One of the most important things about any career is continued learning. If you can learn something new every week, you’ll stay happy and more fulfilled (a quick Google search for “learning and happiness” will bring up a ton of articles explaining why this is true).
In my own career, I’ve gone through periods of learning and times when not much changes or is new. What I’ve slowly realized over the years is that this is something I should pay explicit attention to and understand my learning rate over larger periods of time when it’s easy to lose sight of the importance of this.
As both reflective and forward motivating, I hope this once-a-week series of posts can be useful to both you and me. If anything, maybe you can learn something from my week.
Business
- Org Vision – I came upon this idea during a conversation with one of the engineering directors at my company. The context for how it came up is probably worth a post on it’s own, but what struck me is when looking at building a business, product vision is one of the things most sought at the very beginning, but as the product vision becomes realized and the team executing that vision grows, it becomes important to think about the structure of the team itself, and the types of roles you need within the team to execute the vision long term. Note that this is separate from figuring out how a specific person fits into that org vision – if you do the reverse and try to fit a person into an org without a specific org vision in place, you may find that you’ve only delayed the question of org vision and fit till later.
- Give and Take Maxims – I’m currently working through Give and Take by Adam Grant and I thought that I would list out some of the more memorable maxims.
- Think of everyone as a bloomer – If you expect greatness from everyone on your team, they’re more likely to grow into those expectations, regardless of talent.
- If an ask takes 5 min, say yes – Anyone should be willing to do something that only takes 5 minutes, even if there is no obvious benefit to the person being asked.
- Escalation of Commitment – This was a pretty interesting idea. When you make a bad decision, trying to stay the course and prove the decision was actually right just makes things worse. The sunk cost fallacy applies to decision making and people so don’t be afraid to cut ties when things aren’t working.
Bytes
- Full Text Search and Typeaheads – I needed to hack up a quick typeahead feature for our product over a database of around twenty thousand entires. The database was already stored in MySQL and so I knew that I could probably leverage Full Text indexes somehow to solve this problem quickly.
Not having used Full Text indexes before, I did a quick bit of research and stumbled upon this slide share article – http://bit.ly/1PW4mmQ.
A quick scan of the article confirmed that Full Text indexes were a good, simple solution that had reasonable performance (though with the number of rows I was dealing with, performance didn’t matter too much). One thing I did like about the Full Text index solution is boolean mode and the ability to customize the query with modifiers. Since the search query was over a specific domain, I was able to add some pre-processing steps on the query itself to exploit specific knowledge about the domain and improve the search results.
Similarly, to improve the relevance of the results, I added some post processing logic to re-order the results once again exploiting knowledge about the query domain.
With more records or a less specific corpus, using one of the other indexing solutions such as Solr or Sphinx would probably be a good thing to do, but it was unnecessary to get this feature off the ground.
- Free Data – Federal and local governments, at least in the United States, have to respect Freedom of Information requests for tax payer funded data and therefore are pretty good about proactively providing data through the web. So if you ever need to seed a database and don’t want to have to license or pay for one provided by a commercial entity, consider if there is a tax-payer backed database that you can leverage for your purpose. Still be aware of copyright law in the process (http://bit.ly/1LZLde5 for some interesting reading).