tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-66154808780829748202024-03-18T08:33:06.206+05:30Blog @ CodonomicsDemocratizing Knowledge & ExperienceKarthikhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13054295982718010059noreply@blogger.comBlogger286125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6615480878082974820.post-61344996371381476032024-02-11T13:44:00.004+05:302024-02-12T12:58:02.569+05:30Desiring to tread the path of Engineering Management faster?<p></p>
<div style="text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="409" data-original-width="750" height="350" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjdw8vuPooV_TFcd6ZGpBfJTATW0NcquZ1SY6e3if6l-zctdB1E_YFqdOt62Gf7DzT_tB6pV90EsbFyHL_vubB_6sN6Wdk4VktygxIQz4WaGM9ndzda5zZ6YTU4ygzRKXhqGOtA9_rZwhikYEPtTVnfK9ed59_rMfNKjeA4cPeNcIE92gWSknGbE8LEjKk/w640-h350/EngineeringManagement.png" width="640" /></div>
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Aspiring to become an Engineering leader early on in your career because Engineering Management is so fancy and hot? You may want to think about it again and I hope this post serves you as a good food for thought to aid your decision making.
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<p><span style="font-size: medium;">If you are dreaming to becoming an Engineering Management leader sooner because pure Engineering doesn't carry that apparent charm, below are list of situations for you to ask your engineering leader and see if you get answers similar to what you have thought about it as a first-cut validation for your aspirations.</span></p>
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<li><span style="font-size: medium;">How do you measure developer productivity - LoC, Spring Points, Say-do ratio, etc.? As extension, how do you measure team productivity - Velocity, Say-do ratio, etc.? [Spoiler alert: Most workplaces haven't got this right. A challenge you will have to face to make a difference in your role in Engineering management.]</span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: medium;">How many QAs are good for a development team? </span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: medium;">How do you handle a poor performer in your team? [This is such a common question these days, that any Kaju or Kerry, will vomit a routine answer and perhaps mimic, to score a brownie. Spoiler alert, the most common answer that is liked and practiced is so darn egregious to put mildly. To me, the leader will stand out from the crowd in how this question is responded.]</span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: medium;">How would you let go of a developer your business function dislikes?</span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: medium;">How would you motivate your team to deliver quality product faster?</span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: medium;">Do you think as Engineering Leader it is your responsibility to say YES for all the things that your business and product demands from Engineering?</span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: medium;">How do you handle tasks with competing priorities to be picked up say, for a given sprint?</span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: medium;">How would you handle unplanned tasks coming your way in the midst of delivery?</span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: medium;">How do you wish the feature requirements are laid out to your engineering team?</span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: medium;">In your company's Agile model, different teams have different sprint sizes - ranging between 2 weeks to 2 months. What is your take on this?</span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: medium;">Burn out is so common in your teams that your executive leadership celebrates it. How do you intend to thrive in this atmosphere?</span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: medium;">Product and business determines the work estimates for your team, in your company. How do you influence your team to commit to the given delivery deadlines, to prove your commitment and demonstrate your engineering prowess?</span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: medium;">As an Engineering Leader, how do you intend to lay the career path for engineers in your team - pick a few roles and define your expectation for each of these roles to help categorize your team members by their expertise and experience.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: medium;">You Boss joins you in your meeting, scratching his head showing his frustration on the log volume that is burning the company's cash. He calls for persistent logs archival interval to be reduced. How do you intend to respond and proceed on this?</span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: medium;">How do you handle cross-functional and cross-team conflicts in your teams? Share a few examples that you have experienced and how did you overcome those?</span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: medium;">What is your take on microservices and monolith architectures?</span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: medium;">What in your opinion makes for good engineering practices?</span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: medium;">Your boss decided to hire more developers to increase delivery throughput. How do you intend to help him?</span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: medium;">Your boss decided to hire more developers on short term contract for 3-6 months duration. How do you intend to help him?</span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: medium;">Over the course of your experience, list the old engineering opinions/practices that you changed for good? [This is my favorite question that I ask any candidate to learn more about that person as an individual and his experiences.]</span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: medium;">Upon your joining a company, you are mandated to git rid of bottom 20% of your team and hire their replacements. How do you intend to execute this mandate?</span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: medium;">How do you measure your QA's expertise for performance?</span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: medium;">What is your expectation from a Product Manager, Program Manager, QA, BA, senior team member, junior team member, etc.?</span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: medium;">What is it in Engineering Management that you like wanting you to pursue this path?</span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: medium;">How do you see the day in the life of someone in the role of Engineering Management?</span></li>
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<div><span style="font-size: medium;">This by no means is an exhaustive list but a small sample of questions that you can start seeking answers for, if for nothing but to enjoy your professional journey. I did this heartily and have no regrets for my experience is super enriched that I have been paying it forward to folks I get to work with. I have worked with Engineering, Product and Business stakeholders alike in convincing them on the path forward on more occasions in many workplaces because I got my fundamentals in Engineering ironed out and I remain as curious as I was. As a matter of fact, with strong fundamentals alone, I have in the past decade, without fail, have led teams to continuous improvement and fastest jump in productivity by at least 20% in the first quarter.</span></div>
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<div><span style="font-size: medium;">Now for the bad news, it is likely that your old-school engineering leader give you dated answers giving you a false impression of Engineering Leadership roles and responsibilities; although on the positive side of it, you at least know what it takes to grow in the context of your company's environment. Take for instance, a real situation in many startup companies backed by well-known investors, it is common for investors to run audits and recommend improvement of Automated Testing Code Coverage. If you don't have your fundamentals right, as Engineering Manager you would end up merely trickling down the pressure, when what you should be doing is showing the right path to get there by working with the developers.</span></div>
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<div><span style="font-size: medium;">You might be thinking of adopting some book answers for the above sample questions and perhaps even get your dream job but then you won't enjoy a single day in your job and end up continuing for the sake of it. So don't be in a haste and join the rat race. Rather live your life learning on the job and get enlightened with every aha moment that comes by.</span></div>
<p></p>Karthikhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13054295982718010059noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6615480878082974820.post-7947334157890668312024-01-18T22:48:00.004+05:302024-02-11T13:53:17.469+05:30Things To Know Before You Construct Your Dream House<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiUgHXC9h4cgY-PysN786m4sK6cf6_qNxFovpdCwoZ6rLNe0xQh2s8qsVwT_RzvwLijutYSDXvB3FryMfOdLopF4xkX7tAHTwpEFTAM_zbn9V7r9i_47KE_K8oJ0iz02Bgpp6hmHdwjzn0p54QFpGN3jRUC7b6T5yzeLmhTJJcFleF7y6QAwhFxBUIvw8c/s1193/dream-house-construction.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><img border="0" data-original-height="621" data-original-width="1193" height="334" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiUgHXC9h4cgY-PysN786m4sK6cf6_qNxFovpdCwoZ6rLNe0xQh2s8qsVwT_RzvwLijutYSDXvB3FryMfOdLopF4xkX7tAHTwpEFTAM_zbn9V7r9i_47KE_K8oJ0iz02Bgpp6hmHdwjzn0p54QFpGN3jRUC7b6T5yzeLmhTJJcFleF7y6QAwhFxBUIvw8c/w640-h334/dream-house-construction.jpg" width="640" /></span></a></div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span><p><span style="font-size: medium;">There is a famous saying in Tamil, “கல்யாணம் பண்ணி பார், வீடு கட்டி பார்’’, which translates to mean ‘conducting a marriage and constructing a house is such an arduous task that you get to realize life and its hardships by the time you are done with both of them’. I have my share of learnings in the construction of my house and still am going through the grind - for over a couple of years now. The project is exhaustive, and painful; while you can't avoid the pain, I guess you can well mitigate it to a large extent by being diligent and curious.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">If you are purchasing an apartment, there isn't much you can do and need to worry about. But if you are constructing a house on your own plot, there are a heck a lot of things that could go wrong leaving you exhausted and devoid of your peace of mind. This post is a note to younger self on things to get right for the mega project called "House Construction". </span></p><p></p><ol style="text-align: left;"><li><span style="font-size: medium;">Government Permissions: Know the touch-points with governments for which you need permissions/licenses - Municipal Water, Drainage, Municipal Tax, Electricity, House Plan Registration, etc. This clearly is the fort of the realtor to squeeze money out of you and still not deliver.</span></li><li><span style="font-size: medium;">Blue-print: The building structure (the pillar/beams) are dependent on the house Blue-print. Iterate on the house plan to your needs be it Vasthu, utility, safety, etc. before you give it that final nod. If the realtor is kickass, the fully constructed house would not see the beams at all. And truth be told, you don't get to see a realtor who can deliver to this level of perfection. Welcome to the new world order, where the play jugad/hack to cover this deficiency by promoting false-ceilings as superior alternative. Old-schoolers like me see beauty and strength in core stuff. If you are craving for false-ceilings, or any interiors for that matter, wait until the first few rains, to know how good your construction is. Nature shows you the path forward. (There is so much to this one, that this deserves a separate blog. More on this sooner..)</span></li><li><span style="font-size: medium;">Get the House Plan approved before demolishing your existing house. Your realtor will push you to first demolish you existing house to be rest assured that he has his gig and take control. Beware!</span></li><li><span style="font-size: medium;">Cost Estimate and Agreements: Ensure that your project cost estimation breakdown has milestones and only upon such milestones the due amount would be delivered. The milestones IMHO, should have penalty clause for time and quality - ideally. </span></li><li><span style="font-size: medium;">Shared Ownership/Partnership: In case of shared ownership of property (henceforth called as partners), ensure that all property owners are clear and transparent in what is happening. I had created 2 Whatsapp group, one internal group and other with realtor, for communications to happen in only these channels. Break this process, everyone gets to lose; for it doesn't matter where in the bottom of a boat a crack is, the entire boat sinks. This seemingly simple value system is not only overlooked and broken in workplaces, but often is broken in family too.</span></li><li><span style="font-size: medium;">If you got partners, and one of them is a mole without responsibility, set clear expectations on his conduct and better to get in agreement to enforce it. Often, an irresponsible person is as dangerous as a greedy one - you are better off to fear both.</span></li><li><span style="font-size: medium;">The realtor will in a few months into the construction works, will play out emotions to seek advance money than what is agreed upon. It could be anything, from his kids marriage, personal loss, etc depending on what he reads as your weakness. Do not fall prey for it. And beware that they would have a ton of tricks like this that they would keep employing from time to time.</span></li><li><span style="font-size: medium;">Your Trusted Supervisor: You should have at least one and preferably two experienced people from your family circle or someone you trust, who can supervise the works even if the entire project is given out as a contract. Without this in place, you can take for granted that your money is gone for nothing.</span></li><li><span style="font-size: medium;">Pest control: Pest control should be administered when the foundation is laid - this is the best time for max impact against pests that can eat your pricey woodwork in your home. You should have a witness and proof of this thing happening.</span></li><li><span style="font-size: medium;">Roofing: You should personally supervise on the day when they do the roofing for each floor, to ensure that the concrete mixture is done right and poured over. Typically this structure must be tested later for its quality usually by Rebound Hammer Test.</span></li><li><span style="font-size: medium;">Wedged Window Elevation: Every window should have wedge border as elevation, failing which the water drips inside during the rainy season spoiling your furnishings and thus your peace of mind.</span></li><li><span style="font-size: medium;">Wet Rooms: Any wet surface rooms like toilet and bathroom when packed out with cement and tiles, be there in person to ensure that water resistant glue is mixed well enough with the cement and the flooring tiles are well bridged with Grout matching the tile color. Gaps between tiles is no small issue. Do not underestimate water - it has a unique way of creeping through pores and weakening the structures or affecting the wall-paints in moisture form.</span></li><li><span style="font-size: medium;">Painting: Do not paint your house inside first before first painting the outside building, especially during rainy season. You will end up re-painting your inside otherwise. Supervision is required to not just prevent pilferage, but also to ensure right amount of water is mixed with the paint, as prescribed by the company. Also indoor painting for a house should be done only after the walls and floor concrete are tested to be dry enough. </span></li><li><span style="font-size: medium;">Do not overpay your realtor. If you do, take for granted that the overpaid money is gone for nothing.</span></li><li><span style="font-size: medium;">[Will be adding more sooner or later to this list...not done yet!]