October 8, 2014

Using GitHub as your coding resume

If you are a software engineer and you don’t know about GitHub, you should. You are probably already be on LinkedIn, but what better way to describe your software than to show it on GitHub. I can’t imagine a better way for a prospective employer to pre-qualify a software engineer than to view some of their code. This is assuming that the code you have is owned by you or will not violate any legal issues if you share it.

Here is what you need to do:

1. Get a free account at GitHub, install and configure it to your specifications. One thing to keep in mind is that you want your username to be as close to your real name as possible.

Below are a couple of useful configuration options entered via the terminal.

git config --get user.name
git config --get user.email

These should be the same as what you used to create an account at GitHub. If you don’t get anything back do the following:

git config --global user.name "John Doe"
git config --global user.email "jdoe@email.com"

If you want to exclude files, type in:

git config --global core.excludesfile ~/.gitignore_global

then

echo '.excluded file/' >> ~/.gitignore_global

for each file you want excluded.

Rather than push all of your files, the following will just push the branch you are currently working on:

git config --global push.default current

2. Confirm your account. In the terminal type:

pbcopy < ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub

Go to https://github.com/settings/ssh. Click Add SSH key, put ‘Laptop’ in Title, then Paste in the Key box. Verify the SSH Key settings by typing the following into the terminal:

ssh -T git@github.com

Once confirmed, type:

git init

to initialize the git program on your system

3. Create a new repository for your code at GitHub. Just to the right of your username, you should see a “+” symbol. Click on it and chose “New Repository”. You should name it after an existing directory where you have the code that you want the world to see and click “Public” and the “Create Repository” button. GitHub then makes it as easy as possible by giving you a couple of options for code to paste into your terminal and run. Reload the browser and bingo, your code is now on the web!

4. If you need to make changes to your code, once you are done with your changes, in the terminal, run:

git status

to see that the file has been changed and can be staged.

git add 'filename'

to stage the file

git commit

to commit the file to be pushed to GitHub.

git push

to push the file to GitHub. You can check the website to see that your changes made it.

If you happened to be on GitHub’s website and you wanted to make a change to your code, you could do it there also. Once finished saving your changes, back in the terminal, you could type:

git pull

to update the file on your laptop from GitHub’s website.

5. Make sure your GitHub profile link is on LinkedIn and on your resume. Prospective employers may be able to stumble onto your GitHub account using google, but why not just give them the link?

September 26, 2014

Book Review – Training for the New Alpinism: A Manual for the Climber as Athlete

I decided to pick up Training for the New Alpinism: A Manual for the Climber as Athlete because I had never seen a book on this topic that attempted to cover so many bases. I had always wondered if my regime of weights and cardio was not enough or too much for weekend warrior mountaineering. This book has a little something for everyone – planning cardio and weight training, nutrition, stories, altitude strategies and the science behind all of it. To plan my workouts, I translated the book into an excel workbook so that the only two inputs I needed were maximum heart rate and an estimate for number of hours trained in the prior year. I thought I found an error in the book and contacted the authors. They were both expedient, informative and thorough with their responses. It turns out that I was interpreting a graph correctly, but didn’t think that the distribution of time made sense given my training level versus an uber-athlete. They also told me that the book wasn’t meant to be so formulaic. I’ll cut to the chase and say that I highly recommend this book.

Overall content and organization. This book is really well organized and has many real world examples and stories not just of the author, but a who’s who of mountaineering. Even though it is hard to relate to the endeavours described in the stories because they are out of reach for the average athlete, they are still inspiring. All of the exercises are well explained and the pictures are helpful. It is always helpful when all references are noted but when further exploration of sources is encouraged, you really know this isn’t just another workout book.

Quality of the workout program. The overall basic premise is to increase your yield, regardless of what stage you are in and regardless of it is cardio or weight training, by building up and then tapering to recovery for the next stage which will be progressively harder. It is designed with a big peak attempt in mind at the end of the program. You can plan your training regime for that big peak a year in advance with this book.

Cardio workouts are based on time working out in different heart rate zones. It isn’t just go all out for x number of minutes. For example, here are my zones broken out by beats per minute:

<97 = Recovery Zone

97 – 132 = Zone 1

132 – 140 = Zone 2

140 – 158 = Zone 3

158 – 167 = Zone 4

>167 = Zone 5

Weight training is more exercises done with body weight than traditional weightlifting exercises and they are not done until failure since gaining muscle mass is not an objective. To give you an idea of how organized the program is, here is one sample week of workouts:

Monday AM – OFF, PM – Strength

Tuesday AM – Zone 1, PM – Zone 1

Wednesday AM – Zone 2, PM – Zone 1

Thursday AM – OFF, PM – Strength

Friday AM – OFF, PM – OFF

Saturday AM – Zone 1, PM – OFF

Sunday AM – Long Zone 1, PM – OFF

In this week, Zone 1 and Strength workouts are 32 minutes long, Zone 2 is 70 minutes and Long Zone 1 is 88 minutes.

