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[swiftdayblog]

Why join Startupbrk?

-by Gaurav Nolkha. Originally appreared on Startupbrk here.

Why join?

Startupbrk is an event where 'arts, business, engineering, science and life' students have the opportunity to create a startup over summer and winter break. Startupbrk experience can be a real differentiating factor. How?

Solve real problems. Implement practical solutions. Manage a team. Grow a real business.

Thinking about placement opportunities ?

Companies value practical experience.

It helps them ramp you up faster.

Companies use latest development methodologies and technologies.

Very few companies of the new world use languages that are taught in the colleges.

Companies value risk-taking and initiatives.

In school, you can only harm yourself by not doing things, in companies you can harm the whole team.

Companies value collaboration, team work and leadership skills.

Contrary to schools where collaboration is cheating, companies need a lot of team work, because the problems are generally of bigger scale.

Companies can be approached through the people who they trust.

Building your network with people who have seen your work can do wonders for your job applications.

Thinking about internships?

Companies want to hire interns who can potentially join them later.

So for all the reasons mentioned above, Startupbrk can be an incredible addition to your LinkedIn profile. Quick rampup can sometimes make all the difference, because of limited time.

[swiftdayblog]

A tale of two projects

- by Gaurav Nolkha. (Originally appeared on LinkedIn here.)

Most undergraduate students want to learn, have fun and would love interesting opportunities while they spend the formative years of their life in the school. Lazy engineers who want to get an awesome opportunities (or jobs) need to wake up at 4AM in the morning and sleep at midnight and study continuously through the day ;).

While what I said above may actually work quite well, it does not go well with the other important goal of having fun. So what is an optimized trade-off? 

Lets walk backwards from a job interview.

The interview

The recruiter / person looking at the fresher’s resume from a given university is not going to spend more than a few seconds (5 to 30 seconds) looking at the resume. What do you think she is going to pay attention to? Here is my guess from some of my own personal experience:

Grades – must not be bad.

Experience – unique experience can stand out (e.g. foreign internship)

Projects – unique projects can be a huge plus (not talking about class projects, because they are mentioned by all your classmates as well. Edit: Prof. Adnan Aziz rightly pointed out in the comments below, "a bright student can take a cookie-cutter project and do something out of the box .... Also many classes have self-directed term projects, you can do really exceptional things there. Key is to document, publish it (eg on github))".

Awards – since not many people can boast of awards, they certainly can help you stand out

Misc – Things like volunteer activities, initiatives can speak volumes about you as a person

Most of these are self explanatory on why they are helpful in selection process. I would like to focus on one important piece out of these, the projects.

Projects

Interesting projects can fundamentally improve the weight of your resume. They will differentiate you from your class. They will effeminate positive vibes about you as a person. They can potentially establish you as a leader and an initiator. Finally, they can also help you guide the direction of your interview towards what you know the best rather than answering the questions which the interviewer prepared for you.

Okay, maybe you had a hunch that the projects done outside the class are interesting, but how do you go about these. Specifically:

What is a good idea to work on?

How many projects are good enough?

How can it be fun?

Is it the right time, place and environment?

Reinvent the wheel

As a fresh grad, low recruiter expectations are your friends. You don’t have to invent a technology to be able to stand out. One of my friend, Saurabh told me about this keyword for students “Reinvent the wheel”. Basically take a product or software that you really like and implement it in your own way. If you can get real users on this application of yours, or better yet, if you can earn some money out of this endeavor, it can be a great story to share in the interview.

A tale of two projects

My hypothesis is that if you can tell a tale of two good projects, you are all set to move up the initial salary bucket by a significant percentage. Let me explain.

Let’s consider the following hypothetical scenario where student X can potentially earn 20, 40, 60, 80, 100 units of money every month, depending upon the kind of company and job profile he / she lands. The greener the bucket, the lucrative it is. (Edit: This certainly depends on the companies that visit a particular campus, but mostly there is decent variation in the size and type of the company.)

Lets consider the worst-case scenario of a student who is positioned in bucket 1, given his grades and the rank of her university. Now the question is, what would it take to increase her chances of moving from bucket 1 to bucket 2 (a 100% improvement in the salary)?

The answer is simple, a tale of two projects in the interview can offset the other negatives of her resume to move her to bucket 2.

Where is the fun?