</span></li></ol><div><span style="font-size: medium;">Should you believe I missed adding something to the above list or have better solutions to the listed problems, I sincerely would love to learn from your experience.</span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">As thumb rule, you can take for granted that your realtor could potentially be that sweet sounding scamster who has the knack of figuring out the cracks in you and exploiting it. Beware and be alert until your house is done to completion and that you have it audited and certified by a third party person at every milestone.</span></div><p></p>Karthikhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13054295982718010059noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6615480878082974820.post-32814283363575671052024-01-17T22:54:00.004+05:302024-01-18T08:49:17.582+05:30Covid, World Economy And Layoffs<div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg7Jdwc7en0kTb5XOqLrIbpQAd6_r_4eKXMaySUP-KBfs0rOKCRuVvdRDw3tQAcTvlkTi_8dLbxmW07NZBlwCWg4EGNB59MAK-i_pmSV5oFSqBxfdq_PEWR4_Jp-cmLQsVMk5prrfAsmi9rlCMom96rgU4zBcmXuUKed-LMMcaXHApX6pns2-urQzwsWgw/s750/big-ball-of-mud-survivor.webp" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="499" data-original-width="750" height="426" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg7Jdwc7en0kTb5XOqLrIbpQAd6_r_4eKXMaySUP-KBfs0rOKCRuVvdRDw3tQAcTvlkTi_8dLbxmW07NZBlwCWg4EGNB59MAK-i_pmSV5oFSqBxfdq_PEWR4_Jp-cmLQsVMk5prrfAsmi9rlCMom96rgU4zBcmXuUKed-LMMcaXHApX6pns2-urQzwsWgw/w640-h426/big-ball-of-mud-survivor.webp" width="640" /></a></div><div><br /></div>As I see it, since the beginning of Covid-19, things seemed to be have gone from good/great to bad and with time things are turning worse and worser. Indeed a painful thing to witness and experience for all of us. </div><div><br /></div><div>During this time, we also witnessed a season of "the great resignations", times when the leaders of affected companies cried out loud about talent being poached from their companies and the recruiting companies that poach talent lamenting about demand for disproportional compensation hikes. Sitting on the other side of the table, I changed the way hiring happen in our company to hire the right talent at well deserved hikes. Note that I use the word deserved hike instead of calling it decent. By well-deserved hike I mean a compensation that doesn't break team parity and that the candidate knows well what he is signing up for during the course of his hiring. I call this sticking to fundamentals and it worked to my benefit.<div><br /></div><div>"What about firing/layoffs?" you ask. I'll get to that, but before we get there let us see how big tech companies have responded to this crisis.</div><div><br /></div><div>Google admittedly laid-off over 12K employees worldwide in early 2023 and the key here is how its CEO, Sundar Pichai, took responsibility for it, all upon himself and how he treated the affected employees calling them <b><i>"incredibly talented people"</i></b>. Do check out <a href="https://blog.google/inside-google/message-ceo/january-update/" target="_blank">Sundar Pichai's email</a> last year that he had published openly for the sake of transparency. And later that year, he responded to a query on this subject with words, <i>"This is <b>difficult for any company to go through</b>. At Google, we really haven’t had a moment quite like that in 25 years. It became clear if we didn’t act, it would have been a worse decision down the line. It would have been a major overhang on the company. I think it would have made it very difficult in a year like this with such a big shift in the world to create the capacity to invest in areas...<b>Clearly it’s not the right way to do it. I think it’s something we could have done differently for sure.</b>"</i></div><div><br /></div><div><a href="https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2023/01/18/subject-focusing-on-our-short-and-long-term-opportunity/" target="_blank">Microsoft's Satya Nadella</a> in the beginning of 2023 announced that roughly 5% of the workforce (that is about 10K employees) would be let gone. His words in that communication are note worthy for any aspiring and existing leaders alike. I strongly believe, the foundation to leadership success is trust, transparency and respect for its team.</div><div><br /></div><div>Amazon laid-off its employees but shutting down the entire divisions or down-sizing them significantly or Role eliminations that they felt weren't yielding expected results. Amazon's CEO, Andy Jassy hinted the divisions that would be most likely be affected hinting its workforce on what is coming. No blaming of its talent here. Instead he goes about citing the market uncertainty and calls this a difficult decision. As an aside, <a href="https://justingarrison.com/blog/2023-12-30-amazons-silent-sacking/" target="_blank">Justin Garrison has an interesting post</a> on this subject and on the impact this has on AWS for the techies to munch. </div><div><br /></div><div>A lot of other companies weren't this transparent in its layoffs. Most of them blamed its employees for their poor performance without any shred of evidence, prior feedback and worst of all giving its employees the worst shock of their lives. This is terribly wrong and in my humble opinion unethical too. Notably, Cloudflare too seemed to have fallen in this unfortunate side of the story that I have come to known a few days back when I stumbled upon it in <a href="https://twitter.com/SMB_Attorney/status/1745609324544536778" target="_blank">Twitter, where in this video Cloudflare's employee recorded her getting laid-off over a 15 minute video call with her CEO apparently</a>.</div><div><br /></div><div>No two companies and their circumstances are same but that is no reason to being rude to your own employees. I wonder what happened to the terms like "employee experience", if not "employee care". Even when parting ways with an employees, how they go through it makes a big deal of difference to the brand of a company. We sure can learn some important lessons from other's stories; after all, a wiseman learns from other's experience - mistake or otherwise.</div><div> </div><div>How did I handle layoffs pressure? I for one, personally care for my team's welfare and in their welfare and upliftment, I bet on the business results that we as a team deliver. I can state with immense delight that I managed to resist to succumb to the temptation of yielding to the pressure of firing any of my team members under the guise of poor performance or rude surprise. I have had tough conversations with my leadership in the past couple of years in the lines that - layoffs have an impact on morale and thus delivery. Engineering leaders that are hands-on engineering know why it is so - the business product in use with repeated churn becomes a <a href="http://www.laputan.org/mud/mud.html#BigBallOfMud" target="_blank">big ball of mud</a>, faster than the time one can imagine.</div></div><div><br /></div><div>I would put forth the below guidelines as food for though before the leadership thinks of firing its workforce:</div><div><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>The leadership with greatest stake (often the CEO) should own it and communicate it too.</li><li>Build transparency and improve exit experience. Remember, every ex-employee is your brand builder or breaker. You determine that with what he experiences during his/her exit. Every leader has stake in this.</li><li>If you are downsizing your team, you shouldn't be thinking of expanding it again for another 3 to 6 months. It is the same with role redundancy as well. Otherwise, it reflects poorly of respective leadership's capability.</li><li>Where it is not about market conditions but genuinely performance issues. This can't and shouldn't be a surprise to a team member. Better the feedback mechanism and introduce Performance Improvement Program. Often, it mitigates sour exits. If you talk of large scale performance issues, it reflects badly of respective department's leadership - how did they miss it for long? Be mindful of your actions! </li></ul></div>Karthikhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13054295982718010059noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6615480878082974820.post-79775526113802153412024-01-10T18:35:00.000+05:302024-01-10T18:35:12.357+05:30Aadhar Card - Online Address Update Process<p><span style="font-size: medium;">Do you know that you can update the address of your Aadhar via web instead of in-person. The in-person thingy is something that is a time killer, where one has to spend at least half-a-day at the UIDAI authorized enrollment center like state's municipal office or post-office standing in long queue.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">If you are making the address update request based on your address proof document, you can check out <a href="https://www.indmoney.com/articles/personal-finance/how-to-change-address-in-aadhaar-online" target="_blank">IndMoney's blogpost on this</a>; I wish UIDAI had put up a post like that apart from the <a href="https://uidai.gov.in/en/contact-support/have-any-question/922-english-uk/faqs/aadhaar-online-services/online-address-update-process.html" target="_blank">FAQ post on this topic</a>.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">If you are like me living with parents, where my dad is the Head of Family in my family's Ration card, I realized that I can quickly update my address in my Aadhar card based on the address of my Dad's Aadhar card. All of us in family felt so relieved at this simplification of the process. I personally felt appreciations for the Product Managers at UIDAI to have known the domain well enough to have thought through a simplified solution. They would have been world-class, if only they had documented the process as well to make the end-user's life easier. Now because they didn't do this and that their workflow is broken in poor communication with the end-user, <span style="color: red;">I had to wait for over 4 months with the workflow being stalled in "Verification Stage"</span>. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">After months of waiting, I visited the local municipal office to see what is stopping them from clearing this verification from their end and I was simply asked to contact the customer care for all online requests. Several calls and emails to call center weren't really helpful in that we got template responses that made no sense; until one gentleman clarified that the "Verification Stage" in case of "My Head of Family (HoF) Requests" are to be done by the Head of Family and not by some govt or UIDAI official in the backend. One of those times in life when you feel greatly relieved (that you found some way forward) and pained (for having wasted a lot of time and energy in a supposedly trivial affair) at the same time.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">My request has now moved to "Validation Stage" now and I hope there are no surprises. Will keep you posted if I encounter one.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>Cut to chase</b>, post your address update via "Head of Family" route and successful payment of 50 INR, you would get an SRN (Service Request Number) that you should record for all future reference to this transaction. If like me, you have not done it, you can get it by logging into your <a href="https://myaadhaar.uidai.gov.in/" target="_blank">Aadhar Account</a> and selecting "Payment History" box in your dashboard page. The Payment History page shows the SRN number against the payment for address update request you made earlier. Share this SRN number to your "Head of Family", who can then login into his Aadhar Account and select "My Head of Family (HoF) Requests" where he can search for SRN numbers to either Approve/Decline your request. Once your SRN number is approved by your HoF, you can see that your request moves to "Validation Stage" from your Aadhar's dashboard like below:<br /><br /></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-NbLbK_KN4o6lJG6Qehn6Pn5y7XhKjQ9-dokgR-67B-MbpgQ-DWrCbySp0zC-Xr2IVZrYhPStGl9k-KELVxnufwpP0GKDLJdXGvwEOLlqMbfZBBRvH8zHPYsmsm9GMgAQ4ZK_Ml6oLtRgQ3r5cKvUv_ZpsT0esWIds_IAf3Een86IimLswwGrVtqimEU/s1321/Screenshot%20(509).png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><img alt="Aadhar User Dashboard" border="0" data-original-height="941" data-original-width="1321" height="456" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-NbLbK_KN4o6lJG6Qehn6Pn5y7XhKjQ9-dokgR-67B-MbpgQ-DWrCbySp0zC-Xr2IVZrYhPStGl9k-KELVxnufwpP0GKDLJdXGvwEOLlqMbfZBBRvH8zHPYsmsm9GMgAQ4ZK_Ml6oLtRgQ3r5cKvUv_ZpsT0esWIds_IAf3Een86IimLswwGrVtqimEU/w640-h456/Screenshot%20(509).png" title="Aadhar User's Dashboard" width="640" /></span></a></div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span><p><span style="font-size: medium;">If you have been through this pain and have reached here to find the fix, here is one thing I ask from you - do your job whatever it be, well enough for your end-user. <b><i>Grow that empathy for end-user and let that be your intrinsic motivation to do well in your job.</i></b> Cheers!</span></p>Karthikhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13054295982718010059noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6615480878082974820.post-73074171261402691542024-01-06T18:00:00.003+05:302024-01-10T13:33:10.398+05:30How to spot an idiot in your office?<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<div><span style="font-size: medium;">Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker delivered a rather unique commencement address to the Northwestern University Class of 2023 on Monday, sharing wisdom from the hit television show "The Office" to help send graduates "forward on the right path in life.". For shorter version of this video check out <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i2Lo8ChhOKU" target="_blank">this</a>.</span></div>
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<div><span style="font-size: medium;">This is one of those speeches that make you laugh, think and get inspired to become a better person at work. Thankfully for me, I was fortunate to have been with leaders like this at workplace early on in my career to have strong value system that underpinned all our initiatives to successes. It is in such an environment that I grew stronger from strength to strength and have been seeding this culture in all places that lack this.</span></div>
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<div><span style="font-size: medium;">So here is my take on the subject that is in the lines of this august speaker. An idiot in a field is understandably insecure and thus notoriously servile to his boss while being cruel to his team, in that he would take more pride in cruelty than any shame in his idiocy at skills. You may find it surprising at first before normalizing this behavior when you witness this in corporate world.</span></div>
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<div><span style="font-size: medium;">Don't aspire to be that idiot. Work on your skills, strengthen you values, and become the leader you wish to work with. This is how we make this world a better place for others and consequently ourselves.</span></div>Karthikhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13054295982718010059noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6615480878082974820.post-69027197168898140462023-12-27T17:03:00.006+05:302023-12-28T18:05:10.745+05:30The Design Of A Rolling Dice<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhevnfpoQio0TIsl3ArSoHoIt8nOgtVxY8mNkJDaLWbPrZh2cIASYemQUqA3WJuVEvOlxJCoxYxPZ5vFx6nRp5hnYB1TjTnYWgbzkYxgZIFlPCayikaY95VRD912XC526Q_4LdvJk1804bQmnHzwPvS4UAzAySRcB6VcAOlXdnRN-5qAc6xcb3KoF-qI9I/s1440/dice.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="770" data-original-width="1440" height="214" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhevnfpoQio0TIsl3ArSoHoIt8nOgtVxY8mNkJDaLWbPrZh2cIASYemQUqA3WJuVEvOlxJCoxYxPZ5vFx6nRp5hnYB1TjTnYWgbzkYxgZIFlPCayikaY95VRD912XC526Q_4LdvJk1804bQmnHzwPvS4UAzAySRcB6VcAOlXdnRN-5qAc6xcb3KoF-qI9I/w400-h214/dice.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
<span style="font-size: medium;"><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div>Did you ever observe the numbering patterns in a rolling dice and wonder why is it that way? Did you ever wonder why on earth probability problems in any book reads like, "rolling a fair or balanced dice"?