The cardio workouts won’t work unless you can monitor your heart rate, so you are going to have some way to monitor it. I use the Suunto Ambit2 Sapphire (with HR monitor) watch.

One thing that is repeated throughout the book is to avoid overtraining. I had never heard of the concept of “recovery workouts”, but they are part of the program and definitely help you feel better.

Results. The weight training circuits were far more challenging than I expected them to be. I never had organized cardio before in anyway except 2-3 times a week. Varying the intensity and times helps a ton with monotony, but with the overall goal of increasing yield. I will not be attempting a major climb this year so I will not be able to see the entire program put into effect. However, the few local peaks I did were not much of a problem. The biggest difference I noticed was that there was not an extended recovery period. Overall, I really like the all encompassing approach to planning covered in this book.

I think this book would be useful to the weekend warrior mountaineer, serious alpinist, workout gurus, professional trainers and coaches and anyone who likes the subject. There is really something for everyone in this book and you will learn something useful no matter what your background.

February 13, 2014

Dead Startups

In the spirit of Megan McArdle’s book The Upside of Down whose message is that failure is what makes success possible, here is an analysis of dead startups from 2010-2013 by CB Insights.

The main takeaways from CB Insights:
-In each year since 2010, 70% of all dead tech companies have been in the internet sector.

-55% of failed startups raised $1M or less, and almost 70% companies died having raised less than $5M overall.

-While the dead companies on our list raised $11.3M on average, the median funding raised which is a better measure in this case was $1.3M.

-The average company dies ~20 months from its last funding round in the absence of additional funding or acquirers.

Since we don’t know the reason why these failures occurred, we can at least take away the importance of the startup to continually be in the mode of raising money. The next interesting issue to consider is the likelihood of follow up financing. Based this analysisfrom Red Point, the probability peaks at 9 months since the previous raise regardless of round, size or industry.

January 16, 2014

Risk Off – Crapping Out On Orizaba

In December, I failed to summit Pico de Orizaba, the highest point in Mexico and third highest point in North America. I made it to about 17,800 feet while its peak was just beyond me at about 18,400 feet. I knew I was physically close, but the only thing that kept me going from about 16,000 feet was my willpower. Whether I was at the onset of a chest cold or had a mild case of hypoxia or it just was not my day, my body started to tell me to stop long before my mind did. After I descended down to 16,500 feet to wait for the rest of the team to summit and return down, I checked my pulse oximeter and it read 70%. That means at 17,800 feet it had to be under 70%. Earlier in the day at our 14,000 foot basecamp, my reading was a more normal 92%.

Sure, summiting would have been nice since it was the goal, but I decided to cut my losses. It is psychologically very difficult to cut any kind of losses. Instead of selling investments when they go down 10%, most people hang on to see what happens even if that means eventually getting wiped out.

Minimizing losses is just as important as maximizing gains because it keeps you in the game.

When it comes to climbing peaks, the losses you are trying to minimize are injury and death. Orizaba is not known to be a technical nor deadly mountain by any stretch, but a 25 year old American fell to his death just a few weeks after my friend and I were down there.

The only things that were going through my mind when I decided to turn around were that I was slowing down the team, it was not a good spot to stop because that part of the glacier would have been shaded and too cold for too long and that I could be a potential risk for the team higher up. It was the only time I have ever turned around for something non-weather related. The mountain is still there if I decide to attempt it again.

November 6, 2013

Open the Flood Gates: CleanTech Financing Just Changed Forever

Solar City filed to do the industry’s first securitization a few days ago. This is huge news for anyone in the solar space with positive consequences for all other non-solar energy producers. Gone are the days of one-off financing, Solar City and Wall Street just made solar an institutional bond product.

http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/Solar-Milestone-SolarCity-Introduces-Securitization-to-Distributed-PV

October 28, 2013

Mega Trends – China Version

1. Industrial & Commercial Bank of China Ltd., the world’s most profitable lender, and its four largest rivals expunged in the first six months 22.1 billion yuan ($3.65 billion) of debt that couldn’t be collected, up from 7.65 billion yuan a year earlier, filings showed. (BBG)

2. Gold supply/demand figures are notoriously opaque and since there aren’t quarterly earnings calls for gold, who knows about the real numbers. However, if the numbers are to be believed: China has become the world’s largest producer @ 400 tonnes per year and is continuing to buy producers; 2,600 tonnes will be delivered to China by the end of the year (1,730 through August annualized) and the rest of the world produces 2,260 tonnes.

3. China holds roughly $2 trillion in dollar denominated debt and 3.7 trillion in USD reserves (PNC).

4. China has made it know that it would prefer to shift from an export based to domestic based demand economy. Next month’s Third Plenum of the Central Committee of the 18th Chinese Communist Party Congress should show how willing the leadership is to commit to that strategy (CBR).

