While reading Amazon Video Goes Global… It is fun to make predictions now and see in 4 years how they turn out. My prediction: in 4 years Netflix runs out of money to buy and produce their own shows. Netflix’s current offering for movies and TV shows will be squeezed to be a much smaller library […]
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This week I learned something new about myself. I learned that what I’m thinking in my head, when not explicitly told to those I love, is not necessarily known to those love ones. This seems like a very obviously point, but I often make this mistake. I think this could be that I […]
Read moreAll of us have a key that enters our front door. We believe that no one else can get in without a key and we entrust this front door key only to people we absolutely trust. The security of your front door is an illusion. The door can be easily broken […]
Read moreSource: Apple’s iPhone 7 Plus expected to come with 256GB of storage – Business Insider After reading this headline, I ask myself why we need 256 GB of storage? Most phones I’ve looked at from my family has these top 3 types of data that consumes the storage on their phones Apps Photos Videos If […]
Read moreDear LinkedIn, You are the only service out there to discover data about companies both private and public, what type of employees work there, which universities the employees graduated from and lots of other useful data about the professional lives of the workers. LinkedIn is a fantastic service for professionals. There have been many articles in recent years […]
Read moreThis morning I was lucky to have some homemade almond milk left over and decided pull a shot of espresso and foam some milk. Usually almond milk doesn’t foam up enough micro foam to allow my amateur skills to be able to do any sort of latter art. This morning, I was able to finally […]
Read moreJust putting a theory out there that Pokémon will not last as the top game longer than Sept 1st 2016. Most adults will get tire of the game since they never grew up with it. Once you have tried to walk most of the city you are living and working in, there is no more […]
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This is worth listening to learn about how Facebook thinks about software and expecially how they are trying to push software developer forward for the entire industry. React and React Native are being called out as very successful open source projects from Facebook. Cassandra has also been a huge winner. The interesting take […]
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Splunk’s Company Mission I like the simple and clear mission: We make machine data accessible, usable and valuable to everyone Update: Oct 24, 2018 2 years at Splunk so far Personal I’ve started a large community of badminton players and even setup a badminton net in our court yard I’ve grown a community of engineering helping each other virtually on Slack I’ve […]
Read moreI understand the free services like LinkedIn, Yahoo, Google, Facebook are supported by ads. But the ads are not well targeted or creepy and repetitive, too much in your face (2nd post on LinkedIn, every 5-7 posts on Yahoo.com) and ultimately waste a lot of my time scrolling pass them in order to see relevant content. […]
Read moreSign of the times, no more freebies. I am not sure how this will convince me to stay using Evernote or pay for it. It only makes me want to export my notes out to Google docs or One Note. “At Evernote, we are committed not only to making you as productive as you can […]
Read moreMarking my 2nd month at Splunk. I really love the culture of being data driven at everything we do. Being here at Splunk already opened up my mind as to how I can grow and learn as an engineer because of the people and the relentless focus on execution and innovation.
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This week I really enjoyed and learned from the following links and podcast. Inspiration Graduating and Looking for Your Passion? Just Be Patient … advice to young graduates is not to “follow your passion” but rather, to “foster your passion.” – link Podcast: Advice for the Aging: Learn Something ‘Different and Hard’ – When journalist Gerald Marzorati faced retirement, he […]
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Some of the material from the web I loved reading on the web and used for my work at Splunk. Apps: Water Drink Reminder: Android and Android Wear app to help remind me to drink 72 oz of water for my weight. Love: NYTimes: Why You Will Marry The Wrong Person – an interesting take on […]
Read moreIt’s not incompetence, but competence, that causes companies to be disrupted. That applies to big companies and small, as well as people too. Or so argue Clayton Christensen and Marc Andreessen in this podcast, based on a conversation at Startup Grind (moderated by Derek Anderson) between the a16z co-founder and Harvard Business School professor Christensen […]
Read moreApple iPhone, Once a Status Symbol in China, Loses Its Luster http://nyti.ms/1VChAbY “I like Apple a lot,” she said. “I use an Apple computer. But in recent years, especially after I tried my friends’ Android phones, I realized that the brand has lost a bit of its charm.”