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<p><span style="font-size: medium;">Any standard 6 sided dice is designed such that the sum of numbers on the opposite sides will be seven -- 6+1, 5+2 and 4+3. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">This design is a combination of 2 important factors - fairness and balance.</span></p>
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<li><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>Fairness:</b> Each number on the die (1-6) should have an equal chance of landing face-up when rolled. The way the opposite sides add up to 7 ensures this. Imagine the die as six equal-sized triangles joined at their corners. Any two opposite triangles will always have numbers that add up to 7. This means no matter how the die lands, a specific number landing face-up doesn't affect the likelihood of another number coming up next time.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>Balance:</b> The die should land randomly and not be biased towards favoring any particular side. The opposite sides summing to 7 helps with this too. The weight distribution of the pips (dots) is roughly the same on all sides, and the opposing numbers balance each other out, contributing to a more stable roll.</span></li>
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<div><span style="font-size: medium;">So, the simple rule of opposite sides adding up to 7 on a die isn't just a fun fact, it's a clever design element that ensures random and fair outcomes, making it the perfect tool for games and activities that rely on chance.</span></div>
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<div><span style="font-size: medium;">This pattern exists not just for six-sided dice, but for many other types of dice with different numbers of sides. Now as an exercise try thinking what would be the sum of opposite sides for a 10 sided fair and balanced dice?</span></div>Karthikhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13054295982718010059noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6615480878082974820.post-60251349336727069622023-09-21T23:18:00.003+05:302023-09-22T13:24:26.539+05:30Book Review: Direct From Dell<div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://amzn.to/3ESoEwc" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;" target="_blank"><span style="font-size: medium;"><img border="0" data-original-height="475" data-original-width="313" height="475" src="https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1173330850i/274888.jpg" width="313" /></span></a></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><a href="https://amzn.to/3ESoEwc" target="_blank">Direct From Dell</a> authored by <b><i>Michael Dell</i></b> who is the very Founder and CEO of Dell, is a business memoir. </span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">This book surely falls in the list of must reads for every leader, especially in the IT industry. I bet you will profit from the bucketlist of the author's experience that is well articulated. </span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">I gave it a full 5 stars for this book in <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/5849949790" target="_blank">Goodreads</a>. Why? Because, there isn't a sentence that you would feel like skimming through and beware that this book is a page turner that will engross your attention to finish it all in one-sitting. But I would say, DON'T finish it in one sitting. Read it, assimilate it, introspect how you can put it to practice in your leadership.</span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">The author drives home a leadership nugget or two in every chapter that he has authored and there are 15 chapters of distilled leadership experience of fighting the battles from the forefront, drawing strategies of being ahead of the competition by instilling customer first thinking in everyone across board in the organization (did you see this in action during my leadership? ;), and various other critical leadership lessons on collaboration, humility, empathy etc. </span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">Let me quote 10 punch-lines of sorts that I found early on in this book that I personally embrace and put to practice.</span></div><div><ol style="text-align: left;"><li><span style="font-size: medium;">Continuous learning is a continuous theme in Dell.</span></li><li><span style="font-size: medium;">Culture is one of the main reasons that our company has been successful where others have not.</span></li><li><span style="font-size: medium;">Execution is everything. No excuses.</span></li><li><span style="font-size: medium;">It is a myth that one person can run a company.</span></li><li><span style="font-size: medium;">Anybody can sprint for a while but not for long.</span></li><li><span style="font-size: medium;">Quality of decision making increases when we build on one another's ideas.</span></li><li><span style="font-size: medium;">Be fascinated with eliminating unnecessary steps.</span></li><li><span style="font-size: medium;">Nearly everyone is motivated by fear in some form.</span></li><li><span style="font-size: medium;">Always think about what is possible and achievable; and then set stretch goals accordingly.</span></li><li><span style="font-size: medium;">Dell was founded on the premise of, "Always under-promise and over-deliver - to customers, employees and partners". <i>Frankly, I first heard this from Infosys Founder Narayan Murthy when I was in my school. This stuck with me since then.</i></span></li></ol></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">I really don't want to play spoiler here and in fact <b><i>there is a wealth of lessons that you can benefit from reading this book</i></b>. Go read it and come back to thank me later</span><span style="font-size: large;">.</span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">Confession: I purchased this book many years back but didn't read it until this week. Trying my best to break my tsundoku.</span></div><div><br /></div>Karthikhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13054295982718010059noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6615480878082974820.post-65627619910681132822023-09-13T22:15:00.006+05:302023-09-21T22:44:06.085+05:30Book Review: The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell<div>
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<span style="font-size: medium;"><b><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2612.The_Tipping_Point" target="_blank">The Tipping Point</a></b> by <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/1439.Malcolm_Gladwell" target="_blank">Malcolm Gladwell</a> is a wonderful book that I wish everyone reads to learn how little things can make a big difference to reach the heights you didn't imagine to begin with. Few concepts in this book stand out for me: </span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">1. The first being <i><b>The Law of the Few</b></i> that emphasizes the need to identify and engage The <b><i>Mavens</i></b> (aka Knowledge Encyclopedia), The <b><i>Connectors</i></b> (aka Glue) and The <b><i>Salesmen</i></b> (aka Deal makers who persuade); </span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span>
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<span style="font-size: medium;">2. The second being <b><i>Stickiness</i></b> in the content/messaging that plays a pivotal role in the steep rise of the commodity to reach its tipping-point.</span>
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<span style="font-size: medium;">3. Finally, the often overlooked thing but such an important one - The <b><i>Context</i></b>. How this determines the outcomes is surely enlightening. </span>
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<div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">I personally have a strong opinion to know the context in my endeavors and have always urged folks in my circle to know it for their own good. I wish I had read this book much earlier when this book was at its tipping point as best seller, that I would have cited this book to support my case from then on. Better late than never, they say, I would go about citing this book in my future conversations where appropriate.</span>
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<span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">P.S: I think the book could have been a little more trimmed, somewhere mid-way onwards; I know there is always this skim it or skip it option, and yet I wish the content is a little more condensed. The case-studies for instance are things the reader can skip altogether or read later or read it to make the lessons in the book stick.</span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span>
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<span style="font-size: medium;">I have posted the above review in <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2051184959" target="_blank">Goodreads</a> as well, where you can follow me for more of such reviews.</span>
</div>Karthikhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13054295982718010059noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6615480878082974820.post-51357373383272515002023-09-05T15:35:00.003+05:302023-09-05T19:30:58.024+05:30Kafka System Overview - A Cheatsheet<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgS5G1psEZrld9wrw6JdBp5VI3kQyH7eiYZWIfxSyc_kCc5EuCmR9q_8XV4Xk-pjZ1XXCSGfUy7qJsxJ5X5REUSaQ6D53xq_3z_YUH3TsW_jv6YAKGffajDckZ-e0EYCKuAZG0BhgUbH9zVyuzBGZR1owLHFEF7ABkmJ2R7m0k32r8NcoOrwebY8mOt5AA/s1223/Kafka%20System%20Overview.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="841" data-original-width="1223" height="440" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgS5G1psEZrld9wrw6JdBp5VI3kQyH7eiYZWIfxSyc_kCc5EuCmR9q_8XV4Xk-pjZ1XXCSGfUy7qJsxJ5X5REUSaQ6D53xq_3z_YUH3TsW_jv6YAKGffajDckZ-e0EYCKuAZG0BhgUbH9zVyuzBGZR1owLHFEF7ABkmJ2R7m0k32r8NcoOrwebY8mOt5AA/w640-h440/Kafka%20System%20Overview.png" width="640" /></a></div><br /><p></p><div><span style="font-size: medium;">There are a plethora of Message Brokers or Queuing systems, each with it's own set of nuances that come from how it is designed to work. For someone like me who dabbles on varied technologies it gets really hard to remember some key details (and you know that the devil is in the details). This is a cheatsheet of sorts that I had prepared to quickly refer to, for reflection, introspection and analysis of current system design that employs Kafka in its Architecture. </span><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">Whether you are a Developer, or an Architect or an Engineering Leader, this should help you get your understanding right about how Kafka works and the components involved in its ecosystem.</span></div></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><h3 style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Some Key Pointers</span></h3><div><ol style="text-align: left;"><li><span style="font-size: medium;">Kafka provides mechanisms to achieve <i>exactly-once message delivery semantics</i>, which ensures that messages are processed only once. </span></li><li><span style="font-size: medium;">Apache ZooKeeper is used for cluster management, metadata storage, leader election etc. Starting Kafka v2.8.0, Kafka can be run without <u>Apache Zookeeper</u>, by using <u>Kafka Controller</u> for these tasks.</span></li><li><span style="font-size: medium;">Kafka brokers are individual Kafka server instances that store and serve data.</span></li><li><span style="font-size: medium;">Data in Kafka is organized into Topics, which act as logical channels for data streams. Each Topic is divided into Partitions, which allow data to be distributed and parallelized across multiple Brokers. Partitions are the unit of parallelism in Kafka.</span></li><li><span style="font-size: large;">A Message is composed of a Key, a Value and a Timestamp.</span></li><li><span style="font-size: medium;">A messages' key is hashed and based on its value, which partition the message is put into is decided.</span></li><li><span style="font-size: medium;">It is important to remember that number of Partitions for a Topic cannot be changed, once a Topic is created.</span></li><li><span style="font-size: medium;">Typically, Consumers split the workload amongst themselves based on Partitions. For this reason it is important that the "Number of Consumers" is NO GREATER THAN the "Number of Partitions". You can witness idle Consumers if their number is greater than the count of Partitions.</span></li><li><span style="font-size: medium;">Kafka maintains an offset for each consumer to keep track of the last consumed message. Consumers can specify the offset from which they want to start consuming messages. Consumers can also specify if they want to get all the messages or receive only the new messages.</span></li><li><span style="font-size: medium;">Kafka supports message compression to reduce network and storage overhead. Common compression codecs include GZIP, Snappy, and LZ4. <u>Message compression is not enabled by-default</u>.</span></li><li><span style="font-size: medium;">Message compression can be done at Producer-side configuration, or as Topic-level configuration or at Broker-level configuration.</span></li><li><span style="font-size: medium;">Note that message compression implies reduced network and storage bandwidth but increased compute. Know what you trade in your decision making.</span></li><li><span style="font-size: medium;">When a message is compressed at Producer-side, it remains so in Topic and automatically gets decompressed at Consumer-side by Kafka client library if it is aware of the compression codec that is used. This is a good option when you are thinking of message compression (opinionated - please consult your Architect/Tech-head before you take this call!).</span></li></ol></div>Karthikhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13054295982718010059noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6615480878082974820.post-48285057106254508322023-08-30T17:05:00.003+05:302023-09-05T16:48:00.478+05:30RabbitMQ System Overview - A Cheatsheet<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhLj_jcbvEcFcKPIj97w_luZTzimjo98AFRvKlu_v50FZfVzTtjbSE1KCTCLjqtsHhJVbjTbBB9dsrVyh-wNf9O5d3rIxaEnMiONRzzFi4zxB7EHYBtH3TUoZo_wgvQqIFwoGkB48fx1y5-Z4YiXXtGDbd_vj5dXsbTYVqZyorh5tFF4jqd2MdHObx3-Jw/s1111/rabbitmq-system-design-cheatsheet-copyright.png" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><img alt="" border="0" data-original-height="716" data-original-width="1111" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhLj_jcbvEcFcKPIj97w_luZTzimjo98AFRvKlu_v50FZfVzTtjbSE1KCTCLjqtsHhJVbjTbBB9dsrVyh-wNf9O5d3rIxaEnMiONRzzFi4zxB7EHYBtH3TUoZo_wgvQqIFwoGkB48fx1y5-Z4YiXXtGDbd_vj5dXsbTYVqZyorh5tFF4jqd2MdHObx3-Jw/s600/rabbitmq-system-design-cheatsheet-copyright.png" width="600" /></span></a></div>
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There are a plethora of Message Brokers or Queuing systems, each with it's own set of nuances that come from how it is designed to work. For someone like me who dabbles on varied technologies it gets really hard to remember some key details. This is a cheatsheet of sorts that I had prepared to quickly refer to, for reflection, introspection and analysis of current system design that employs RabbitMQ in its Architecture. </span><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">Whether you are a Developer, or an Architect or an Engineering Leader, this should help you get your understanding right about how RabbitMQ works and the components involved in its ecosystem.
