is fast going.

It is a strange state of mind, to translate raw imagination straight into code, bypassing conscious thought, especially verbal thought, to see how the code manifests and to add to it iteratively. It is extremely productive when you are in the zone and keep getting it right. Getting it right is the key, since you are bypassing all standard procedures. But since the concept in my head is not a 500 page user tested document, (judging the direction is easy; comprehensive description is massively time consuming), I’m finding that this is the fastest and natural way to elaborate. Show and Tell vs. Tell and Guess or Tell and Confuse

And at this early stage of the company with only me, it is a luxury I can afford, coding late at night at home with my System76 Gazelle listening to music (spending the day time with family or running errands or playing sports guilt free) or coding in the middle of the day silently in the library. This is also very clarifying for myself on who I need to hire for exactly what and when and what is needed to distinguish this concept.

Until the system starts to work end to end….

I joined Seattle Python Interest Group (SeaPIG). Although it has a couple of hundred members in its mailing lists, apparently about a dozen get together for the monthly meetings. The March meeting happened in our house, as they were looking for a place and we volunteered. It was good to make some connections and have some shop talk with some nice friendly folks: PyCon news (Stackless used by a massively multiplayer online game Eve Online, IronPython, Twisted, PyPy, TurboGears)), one person getting their home machine root-kit-ted to various python projects in the area.

In the last couple of weeks, I attended my farewell party at Microsoft. (Thanks for organizing it BB, SL, BM). It was good to be back briefly in a familiar environment in a familiar context, with some of the people I feel close to with an exciting shared past, even as the present diverges. But I didn’t have the context when David stopped by. Missed it while I was in India. Time flew by, before duty called, with some mere Hellos and some longer conversations and some permanence in a memento.

I filed papes for incorporating my company in the state of Washington. I also kicked off the process for registering its subsidiary in India.