I am going to meet my friend on Sunday and he mailed me and told me where to meet and then he added:
I will religiously wait for you
To do something religiously always yield power that others don’t understand and cannot imagine.
Two nights past and I basically haven’t seen London yet.
I generally don’t do this, but Yang Meng is so special to me so I promised to post a job for him to my expat community, although I warned him not many people are still following this blog. :-) Here you go.
Make life better. Get in on the ground. Start a career at Anker.
Started by a few ex-Googlers in 2009, Anker set out with one goal in mind: to design reliable, affordable yet inspiring products which we would use ourselves. Today Anker has 100+ employees globally, spread among Changsha, Shenzhen, San Jose, Tokyo and Beijing.
We’re passionate about technology and looking for ways to make life easier, more convenient, less consumed by the day-to-day. Anker thrives on the enthusiasm of a hardworking, earnest family of employees. If you’re looking for a job to challenge, inspire and reward you, we’d love to sit down and start talking about adding you to our team. We could be reached via recruiting@ianker.com. If you know someone who might be a good candidate, we’d also love to hear from you and hopefully thank you with our $2,000 referral bonus once the person is hired.
Position 1: Copywriter (in Changsha/Beijing)
As a copywriter at Anker, you will serve as a representative of our brand by producing the written materials necessary to interact with customers. Both individually and as part of a team, you’ll find ways of reaching out to the public. By thinking from a user’s perspective, you’ll determine how to illustrate our products to the world.
Job Description
– Consider newly developed products from the consumer’s point of view.
– Craft compelling storylines, taglines, and other narrative “nuggets” to introduce our products to a Western audience.
– Serve as a written ambassador of our brand by contributing to the company website, leaflets, promotional events, etc.Job Requirements
– Strong written and time management skills.
– Ability to view products from the customer’s perspective and figure out ways to attract them.
– Interest in gadgets and technology (smartphones, tablets, etc.)
– Outgoing personality with the humility to work as part of a team.
– Comfortable expressing him/herself in a Chinese work environment, preferably in Chinese.Position 2: Marketing Supervisor (in Changsha/Beijing)
Be the mouthpiece of our company. We’re looking for someone with a flair for influencing others. Whether this be face-to-face or through online social media, you will be the person who works to spread our name. We need a juggler for this role – the ability to multi-task and plan ahead will be crucial to success.
Job Description
– Build lasting relationships with members of the media to trumpet our brand.
– Create a strong online presence for our company through social media websites.
– Wear a variety of hats to communicate with consumers via forums and other channels.Job Requirements
– Warm personality and eagerness to meet new people.
– In tune with tech media, preferably with established contacts.
– Well-versed as to the ins and outs of social media.
– Excited to use persuasion and influence to ignite our brand.
After switching to WordPress from MovableType, and after switching from Windows to Mac, I need to find some software to blog on my laptop. Here is MarsEdit. I saw some good comments from Quora on it, and here you are. This is the first post from the client.
Mr. Systrom, now 29, offered this as a parable for the roomful of would-be entrepreneurs who came to hear him talk at Stanford last spring: in the intensely competitive start-up scene here, success is as much about who you know as what you know. “Make sure to spend some time after the talk getting to know the people around you,” he told his audience.
Arrived in Hong Kong and stay in Causeway Bay.
I created my first plugin when I created my CEO Blog. The problem is obvious: I am going to have a CEO blog where I can share my thoughts with the team frequently. I tried to write a different blog, and I found it is just impossible to maintain two. So I decided to put it on to my own personal blog.
Although most of the articles are public in nature, I do have something that I hope to disclose to the general public later. I don’t want to have complicated OAuth based verification. A simple IP based restriction is good enough. There is no simple solution so I wrote one myself.
Here is the ZIP of the plugin: https://home.wangjianshuo.com/wordpresscn/wp-content/plugins/iponly/iponly.zip
You can download it, modify it, and do whatever you want. There are many hard code in the system – I never blame developers for doing dirty hacks when the time is limited, but we do need to polish it from time to time.
I promise to add all the hard code to options, and create an admin panel for it, in the next version.
I read some code by FriendFeed guys. They are great. The Tornado code is neat. You can take a look here:
https://github.com/facebook/tornado
One of the test I ask my developer is, do you feel comfortable to open source your code. If they do, they are pretty in good shape.
