R. Rajesh Jeba Anbiah

 I have huge respect for  David Barrett for his technical background. But, his company, Expensify is following a modern  psychometric test called a  question-based hiring process . The company claims to look for candidates with 'Talent, Ambition, and Humility'. The psychometric test was a fad in India about 20-years ago and the companies that followed the hiring approaches are no more and some have changed the approaches to survive. I just thought of blogging my thoughts here to see how Expensify evolves.

TLDR; Amazon.in shows and sends me a Prime offer that I can't avail (it leads to an error message) I have escalated this issue to Amazon India through various means, but the team wants screenshots (even after sharing them through Twitter) and so here's the post explaining that... 1. Amazon India sends me an email: Your Prime membership ends soon - Renew early to lock in old price of ₹999 1499 for another year of Prime. The newsletter comes like this: Rajesh, Renew Prime early and save ₹500 Your Prime membership ends soon Renew today Expiring soon DON'T GO A DAY WITHOUT PRIME! Your Prime membership ends soon - Renew early to lock in old price of ₹999 1499 for another year of Prime. Continue enjoying uninterrupted Prime benefits. Renew today Kindly ignore if you have already availed this offer. Please note that pro...

We have Clubhouse clones from Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, and now Spotify. Unlike others, Spotify seems to target directly into the Clubhouse audience/members. It is extremely obvious inside Clubhouse as you can find many spammy clubs and rooms created to attract the Clubhouse users. Greenroom Vs. Clubhouse I was stumbled upon one such room Clubhouse influencers are jumping off to Greenroom? - All things Hollywood . Few takeaways from the room are: Text chat is not available in Clubhouse, whereas it is available in Greenroom. This is the most talked-about USP. The recording feature is not available in Clubhouse and the same is available in Greenroom. Spotify has opened up a creator fund for Greenroom creators in the USA. However, I think, there are better indirect monetization options available for Clubhouse users. Stream's chat component & million-dollar opportunity? As I tweeted , Clubhouse can quickly bring the text chat feature by using Stream's chat component . If they...

I vaguely remembered that sometimes around 2009, engVid on YouTube was very popular. I especially liked a teacher by name Valen Smith's videos. She was not only beautiful but also very good at explaining the English usage. I also vaguely remembered to check her channel ValenESL around 2015. But, not sure what happened to her or engVid, all her videos are sadly gone. I have also noted that many people on Twitter were asking the same. Not sure what happened. Some people seem to have reuploaded her videos and YouTube continuously removing them with a note "This video contains content from LearnVid, who has blocked it on copyright grounds." Strangely though, on Facebook, some people have managed to create a fake account using her old channel name ValenESL.

Coronavirus (Covid 19 caused by SARS-CoV-2) pandemic and lockdown disrupted lives and market in a completely unexpected manner. One market that seen a spike during lockdown is MOOC and online education. What I realized of late is that many of these MOOC materials are not suitable for remote viewing. I have taken a couple of courses in random pseudonyms in Coursera and also another one in my real name in PadhAI conducted by IIT faculties. Most of these materials were recorded in a way as if they teach in physical classrooms. Because of that reason, they're very tiring to watch; they lack some basic video editing. Compare that to animated education videos posted to YouTube. One exception to this MOOC material is MIT 6.S191: Introduction to Deep Learning (I'm yet to watch them all though) Classical teaching jobs are in danger These days schools are starting up online classes that follow materials similar to these MOOCs. Students are finding hard to follow them as they're...

Personally, I compare this BlackLivesMatter campaign with India's secularism campaigns that tried to protect BJP and Narendra Modi from capturing the power. But, BJP's political marketing made that in favor of them and cleverly consolidated votes. A similar thing may happen in the US too in the upcoming presidential election.

NDA (Non-disclosure Agreement) is a common requirement in the Indian IT sector. So outsourcing clients indirectly forced the companies not to disclose the projects and other specifics. This in turn restricted many developers from contributing to the open-source and other community efforts. New age developers and NDAs I recently stumbled upon a resume of a fresher based in Chennai whose resume filled with speaker portfolios. Though the experience and meetup topics didn't look attractive, the overall presentation of the profile was great. In fact, that seems to have helped them to get a new attractive offer. In the Indian IT scene, the new fad is Product Management. Most of the young wannabe product managers are now speaking and presenting in many meetups. So nowadays it looks like these folks are not following NDAs or the clients have become lenient. International scenario I also stumbled upon highly talented Nadieh Bremer and Sara Soueidan websites. In fact, Nadieh Bremer h...