</span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><h3 style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Some Key Pointers</span></h3><div><ol style="text-align: left;"><li><span style="font-size: medium;">Every Queue is a RabbitMQ process.</span></li><li><span style="font-size: medium;">Queues are not replicated by design.</span></li><li><span style="font-size: medium;">Supported protocols include AMQP, MQTT, STOMP and HTTP.</span></li><li><span style="font-size: medium;">Conceptually, you can have, "Many Publishers to a Queue". Many Publishers like ProApp1, ProApp2, .., ProAppN can publish message to a same queue.</span></li><li><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>Quest For Design of Queues </b>:</span></li><ol><li><span style="font-size: medium;"><u>Approach 1 - A Queue Per Subscriber App/Service :</u> No more than one group of Consumer Apps should subscribe to the same queue, i.e . you can have many instance of ConApp1 subscribing to Queue1, but cannot have another app ConApp2 subscribing to same Queue1.</span></li><li><span style="font-size: medium;"><u>Approach 2 - A Queue-Message Per Subscriber App/Service :</u> This is a design situation when you have more than one kind of Subscriber App/Service mapped to a Queue but then they are not interested in the same message but different ones. For example, <i>OrderPlacedJob</i> services and <i>OrderDispatchedJob</i> services can subscribe to a queue named <i>Order</i> each interested in their own kind of message exclusive to it.</span></li></ol><li><span style="font-size: medium;">RabbitMQ <i><b>pushes</b></i> messages to its dumb subscribers for their consumption.</span></li><li><span style="font-size: medium;"><span>Do monitor your queues for its size. </span><span>If all subscriber instances for a queue are busy, then that queue can easily fill-up and slow down your RabbitMQ. The size of a queue determines how many subscriber instances aka workers are needed to process the messages in the queue.</span></span></li><li><span style="font-size: medium;">To speed up processing, RabbitMQ may send more than 1 msg to a consumer/subscriber.</span></li><li><span style="font-size: medium;">Message Acknowledgement : As default, a message delivered to a consumer/subscriber is marked for deletion.</span></li><li><span style="font-size: medium;">No message timeouts : RabbitMQ redelivers a message when a consumer/subscriber dies.</span></li><li><span style="font-size: medium;">You may have to optimize <b><i>Prefetch Count</i></b> from time to time depending on the change in your business needs.</span></li><li><span style="font-size: medium;">RabbitMQ by default uses round-robin method of distributing messages in the queue to its connected subscribers/consumers/workers to achieve fair load distribution. However, if there were to be say 250 messages in a queue before any subscriber becoming active, the first subscriber to get connected to the queue might get all the messages (depending on the prefetch count, where the default is 20 but it could have been modified in production servers for performance reasons), leaving the subsequent consumers idle until the new set of messages arrive.</span></li></ol></div>Karthikhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13054295982718010059noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6615480878082974820.post-75871571334000748722023-08-27T13:56:00.005+05:302023-08-27T13:56:59.898+05:30Lessons From A Sports Coach In Leadership - 1<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhje4C8DOkI4LwL-q5pQeeRzVMcHWRgw9IxyWfZDsP70I0lywqQsMuqBGQ1N6o7x7_zY6ok6KExsGISIn_WFov8GmNq3Cr1BYiBtEIr3JNbH3-94ApCt-UT7tfFxr-QOYYPV-7tkC7S8YduiODdDIw3GJQczeGDmoJ0NyEPbEw2X8_lompSsZquncNeDec/s911/sports-coach-and-athlete.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="911" data-original-width="720" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhje4C8DOkI4LwL-q5pQeeRzVMcHWRgw9IxyWfZDsP70I0lywqQsMuqBGQ1N6o7x7_zY6ok6KExsGISIn_WFov8GmNq3Cr1BYiBtEIr3JNbH3-94ApCt-UT7tfFxr-QOYYPV-7tkC7S8YduiODdDIw3GJQczeGDmoJ0NyEPbEw2X8_lompSsZquncNeDec/w316-h400/sports-coach-and-athlete.jpg" width="316" /></a></div><p><b>Athlete:</b> Can I drink alcohol?</p><p><b>Coach:</b> Yes sure!</p><p><b>Athlete:</b> Can I smoke a cigar?</p><p><b>Coach:</b> Certainly. </p><p><b>Athlete:</b> Can I party with my friends all night, dancing, chatting and watching movies? </p><p><b>Coach:</b> Of course you can!!</p><p><b>Athlete:</b> Can I get high??</p><p><b>Coach:</b> With anything you want. </p><p><b>Athlete:</b> So what is it I cannot I do?</p><p><b>Coach:</b> What you cannot do is expect to have the fitness and skills to win a competition without first sacrificing everything you mentioned above. All things are permissible but not all things are beneficial for anyone with goals. You decide to sacrifice for your next level, for your life goals. You decide what is more important - your worldly desires or your noble goals. You decide how far to go up or go down, that is your responsibility. To reach your goals, worldly pleasure must be deferred, at the very least.</p>Karthikhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13054295982718010059noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6615480878082974820.post-54494332641703639002023-08-11T20:00:00.004+05:302023-08-11T20:00:53.990+05:30Some Notorious Blockchain Scandals Worth Knowing About<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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</a>
</div>
<span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span><p><span style="font-size: medium;">There are many other notorious stories in the blockchain world that one needs to know about, and some of them have been documented in various media. I list a few notorious ones as quick spoiler and links to known documentaries about it that are worth watching.</span></p>
<p></p>
<ul style="text-align: left;">
<li><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>Quadriga CX</b> was once the famous crypto exchange company in Canada whose debacle leading to a loss of over 250 million USD, led to public outcry and regulation in the blockchain technology. Interestingly this regulation was the very pitch that blockchain was advertising against to its gullible mob towards it with the promise of making them rich overnight. So what happened? The founder of this company, Gerry Cotten, was the only one who had access to the passwords and keys that controlled the funds of his customers, which amounted to $250 million and he apparently died under mysterious circumstances. As nice, innocent and nerdy as might have seemed, he had a past history of cyber crime, which was only known at a later date leading to a lot of speculations about his death. Do check out a nice documentary on this in Netflix and it is titled, <a href="https://www.netflix.com/in/title/81349029" target="_blank">"Trust No One: The Hunt for the Crypto King"</a>. I believe, Canada ushered in some regulations in the blockchain as a consequence of this scandal.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>The Silk Road</b> was an online black market that operated on the dark web, where users could buy and sell illegal goods and services using bitcoin as the payment method. The site was founded by Ross Ulbricht, who went by the pseudonym Dread Pirate Roberts, and was eventually arrested by the FBI in 2013. Ulbricht was convicted of money laundering, computer hacking, conspiracy to traffic narcotics, and procuring murder, and sentenced to life imprisonment without parole. There are quite a few documentaries on this titled, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7GAoeo4FnBU" target="_blank">"</a></span><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7GAoeo4FnBU" target="_blank"><span style="font-size: medium;">Deep Web: The Rise and Fall of the Silk Road Documentary</span>"</a>, <a href="https://watchdocumentaries.com/silk-road-drugs-death-and-the-dark-web/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">"Silk Road: Drugs, Death and the Dark Web"</a>, etc.</li>
<li><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>The DAO</b> was a Decentralized Autonomous Organization that ran on the Ethereum blockchain, and aimed to provide a platform for smart contracts and crowdfunding. The DAO raised over $150 million worth of ether, the native cryptocurrency of Ethereum, in a record-breaking crowdfunding campaign in 2016. However, soon after its launch, a hacker exploited a vulnerability in the code and drained more than $50 million worth of ether from the DAO. This led to a controversial decision by the Ethereum community to fork the blockchain and reverse the hack, creating two separate versions of Ethereum: Ethereum (ETH) and Ethereum Classic (ETC). The DAO hack and its aftermath have been covered in documentaries like, "<a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7407496/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Trust Machine: The Story of Blockchain</a>", "<a href="https://vimeo.com/226777744" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Banking on Bitcoin</a>", etc. </span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>BitConnect</b> was a cryptocurrency lending platform that promised investors high returns on their investments, ranging from 1% to 40% per month. Bitconnect claimed to use a trading bot that could generate profits from the volatility of bitcoin prices. However, Bitconnect was exposed as a <b><i>Ponzi scheme</i></b> that used new investors’ money to pay old investors, and collapsed in 2018 after receiving cease and desist orders from several regulators. It is claimed that it has defrauded the US by about USD 2 billion. Bitconnect is widely regarded as one of the biggest scams in the history of cryptocurrency, and has been the subject of documentaries such as <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fw_xe3xnzGc" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">"Bitconnect: The Wannabe Bitcoin Ponzi Scheme | Multi Level Mondays"</a>, etc.</span></li>
</ul>Karthikhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13054295982718010059noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6615480878082974820.post-35356384760436632142023-08-11T16:45:00.004+05:302023-08-13T16:34:49.034+05:30Google Play Store Reject App For Having Non-justifiable App Permissions<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiF6rG351tuM4hjm4_jqLDclXU5mTnZw9_kJ5ZxKNC8a4lX63m8Yf2PBPPfABgqwRDWh8NvKKjhFQxLQmQrJ2UawE4ORbfg7LbMe78u7xjlOpKEOUZxy4aIf1GkNVTmHLGklo_XNIzudeZbhy3uYzir_elh0oFNLdOOUTafuvNeA9-B5P1hhZmCQ9wGMck/s1200/remove-unwanted-permissions.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="628" data-original-width="1200" height="334" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiF6rG351tuM4hjm4_jqLDclXU5mTnZw9_kJ5ZxKNC8a4lX63m8Yf2PBPPfABgqwRDWh8NvKKjhFQxLQmQrJ2UawE4ORbfg7LbMe78u7xjlOpKEOUZxy4aIf1GkNVTmHLGklo_XNIzudeZbhy3uYzir_elh0oFNLdOOUTafuvNeA9-B5P1hhZmCQ9wGMck/w640-h334/remove-unwanted-permissions.jpeg" width="640" /></a></div><span style="font-size: medium;"><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p>Google's Play Store is pretty fast evolving that they bring in new policies almost every month to plug the discovered gaps in app publishing for the sake of protecting the end-users of its platform who download the apps.</span><p></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">In the absence of app owners not acting on the new policies, the non-compliant apps are removed from the play store. I had two of my apps removed last year, as I really couldn't keep up my apps compliance with the new policies. Sometime during the end of last year, I revived one of my apps and published it with much relief.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Months down the lane new policies were brought in by Google, notable the mandate for apps to have genuine reasons to have Location permissions (which includes all 3 - </span><i>android.permission.ACCESS_FINE_LOCATION, android.permission.ACCESS_BACKGROUND_LOCATION, android.permission.ACCESS_COARSE_LOCATION</i><span style="font-size: medium;">) and Package Install permission (</span><i>android.permission.REQUEST_INSTALL_PACKAGES</i><span style="font-size: medium;">).</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Only last year, I had migrated my app from native android to ReactNative (RN) leveraging Expo SDK and platform. Expo has this weird nature of adding unwanted permissions to the app, even without you asking for it at the time of it bundling the app for publishing. Incidentally, I had noted this issue much, put in a fix and published a newer version of the app well last year, much before google notifying me of non-compliance on this front. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">And yet google removed my app citing non-compliance on this front, sometime this year. To make things harder, its communication on what and where things have gone wrong was ambiguous.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">I did the following to get out of this situation and get the app published again.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>Step 1:</b> Ensure that in your </span><i>app.json</i><span style="font-size: medium;"> the required permission settings looks like below:</span></p><p></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgUh6CT62anPE1cKj6sSIk-MMUS4HcMbSeSWqY1F6saWZRxSDLuEn3o3-lXgblcAyXshR8SfLZzqARi-4_vZ7yHK_Kn-_mbvxHzxZbIj0U2VtWCXftoK0ZLqWZc1itc2e0ecfw1QZSR2QlpPUZEAe57KLclOpJSMZbIGSCvrdE2c1xrC1F40UiDh_Zryak/s479/carbon.png" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="313" data-original-width="479" height="261" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgUh6CT62anPE1cKj6sSIk-MMUS4HcMbSeSWqY1F6saWZRxSDLuEn3o3-lXgblcAyXshR8SfLZzqARi-4_vZ7yHK_Kn-_mbvxHzxZbIj0U2VtWCXftoK0ZLqWZc1itc2e0ecfw1QZSR2QlpPUZEAe57KLclOpJSMZbIGSCvrdE2c1xrC1F40UiDh_Zryak/w400-h261/carbon.png" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="font-size: small; text-align: center;">Image generated using https://carbon.now.sh/</td></tr></tbody></table><span style="font-size: medium;"><p><b>Step 2:</b> If you are having managed publishing setup like me, then it is important that the active deployment in each of the channel, has these issues resolved. If not ensure that you update that channel as well with latest artefact having a fix for this or promote your latest artefact to the other channels with dated artefact having this permission issue in it. This was my issue that I discovered the hard way.</p></span><p></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>Step 3:</b> You can appeal against the respective decision within the Play Console and can anticipate to get a response within a day or week (in worse case).</span></p>Karthikhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13054295982718010059noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6615480878082974820.post-85520815851035622242023-07-26T20:34:00.006+05:302023-08-29T11:36:05.242+05:30Containerization Maturity Matrix<div style="text-align: center;"><img alt="Image of Containerization Maturity Matrix" border="0" data-original-height="551" data-original-width="900" height="392" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgannd-eymDoKU21BcHD-gAusS3junHRthPtW2Tx7MPelIiDKZjRGxBR8eeDdceivmNGO6uMM_FOh93WAiS98CqhxQpxhf22vYmY1YSwkrI-xnxtphIhFjZjlIq8oY1bNK1vah1cQED08oRoIYTMndGGCZGlyyqb63ZIqwPL-acRzoPFj5E5LP3hGlfhrg/w640-h392/containerization-maturity-matrix.png" title="Containerization Maturity Matrix" width="640" /></div>
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<p>
<span style="font-size: medium;">A lot of companies do this grave mistake of hasty technology onboarding without proper milestones and training in place. This catapults the growth of tech debts and unsurprisingly enough we witness the engineering leadership the blame the Product and the Business for this situation as they had set-up unrealistic deadline for engineering. While there sure is truth in that without doubt, the pressure varies greatly depending on the maturity of the company (the room for conversation is usually much more mature and organized in enterprise companies than startups). But irrespective of the size and nature of the company, I tend to pick the unchartered path of working my way through to come up with communication techniques that helps alignment across board by building trust and transparency. In this blog post, I share my technique of having a <b>Containerization Maturity Matrix (CMM)</b> for my teams in their journey of modernizing their platform to Kubernetes. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">CMM is about knowing where every team member stands in the utilization of the tech-ware to be adopted at the most granular level. Every team/pod can have this matrix to aid tracking things at pod level. The desired picture of how this matrix should look like is communicated to all teams and then it becomes much more easier to track and have conversations with the respective Engineering Managers or team members to reach the desired end goal. With every team reaching the desired end state, as an Engineering Leader you can then celebrate and move on to pick the next burning problem to solve.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: medium;">I have employed this even in situations where when I walked in, Kubernetes is there in production environment but not in QA and/or Dev environments. Having a matrix like this helps to ensure that the technology adoption is not at surface level but has penetrated to the extent that the team has an appreciation for it.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: medium;">Below are some of the key reasons for having it in place:</span></p>