I am genuinely interested in numbers, and specs. I must be the strange person in other people’s mind, but I am just so excited to see things like numbers. For example:
1. CVC 22651
When travelling in California, I really love the CVC 22651 printed on the TOW AWAY plate, and traced to the following document: http://www.dmv.ca.gov/pubs/vctop/d11/vc22651.htm
2. ISO 8601
The smart guys want to solve a problem of how to represent date across the world (both west and east and both computer or human). So they invented something like:
2012-08-20T13:09:16+08:00
and they call it ISO 8601 format.
3. RFC 2616
Maybe one of the most important RFC. It uses just 4 digits to express that. If you are curious, it is:
Hypertext Transfer Protocol — HTTP/1.1
http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2616.txt
The RFC has been there for 30 years, so I was pretty shocked to know there did exist an RFC 1: http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc0001
4. 200030
This is pretty simple: the post code of the area I am moving around. I love the idea of postal code, but the way it is presented in China is not so up-to-date. The postal code of US seems more interesting, for example, 94301, or Singapore, where they assign a post code for every building.
5. Other random numbers
The more universal numbers are most interesting for me. For example, the ISBN numbers (isbn:0375420827 for the Art of travel), the mobile phone numbers (13916146826 for me), or even PNR.
Why I am so interested in these numbers? I am still puzzled and don’t have an answer. Maybe that is the inborn instinct of an engineer?
Here goes my notes on Hiring is Obsolete.
Wisdom comes from facts. Everything is getting cheaper. (Computer of the same power? Automated services?) Cost of startup should only be people.
(Nerds have better things to do) => (Nerds are unpopular)
if( (Undergraduates are Undervalued) == true)
invest(undergradutes());
if((Smart people speaks stupid things) == true)
dont_ignore_people_do_stupid_things();
value = people_to_user();
compensation = company_estimate();
compensation = average(values);
assert(difficulty(valuing work) > 80%);
class bigcompany :
def __init__():
protect_mode = on;
def product_development() :
while(1):
improve();
release();
We really want to spend the money outside the company on marketing (throw the dollars to a anonymous guy you know will do bad seems wiser to give it to the best people in the company. Why?
Founders run engineering directly, and the rest …
The cage is open. There is no limitation. Blogging is possible in 1995, but people don’t write too much until 2001. It just took 6 years for people to realize the cage is open.
The older you are, the most risk you can take.
{
"ok" : true,
"status" : 200,
"name" : "Gardener",
"version" : {
"number" : "0.19.8",
"snapshot_build" : false
},
"tagline" : "You Know, for Search"
}
These lines of response from Elastic Search at http://localhost:9200 seems so nice. I smiled when I saw this response, and I said to my self: “Hack! Those guys at elastic search really solved a problem.
They defined a problem in their statements, and they solved the problem. Doing a lot of things should be easier and easier – that is the thoughts of typical hacker. Why should I even need to download something to my server to run search? I may further ask the question. I believe some hacker out there will solve this problem.
You know, for Search
So, we build a web site or an application and want to add search to it, and then it hits us: getting search working is hard. We want our search solution to be fast, we want a painless setup and a completely free search schema, we want to be able to index data simply using JSON over HTTP, we want our search server to be always available, we want to be able to start with one machine and scale to hundreds, we want real-time search, we want simple multi-tenancy, and we want a solution that isbuilt for the cloud.
“This should be easier”, we declared, “and cool, bonsai cool”.
elasticsearch aims to solve all these problems and more. It is an Open Source (Apache 2), Distributed, RESTful, Search Engine built on top of Apache Lucene.
Company
Any company started with an observed problem in this world, and people in the company get excited about solving that problem. If they solve that problem, they created something people want, just like those guys created elastic search, which is what I and Xiaopai wanted.
If you create something people want, you are likely to be fine. People will take care of the monetization problems and others easier than creating something people want. I saw a good model in Elastic Search.
Value of Technology
New ways of doing things, like elastic search takes JSON as input and output, and adapted schema free, and NOSQL type of approach is new way to do search, and that works very well for me.
It is the technology that makes this world better (well, among many other great things), and I am happy to be still back to the technology world.
I pre-released Baixing Graph API internally at 1801. I am going to release it to the public on Sept 6, 2012. (One of the key driver to make anything happen is to make it public first, and let the pressure push you to make it happen).
I am learning GIT.
A new frontier for me to learn. GIT.
Technology is actually driven by tool makers. Think of the few generation of advancement: Weaving machines in Florence, Herring cutter and commercial boats in Holland, stream engine in English, electronic and information technology in US – all of them are tools. The advancement of tools help human develop and advance.
GIT is such a tool. I started to use version control with SD (SourceDepot). That was a very good tool developed back in 198x, before git appears in the horizon.