Today spoke about hardening WordPress at the WordPress meetup . It's a nice experience as the audience were from mixed backgrounds (developing, marketing, product management, etc). My slides and links are available in the Pinboard . I have also shared an actionable checklist to harden a WordPress instance, that anyone can use in the form of the Restyaboard app (Restyaboard similar to Trello but open source and can self-host).

Recently one of our customers sent design files in fig format (with .fig extension). As .fig is an extension used by famous old Linux design tool Xfig , we tried to open in it and were getting errors. And then the designer came to rescue and informed about the online tool Figma . Figma provides easy prototyping options for lazy aka productive designers. In my opinion, it is somewhat comparable to Pingendo . It is more of an online tool developed in JavaScript. They also provide desktop version / downloadable software. I'd thought that its performance will be better in desktop tool, but noted that it is only an Electron app.

Many people are getting shocked to know that I'm using Ubuntu in my workplace. Linux/Ubuntu is more of an alien here as Windows 10 and Mac OSX is having good market here. First of all, I'm a very happy Windows XP user. In XP, I used to do most of my JavaScript and PHP in  Devl , the editor that our team has developed. Reason for switching to Ubuntu MATE Primary reason for switching to Ubuntu was, at one point of time PHP team stopped supporting Windows XP . So, we're left with few options: 1. Upgrade to Windows Vista, 2. Switch to Ubuntu. We chose the second option to experiment it. One of the major challenges was choosing the right code editor and we chose VS Code . Ubuntu MATE - Pros Linux comes with lots of command line tools. I have started to do many tasks using these shell scripts and found very productive. We switched from Google Chrome to Chromium for good. Ubuntu MATE - Cons We started with GNOME for desktop, but it was memory hungry and was not ...

Tamil caste system and its hierarchies are complex and difficult to understand--due to different addressing systems. Similarly, the caste consolidation or grouping of similar or different castes under some title is extremely confusing. In many cases, the caste consolidation doesn't make any sense, but due to ulterior motives of politicians for their vote bank politics, these systems exist. So, to explain the system, I created a formula like cheat sheet: Vellalar = Pillai + Mudaliar + [Gounder] Pillai > Mudaliar ~ Gounder Thevar = Maravar + Kallar + [Agamudayar + [Senathipathi]] Senathipathi >>> Agamudiyar > Maravar ~ Kallar Agamudayar ~ Gounder Vanniyar = Padayachi + Gounder + [Naicker + [Reddy]] Naicker >>> Reddy > Padayachi ~ Gounder * Gounder is BC, Padayachi is MBC

I don't usually keep track of the projects that I worked on. I have been recently advised to keep resume updated with the projects list. And so I have searched for resume templates and tools. Indian resume Vs International resume During the process, I have found that there are vast differences between the format of Indian resumes and International resumes. Indian resumes are extremely verbose with number of projects, team size, client name, etc. whereas international format is more succinct and short. So I was kind of lost in the process in adopting the template. LinkedIn to the rescue? No. Unfortunately, LinkedIn format is "common" and is not easy to update. Moreover, these days LinkedIn has become signupware [sic] and so accessing resume is a nightmare. Enter JSON Resume JSON Resume is an awesome open source approach for creating resume. I accidentally came across while searching for JSON-LD format for resume. Couple of great features: Resume hosting (op...

Of late, I have worked on the development of AppleOnly.in , a website that sells cases, sleeves, covers, bags, etc for Apple MacBook Air/Pro, iPhone, etc. Because of that, people started to ask questions about cases and their reviews. I'll try to summarize my answers here: i-Blason Vs iBenzer -- what is the premium brand and why? Both i-Blason and iBenzer are from the USA. Hence, both are priced around Rs.3,000/- to Rs.8,000/-  i-Blason is relatively an established brand (and so, they're popular in social media) iBenzer is relatively new compared to i-Blason. But, cost wise and quality wise, iBenzer is much superior to i-Blason. For example, Hexpact by iBenzer is an award winning design at the CES At AppleOnly.in, we have not received a single return and complaints for iBenzer. But, many times, we have received complaints and returns from customers for i-Blason. What MacBook Pro/Air case would you recommend and why? I would personally recommend iBenzer cases with...

When one of my friends wanted home loan, it was taking a big mess as bank was asking lot of paper work. Now, I came across good bank contacts and so if any of you want home loan, message your contact number in comments section below. Note that your comments will not be published and your contact numbers will be shared with my contacts for further processing.