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My daughter is taking up writing and publishing her stories publicly on WattPad. Her current series is based on the seven sins and she is trying to take on seven different writing styles. Give it a try and support her efforts in putting her writing out there :) You will have to sign up for […]
Read moreFrom Edmond Lau’s The Effective Engineer blog 1. Optimize for iteration speed. Quick iteration speed increases work motivation and excitement. Infrastructural and bureaucratic barriers to deploying code and launching features are some of the most common and frustrating reasons that engineers cite during interviews for why they’re leaving their current companies. Read the rest of […]
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(The photo is from a customer of my restaurant I Privé) We all love to take advantage of user contributed reviews such as Yelp, Amazon, Airbnb. They give us another trustworthy dimension to decide whether we want to go to a particular restaurant, buy that bluetooth headphone or rent that vacation apartment. Based on owning […]
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(The photo is of my sister and I in China 1975) I was listening to Leo Laporte’s Tech Guy podcast and he was commenting on the FBI vs Apple case about unlocking an iPhone used by the the shooters. He was pointing out the following misconceptions in the popular press. Inspired by his comments about […]
Read moreThe Apple Watch got me hooked on mechanical watches https://marco.org/2016/02/05/watch – Tony Tam
Read moreI have partnered with my best friend from middle school Stanley Chan (bio) to open up a modern sushi restaurant, I Privé, in downtown Burlingame in 2014. We have been in business for little over 14 months now. The restaurant serves innovative Japanese food that combines flavor, texture and sauces to bring “not just another […]
Read moreI’m using one of his tips, which is to create a high priority email address for everyone important in your life and a 2nd email for everything else.
The neuroscientist that brought us bestsellers “This is Your Brain on Music” and “The World in Six Songs” has turned his attention to the problem of organization. Dr. Daniel Levitin’s new nonfiction book, “The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload,” combines scholarly research and interviews with people like Michael Bloomberg, George Shultz and Sting with practical tips on how to organize our homes, social lives, time and more.
Source: Ten Tips on Organizing Your Mind, from Dr. Daniel Levitin – Speakeasy – WSJ
1. Take breaks.
2. Set up different computer monitors for different activities.
3. Embrace a (modified) paper to-do list.
4. File correspondence in multiple ways.
5. Purge, when needed.
6. Designate time for short tasks and longer projects.
7. Don’t spend more time on a decision than it’s worth.
8. Sleep, and nap on the job.
9. Don’t over-organize.
10. Leave work at work.
Despite being cleared by the FTC in 2013, Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman still believes that Google is sometimes evil. And there’s some irony in that. Source: Yelp CEO talks Google ‘cloak and dagger’ – Business Insider
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The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), the body responsible for overseeing the internet’s technical standards, has approved HTTP 451, “an HTTP Status Code to Report Legal Obstacles”. The new status code will show viewers when a web page is being blocked for legal reasons.Source: Error 451 is the new HTTP code for online censorship (Wired […]
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Source: One Founder’s Desperate Battle To Keep Workers Employed | Caroline Fairchild | LinkedIn Stembel can’t afford to hire a number two because she is devoting a significant portion of her revenue to a cost that her competitors eschewed long ago. Namely, she employs all 48 of her workers — her bike couriers, car drivers and […]
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See this video capture showing native ads (promoted tweets) in my twitter client app. The positions 1 3 4 5 9 10 are ads, where is my real content?
Read moreWhat I want for Christmas from LinkedIn Incentivize people to actually update their profiles and update with a real resume Either make resume (in PDF) a first class part of your LinkedIn professional profile. (do not send an update to your network, I don’t mind my boss finds an updated resume, but I don’t want […]
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No only can you now use Yahoo to check emails from GMail and AOL. The coolest feature is that Yahoo implemented a backend search that is way better than any email client could do. Check out how cool and fast the searches are. Download here https://overview.mail.yahoo.com/features/multiplemailboxes Power users: try these searches from:tony – emails sent from yahoo.com […]
Read morelink: http://www.bitrebels.com/lifestyle/18-ways-to-be-more-positive/
Read moreDo you have the same password for multiple online accounts? Imagine the worst case senario that can happen if any of your accounts were hacked. These types of accounts are a nightmare if they were hacked: your email, Apple account, bank account, LinkedIn, Facebook, twitter. You could be publicly embarrassed, financially compromised or worst, compromise […]
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I’m proud to work for Yahoo, to be part of the dog fooding of this new app inside Yahoo. The team that worked on the new Yahoo Messenger app is awesome! Check out the features!! http://yahoo.tumblr.com/ and http://messenger.yahoo.com Animated gif search from tumblr directly from Yahoo Messenger unsend (is that even a word?) any message, […]
Read moreInteresting look at automation at the task level.. the mundane parts of the job can be automated, but not the entire job. Automation Will Change Jobs More Than Kill Them http://nyti.ms/1kfj78b – Tony Tam
Read moreWe do not pay for cable, never did and do not have a TV. We do have movie projector and a 90″ drop down screen. Looking at our digital entertainment obligations: We get recent DVD ‘s free from the San Francisco public library. We pay for Comcast for 6mbps for faster internet than AT&T, this […]
Read moreEvernote Basic subscribers can save up to five emails to their Evernote account. To continue using the feature, you must upgrade your Evernote account. Today when I emailed a note to my notebook, I got the above paywall message. I used to love Evernote. You can create notes very quickly, you can email notes to […]