Another worst-case scenario to consider, how about a student with the attitude that he does not care about better grades or job or anything for that matter. I argue that even those students care about fun. In universities across India, the two most attended events are sports events and cultural events of a college. So all you need to do is find what is fun to you, and then do something interesting. Rest of the things will just follow. Think about the initial Facebook project to rank the faces in Harvard.

Right place, time and people

Okay, you may think that we got an idea that we can reinvent, and its fun too, but you may ask how is university the right place and is it the right time? The answer again lies in some success stories across the world. The Facebooks and Googles and Microsofts of this world started the universities, because as students you have the most important asset – your friends. Your friends who are fun to be with can also be fun to work with. You also have time, without the worry of opportunity cost. Yes other things like resources, mentorship etc. can be managed. Not only these, you have access to other students who can be a great market for so many ideas.

As students you perhaps have the knack to see the next potential big thing. Go, just do it.

Thanks to hundreds of students and faculty for their help in validating the ideas presented here.

(My engineering background biases me towards engineering students and engineering schools, but this essay should be applicable to other streams as well.)

[swiftdayblog]

-by Gaurav Nolkha

Load more...  This is for you guys, “Team Uber Awesome”. Thanks to Kajal and Preeti’s final exams, Team Fundulabs decided to prioritize the “Load more...” messages feature. Because of their final exams, they have not been active for past few days. And given how active their team member, Gaurav Shukla is, the chat room already had hundreds of messages. And it would set us back if they could not read through those messages. But unfortunately, the chatroom showed only last 20-30 messages. Paging of messages was not implemented. It was high time we added the ability to load more messages.  We responded to that use case quickly and when on 24th May Preeti and Kajal return, they will be able to read through all the messages. Thank you team Uber Awesome.

[swiftdayblog]

For the Love of Hackathons

Yesterday we held another Sunday morning hackathon, our second in a row. A trend is developing ...

Let’s recap what happened in the first one:

Sai Boorlagadda, Ashwin Umapathy, and Goura Das produced an initial iteration of our classroom task management feature.

Sandeep Patil drafted presentation slides that tell the educator and student stories which our product will fundamentally change.

Gaurav Nolkha and David Smith pitched several team communication experiments aimed at keeping everyone up-to-date on progress and discussions.

This time we followed up with several improvements and planning sessions:

Sai enhanced the task screen to show both the discussion content and details.

Ashwin completed the task submission flow.

Goura added a pending list of tasks for the user to review progress.

Gaurav embedded analytics into the tasks feature.

David drove some discussions about pilot program challenges and feature prioritization for the fall term.

Finally, we would also like to give a very special shout-out to Dr. Sandeep Sancheti (@profssancheti), President of Manipal University Jaipur, for his invaluable encouragement. In our most recent conversation, last week, we had the opportunity to review with him the results of our Spring 2016 pilot program: what we learned, what went well, and what needed improvement. His advice inspired a lot of discussion at the hackathon and informed how we thought about the priorities of future pilots. We are very grateful for his advice and support for our mission.

We’re looking forward to the next hackathon and keeping you up to date.

—David Smith, on behalf of the Swiftday team

Contact us at gaurav@swiftday.com or support@swiftday.com.

[swiftdayblog]

Crunching home showing data

-by Gaurav Nolkha

Real estate agents show homes to their clients but do not keep a record of the showings. Well, you may ask, why would I need that data?

Showings data can answer many interesting questions like the following:

Time related: what time are you usually busy (in a week, month, year). May help you plan your resource requirements ahead (hire a secretary or not?).

Place related: what is your buyer really looking for? what are hot areas? what are trending areas? what are the hot homes?

People related: who is serious buyer vs not? how many homes does a buyer of type ‘x’ see before they buy homes. what is your response time?

It basically tells you a lot about the buyer behavior. And can potentially help you understand your buyer much better. This may also help you improve your service, by offering what your buyers are really looking for. But this data can perhaps answer a lot more interesting questions than the one we just listed above.

Okay so if you are convinced about the importance of the showings data, what can you as a agent do about this? A simple solution can be to keep an excel sheet for showings information. You can then again use Excel to process this showings data and learn some useful insights from that data.