Our team has done some Machine Learning projects. When it comes to recommendation system, my favorite has been so far PredictionIO which was based on Apache Mahout (Now they have switched to Spark). I was also avidly learning Machine Learning for some time. My boss suggested me to attend the CTO Talk event hosted by OrangeScape. Its first session is “AI/ML in Flipkart” by Flipkart CTO Ravi Garikipati. As I mentioned earlier , I always had my skepticism towards these buzz words.  But, this presentation changed my perspective for good. Event The event started with welcome note by Rajesh Manickadas, Head of Engineering, OrangeScape. Then OrangeScape CEO Suresh Sambandam quickly introduced and handed over to Ravi Garikipati. Flipkart CTO Ravi Garikipati Ravi explained his journey from TCS in 1988 to IBM, Oracle, etc. He explained his earlier attempts of AI based virtual assistant for [24]7. Also, quickly connected with the audience through his remark about his connection with ...

Bubbles of bitcoin, blockchain, machine learning, deep learning, artificial intelligence and more People usually appreciate me for my predictions on technologies. As I already noted our team will quickly hit the edge case for any use cases and that's supposed to be the reason for my better prediction rate. And so, here are my predictions… Bitcoin bubble When Bitcoin became talk of the town/industry, I informed my boss and colleagues that I find no real use case for this digital currency--except in underground markets like drugs, etc. In fiat currencies, there is at least a way to take legal route, in case, if you've transferred the money and not received the goods. But, in Bitcoin, this is not possible at all as it is not a legal currency. So, if there is no trust, the chances that other person can cheat you by not sending the goods and or not transferring bitcoins after receiving goods. My stand above vindicated by the article Ten years in, nobody has come up with a...

How to Use Sodexo Meal Pass Card in Bigbasket.com Sodexo started to issue Smart Card similar to Credit Card--instead of their usual paper based vouchers. I was using Sodexo vouchers for longtime, but it was a big letdown when I can't get some of my unused vouchers renewed. And so, I was somehow happy with their new Meal Pass Card. But, again, it was a big letdown as I can't use it with BigBasket--where I usually use most of my meal coupon vouchers. SMS message from Sodexo on December 20, 2017 1:18 PM came as a big surprise, as I was waiting for this for longtime: Great News! Pay with your Sodexo Meal Card for food items ordered from Big Basket. Choose Sodexo in the payment section & pay on delivery. And so, this month, I tried to use my Sodexo Meal Pass Card in BigBasket. BigBasket website had not much information; I thought that I have to swipe my Meal Pass Card. Delivery person also didn't have much information; initially he was rejecting my Card! I trie...

Today (July 31st) is the last day for filing income tax returns. Donations to charity and political parties are exempted for tax under Indian income tax clause 80G . When it comes to donations, World Vision India used to be my choice because of their professionalism and prompt communications. Of late, having heavily impressed by Nisaptham Blogger 's writings about his charity work, I thought of sending meager amount to his charity Nisaptham Trust. Unfortunately, when I sent that in March, it was not a pleasant experience. I had to randomly follow him through email and WhatsApp to get PAN of Nisaptham Trust; he shared that PAN details after 3-months. When I try filing returns yesterday, it was another shock; apart from PAN, I also need to furnish the charity address. I quickly searched through Google and there were no results about the address; I can only find its bank account details. Google's autocomplete suggestions hinted the possibility of such queries by others thou...

Vodafone India is exposing website surfer/user's phone number to the partner website when using mobile data plan. It might be offering hidden API to those partner websites to uniquely identify users. I have noticed it around 1-year before, thought about blogging, but forgot it at that time. Now, I have got some time and so thought of explaining the issue. How I noticed the issue? Sometime ago, I've bought SanDisk microSD card. In the wrapper, they've mentioned about some offer about hungama (Still available in SanDisk website at www.sandisk.in/campaign/landing/hungama/offer_three). The URL mentioned was offers.hungama.com/sandisk3/ and when I opened that in my mobile browser, it was prompting with Welcome, 91-98XXXXXXXX . Phone number leaked by Vodafone India I was shocked as I never seen anything like that before. So, I immediately opened the same URL in my desktop browser and got completely different page: Desktop version of the same page And, aga...

" All owned house people in Chennai are lunatic ", some strangers were discussing in a bus. Since, I was reading Blessing or Curse: You Can Choose , book by Derek Prince , I thought little deeper on this. While analyzing on this topic, I have noted that the people of own house in Chennai are restless, have problematic personal and family life, prone of unexpected failures. Raju Murugan , once wrote about sons of Chennai soil in Ananda Vikatan magazine in which he's explained how these people are exploited and chased away from their own-native places. While correlating Derek Prince's doctrine and Raju Murugan's writing, I think, there are some curses.