5. China has taken over the top spot (from the US) as the world’s largest oil importer (EIA). Oil contracts have been historically dollar denominated but that has slowly given way to eurodollar and given this turn of events, contracts denominated in yuan might overtake dollar denominated ones.

China has been trying to shift its economy to be driven by domestic demand rather than through exports to the debt addicted U.S. consumer. However, they have potential over inflation problems due to this strategy. It will be interesting to see how they balance the shift while slowly moving away from the dollar and U.S. Treasuries. A short term recession might be a good thing for China if it can depeg the yuan while it is weak allowing them to sell dollars and bonds.

October 21, 2013

Rental Kharma and the Structure Sensor – 2 cool tools for residential and commercial real estate

1) Even though the main idea of Rental Kharma is as a credit building tool, since one of the data points is lease termination, it could be used as a lead generation tool for the client whose lease is up or the space that is now available.

2) Occipital’s Structure Sensor is a device that attaches to your Ipad or tablet and lets you scan any space in 3D. At a bare minimum, you could put away the tape measure, but you could also use it for virtual tours or quick estimates of remodelling projects.

October 17, 2013

Thoughts about Rocky Mountain CleanTech Open

Even though I signed up late, I was able to volunteer as a specialist mentor, mock judge and provided logistic support for the regional finals as the scoring data guy. My comments are from those three perspectives. Before I get to that, I just wanted to say how impressed with the quality of a nearly entirely voluntarily run organization and thankful for the opportunity to give my time.

Specialist Mentor – I provided pitch book feedback to 5 different teams. I am not sure if teams use the mentor profiles, but none of these teams reached out to me initially and stated that they didn’t even know I was available. They were more than happy to take the feedback and some of them even incorporated some of the suggestions they agreed with into their presentations.

Not all teams use Launch Pad either and from a management perspective, this could be a useful tool for CleanTech. I was engaged 6 different times, but only 1 of them was recorded. Granted not all teams need all of the services provided, but it should be at least known who is using what and how often.

Mock Judge – This is where the rubber hits the road for the teams and I thought a pretty good job was done at getting a good mix of different kinds of judges. This is important for the teams so they get a balanced feedback loop. The biggest room for improvement in this process has to do with managing the team’s documents which includes their presentations, summaries and worksheets. There just isn’t enough time to ask all of your questions and give all of your feedback in the time allotted. I am fine with the time allotment, but I am wondering if there is a way to document and provide teams your questions and feedback – perhaps allowing judges and teams to share documents?

Even though I didn’t do it, I considered filling out my scorecards ahead of time just so I take my time analyzing them and not worry about getting fatigued in the afternoon session. Then, if needed, I could have modified the scores and commentary base on the pitch. This might be overkill for a mock judge session, but maybe a good idea for the regionals and finals.

Scoring Data Guy – The most obvious thing I noticed is how inefficient it is to print out score sheets, have judges fill them out and then manually input the scores. Ideally, one of the sponsors would provide tablets for the judges which would eliminate the paper, potential for input error and scores would be all stored instantly. That way, we could spend more of our time analyzing the data.

I also noticed that the second question in the legal section (Is their corporate and cap structure free of issues?) was the least scored question. Surprisingly, the questions in the sustainability section were the next least scored questions. The topics are important, but the questions might need to be reworked.

October 11, 2013

The Data Driven Life – Chasing the Nigerian Nightmare

With a stronger post-surgery shoulder, I decided to start lifting weights again a few weeks ago. Using the metric of the sum of all repetitions * weight, this week I lifted a total of 56,000 pounds. This is the sum of a five day workout by these groups: legs, chest, back, shoulder, biceps and triceps.

The total metric of 56,000 pounds made me think of Christian Okoye, aka “The Nigerian Nightmare”. Supposedly, he use to have workouts of 40,000 pounds PER DAY. Without knowing what his workouts consisted of or how many days per week he lifted, I decided to do an unscientific comparison between the two of us. As a college player entering the NFL, he could bench, clean and squat 405, 395 and 725 pounds respectively. If you would have asked me, I would have guessed that he was probably between 2-4 times stronger than me. I never consistently did cleans, but my max bench and hip sled squat were 275 and 450 and these days I am nowhere near those numbers.

If I assume he had a five day workout split like me that means he would lift 200,000 pounds per week or 3.6 times as much absolute weight as me. Now since he weighed in at around 260 at that time (I think he got up to 290 in the pros) and I currently weigh about 190, I can use those numbers to normalize the total amount lifted. 200,000 / 260 = 769 vs. 56,000 / 190 = 295. In other words, in one week, he lifted 769 times his bodyweight and I lifted 295 times my bodyweight. Using those numbers, he was 2.6 times relatively stronger than me. I know I will never get to 40,000 pounds per workout (nor do I want to), but maybe I can get under 2 times relative strength and be happy I never had to tackle him.

I would be remiss if I didn’t include some obligatory highlight clips. The first is of Okoye and the second is of Steve Atwater and the “hit heard around the world” (before Jadeveon Clowney was even born).