Hackers and Painters: An unbashed recommendation

The best way to describe "Hackers and Painters": for the hacker, by the hacker and of the hacker. Paul Graham's essays are a treat to read, and they give an insight into a programmer-nerd's mindset. Graham starts with the nerd mentality in the typical American school and why nerds are different and why it is good to be a nerd. In another essay, Graham paints hacking as an art rather than a science, and does so by comparing it to, well, painting. He goes on to describe what programmers can learn from painting. Further, there are essays on the spirit of inquiry and why hackers are non-conformists and don't like authority.

The book then takes a more technical turn. One of the best essays here is about how web-based applications will change the rules of the game, load it in favour of innovators rather than the big companies and why they would make software engineering easier. Graham is quite clearly a big fan of Lisp and describes its use in his startup ViaWeb and why it is the ideal programming language of choice. There are quite a few other interesting topics he touches upon.

If that doesn't sound impressive, you can be rest assured that coming from a practitioner who has seen it all, it sounds absolutely natural, with a sense of deja vu. His writing is witty and very lucid. The arguments are well reasoned and the chain of thought is well presented. And there are quite a number of smart one-liners you can smile at. This is a case of text book essay writing (if I may use such a term). Highly recommended.

You can find many of these essays and more on Paul Graham's site.

Pune Barcamp 5

I attended my first Pune Barcamp (and my first barcamp too) this Saturday at SISCR. Basically a barcamp is an ad hoc gathering of people interesting a particular topic; but without a pre-determined formal agenda. Instead, the agenda gets decided on the day of the event, in an ad hoc manner, democratically by all the barcampers. For more read this.

There were talks and discussions on many interesting topics. The fact that it is democratic and volunteered allowed many unconventional topics like 'Knowledge Representation in Sanskrit', 'Pune e-governance and civic activism', 'e-learning', 'Save Pune traffic' and 'Why should you twitter?' to be taken up. Ofcourse, there were purely interesting tech topics like wireless security, mobile application development, Google Analytics too. And then you don't have to sit in a boring lecture, could just walk out :). However, at the barcamp there wasn't much of an incentive to walk-out. Straight, to-the-point talks kept you interested and you had a choice of talks to attend. In addition, it was a keep opportunity for networking and having a few good discussions. All-in-all a good package. Looking forward to attending more barcamps.

POCC's Startup Speed Date

Today's POCC meet was unique. The meet format allowed participants to talk to all startup registered for the meet on a one-to-one basis. It was a great platform, where I got a meet quite a lot of new people and the interesting stuff they are working on. Being interested in natural language processing and search, it was great to know companies like Alabot, 42 and Lipikaar that are doing good stuff.
As always, Navin has been liveblogging on the event. You can find briefs of the startups who registered today here.

For those familiar with POCC, it is an informal forum for investors, startups, advisors and techies in general in Pune to interact. PuneTech covers information on tech trends in Pune.

Pune Tech

Since coming back to Pune, I have been trying to get a hang of the tech scene in Pune. From the campus recruitments at IITB, my view is that Pune has a good tech ecology developing. We have had some startups working on exciting products coming to the campus. This just seems to be the right time to be in Pune.

Last week, I attended the monthly meet of the Pune Open Coffee Club (POCC). POCC is a group which seeks to promote startups, provide a platform for people with ideas to meet, seek advice, get in touch with VC, etc. and be noticed. Last week's meet was a good experience. There was a panel discussion on bootstrapping of startups with Anand Soman, Tarun Malaviya, and Shridhar Shukla and a showcase of a new startup in Pune. You can find a liveblog of the proceedings here.

A very useful resource to keep track of the tech scene in Pune is punetech.com. On the wiki, you can find links to various companies based in Pune and interest groups like the Pune Google Technology Users group. There is also a calendar, which lists all the tech events scheduled in and around Pune. All this is ofcourse community edited, so its for us techies in Pune to build on this initiative.

About Fibinacci Numbers

Discovered a few new facts about Fibonacci numbers. All I knew about Fibonacci numbers what that it is the sequence 1,1,2,3,5,8,13,21.... , where the nth number was the sum of the (n-1)th and (n-2)the Fibonacci number. Well, I have always wondered what makes these numbers special. Turns out the nth Fibonacci number can be defined as the number of ways n can be represented as a sum of 1's and 2's. That gives a combinatorial interpretation to the Fibonacci numbers, and raises them from being outcomes of a mere uninteresting addition process. I got to know about this fact during a fascinating talk at IIT, Bombay by Prof. Manjul Bhargava from Princeton. (More about that talk later).

And that's not all about the Fibonacci numbers. It turns out that any number can be represented as the sum of Fibonacci numbers. That means Fibonacci numbers can serve as a base system. However, there could be more than one way of representing the same number as a sum pf Fibonacci number. Check this to know more.

To finish this post, Fibonacci numbers were first described by the Indian linguist Hemachandra about a 100 years before Fibonacci described them and probably by Pingala in 200 B.C. too.