<p></p>
<ul style="text-align: left;">
<li><span style="font-size: medium;">It brings in transparency and thus boosts trust across board from a new developer joining the team to the non-tech executive leadership that gets a hang of engineering intensity. </span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: medium;">For team members it serves as a motivation for self-organization. Remember that Agile teams are self-organizing. It is the duty of engineering leadership to unlock team's agility by bringing in measurable metrics like this that matter.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: medium;">Where we don't get to see the right check marks, it is easy for an engineering leader to participate and understand the blockers. This is typical me at least and I further sit with the team in problem solving, should they need my help.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: medium;">It is a mini-map of sorts with milestones to achieve for complete adoption of Kubernetes. </span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: medium;">In my opinion, this is structured approach to problem solving that aids engineering management even in a chaotic environment; I have put this to use very many times in the past years in companies of different sizes.</span></li>
</ul>
<div><span style="font-size: medium;">May you put this to use in your environment and let me know how it served you. </span></div>
<p></p>Karthikhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13054295982718010059noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6615480878082974820.post-19098912145954251782023-07-25T23:28:00.001+05:302023-07-28T20:48:24.327+05:30Blockchain Versus Non-blockchain Ecosystem Comparison<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhFsBxtInk1XV2MXud3-9C20Tx-yk0bYQ-9KNRBcnyUKqSZh1eXtg4E0YytKHZ_Qxf_4e99gvp4d62FL6bjY-6ZANmlae9dgnD1-YlohiLgHUB5OhIQH6A5coHSY5BMot_1FuIEx_Pi06roZt0ziidgqsU_EAeTko3-MzI_LitFG1Jh5w6u5KMihARvbA0/s800/blockchain.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;">
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</a>
</div>
<p> There are many factors to consider before choosing/adopting blockchain tech-stack and the table below highlights some of them, as I see it:</p>
<ul style="text-align: left;">
<li><b>Performance</b></li>
<ul>
<li>Blockchain : Slower transaction throughput and higher latency due to consensus mechanisms and decentralized nature.</li>
<li>Non-Blockchain : Faster transaction throughput and lower latency because of centralized nature.</li>
</ul>
<li><b>Scalability</b></li>
<ul>
<li>Blockchain : Scalability challenges in public blockchains do exist; private/permissioned blockchains can offer better scalability relatively.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span></li>
<li>Non-Blockchain : Scalable solutions available in cloud-based environments for handling large volumes of transactions.</li>
</ul>
<li><b>Cost</b></li>
<ul>
<li>Blockchain : Costlier implementation and maintenance due to blockchain infrastructure requirements and mining/consensus costs.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span></li>
<li>Non-Blockchain : Generally more cost-effective with fine-grained control and flexibility.</li>
</ul>
<li><b>Data Privacy</b></li>
<ul>
<li>Blockchain : Better data privacy and security through cryptographic techniques that can be leveraged out of the box as is provided by the ecosystem. Public blockchains may lack full data privacy.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span></li>
<li>Non-Blockchain : There is scope of human error in missing things out at different layers and areas of spectrum, leading to data leaks that we witness from time to time.</li>
</ul>
<li><b>Transparency and Trust</b><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span></li>
<ul>
<li>Blockchain : High transparency and trust due to immutability and decentralized validation of transactions.</li>
<li>Non-Blockchain : Transparency and trust may vary depending on the system's design and governance structure.</li>
</ul>
<li><b>Regulatory Compliance</b><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span></li>
<ul>
<li>Blockchain : Some blockchain implementations can simplify regulatory compliance through traceability and auditability.</li>
<li>Non-Blockchain : Compliance in traditional non-blockchain systems are achieved with additional efforts and customization.</li>
</ul>
<li><b>Use Case Suitability</b><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span></li>
<ul>
<li>Blockchain : Ideal for applications requiring transparency, decentralized trust, and traceability, such as supply chain, identity, and digital assets.</li>
<li>Non-Blockchain : Well-suited for real-time applications, centralized control, and situations where a trusted intermediary is acceptable/mandated.</li>
</ul>
<li><b>Openness and Flexibility</b></li>
<ul>
<li>Blockchain : The blockchain ecosystem isn't always that open and you don't get the flexibility to choose the tool in the tool chain. It is more a boxed offering that you can take it or leave it. </li>
<li>Non-Blockchain : The ecosystem is largely open and you get the flexibility to replace any part of the toolchain per your changing requirements.</li>
</ul>
<li><b>Battlefield experience</b></li>
<ul>
<li>Blockchain : This still is a fairy tale story without solid use-cases that proves the Blockchain tech-stack promises are true in the battlefield.<span style="white-space: pre;"></span></li>
<li>Non-Blockchain : This is battle-tested and the community adopts relatively faster to the ever changing landscape in the technology spectrum.<span style="white-space: pre;"></span></li>
</ul>
</ul>
<p></p>
<p>Technology is fast evolving and what is right tomorrow is for tomorrow; but betting on what platform could serve us well enough tomorrow is for today. To make our bets right we will have to factor into multiple aspects and some of the ones presented above should provide a good starting point for your conversation amongst the architects and tech leadership.</p>Karthikhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13054295982718010059noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6615480878082974820.post-60430557226324309092023-07-21T17:12:00.004+05:302023-07-28T20:48:13.844+05:30Top Reasons For Why Blockchain Is A Misfit For Regulated Domains<p><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhFsBxtInk1XV2MXud3-9C20Tx-yk0bYQ-9KNRBcnyUKqSZh1eXtg4E0YytKHZ_Qxf_4e99gvp4d62FL6bjY-6ZANmlae9dgnD1-YlohiLgHUB5OhIQH6A5coHSY5BMot_1FuIEx_Pi06roZt0ziidgqsU_EAeTko3-MzI_LitFG1Jh5w6u5KMihARvbA0/s800/blockchain.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><img border="0" data-original-height="480" data-original-width="800" height="384" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhFsBxtInk1XV2MXud3-9C20Tx-yk0bYQ-9KNRBcnyUKqSZh1eXtg4E0YytKHZ_Qxf_4e99gvp4d62FL6bjY-6ZANmlae9dgnD1-YlohiLgHUB5OhIQH6A5coHSY5BMot_1FuIEx_Pi06roZt0ziidgqsU_EAeTko3-MzI_LitFG1Jh5w6u5KMihARvbA0/w640-h384/blockchain.jpg" width="640" /></span></a></div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span><p></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">While the blockchain advertises itself as the new world order for a suite of benefits it claims to offer, I see Blockchain technology platform as untried and untested one, to lay my trust on it. In particular, I think it is a misfit for highly scalable, critical and regulatory domains like finance, insurance and healthcare for the following reasons:</span></p><p></p><ol style="text-align: left;"><li><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>Scalability :</b> Blockchain networks can face scalability challenges. The processing speed and capacity of many blockchain networks are limited, which may not be suitable for high-frequency or high-volume transactions common in fintech or insuretech or healthtech applications. <br />How does blockchain manage the ever-growing size of transactions even if it is a private deployment? <br />It's promise of scalability in Ethereum 1.0 was tested to be about <a href="https://www.kiln.fi/post/path-to-proto-danksharding-episode-i-ethereum-scalability-limitations#:~:text=Currently%2C%20the%20Ethereum%20network%20is,of%2021%2C000%20units%20of%20gas." target="_blank">15 TPS</a> at best which isn't sufficient for today's condition and this poor performance is largely due to the decentralized nature of ledgering in general and the community blames it on the Mining (aka Proof of Work) <a href="https://crypto.com/university/blockchain-scalability#:~:text=The%20difficulty%20of%20scaling%20a,a%20large%20number%20of%20transactions." target="_blank">consensus mechanisms</a>.</span></li><li><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>Cost :</b> Implementing and maintaining blockchain networks can be quite expensive, assuming that the tech companies operating in the regulated domains like finance and healthcare will opt for private blockchain. At a time when the world is still learning to get the Cloud Cost Estimate right, how are technology leaders evaluating the TCO of Blockchain platform is a puzzle, for it has its own denominations of money and unclear set of things that make up the cost computation. Assuming that a company were to leverage private blockchain deployed on cloud, how the cost estimate were to be made on top of cloud cost is only more head-scratching exercise.<br />Lastly, a simple case in point as to why I see blockchain as a cost multiplier. Given that blockchain data is ever-growing and that the participating node in the cluster holds an entire copy of the blockchain, the storage cost is in the multiples of the number of participating nodes. Do the similar math for IO, compute, etc. Don't you see the cost ballooning over the traditional system? </span></li><li><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>Uncertainty in Legality and Regulations :</b> The regulatory landscape surrounding blockchain is at best mute so far. With the ushering in of new and evolving regulations in Fintech in India like the <a href="https://blog.codonomics.com/2023/04/noobies-guide-to-digital-lending.html" target="_blank">Digital Lending Guidelines (DLG)</a>, <a href="https://blog.codonomics.com/2023/05/faqs-on-co-lending-model-clm.html" target="_blank">Co-Lending Guidelines (CLG)</a>, etc, fintech companies may face uncertain or restrictive regulations, making compliance complex and expensive to maintain. I have posted a more detailed post on <a href="https://blog.codonomics.com/2023/07/legality-of-blockchain.html" target="_blank">Blockchain's legality</a> in general, yesterday.</span></li><li><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>Privacy Concerns :</b> Blockchain is not inherently designed for privacy. Any user having an account can see everything in the Blockchain ecosystem. Privacy implies centralization needs that is contrary to the decentralized nature of Blockchain platform.</span></li><li><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>Maturity and Complexity :</b> Blockchain technology is relatively new with much hype. There are a number of Blockchain ecosystem that has evolved and more is evolving. The use-cases where it is put to use in itself is still not a hands-down approach but more an adventure whose benefits are to be seen in the years to come. Blockchain doesn't look like a replacement to the traditional systems that we are used to. </span></li></ol><div><span style="font-size: medium;">Additionally, if this platform is not wholly embraced, how challenging it would be to integrate systems is another thing to learn and understand. I am not fully sure how secure the Blockchain ecosystem is, given that, if one were to get hold of an access to one node, he has access to the entire system.</span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">Lastly, any specific reason for which Blockchain is chosen, should be achievable with the use of alternative technology platforms that are battle tested. What am I missing here? Your experience is much appreciated and am all ears for it.</span></div><p></p>Karthikhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13054295982718010059noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6615480878082974820.post-66030459123347612932023-07-20T22:00:00.015+05:302023-07-28T20:48:02.276+05:30Legality of Blockchain<p><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhFsBxtInk1XV2MXud3-9C20Tx-yk0bYQ-9KNRBcnyUKqSZh1eXtg4E0YytKHZ_Qxf_4e99gvp4d62FL6bjY-6ZANmlae9dgnD1-YlohiLgHUB5OhIQH6A5coHSY5BMot_1FuIEx_Pi06roZt0ziidgqsU_EAeTko3-MzI_LitFG1Jh5w6u5KMihARvbA0/s1200/blockchain.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><img border="0" data-original-height="720" data-original-width="1200" height="384" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhFsBxtInk1XV2MXud3-9C20Tx-yk0bYQ-9KNRBcnyUKqSZh1eXtg4E0YytKHZ_Qxf_4e99gvp4d62FL6bjY-6ZANmlae9dgnD1-YlohiLgHUB5OhIQH6A5coHSY5BMot_1FuIEx_Pi06roZt0ziidgqsU_EAeTko3-MzI_LitFG1Jh5w6u5KMihARvbA0/w640-h384/blockchain.jpg" width="640" /></span></a></div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span><p></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Blockchain has been there for around for a good few years now and I continue to remain skeptical of this technology platform. I have been pretty vocal about this and in the recent times am witnessing a few startups in India, that too in the regulatory domain space like finance, healthcare etc. cropping up by adopting Blockchain platform. This baffles me. Any regulatory environment involves citizen's critical data and also that it can affect the nations economy significantly. In the light this thought, I am writing this post to drill down on the legality aspect specifically, and would love to learn from those executive leaders working in the blockchain tech in regulatory space, as to what made them chose this unconventional, unpopular, untried, and untested, technology platform with unclear legality in most of the nations around the world. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Taking a step back, in a very simplistic way, Blockchain technology is a decentralized system of computing, storing and verifying data that is <i>advertised</i> to have many potential applications and benefits. However, as I see it, it also poses some serious challenges and risks, such as legal uncertainty, regulatory compliance, security, privacy, and scalability. For this reason, different countries have different approaches to regulating blockchain and its use cases, such as cryptocurrencies.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">As things stand today:</span></p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><span style="font-size: medium;">United States, it does not have a unified or comprehensive legal framework for blockchain at the federal level. Only some states in USA, such as Arizona, Tennessee, Wyoming, and New York have explicitly recognized and facilitated the use of Blockchain. In 2022, USA had announced a new framework for regulating Blockchain, especially with the agenda of cleaning up illegal cryptocurrency activity.</span></li><li><span style="font-size: medium;">The European Union a while back had proposed a regulation on markets in crypto-assets (MiCA) that aims to harmonize the rules for crypto-asset service providers and issuers across the bloc. The regulation intends to establish a common legal framework for crypto-assets that are not covered by existing EU financial services legislation. Even this is in the pilot stage.</span></li><li><span style="font-size: medium;">China in 2021, placed a ban on Bitcoin mining, forcing many engaging in the activity to close operations entirely. And also, since then it the country has been working on developing the digital yuan (e-CNY).