Suresh Shanmugam

Suresh Shanmugam

I am a PM for AI & Data products.

Recent posts

my year in 2009

My year in 2009 was pretty adventurous and difficult at times. Time with family was crucial and helped stabilize emotions. Boo and I are making progress towa...

Do something you’re very passionate about, and don’t try to chase what is kind of the ‘hot passion’ of the day. I think we actually saw this. I think you see it all over the place in many different contexts, but I think we saw it in the Internet world quite a bit, where, at sort of the peak of the Internet mania in – say 1999 – you found people who were very passionate of something, and they kind of left that job and decided, “I’m going to do something on the Internet because it’s almost like the 1849 Gold Rush in a way.” I mean, you find that people – if you go back and study the history of the 1949 Gold Rush you find that, at that time, everybody who was within shouting distance of California was – you know, they might have been a doctor, but they quit being a doctor and they started panning for gold, and that almost never works. And, even if it does work, according to some metric, financial success, or whatever it might be, I suspect it leaves you ultimately unsatisfied. So, you really need to be very clear with yourself. And I think one of the best ways to do that is this notion of projecting yourself forward to age 80, looking back on your life, and trying to make sure you’ve minimized the number of regrets you have. That works for career decisions. It works for family decisions. I have a 14-month old son, and it’s very easy for me to – if I think about myself when I’m 80, I know I want to watch that little guy grow up, and so it’s – I don’t want to be 80 and think, “Shoot! You know, I missed that whole thing, and I don’t have the kind of relationship with my son that I wished I had,” and so on and so on. Another thing that I would recommend to people is that they always take a long-term point of view. I think this is something about which there’s a lot of controversy. A lot of people – and I’m just not one of them – believe that you should live for the now. I think what you do is think about the great expanse of time ahead of you and try to make sure that you’re planning for that in a way that’s going to leave you ultimately satisfied. This is the way it works for me. There are a lot of paths to satisfaction and you need to find one that works for you.

Do something you’re very passionate about, and don’t try to chase what is kind of the ‘hot passion’ of the day. I think we actually s...

Walden, Thoreau

Men labour under a mistake. The better part of the man is soon ploughed into the soil for compost. By a semming fate, commonly called necessity, they are emp...

Sinatra minimal service

# Sinatra example for simple webservice. # Sort lines in a file and return it. require 'rubygems' require 'sinatra'

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; because there is not effort without error and shortcomings; but who does actually strive to do the deed; who knows the great enthusiasm, the great devotion, who spends himself in a worthy cause, who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement and who at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly. So that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit b...

Good design is innovative.
Good design makes a product useful.
Good design is aesthetic.
Good design helps us to understand a product.
Good design is unobtrusive.
Good design is honest.
Good design is durable.
Good design is consequent to the last detail.
Good design is concerned with the environment.
Good design is as little design as possible.

Good design is innovative. Good design makes a product useful. Good design is aesthetic. Good design helps us to understand a product. Good design is unobtru...

The best designers and the best programmers aren’t the ones with the best skills, or the nimblest fingers, or the ones who can rock and roll with photoshop or vim, they are the ones that can determine what just doesn’t matter. That’s where the real gains are made. Most of the time you spend is wasted time on things that just don’t matter. If you can cut out the work and thinking that just doesn’t matter you’ll achieve productivity you’ve never imagined. It’s there if you just don’t pay attention to the things that don’t matter.

The best designers and the best programmers aren’t the ones with the best skills, or the nimblest fingers, or the ones who can rock and roll with photoshop o...

Simple design, intense content.

Tufte codified the design process into six principles: “(1) documenting the sources and characteristics of the data, (2) insistently enforcing appropri...