SwiftDay Dash

A new service offering from SwiftDay for Real Estate Agents, available to RMLS customers in Oregon and Washington

SwiftDay Dash is built on top of the SwiftDay platform. SwiftDay platform enables an agent to easily record the home showings data with just a few clicks. This is easily possible because our platform is integrated with RMLS data feed. Because we already understand ‘MLSID’. All an agents needs to do is, select the buyer, add the MLSID and save the date and time for the showing.

The showings data automatically includes the following:

Details about homes

Details about buyer

Details about seller agents

Details about date time and location

SwiftDay algorithms then process all this information and presents it to the agent in a nice and easily understandable visual dashboard.

Over time, SwiftDay Dash will also show you aggregated data for agents in your area. For example: Without revealing the information about other agents, it will show you how your response time compares with other agents in the area.  

If this excites you, please reach out to david@swiftday.com or gaurav@swiftday.com to know more.

[swiftdayblog]

Awesome product vs amazing data

-by Gaurav Nolkha

A couple of days ago, I had an interesting conversation with friend who is in Sales. The topic of the debate was whether in SwiftDay context, what would be more interesting:

an awesome product, that would charm its users

or a reasonably well working product with an amazing data set that can be analyzed to yield insights not possible before.

For SwiftDay, a company which is in its nascent stage, it is critical to sell, with whatever that elevator pitch is. The discussion started about being able to convert the conversations into paying users. And question was about how much importance should be given to data and BI.

My friend who happens to be in analytics domain thought that the product forms the basis of usage. Product has to work very well for the users, and should drive the engagement. Engagement will then eventually result into the data that will be useful and insightful. And he clearly understand the value of the data, but had the opinion that it is still a by-product and something that people may not want to pay for in the beginning.

I on the other hand, had recently discovered the power of BI and data analysis. And had quickly started to believe that depending upon who in the hierarchy you are talking to (for selling) data may be the key to selling. I can imagine a productivity software like ours being very useful to the users of our product, real estate agents in this case. But what is the visible benefit to their boss, their company? To me it seems that a pitch to the boss that involves emphasis on data can be more successful in converting a lead into a user. Because earlier a critical business process that was not tracked, could now be tracked and can be used in taking data-driven decisions.

Time will tell, if it’s successful or not, but we’ll give it a shot.

Sample SwiftDay data visualization is here.

[swiftdayblog]

Saurabh Jain -  - SwiftDay Intern Winter 2013. Codeacademy achievements. Congrats Saurabh, keep it up.

[swiftdayblog]

Arpita Mathur - SwiftDay Intern Winter 2013. Codeacademy JavaScript achievements. Keep it up Arpita.

[swiftdayblog]

Internship Experience - Summer 2013

-by Saurabh Agarwal, Intern at Swiftday

Experience at Swift Day

From very beginning of my intern at Swift Day, I was very excited for the work that I was going to deal with. Since I joined this company as a startup, I already had illusions about challenge that this company was going to put in front of me. One thing that I liked about company is that they start from scratch and moved to acme of technology in very short period of time. Whole Intern program was very intelligently planned. Firstly they introduced each and every technology in chronological order from easy to hard. Then they directed us to major project to work on. We were supposed to make code more structured and more dynamic and remove redundant code. After getting initial bumper I was finally able to synchronize with these guys. The way these guys work and manage their work is so about flawless. I learned professional way to approach a problem and now I knew how all big co corporation were initialized.

Journey from Intern at SwiftDay to Placement in C-DOT R & D

College started in July and company started visiting our campus. First company in which I sat for interview was Amazon, this interview was about coding and problem solving. They asked two questions.  First one was about insertion and deletion in sorted circular doubly list. They were checking if I can include all edge cases. Than they asked second question about number of places possible in a chess board for a knight, given number of valid knight movement.  Like for input given as 2, there are 4 possible places in chess board form where a knight can have only two move i.e. 4 corner places. These questions were given simultaneously to two students. Second one got them in better way and got selected.

After this I got selected for Net-App interview. They asked me about my projects and Intern. They were quite impressed about my intern and then moved to operating system and data structure question. Interviews are such a hard puzzle to solve. I gave all correct answer and also I elaborated all my answer in very depth but didn’t get selected. Then I realized that I misrepresented myself. They doubted my research profile and considered me as a non-eligible guy. One more friend of mine got rejected for the same reason. After all this was a great learning.