If you want to predict which technical company will win, check what tool they use! If a company start to lose in the tool front, it is losing in many front.
A danger of travel is that we see things at wrong time, before you have the opportunity to build up the necessary receptivity so that new information is as useless and fugitive as necklace beads without a connecting chains. – Alan de Botton
This time, I visited Nanjing during the weekend, and I had some preparation to get the receptivity, and tried to use a connecting chain to guide what to see. The topic will be the government of Republic of China, a historical term in mainland China, and a current term in Taiwan.
I went to the following places:
They are scattered into different places across the city, but to follow a path to visit every single one of them makes a great day.
Nanjing is a city with great histories. Many of the memories were painful, just like the feeling of Berlin. It is also moving very fast. I didn’t expect to see a building 450 meters high (due to my ignorance, I didn’t know that). Many years ago, I would say Hangzhou is a much better travel destination than Nanjing, and now I rediscovered the city and claim it to be better to spend a weekend than Hangzhou. Here is why.
I will visit Nanjing soon during weekend. A weekend escape in Nanjing is just a very good experience for me – high-speed train, Hanting Hotel, plus Metro tickets are good package for me.
I am trying to do a full day black out on Wednesdays. It turned out, because of previous appointment, there is one meeting slip to the calendar, so I have take the meeting at 2:00 PM.
Having been super effective this morning, and facing an approaching meeting, I am aware of the psychology change. I started to loose productivity about 10 minutes before …
(Bing! Here they come and interrupted my posting and now the meeting is over)
See? When I switch back to the writing mode, it is completely different. The flow of thought was gone, and I don’t have ways to get them back. It takes at least half an hour for me to get back to the interruption point. So, just be very aware of the cost, and in the future, don’t schedule 2:00 PM meetings, and don’t schedule any meetings on Wed.
Below is a reading note on Richard Hamming’s lecture: You and Your Research.
Age: Why most productive things were done young? One of Richard’s explanation was: “If you do some good work, you will find yourself in all kinds of committees and unable to do any more work”. That is the first problem. The second problem is, when you are famous for doing some good work, you can only work on great problems, not small. I was so shocked to know how small the idea Pierre Omidyar, eBay’s founder, had for his next startup. Very few people would understand the once-famous-founders’ second startups at the very beginning.
He mentioned about working condition – the best working conditions are not the way everyone want, just like the shacks in Cambridge is the birthplace for a lot of great physics.
Besides age, and working condition, there is drive. The really ambitious people drive themselves very hard. This relates to my standard of people around me. They can be inexperienced, but they have to be ambitious. There is a saying: Why bother? This is just a blah.blah.blah position. It does matter.
Ambiguity is an interesting one. The right balance between believe, and not believe. You believe it enough to go ahead and practices it, but not believe it enough to be able to adjust and change.
Subconscious. You need work enough, think enough, and starve the subconscious enough, and avoid any dilution of any noise of other kind to really get great result from the work of the subconscious. It is called creativity, or inspiration, or whatever. It is an extension of your hard and intensive work of conscious.
“What are the important problem in my field?” That is the starting point of everything. Again, as Paul Graham mentioned in early articles, beautiful thing is simple. I think this question is simple, shorter, and sweeter, and it is much more inspiring than the complicated 7 habits, or other bestseller books. I agree that the best minds are not always found in best sellers.
Really important problems are daring. Look at the three problems Hamming mentioned in his field: physics – 1) Time travel 2) Teleportation 3) Antigravity. My God!
The two problems a classifieds site have are: 1) fraud listing 2) way to attract enough personal listers. It is such a hard problem that we need to solve. The rest are relatively easy.
For the most important ideas, when there is a chance to fix it, the greatest scientist drop everything else, and pursue it.
That leads to the discussion about whether closed door working style, or open door working style is better. Obviously I know most modern companies, especially Internet companies, favor toward open door, or even open office with no cubicles. I was nervous when I started to read Hamming, and I thought he was arguing in favor of closed door – get more things done in today and tomorrow, and that is against what I long believed, and I felt relief when Hamming finally concluded that open door is a better option. Productivity in short term does not compensate on the error of direction.
Great thinkers get desperate when they see their life as a long sequence of problem one after another after another after another… all small problems If one can solve so many problems, it must be very small problems.
We should really do our work in a way that others can stand on top of ours. The science and technology world is cumulative. The beauty of the whole computer, or Internet world is, it can be split to layers, and our work can benefit others. One on top of another. For mathematics, the effort to generalization means the solution is simpler. It is exactly the same for almost every field. For Internet, and computer system, it is so. We should work on generalization.