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I have developed a set of small apps that I have published to the Apple Store and Google Playstore. Recently I have been playing around with Android Wear and a refurbished 2014 Moto 360 watch and wrote a simple app on the watch to only focus on 3 todo’s a day, call ‘tri wear‘. The […]
Read moreThe best way to tell if your speech is going to go well is to give your speech. The best way to find out if your new product has market appeal is to try to sell it. The best way to become a teacher is to teach. There’s a huge need for study, refinement and […]
Read moreIt wasn’t Professor Plum in the Library with the Candlestick. So what killed Twitter? Source: Why Twitter’s Dying (And What You Can Learn From It) — Bad Words — Medium
Read moreYahoo has a new pitch to email users: Forget about your password. Source: WSJ http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2015/10/15/yahoo-offers-password-free-login-for-email/ and… The new @Yahoo Mail app is out. There’s magic at every tap…and now supports Hotmail, Outlook.com and AOL Mail! Learn more here: Yahoo Tumblr
Read moreFrom Pamela Fox of Kahn Academy http://blog.pamelafox.org/2015/10/voice-coaching-what-i-learned.html I use my voice a lot. I give talks at conferences, I teach workshops for GDI, and I record videos for Khan Academy. But I’ve never loved my voice. I grew up with British parents, so I spent my life wishing I had an accent that sounded as […]
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I decided to start development for Android Wear this week after seeing my co-worker Ollie’s watch and him mentioning that it’s a new space to get into while it’s still relatively young niche in the mobile market. I bought the Moto 360 (2014) model from Amazon for roughly $124 (refurbished). My daughter (14 years old) […]
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Dear Yelp, I am writing to you as a small business owner as well as a loyal foodie using your app to find great places to eat. I have rated over 100 small businesses, most restaurants. I manage the digital infrastructure of 2 restaurants in the Bay Area and the Yelp for Business Owner pages. Everyone has […]
Read more2018 update: Now I have box.com for long term storage, dropbox for daily syncs update: box.com is not doing any better either after my switch. The box.com sync app hung and I had to kill it. Recently the dropbox.com sync app on my Mac has been chewing up 100% of my CPU causing my machine […]
Read morePlatforms, distribution and audience http://ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2015/9/14/distribution-and-audience – Tony Tam
Read moreEven though I work in high tech, I don’t really understand business that loose money during their entire existence. How can that be a business? I invest in a restaurant that is luckily profitable after 1 year. We offer a product people value and are willing to pay for. We have investors who want to […]
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We are celebrating my mom’s 74th birthday today. She is a medical licensed pediatrician in China. When my family immigrated to the United States in 1980, her medical degree was not recognized here in the states and she lack the basic English to be medical doctor here. She took on a job as a seamstress […]
Read moreAfter owning the I Prive restaurant for over a year and helping run the digital infrastructure as well as posting job openings on Craigslist, I have a theory that a lot of people who used to work part time at restaurants are now working as drivers for Lyft or Uber. The hours are probably more […]
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I have played badminton for half my life. Four years in high school, four years for the UC Berkeley club, then I picked it up again very seriously trained and competed for 3 years and now I play for fun with my co-worker and near my house. I love playing of course because of […]
Read morequoted from synopsis East•Side Sushi introduces us to Juana, a working-class Latina single mother who strives to become a sushi chef. Years of working in the food industry have made Juana’s hands fast—very fast. She can slice and dice anything you throw at her with great speed and precision. Forced to give up her fruit-vending […]
Read more(dinner at the restaurant that I own in Burlingame, I Privé ) / stepping up my high horse I would love to see this in the perfect world for a product support experience. 1) Takes me zero effort to report a problem, make this as easy as possible. Realtime chats, email. 2) I get an […]
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As a software engineer, I had one of the most rewarding day in recent months. When I got into the office, a developer from Flickr filed a ticket about UI browser testing into another Jira queue (bug tracking) and I happen to see that it’s related to the SauceLab project I now own as a […]
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My co-workers and I were doing some user studies with an internal developer who was using our tools in order to see how he was using it daily and also asking him how he debugs problems with our tools. It was amazing to see the developer go to the homepage of the tool, he noticed a […]
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In the restaurant that I own, I Privé in downtown Burlingame we receive a lot of feedback from our customers. Yelp, Travelocity and Facebook users send us both positive and negative reviews, all of them public. We solicit private feedback from our diners via email. We leave paper forms in the final bill before they […]
Read moreReally enjoyed this background of DevOps as a movement to remove friction from a product idea to a feature making it to the end user. Not focus just on continuous delivery, not focused on specific tools. Worth listening to for anyone who cares about how to increase the velocity and quality of software releases http://softwareengineeringdaily.com/2015/08/31/origin-of-devops-with-john-and-damon-from-devops-cafe/
Read moreI am a partner at a modern Japanese restaurant in Burlingame, California http://facebook.com/iprive Our new Salmon Fiesta dish is as good as it looks. Enjoy six pieces of wild king salmon sashimi wrapped in cucumber and mango, served with sweet vinaigrette. It’s a refreshing and delightful way to begin your dining experience. And if salmon […]