And after this, here comes C-DOT, a PSU and dream for all candidates. They shortlisted 12 candidates on bases of their CGPA and interviewed them. This time I kept my answer to the point. I highlighted company related work in my work. They asked me question related to mine projects and internship and I nailed it. This time I could see a clear impression on interviewer.  They were quite impressed by mine projects as well as Intern part. Then they asked me a little bit about networking. Conceptual part was good but as soon they start asking some absurd terms related to networking I got stuck. They fired like 5-6 terms and I didn’t answer any question then there was a silence and then I said that I have worked on neural network and related stuff, u can ask me from that. Then he start asking me about that and then there was a tense moment when I argued with him that mine approach is better than his and after little discussion we came to conclusion that hybrid of both approach would be better and after that he said me you can go now. Until results came, I didn’t know that weather mine argument was good or not. Finally I got selected and they call me and said that we are impressed by your designs in project and intern.

A great thanks to all SwiftDay team for such a great opportunity.  

[swiftdayblog]

Internship Experience - Summer 2013

-by Pooja Bansal, Intern Swiftday

Hey All, I am a final year B.Tech student studying in Information Technology (Computer Engineering Department), Malaviya National Institute of Technology,Jaipur.I wish to share my awesome internship experience during this summer.I did my internship from Swiftday (www.swiftday.com). It is basically a startup with a team of 6 people including 2 interns. I would like to tell you guys that I had a lovely time working with these people.They are a group of experienced and hard working people.Above all, they are really understanding.We, interns, were given mini-assignments, which were supposed to make us familiar with the technology used.After about 20-25 days ,we were quite comfortable with the technologies used.Then, we started working on the real project. During the learning period, our seniors(a team of 4),guided us at each and every step.There were times when we got stuck at the most silly and dumb things but there was always a support from them.They were very patient and literally "tolerated" even the stupidest things done by us.I never felt that I am being monitored upon by someone but always felt as being taken care of at every point of time.I never had to ask for anything I needed,they always made it available even before I actually needed it.They helped me in every possible manner from providing study material to doubt solving sessions.I had the best experience among all of my colleagues who did their internships from all around the world.The technologies learnt by me during this period proved to be a great help in my campus placement which is validated by the fact that I am among the first ones to be placed in my batch!!! Not only this,we were also given monthly stipends which served as the icing on the cake.I am so happy and satisfied (rather more than satisfied!!) with this internship program that I am continuing working with them even after the vacations ,as a part timer.   The most fascinating part of this internship is that it allows you to work from home.You can enjoy your summer with family while simultaneously carrying forward your internship.I would really suggest pre-final year students from Computer Science background to apply for this internship program. May be you are the lucky ones!!

[swiftdayblog]

Agent's agony - Heavy cognitive load

Swiftday Team.

https://www.swiftday.com

[swiftdayblog]

Tools and resources

-by Gaurav Nolkha

We have used a lot of tools and resources to build Swiftday, just like any other web app startup, I guess! Nothing special there, but here is what ticks for us:

Backend: Ruby with Sinatra, MYSQL, memcache and a ton of useful gems makes our backed fun to work with. We totally believe in TDD and test infrastructure on the backend uses RSpec and Rack. For payments, we use stripe.

Frontend: Javascript with jquery and Twitter Bootstrap makes our simple and elegant front end. It is designed to be responsive and works on everything from phones to desktops. Currently we are considering moving to MVC based front end framework. perhaps knockout or backbone.

Swiftday Team.

https://www.swiftday.com

[swiftdayblog]

The one minute pitch!

-by Gaurav Nolkha

Imagine yourself to be a travelling salesman for next one minute.

You have multiple clients. Multiple products to show. You need a good schedule.

  Clients have preferences, appointments.

You have preferences, other appointments.

Products have preferences rather constraints.

On top of those you need an optimized route.

You can do it in head, play phone tags, email tags, use maps to give you route, but solution is not optimal, nor satisfactory in most cases.

  Our service can generate schedule for you. We provide this algorithm as a fully baked service.

This service will be able to consume your clients info/preferences and your info/preferences, and other constraints to deliver you  an optimal schedule in a single click. And it will take care of confirmations and reminders too.

So, you can focus on your business, revenue and quality of service and let our scheduler take care of your schedule.

Get in touch with us. We are a startup located in the rose city, Portland, Oregon, USA.

Swiftday Team.

https://www.swiftday.com