On “Great Thoughts Only”. Spend about 10% of the time, in Hamming’s case, a Friday afternoon in every week, to allow only Great Thoughts. Great thoughts means “How computer changes science?” For our business, an example of great thoughts should be something close to: “Why people sell on Baixing?” or “How we can be 10 times more efficient as a company?” These great thoughts help to keep people on track in long term, and push them to the limit, or at least open the eyes of the person who tapped into it. Great thoughts by definition is not a solution. It is a problem. It is why part, not the how or what. We need to correct our path about whether we are attacking the right setup of problems. Another is permission. If you want a No, just go to the boss and you will get a No. Maybe that is deep in many people’s mind – No means you don’t need to work on it. The real doers just go ahead and then present the accomplished fact. Most people would say YES when something is already done. (A note: I just found out the first big gap between entrepreneur and a scientist who has a boss)
On ego assertion. I talked about the conflict in a world with different rules. I claimed that the one who follow the rule of the other side gets the best interest. This is pretty pragmatic approach, just as Hamming changed its cloth to be more formal to get the right service, instead of being who he is. If the dressing has get into the way to something you care, you should change the dress! That’s it. Does it really means you don’t have principle? Well, I would say, when there is a universal principle, stick to it, but there are some local principles, and we should should respect. Sticking to our own ways actually pays small price here and small price there. It is pretty steady cost along the way of one’s life, and the total value is enormous. So try to work with the system instead of fight against.
Hamming does brought out a controversial question: Whether we should fight to change the system. His judgement is, you cannot do the two things together: change the system or be a first-class scientist. Then you should choose. The worst thing is to do it just because of amusement – if that is the case, it is type-B procrastination – Doing less important work.
There are two persons in this world that helped me to gain peace in mind. Both them are alive, and not older too much than me, and ironically, both appear on the same day at the Cannes Lion to give lecture, which I both missed. They are Paul Graham, and Alain de Botton. I believe we share a lot of things in common – maybe all of us are ENFP in personality type; we all like writing; and we all love to think.
Read this article: Good and Bad Procrastination. Just Alain’s Consolation of Philosophy, the article gave me enough confidence to care less about shaving and laundry, which Wendy keep complaining 100 times a day.
Paul mentioned three form of procrastination: you could work on 1) nothing 2) less important thing, or 3) something more important.
That was a really good insight. As Paul explained himself before, beautiful theories are all short, simple, and lasting. This three-type classification is pretty simple, isn’t it? The common people do things but don’t know why and few have insight.
That’s the “absent-minded professor,” who forgets to shave, or eat, or even perhaps look where he’s going while he’s thinking about some interesting question. His mind is absent from the everyday world because it’s hard at work in another.
That gave me the relief to be a little bit at “absent-minded professor” mode – the type-C procrastinators.
I’ve wondered a lot about why startups are most productive at the very beginning, when they’re just a couple guys in an apartment. The main reason may be that there’s no one to interrupt them yet. In theory it’s good when the founders finally get enough money to hire people to do some of the work for them. But it may be better to be overworked than interrupted. Once you dilute a startup with ordinary office workers—with type-B procrastinators—the whole company starts to resonate at their frequency. They’re interrupt-driven, and soon you are too.
“It is better to overwork than interrupted”. It is very well said for startups.
We all need to get into a peace of mind where many people can concentrate to do the most important thing, instead of the overly used word – communication.
I don’t say we cannot fight against the crowd, but it is really hard and cost a lot of energy. In the Silicon Valley, when you meet those technical guys, the investors, and entrepreneurs, you are surprised to see how crazy they are:
The list goes on and on and on.
Every community/city/country has its norms, and you don’t want to be too outlined. In the valley, there are so many crazy people gathering, and you just feel it is the norm.
I wrote an article on Weibo “They Said…” (Chinese) by Lu Chunqing. A very nice article. She mentioned the pressure from “They said…” in mainland China. People tell you to be stable, to get a good job, and to marry quickly… The general opinion from the public just gradually change people, until they become different.
Paul Graham also observed that every fifteen century Italian painters come from Florence. I would argue currently, most of the world famous Internet and software gaint come from the valley. Why?
If we cannot change the world (well, we can but we need to hurry before they change us), we can decide which world we live in.
P.S. Just check what other bloggers are writing about, especially those you greatly admire (like Paul Graham‘s for me), and count who they talk with and who their friends are, and you get some idea. Paul’s blog often opens as “I was talking recently to a friend who teaches at MIT.” as in this article: Taste for Makers. Surround by people you really care, and enjoyed meeting with.