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On August 08, 2015 my wife and I decided to get out of the stock market 75% into bonds. Leaving 25% in the market. We made this decision because my daughter will be going to private high school for 4 years and very shortly she will need money for college. We asked ourselves 3 questions […]
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Slides: http://www.slideshare.net/jedi4ever/code-but-not-as-we-know-it-infrastructure-as-code Book Preview: http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920039297.do ” With Early Release ebooks, you get books in their earliest form—the author’s raw and unedited content as he or she writes—so you can take advantage of these technologies long before the official release of these titles. You’ll also receive updates when significant changes are made, new chapters as they’re […]
Read moreI love listening to podcasts. This is a good list of podcast by developers for developers. I am currently catching up on the old episodes of ‘Debug’ http://simpleprogrammer.com/2014/03/10/ultimate-list-developer-podcasts/ – Tony Tam
Read more“From conducting Equity Research at Thomas Weisel to entering tech as the CFO of Playdom (which she helped sell to Disney for $760mm), Christa Quarles went on to senior roles at Disney and Nextdoor. She is now the CFO of OpenTable and is in charge of figuring out the strategy for what OpenTable does next […]
Read morehttp://www.rosietheriveter.org/ “As the U.S. faced a new and daunting challenge of a global war in the 1940s, people on the home front came together as never before. The stories of their struggles, which broke barriers and shaped many of today’s best social innovations, chart a path for new vision today. Rosie the Riveter is a […]
Read moreGet IP Address from Command Line http://davidwalsh.name/get-ip-address
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We will all die one day. That is the way of life, it’s interesting that even kids realize their parents will die one day and they don’t seem very surprised by that. It’s an eventual fact all humans accept as part of life. People often say “live life as if it’s your last”. I interpret […]
Read more(repost from 1/9/2007) I believe I have a healthy relationship with money. I know how to invest my money, I know how to earn money, and most importantly I know how to spend money on the people in my life. I usually don’t make such bold statements since I’m usually a humble person. Money in […]
Read more(old post from 2007) Kate loves watching Blue’s Clues and especially one episode, “Steve goes to college”. So tonight, instead of reading she wanting me to tell her all about college. I used this perfect timing to tell her about learning and doing well in school. Kate: “Is there a pink college? I want to […]
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Don’t be that person who does not respond to emails who does not respond to feedback who is late to meetings who says he will do something but doesn’t after repeatedly reminded who speaks at a level of detail that is too little or too much in an executive meeting who gets too emotional in […]
Read moreWhile chatting informally with some co-workers, I heard some of them talking about their frustrations about not feeling recognized for their work or working on projects they don’t think makes a difference. Corporations, which usually mean people in management roles, value those individuals who go beyond doing what they are told to do and look […]
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The original post was in 2005, when C. was 5 years old. A few days ago, C asked “Dad, will I hate you as a teenager?” I was a bit caught off guard. I told C that it’s possible that when kids grow into their teenage years, their hormones could change, and they will be testing the […]
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(Repost from 2006) So this film producer and I were chatting on the train back from Copenhagen and we got on the subject of working for Yahoo! and I was telling him about how I got a very unique perspective about the major news events the last 7 years. Almost 100% of the people out there […]
Read moreI sometimes say in jest that in the corporate world the “humans are the problem”. Communication, expectation and difference in perspectives are some of what causes executions of projects to not work. This is a response to frustrations expressed by people on my team that “other” people are doing things the “wrong” way. I find […]
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I grew up in communist China from 1970 to 1979 before coming to the United States. This photo is a rare photo of our family together. This is the time when China just opened their immigration policy to allow people to leave China. My mom was a pediatrician, my dad was an architect. I have […]
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I was visiting this jewelry store in Rome by a very famous jewelry maker Diego Percossi Papi (exibition). The shop is tiny and I was a bit intimidated since the jewelry were all well over $1,000. I looked into the shop for a good 5 minutes until the owner/designer buzzed me in and told me […]
Read moreApril 21st, Google will rank sites higher if they are mobile friendly. Check out your site’s mobile readiness with Google’s tool https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/
Read moreNicholas Zakas take on consensus building. http://www.nczonline.net/blog/2015/04/14/consensus-driven-development/
Read moreIn 2013, public relations executive Justine Sacco tweeted an offensive AIDS joke before boarding a flight to South Africa. By the time she landed, she had been denounced around the world, and lost her job soon after. Did Sacco deserve her public humiliation? Or was she yet another victim of social media shaming and a […]
Read moreShout out to Micharl Radwin of Yahoo. https://ruthlessray.wordpress.com/2013/09/02/inventing-favicon-ico/
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I am working on an Android app which takes the menu data from Locu.com API display the dinner, drink, dessert menu and allows a customer to add items they are interested in into a ‘cart’ for the wait staff to look at and discuss the item the customers are interested in. I’m using the project […]
Read moreFlickr Tab in Chrome brings beautiful images to every new tab | Flickr Blog. Fast and beautiful!!
