Posted by
himath on February 14, 2009
I recently read the book: “Super-Flexibility for the Knowledge Enterprises” by Homa Bahrami and Stuart Evans. It discusses the concept of a knowledge enterprise being super-flexible to harness the inevitable uncertainty. This is highly applicable to start-ups that have to go through uncertain periods as well as to any organization being affected by the current economic environment.
The book is not an easy read, and it does not provide prescriptive actions similar to 10 steps to building your start-up. However, it has a lot of insights that you would be able to apply, if you read carefully with your organization in mind.
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Posted by
himath on November 17, 2008
Dr. Stephen R. Covey’s bestseller: The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People presents a simple principle centered approach for solving personal and professional problems. If you want to build a highly effective team at work, I recommend you expose your team members to the invaluable material in this book. The book discusses how to be effective in leadership, time management, negotiation, and most importantly, how to be a better person.
A few years ago, I read the book and used its material in the trainings I conducted for my team of software engineers. Now, it’s time to have a similar training at OrangeHRM (where I work now). So I started reading the book again to refresh my memory. As I move from habit to habit, I plan to blog about how to apply the principles in a software company.
Posted by
himath on November 8, 2008
Last summer when I was completing my masters at Carnegie Mellon Silicon Valley, I took the Open Source course as an elective. In one of our projects, we had to investigate Open Source productivity tools. That was when I stumbled upon Chandler. 
Although I liked the product and its features, I found Chandler to be slow and unstable. With increased amounts of data, its performance reduced, and became increasingly difficult to use.
While investigating Chandler, I learned about a book titled “Dreaming in Code” by Scott Rosenberg, which was written with the Chandler project as its setting. A few weeks later, when I was early for an appointment, and was killing time in a bookshop in Mountain View, the book caught my eye, and buying it was the most natural thing to do.
The book is the result of an exercise (where Chandler was chosen as the example) to investigate why it’s so hard to build software. One does not need any background knowledge about the software industry to understand this book, as the author explains the history and concepts behind the topics being discussed. I would recommend the book to anyone who wants to get a high level understanding about what building software is like today.
From what I have read so far, it seems that Chandler started with lofty goals, but an unclear vision. The project had weak processes at the beginning. This resulted in a project with ever extending targets for releasing, which seems to be a common problem in the software industry.