</span></li><li><span style="font-size: medium;">Canada, of all the nations, has been more proactive about crypto regulation and became the first and only country so far to approve a <a href="https://www.investopedia.com/investing/bitcoin-etfs-explained/" target="_blank">Bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF)</a>, with several trading on the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX).</span></li><li><span style="font-size: medium;">Singapore is another country that has embraced blockchain technology and fintech innovation. The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) has implemented a regulatory sandbox (is this private/permissioned blockchain??) for blockchain projects and is supportive of blockchain adoption in the financial sector.</span></li><li><span style="font-size: medium;">Switzerland, Japan, Malta, Bermuda too have some regulations in place for blockchain technology as a platform.</span></li><li><span style="font-size: medium;">U.K., Australia classifies cryptocurrency as property but not legal tender, thus subjecting to taxing on its sale. There isn't anything explicitly positive in legalizing Blockchain platform thus far.<br /></span></li></ul><span style="font-size: medium;">India story is similar to U.K and Australia as things stand today. There is a 30% tax levied on all crypto investments and a 1% tax deduction at source (TDS) on crypto trades. This was after the Supreme Court revoked the government's ban on the cryptocurrency. While current regulations are unclear and don’t provide much guidance for investors, RBI has launched e-Rupee or e-INR in 2021 as a digital payment solution. </span><p></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">What about Blockchain technology platform in general other than cryptography? Like most nations, India has been mute on this topic. That said, tighter regulations in critical domains like finance and healthcare, can strangulate the companies that are built wholly on the blockchain platform. In India, the tighter regulations have already kick-started for public good. Given this context, until the Government explicitly pronounces laws on Blockchain, it remains to be seen as to what the Engineering Heads who have chosen Blockchain as a platform for their product suite has to say about their choice and how they intend to overcome the challenges of this platform.</span></p>Karthikhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13054295982718010059noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6615480878082974820.post-18465963034746221462023-07-17T14:21:00.003+05:302023-07-28T20:47:35.058+05:30Key Things To Consider Before Adopting A Third-party Vendor Platform<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhQqs8EOh2KjcYJxfvQA5KRb0HfH7E_Np34oyHWvlZvYnuSmvkoHLvYgOIMnEwHoAkDAyPLSrg9LHrZLL8XdUUwlHn5gHM8rz7nZTlDyG0pIJ7gMg0rvxyftY63Wi2YPbDS0_XQq2A7PB9wP_nAAQRhv6drVN1hsZhgVB6tMkhrgcktsaFb__jTMOOL0Ac/s770/build-vs-buy%20(Small).png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="480" data-original-width="770" height="398" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhQqs8EOh2KjcYJxfvQA5KRb0HfH7E_Np34oyHWvlZvYnuSmvkoHLvYgOIMnEwHoAkDAyPLSrg9LHrZLL8XdUUwlHn5gHM8rz7nZTlDyG0pIJ7gMg0rvxyftY63Wi2YPbDS0_XQq2A7PB9wP_nAAQRhv6drVN1hsZhgVB6tMkhrgcktsaFb__jTMOOL0Ac/w640-h398/build-vs-buy%20(Small).png" width="640" /></a></div><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: medium;"><span><p><span><br /></span></p>Build vs Buy is always a tough decision to make. In the absence of an <b><i>Architecture Board/Council/Group</i></b> in a </span><a href="https://blog.codonomics.com/2023/01/3-phases-of-organization-evolution.html" target="_blank">Scale-up company</a> or bigger ones<span>, it is likely that a Technology Head can overlook some critical things in their decision making of technology choices. Sometimes the repercussions of these choices could cost a bomb - no pun intended. I have witnessed real bad outcomes in the light of such circumstances since the beginning of my career, especially during my consulting stints. </span></span><p></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">In the recent past, I had the pressure of witnessing a company adopting a third-party vendor platform to re-engineer their existing micro and macro services to be developed and deployed on it. Unfortunately, even at technical leadership level, no one had a clue as to why this platform was chosen, how did they zero-in on this over any other available options, what is the road-map for this re-platformization etc. Blame it on the rate race we were in, instead of having a room for conversations to get enlightened or the absence of documents supporting such big decision. It happens in the tech world, although I wish it doesn't happen.</span> And it likely wouldn't happen, if an Architecture Council is established and they drive decisions and collaborate with other stakeholders in the execution of a roadmap.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">If your company is scaling up and you are a technical leader, setting up an Architecture Council is likely your first best move. Once you have it in place, and you encounter a situation where you have to decide on a third-party proprietary platform for your re-engineering or platformization efforts, I have compiled below a list of key things to consider, discuss and publish the data points for your decision making:</span></p><p></p><ol style="text-align: left;"><li><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>Vendor Lock-in :</b> This is the first thing that should hammer your mind to safeguard the interest of your business. Adopting a proprietary platform introduces dependency on that specific vendor's technology stack, APIs, and ecosystem. This should in all likelihood limit your ability to switch vendors or transition to an alternative solution in the future. Consider the long-term implications and evaluate the ease of migrating away from the platform if needed.<br />In the event of your company's dissatisfaction with the vendor for what ever reason it be, what are your answers to the following questions:<br /></span></li><ol><li><span style="font-size: medium;">How long does it take to move-out from this platform to another? </span></li><li><span style="font-size: medium;">Does this timeline and migration cost, justify the investment (again both of time and cost) that is to be made to onboard on this vendor platform?</span></li></ol><li><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>Cost :</b> Even popular platforms are criticized for their cost and it is a genuine concern to have it addressed. Vendor platforms often come with licensing fees, subscription costs, or usage-based pricing models. If you were to engage their professional services in your endeavors of embracing their platform/tool, it usually costs a bomb (no pun is intended here). Depending on the scale and complexity of your application, the cost of adopting a vendor platform may be a significant factor to consider, particularly if it requires a long-term commitment.<br />Try answering the question:</span></li><ol><li><span style="font-size: medium;">What would be the ball-park cost of onboarding the vendor platform + vendor's professional services + training cost of your development team including all developers, quality analysts, product folks etc + cost of development on the new platform + cost of deployment of your services on the vendor platform including the cost of using their network bandwidth, storage, processing, etc. + cost of ongoing support? </span></li></ol><li><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>Customization Limitations :</b> Vendor platforms are designed to address common use cases and cater to a broad range of customers. However, they may not fully align with your specific business requirements or have the flexibility to accommodate unique needs of your business. This requires working in tandem with the product and ensuring that you are having a good grasp of the domain and how the existing system is built to address it.<br />To safeguard yourself and the business in suffering from late discovery, prepare a checklist of things like below to have it documented:</span></li><ol><li><span style="font-size: medium;">Existing domain documentation to grasp the business flows.</span></li><li><span style="font-size: medium;">Existing system documentation to grasp the components involved and know their behaviour.</span></li><li><span style="font-size: medium;">Existing system challenges/pain-points to know if your choice solves these and how they can with your choice of proprietary platform.</span></li></ol><li><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>Vendor's Reliability :</b> Embracing any vendor platforms imply relying on their ongoing support and maintenance. Beyond the cost, there are other factors to consider such as the vendor's reputation, track record, customer support capabilities, roadmap for future development and more importantly how is their market capitalization in general and more importantly with regard to your specific business domain. Assess the level of trust you have in the vendor's reliability and their ability to provide timely updates, bug fixes, and support when needed.<br />I would care to find answers for the following:</span></li><ol><li><span style="font-size: medium;">What is their tech-stack on which their platform is built? How contemporary or cutting-edge is this tech-stack? I for one, flag crypto and blockchain as risk, personally because I'm not comfortable with it for lack of know-how on how it works.</span></li><li><span style="font-size: medium;">What is the infrastructure on which their platform is built, and who maintains it? Say, for instance, if it is on-prem of the vendor, I would doubt its scalability. Or say if their infrastructure is built on open-stack and that it is maintained by another third-party other than the vendor, I'll check to see if that vendor's vendor reliability is appealing to me. It is an OMG moment for tech leaders.</span></li><li><span style="font-size: medium;">Who are the vendor's current customers? If my company is an NBFC that is into lending, I would care to see if there are other customers in the same space who have adopted this vendor. IMHO, there is significant risk to business in being a first-mover and I would want to be explicit on how the pros outweigh the cons.</span></li><li><span style="font-size: medium;">If you are into regulated business, how does this vendor cater to those regulatory measures?</span></li><li><span style="font-size: medium;">Does the platform provide for enough security, high-availability, scalability needs, etc.? </span></li><li><span style="font-size: medium;">Does the vendor cater to the needs of customization requirements and how does that work for us as a consumer company?</span></li><li><span style="font-size: medium;">How financially stable the vendor is? What is their market ranking in the space they are operating? For how long have they been operating in this space?</span></li></ol><li><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>Learning Curve and Motivation :</b> Introducing a vendor platform often means your development team will need to acquire new skills and expertise specific to that platform. This learning curve may require additional time, training, and resources. Assess whether your team has the capacity and willingness to invest in acquiring the necessary expertise.<br />Seek answers for:</span></li><ol><li><span style="font-size: medium;">Does the vendor cater to the training needs - classroom, online, recorded sessions, documentation, demo app and environment?</span></li><li><span style="font-size: medium;">How steep is the learning curve for onboarding various roles? Do they provide role-wise training?<br /></span></li><li><span style="font-size: medium;">Is the team motivated to let go of their love for current tech-stack in adopting the proprietary technology? Do they have FOMO of their market value and thus compromising their career? </span></li></ol></ol><div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">Simply put, the decision to adopt any vendor platform depends on a careful evaluation of your specific application requirements, budget, timeline, and strategic goals. It is crucial to weigh the benefits against the potential drawbacks and make an informed decision that aligns with your organization's unique needs and priorities.</span></div></div><p><br /></p>Karthikhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13054295982718010059noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6615480878082974820.post-71111683888776219432023-07-15T22:58:00.005+05:302023-07-28T20:49:10.676+05:30Compliance Checklist For 12 Factor App Principles<p><span style="font-size: large;">If </span><a href="https://12factor.net/" style="font-size: large;" target="_blank">12 Factor App Principles</a><span style="font-size: large;"> sound overwhelming to you, try answering the following questions as Yes/No, with the end objective of getting YES as answer to all questions.</span></p><p></p><ol style="text-align: left;"><li><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>[ ] Codebase :</b> Is your application codebase tracked in Version Control? (Ideally you should be using Git, a distributed version control system, as things stand today.)</span></li><li><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>[ ] Dependencies :</b> Are the application dependencies declared explicitly and isolated from the application code? (This is typically done using a package manager like NPM in Javascript platform or some dependency management system like Maven/Gradle in Java platform, etc.)</span></li><li><span style="font-size: medium;"><b><b>[ ] </b>Configuration :</b> Is you application configuration externalized and not hard-coded? (It is good practice to go further and secure sensitive information like credentials in a vault to safeguard it from the prying eyes including the developers in the team.) </span></li><li><span style="font-size: medium;"><b><b>[ ] </b>Backing Services :</b> Is the application designed to be loosely coupled from specific backing services like databases, queues, or caches, by accessing it all via well-defined interfaces?</span></li><li><span style="font-size: medium;"><b><b>[ ] </b>Build, Release, Run :</b> Is the build process automated and repeatable? Further, is the application deployed using the same build and release artifacts consistently across environments?</span></li><li><span style="font-size: medium;"><b><b>[ ] </b>Processes :</b> Does the application run as one or more stateless processes, so that it can be scaled horizontally?</span></li><li><span style="font-size: medium;"><b><b>[ ] </b>Port Binding :</b> Does the application export services via a port binding mechanism, so that it can be run as a standalone service that is accessible via a network?</span></li><li><span style="font-size: medium;"><b><b>[ ] </b>Concurrency :</b> Does the application leverage concurrency and parallelism for improved performance? Can it scale horizontally and handle concurrency using process-based scaling?</span></li><li><span style="font-size: medium;"><b><b>[ ] </b>Disposability :</b> Does the application handle failures and crashes robustly? Is the application designed to start and stop gracefully without disrupting other services?</span></li><li><span style="font-size: medium;"><b><b>[ ] </b>Dev/Prod Parity :</b> Are you having isolated environments like dev, qa, staging other than your necessary prod environment? (You are in an older era, without this engineering practice in place.) Are development, staging, and production environments as similar as possible without any environment specific quirks? </span></li><li><span style="font-size: medium;"><b><b>[ ] </b>Logs :</b> Are the logs centralized and easily accessible for monitoring and troubleshooting?</span></li><li><span style="font-size: medium;"><b><b>[ ] </b>Admin Processes :</b> Can administrators easily execute management tasks without affecting the application's core functionality? Are administrative tasks and one-off scripts kept separate from the application code?</span></li></ol><div><span style="font-size: medium;">I hope this checklist will help you identify areas where improvements can be made to align your application with the desired best practices and characteristics of a well-designed, scalable, and maintainable application.</span></div>Karthikhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13054295982718010059noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6615480878082974820.post-44187522642271940912023-05-27T21:44:00.007+05:302023-05-28T14:31:53.288+05:30Phases In The Lifecycle Of A Loan<p><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi23LH5cs7EBIKBidJn6OvNMRI-_j-v12CMMcKPw3hAAcdRuoq77IhasrCU7_SKw2XGa1KJeuDX3NdF6gjf9eOwZKLUH6e3ccKpQGTxG55V2DlXFRM7DUIRCM2xfRKrYNu3kWUFnWt7Puaa0Phqed34tJSvkC6RvM1EcISnPBwlUTMB5F9ImxyxCEgM/s1277/loan-lifecycle-1.drawio.