Read moreNYTimes: Pointing Fingers in Apple Pay Fraud http://nyti.ms/1AQkQkq
Read more42 Rules to Lead by from the Man Who Defined Google’s Product Strategy – First Round Review.
Read moreThis article reminds me of how I felt as a single parent with C.. Scared, protective and constantly worried. As she is heading to high school, I wish to teach her to be independent, free thinker, know to fail and recover. For other parents, this article is a great read amd a reminder that being […]
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In helping my friend’s modern Japanese I Privé raise awareness, we decided to try to pay for marketing on Facebook, Yelp, Yahoo, Google. Here is what I’ve learned about the effectiveness of these companies. Keep in mind that is this my owner personal experience and not based on a large marketing budget and only apply to a […]
Read moreWatch his talk on YouTube Programming is one of the hardest things humans do Programming uses Head and Gut, we don’t really know how we do it JavaScript: Good Parts. Bad Parts. It was done in 10 days and released to the wild JSLint : defines and professional subset of JavaScript JSLint will hut your […]
Read moreThere is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
Read moreMike Long on Modern C++ and the C++ Memory Model.
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(Photo from my restaurant I Privé) I listened to Bob Sutton’s podcast on Scaling Excellence Successfully podcast fro the Center for Social Innovation podcast at Stanford I checked out his blog and found a list of books he recommends. I’ve put To Sell is Human, By Dan Pink. in my SF library queue. (I removed the referral […]
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In high school I played badminton for 4 years. I liked the sport, but did not love it. When I went to UC Berkeley, I join the badminton club and we trained and competed against other colleges. We would travel both days on weekends, come back as a team, have dinner together and laugh about the […]
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I’ve struggled with having too many meetings where I didn’t find them useful, but I felt that there is 10 minutes of useful information so I go to get that info. This particular week, I’ve had several useful meetings. The 3 attributes of these meetings that made them particularly productive are 1) They are 30 […]
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I am in a position to evaluate different point of sale systems for a restaurant I’m invested in (I Privé). There are 3 different business models I have seen. Take a percentage of every credit card transaction, give away the hardware Hosted software, charge a recurring monthly fee per hardware device Sell one time hardware, […]
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Out of a team of 10 people, how do you standout without making others look bad? Figure out what is the BHAG. Out of the 10 features, bugs, on the list of todo, what are the most important pieces that move the needle? Write down all your ideas about improving, developing those 2 things. Ask […]
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If you want to start doing something and improve and do it really well, I suggest you do it everyday. Even if it is only 10 minutes a day, find some time to do it. 10 minutes a day, 365 a year is 3650 minutes a year, almost 60 hours. You will find that once […]
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When you decide on what to spend your time on at work, try to spend your time that you can actually make a big impact. Otherwise in today’s corporate world, you don’t get credit or acknowledgement on it. Either decide not to work on it, or if you decide to spend X% of time on […]
Read moreEmbrace the fact that you won’t get the exact number right. But make sure to get the order of magnitude correct. Should you be getting 50, 500, 5000, 50,000 customers? If you get 30,000 page views, 6,000 clicks and 50 customers what that’s a good marketing return on investment? Once you have mastered being able […]
Read moreWhen you are working on something time passes by without you knowing it. When you start creating a list of things that you want to continue improving and you’re actually getting them done. Whenever you have a free moment when you’re thinking about it or doing something for it. You wish you have more time […]
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