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><img border="0" data-original-height="422" data-original-width="1277" height="212" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi23LH5cs7EBIKBidJn6OvNMRI-_j-v12CMMcKPw3hAAcdRuoq77IhasrCU7_SKw2XGa1KJeuDX3NdF6gjf9eOwZKLUH6e3ccKpQGTxG55V2DlXFRM7DUIRCM2xfRKrYNu3kWUFnWt7Puaa0Phqed34tJSvkC6RvM1EcISnPBwlUTMB5F9ImxyxCEgM/w640-h212/loan-lifecycle-1.drawio.png" width="640" /></span></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><p></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Broadly speaking Loan lifecycle can be broken in two parts pre-disbursal and post-disbursal. The blue shaded boxes or the boxes in the first row in the picture above are part of <b>Pre-disbursal</b>. The yellow shaded boxes or the boxes in the second row in the above picture are part of <b>Post-disbursal</b>. Note, Loan Disbursal phase in terms of systems implementation are part of Post-disbursal systems usually, though some duplicate it in Pre-disbursal system too. </span><span style="font-size: large;"> </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Attempting to cover all use-cases, a Loan would have about 14 phases in its life-cycle. Unsecured loans, for instance might not have blocks like Loan Utilization phase mentioned above. Some NBFCs offering unsecured loans might not allow for Loan Modification/Restructuring and this phase becomes redundant there. So your use-case might vary, but what is important is that the product team has a higher level picture of the domain and phases of its operation in a visual representation like this. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Optimistically stating, 8 on 10 startups don't even have a big picture documentation like this for they have grossly overlooked the importance of shared understanding across board. And invariable in every place that I have walked-in so far, I try to work with my product counterparts to have something like this in place to democratize domain knowledge for the good of the business.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">The Engineering Leadership at helm overlooking this is another gotcha to be polite. It always makes me wonder "how the domain modeling is done?", "how the architecture is conceived?" (especially the microservices architecture that the engineering leadership often boasts of), "taking this use-case in India, how the systems comply to the DLG guidelines set-up for RBI in India?" and on and on. If you are an engineering head reading this, I encourage you to have this in place and see for yourself how the team get better in their delivery.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Simplifying the complexity is hard but the joy lies in that. So let me walk you through the different phases in a loan life-cycle. </span></p><p></p><ol style="text-align: left;"><li><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>Loan Application :</b> The applicant submits a loan application to the bank or NBFC, providing personal information, employment details, income proof, and other required documentation. The application may be submitted online, through a mobile app, or in person at a branch.</span></li><li><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>Document Verification :</b> The financial institution verifies the authenticity of the documents submitted by the applicant, such as identity proof, address proof, income documents, bank statements, and employment verification. This step ensures that the applicant meets the eligibility criteria and provides accurate information. This phase includes KYC and AML.</span></li><li><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>Credit Evaluation :</b> The fintech evaluates the creditworthiness of the applicant. This involves analyzing the applicant's credit history, credit score, existing debts, repayment behavior, and other factors to assess the risk associated with lending to the individual. The fintech may also consider factors like employment stability, industry sector, and repayment capacity.</span></li><li><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>Loan Appraisal :</b> In this step, the financial institution like bank/NBFC assesses the loan application in detail. It involves analyzing the applicant's financial statements, business plans (in case of business loans), collateral (if applicable), and other relevant factors to determine the loan amount, interest rate, and terms and conditions that can be offered. The financial institution might have different policies for different use-cases defined by its Risk Analysts.</span></li><li><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>Loan Approval :</b> Once the loan application and the applicant's creditworthiness have been evaluated, the financial institution makes a decision regarding loan approval. If approved, the financial institution specifies the approved loan amount, interest rate, repayment schedule, and other terms. The applicant is provided with a loan offer or loan sanction letter.</span></li><li><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>Documentation & Agreement :</b> The Bank / NBFC prepares the loan agreement, which includes all the terms and conditions of the loan. The applicant is required to sign the agreement, acknowledging the terms, repayment obligations, and consequences of default. The applicant may also be required to provide additional post-dated cheques or setup auto-debit facilities for EMI payments.</span></li><li><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>Loan Disbursal :</b> After the loan agreement is signed, the financial institution disburses the loan amount to the applicant. The disbursement can be made through various channels, such as direct bank transfer, check, or demand draft. The financial institution may deduct any applicable processing fees or administrative charges from the loan amount.</span></li><li><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>Loan Utilization :</b> Is the borrower using the loan amount for the intended purpose? This is typically tracked and noted by the lender through various methods and mechanisms like collateral evaluation, site visits or inspections, communications & follow-ups etc.</span></li><li><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>Loan Repayment :</b> Is the borrower repaying the loan amount as per the agreed-upon schedule? Are reminder notifications sent at appropriate time to aid the borrower be their super customer.</span></li><li><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>Loan Servicing :</b> Once the loan is disbursed, the bank / NBFC monitors the loan account and ensures regular repayment by the borrower. This includes sending periodic statements, managing EMI payments, addressing customer queries, and providing customer support throughout the loan tenure.</span></li><li><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>Prepayment / Foreclosure :</b> The facility for a borrower to prepay the loan partially or in full before the scheduled tenure. </span></li><li><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>Loan Modification / Restructuring :</b> In certain situations, the borrower may request loan modification or restructuring. In other situations, the financial institutions may offer the same to a borrower as part of their marketing campaign.</span></li><li><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>Collections and Loan Defaults :</b> If the borrower fails to repay, the lender initiates collections activities to recover the outstanding amount. </span></li><li><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>Loan Closure :</b> Once the loan is fully repaid, the loan account is closed.</span></li></ol><p></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Again, your use-case might vary depending on your context. But it is crucial that you put that in writing with some visual representation and explanation text like this blog post to ensure that across the org you have a shared understanding of the domain and its jargons. Some start-ups for instance combines loan repayments and collections together and some combine loan repayment and loan servicing together. Also, phases like Document Verification, Credit Evaluation and Loan Appraisal can be combined together as <b>Under-writing</b>. These concepts are important to be understood at different levels of abstractions, by all players in the team.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Typically, Pre-disbursal phases are managed by <b>Loan Origination System (LOS)</b> and Post-disbursal phases are managed by <b>Loan Management System (LMS)</b>. There could be separate systems like <b>Risk Management System (RMS)</b> for Under-writing teams, and <b>Collections Management System (CMS)</b> for Collections team. Systems are architected based on the needs and structure of the organization and so it is critical for Engineering Leadership to understand how things work in the context of the organization and work with various stakeholders for alignment. Are you doing this?</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Take the pains to document your business domain like this so that your teams and business don't suffer burn-out or exhaustion. Remember, pain is inevitable but not suffering. </span></p>Karthikhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13054295982718010059noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6615480878082974820.post-32220584202804800712023-05-13T18:04:00.049+05:302023-08-28T13:13:04.384+05:30My Keynote - Twin Disruptions of No Code and AI<span style="font-size: medium;"><span> The slide deck below includes my presentation on the topic, "Twin Distruptions of No Code and AI" at SnapLogic's Chennai edition of conference.</span>
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Some pics from the event are included as part of the presentation...towards the end of it.</span></span>Karthikhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13054295982718010059noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6615480878082974820.post-37980676721613503602023-05-01T23:20:00.100+05:302023-05-26T13:09:18.428+05:30FAQs on Co-lending Model (CLM)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhO2pi4ekE3JEJdGOgLK1SFIZKIeZi2B-eIGsjqRVm-f7k5UPOE2Dzelr0r3-uiLFxl2MoDiQf56e0FT5iR_Su4rsO1a9vRrIlA3XFPKYw2ZiHJJXG46IP0hHN1-vLzIXk7t2CJtBf3qzLeYJYmzGG7SB2vqdvJkvphLgUesEN8EinzzOB0gXf1gzxv/s2048/rupee-india-word-cloud.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1024" data-original-width="2048" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhO2pi4ekE3JEJdGOgLK1SFIZKIeZi2B-eIGsjqRVm-f7k5UPOE2Dzelr0r3-uiLFxl2MoDiQf56e0FT5iR_Su4rsO1a9vRrIlA3XFPKYw2ZiHJJXG46IP0hHN1-vLzIXk7t2CJtBf3qzLeYJYmzGG7SB2vqdvJkvphLgUesEN8EinzzOB0gXf1gzxv/w640-h320/rupee-india-word-cloud.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><div><br /></div><div><ol style="text-align: left;"><li><b>What is the primary focus of the Co-lending Model (CLM)?</b> <br />The primary focus of the Co-lending Model is to improve the flow of credit to the unserved and underserved sectors of the economy and make funds available to beneficiaries at an affordable cost. It achieves this by combining the strengths of Non-Banking Financial Companies (NBFCs) in reaching a larger population segment with the strengths of Banks in providing funds at lower costs.<br /><br /></li><li><b>Which sectors are covered under the Co-lending of loans with NBFCs?</b> <br />The Co-lending of loans with eligible NBFCs pertains to Retail, MSME, Agriculture, and Large Corporate verticals.<br /><br /></li><li><b>How does the arrangement between Banks and NBFCs work in the Co-lending Model?</b> <br />The Bank engages with NBFCs registered with RBI for Co-Lending. The arrangement involves joint contribution of credit at the facility level by both lenders. It also includes sharing of risks and rewards between the bank and the NBFC, ensuring alignment of respective business objectives based on a mutually decided agreement.<br /><br /></li><li><b>How does the Co-lending Model benefit banks? <br /></b>The Co-lending Model allows banks to expand their reach and cater to a larger customer base by leveraging the distribution network and customer knowledge of NBFCs. It enables banks to diversify their loan portfolios, tap into new markets, and reduce the risk associated with lending to certain sectors.<br /><br /></li><li><b>Can banks engage with multiple NBFCs under the Co-lending Model?</b> <br />Yes, banks have the flexibility to engage with multiple eligible NBFCs for co-lending arrangements. This allows banks to diversify their partnerships and leverage the expertise of different NBFCs based on their respective strengths and customer segments.<br /><br /></li><li><b>What benefits do NBFCs gain from participating in the Co-lending Model? <br /></b>NBFCs can benefit from the Co-lending Model by gaining access to low-cost funds from banks. This enables them to offer loans at competitive interest rates to their customers. Additionally, NBFCs can leverage the expertise and infrastructure of banks to enhance their lending capabilities.<br /><br /></li><li><b>What are the eligible NBFCs for participating in the Co-lending Model?</b> <br />NBFCs registered with the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) and fulfilling the prescribed criteria are eligible to participate in the Co-lending Model. The RBI sets specific requirements regarding capital adequacy, asset classification, and other regulatory compliance for NBFCs to qualify for co-lending arrangements.<br /><br /></li><li><b>What is the distribution of credit risk between the NBFC and the Bank in the Co-lending Model?</b> <br />At least 20% of the credit risk by way of direct exposure should be on the NBFC's books until maturity, while the remaining 80% will be on the Bank's books. The NBFC provides an undertaking that its contribution towards the loan amount is not funded by borrowing from the co-lending bank or any other group company of the partner bank. The NBFC also seeks consent from the Bank before granting additional loans to the borrower outside the co-lending arrangement.<br /><br /></li><li><b>How are the interest rates determined in the Co-lending Model? <br /></b>The interest rates may be under both fixed and floating rate regimes based on mutually agreed terms with the NBFC on a case-by-case basis. The ultimate borrower may be charged an all-inclusive interest rate as agreed upon with the NBFC, conforming to the applicable guidelines. For fixed rate loans, a single blended interest rate is offered based on the respective interest rates and proportion of risk sharing. In the case of floating interest rates, a weighted average of the benchmark interest rates is offered in proportion to the respective loan contribution.<br /><br /></li><li><b>How does the Co-lending Model benefit the ultimate beneficiary? <br /></b>The Co-lending Model aims to pass on the benefits of low-cost funds from banks and the lower cost of operations of NBFCs to the ultimate beneficiary through the blended or weighted average interest rate. This ensures that the borrower receives the advantages of the collaboration between the bank and the NBFC. Banks and NBFCs are required to provide all relevant information, including loan details, interest rates, risk-sharing arrangement, etc., as requested by the Reserve Bank of India.<br /><br /></li><li><b>What are the reporting requirements for banks and NBFCs participating in the Co-lending Model?</b> <br />Banks and NBFCs are required to submit regular reports to the RBI, providing details of co-lending transactions, loan performance, risk-sharing arrangements, interest rates, and other relevant information. These reporting requirements ensure transparency and help monitor the effectiveness of the Co-lending Model.<br /><br /></li><li><b>How does the Co-lending Model contribute to financial inclusion? <br /></b>The Co-lending Model aims to promote financial inclusion by increasing credit availability to underserved segments of the population. By leveraging the combined strengths of banks and NBFCs, it helps in reaching out to unbanked or underbanked individuals and businesses, enabling them to access formal credit and contribute to economic growth.</li></ol></div>Karthikhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13054295982718010059noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6615480878082974820.post-28878688428346720142023-04-24T16:39:00.009+05:302023-04-25T00:24:10.050+05:30Noobie's Guide To Digital Lending Guidelines (DLG)<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhO2pi4ekE3JEJdGOgLK1SFIZKIeZi2B-eIGsjqRVm-f7k5UPOE2Dzelr0r3-uiLFxl2MoDiQf56e0FT5iR_Su4rsO1a9vRrIlA3XFPKYw2ZiHJJXG46IP0hHN1-vLzIXk7t2CJtBf3qzLeYJYmzGG7SB2vqdvJkvphLgUesEN8EinzzOB0gXf1gzxv/s2048/rupee-india-word-cloud.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1024" data-original-width="2048" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhO2pi4ekE3JEJdGOgLK1SFIZKIeZi2B-eIGsjqRVm-f7k5UPOE2Dzelr0r3-uiLFxl2MoDiQf56e0FT5iR_Su4rsO1a9vRrIlA3XFPKYw2ZiHJJXG46IP0hHN1-vLzIXk7t2CJtBf3qzLeYJYmzGG7SB2vqdvJkvphLgUesEN8EinzzOB0gXf1gzxv/w640-h320/rupee-india-word-cloud.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><p></p><p>The financial regulations in India hasn't been that great in comparison to the west with glaring deficiency in having a well-defined framework to protect citizens interest, money laundering, data theft etc. In spite of these dark sides, the <b>Digital Lending</b> has been on the rise in India with the promise of penetrating credit to the under-serviced segments far and wide. Like how any growth opportunity that when not regulated can get abused, digital lending space too experienced it. Thankfully the current Indian government's finance ministry headed by Mrs. Nirmala Sitharaman had taken note of these and responded well. But how? The <b>Government of India (GoI)</b> and the <b>Reserve Bank of India (RBI)</b> quickly formulated a <b>Working Group on Digital Lending (WGDL)</b> to come up with regulations on all digital lending done online through web portals and mobile applications. These new regulations were named <b>Digital Lending Guidelines (DLG)</b>. </p><p><br /></p><p>The DLG aims to address the following irregularities:</p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>data privacy breaches</li><li>money laundering </li><li>non-traceability of money trail</li><li>unethical business practices</li><li>exploitations of gullible citizens by digital lenders</li></ul><div><br /></div><p></p><div>As per the DLG, the players in the Digital Lending space can be classified as below:</div><div><ol style="text-align: left;"><li><b>Regulated Entity (RE)</b> / <b>Digital Lender (DL) </b>: is an entity that is regulated by RBI to carry out digital lending operations. Essentially the one that doles out the finance to the borrower. Some example for such NBFC digital lending entities would be PayU Finance, Shiksha Finance, Gromor Finance, Fullerton India, CreditSaison India, IIFL Finance, etc.</li><li><b>Lending Service Provider (LSP)</b> : is an agent of the RE who performs a subset of RE's lending functions (which includes lead acquisition, underwriting support, pricing support, any servicing/monitoring/recovery of the loans on behalf of the RE). Some examples of such entities would be: </li><ul><li>PaySense acting as LSP for PayU Finance, </li><li>RazorPay acting as LSP for Gromer Finance, etc.</li></ul><li><b>Digital Lending App (DLA) </b>: is the mobile-app/web-app that supports digital lending services of an RE / LSP to boost the income and productivity of every loan catered via it. Does this also include API platform for consumption by third-parties? Technically yes! Some examples include:</li><ul><li>PaySense's Mobile App is a DLA for the PaySense LSP that acts as an agent for lenders like PayU Finance </li><li>LazyPay's Mobile Apps a DLA for the LazyPay entity who is an LSP for PayU Finance lender </li><li>KreditBee's Web app is a DLA for KreditBee entity who acts as an LSP for some of the lendors like PayU Fin, IIFL, Vivriti Capital, Cholamandalam Investments etc.</li></ul></ol><div><br /></div></div><div><div>These regulations are evolving for better with time, to tighten the noose in public credit space. Some of the key mandates that you should have in your mind (if you are in the digital lending space) are below: </div><div><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><b><i>all loans</i></b> must be disbursed to the borrower/debtor through regulated bank entities only.</li><li><b><i>all repayments</i></b> of the loans by the borrower/debtor are as well done only through the regulated bank entities.</li><li>all these financial transactions between the borrower and the RE lender happens only via the banks and <b><i>no other entity is to be aware of these including LSPs</i></b>.</li><li>First Loan Default Guarantee (FLDG) lending mode is barred for lack of clarity in its agreements (as of the year 2023).</li></ul></div></div><div><br /></div><div><div>Does that sound easy for you? Some questions to think through:</div><div><ol style="text-align: left;"><li>How are Direct Selling Associates and their platform if any, categorized under DLG?</li><li>How do you classify the entities that consume the B2B APIs for its digital lending and the entities that make such B2B APIs for digital lending to happen smoothly?</li><li>Which data of lead/borrower can be stored by who and for how long? </li><li>Where do the <b>Payment Aggregators (PAs)</b> like Google Pay, Amazon Pay, etc. stand in the purview of DLG?</li><li>Which entities are mandated to have Grievance Redressal Officer? Who holds accountability for the grievances?</li><li>Who is responsible for communicating the change in <b>Annual Percentage Rate (APR)</b> to the borrower in case of floating rate loans and how is it to be communicated?</li><li>Given that DLG talks of direct transactions between borrower and RE in both disbursal and repayment of loans, what happens in the case of delinquent loans - can the recovery agent be engaged to collect cash from the borrowers? If so, who bears the cost of recovery?</li><li>Can a third-party or an LSP directly/indirectly control the financial transaction (flow of funds) between the bank accounts of RE and borrower?</li><li>What information of a lead/borrower can an LSP retain?</li><li>How would the product architecture implement DLG mandates? What measures are taken to accommodate its evolution?</li></ol><div><br /></div></div></div><div>The DLG changes the mechanics of how the information flows between entities and who is aware of what information. I am not sure how many financial institutions in the credit lending space has even a hang of this, to accommodate it in their flow and thus re-engineer / re-architect their systems accordingly. Given that the regulatory body is getting more and more tech savvy by the day, the non-compliant ones will be off the market and thus the competition. In Fintech, it is a war where the fittest that comply to the evolving regulatory norms would survive.</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><b>Note:</b> This post is my understanding of DLG based on my readings and experience working with some real good entrepreneurial PMs (Ganesh Prabhu Nandan, in particular) at PayU Credit. In matters like this, I encourage open and continuous conversations to improve engagement and understanding of the complex and evolving mandates that Fintech industry is witnessing.</div>Karthikhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13054295982718010059noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6615480878082974820.post-78406005167732788032023-04-21T17:11:00.006+05:302023-07-18T14:29:32.070+05:30Noobie's Guide To Fintech Parlance Mostly In Credit Domain<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhO2pi4ekE3JEJdGOgLK1SFIZKIeZi2B-eIGsjqRVm-f7k5UPOE2Dzelr0r3-uiLFxl2MoDiQf56e0FT5iR_Su4rsO1a9vRrIlA3XFPKYw2ZiHJJXG46IP0hHN1-vLzIXk7t2CJtBf3qzLeYJYmzGG7SB2vqdvJkvphLgUesEN8EinzzOB0gXf1gzxv/s2048/rupee-india-word-cloud.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1024" data-original-width="2048" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhO2pi4ekE3JEJdGOgLK1SFIZKIeZi2B-eIGsjqRVm-f7k5UPOE2Dzelr0r3-uiLFxl2MoDiQf56e0FT5iR_Su4rsO1a9vRrIlA3XFPKYw2ZiHJJXG46IP0hHN1-vLzIXk7t2CJtBf3qzLeYJYmzGG7SB2vqdvJkvphLgUesEN8EinzzOB0gXf1gzxv/w640-h320/rupee-india-word-cloud.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><p></p><p><b>NBFC</b> = A <b>Non-Banking Finance Company</b> (also known as <b>NBFI</b> - <b>Non-Banking Finance Institution</b>) is a company that offers select set of banking services (like credit facilities, loans, under-writing, chit-funds, share trading etc.) without any banking license. They are not subject to banking regulations but are still classified as <b>Regulated Entities (REs)</b> and are registered with RBI in India. Their regulations are not as stringent and regulated as banks and thus have scope to innovate and specialize in catering to the needs of under-served segment - be it people or MSMEs - in providing access to the credit they need and deserve.</p><p><br /></p><p><b>BNPL</b> = <b>Buy Now Pay Later</b>. Some NBFCcompanies operating in this sector include <a href="https://www.amazon.in/b/ref=apay_emir_signpost?node=15430915031" target="_blank">Amazon Pay Later</a>, <a href="https://paytm.com/offer/paytm-postpaid" target="_blank">PayTM Postpaid</a>, <a href="https://www.flipkart.com/flipkart-pay-later-store" target="_blank">Flipkart Paylater</a>, <a href="https://lazypay.in" target="_blank">Lazy Pay</a>, <a href="https://www.zestmoney.in" target="_blank">Zest Money</a>, <a href="https://getsimpl.com" target="_blank">Simpl</a> etc.</p><p><br /></p><p><b>STPL</b> = <b>Short Term Personal Loans</b> aka <b>Unsecured Term Loans</b>. Some NBFC Companies operating in this space include PayTM, <a href="https://www.lendingkart.com" target="_blank">LendingKart</a>, <a href="https://www.pinelabs.com" target="_blank">Pine Labs</a>, <a href="https://www.moneytap.com" target="_blank">MoneyTap</a>, <a href="https://www.mobikwik.com" target="_blank">MobiKwik</a>, <a href="https://www.gopaysense.com" target="_blank">PaySense</a>, etc.</p><p><br /></p><p><b>MSME Loans</b> = <b>Micro, Small & Medium Enterprises Loans</b>. Some NBFC companies that are providing these services collateral-free are <a href="https://www.lendingkart.com" target="_blank">LendingKart</a>, <a href="https://kinaracapital.com" target="_blank">Kinara Capital</a>, <a href="https://www.indifi.com" target="_blank">Indifi</a>, <a href="https://flexiloans.com" target="_blank">Flexiloans</a>, etc. </p><p><br /></p><p><b>Online Aggregators (OA)</b> = These companies that list the lending companies on their sites offering their customers one stop shop for comparison of services from its pool of lenders. Take the case of OAs in STPL space, we'll have companies like <a href="https://www.bankbazaar.com" target="_blank">BankBazaar</a>, <a href="https://www.paisabazaar.com" target="_blank">PaisaBazaar</a>,</p><p><br /></p><p><b>P2P Lending Companies</b> = Companies that build platforms that enable P2P lending by getting NBFC P2P certification from RBI. Example <a href="https://www.faircent.in/" target="_blank">FairCent</a>, <a href="https://www.liquiloans.com" target="_blank">LiquiLoans</a>, <a href="https://creditvidya.com" target="_blank">CreditVidya</a>, <a href="https://www.lendbox.in" target="_blank">Lendbox</a>, RangDe, etc. </p><p><br /></p><p><b>Co-Lending</b> = NBFCs are bridging the credit gap in India as much as elsewhere in the world. And the concept of co-lending was recently adopted by RBI, encouraging banks and NBFCs to come together to compliment each other and serve larger market segment. Until this a lot of NBFCs were also coming together in offering credit services. The dynamics of this space is changing that could be challenging the NBFCs at times; for instance, very recently the RBI has mandated the Banks to hold at least 10% share in the loans that NBFCs disburse via their channel; what started off as nudge became a mandate. This mandate on the bank, can potentially force the NBFC to have stronger relationship with the bank instead of merely transactional one. In summary, co-lending can be with other NBFC and/or bank.</p><p><br /></p><p><b>NeoBanks</b> = New means new. But what is new about these neo banks? Banking has moved from traditional/conventional brick and mortar (aka physical) branch locations to going digital leveraging internet and technology thus enabling online banking with Web and mobile apps. NeoBanks are banks without any physical branches and operating wholly online leveraging tech through and through. Some of the Newbanks in India include PayTM, <a href="https://freo.money/about/" target="_blank">Freo</a>, RazorPay, <a href="https://www.instantpay.in" target="_blank">InstantPay</a>, <a href="https://fampay.in" target="_blank">FamPay</a>, <a href="https://goniyo.com/niyox-equitas/" target="_blank">Niyo</a>, Finin, etc.</p><p><br /></p><p><b>PA</b> = <b>Payment Aggregators</b> like Google Pay, Amazon Pay, PayTM etc. who aid consumers in managing all their utility billings from their super app.</p><p><br /></p><p><b>AA</b> = <b>Account Aggregator</b> in India is one of a kind framework whereby a network of RBI regulated entities with NBFC-AA license work together in bridging potential borrowers and their potential lenders digitally. AA empowers an individual with control over their personal financial data in a single place instead of it being scattered in silos. Think of AA as an inter-operable data-blind Consent Manager replacing the traditional, cumbersome process of issuing "blank cheque" and agreeing to a lot of granular permissions that may vary from lender to lender. There are quite a few AA entities that an individual can choose from. Some of them being <a href="https://www.anumati.co.in/" target="_blank">Anumati by Perfios</a>, <a href="https://www.proteantech.in/" target="_blank">Protean (formerly NDSL e-Gov)</a>, etc. For more do read the <a href="https://pib.gov.in/PressReleaseIframePage.aspx?PRID=1753713" target="_blank">press release by the government</a>, that should be worth your time. Simply put, with AA, an individual can easily and securely share his financial data digitally at granular level to various financial institutions to avail their credit services with faster turn around time.</p><p><br /></p><p><b>PD</b> = <b>Probability of Default</b> aka Default Probability is the likelihood that a borrower will fail to pay back a certain debt. For businesses, probability of default is reflected in the company's credit ratings; and for individuals, a credit score is one of the things that is used to gauge the default risk. Lenders will typically charge higher interest rates when default probability is greater. PD can depend not only on the borrower's characteristics, but also on the general economic environment.</p><div><br /></div><p>This is work in progress. I do intend to update it with time.. so, stay tuned!</p>Karthikhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13054295982718010059noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6615480878082974820.post-81500190040853706112023-04-20T18:24:00.007+05:302023-05-27T23:58:01.220+05:30Book Review : It happened in India
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1276152673i/1835702.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="389" data-original-width="273" height="389" src="https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1276152673i/1835702.jpg" width="273" /></a></div><br /><p>I have read this book when this was first published and re-read it again with all enthusiasm. This book has a lot of nuggets of wisdom for entrepreneurs and org leaders. </p><p>This is a book about Kishore Biyani (aka KB), the unorthodox entrepreneur who created successful Retail chains like Pantaloons, Big Bazaar, Central etc and put it under the umbrella group called Future Group. In this book, you will read how Kishore is a man of contradictions from not following conventional working models be it his traditional family business or that of his contemporary peers to then looking for Indianness in Retail. Thinking more about it, what is common, is that he followed his instincts and stood by his values.</p><p>The book also show how many leaders who worked with him, found him to be intriguing in the beginning. This is perhaps not just with him, but is something that you and I can witness when joining a new organization as a leader.</p><p>The book recounts Biyani's entrepreneurial journey and provides insights into his business strategies and the evolution of the Indian retail industry. I have my share of take aways on learning, unlearning and re-learning. Here are some key takeaways from the book:</p><p></p><ol style="text-align: left;"><li>Entrepreneurial Vision : Biyani emphasizes the need to identify untapped market opportunities early on and create innovative business models to capitalize on them.</li><li>Customer-centric Approach : Biyani emphasizes the importance of market research, consumer insights, and building a customer-centric organization. By focusing on the customer, businesses can create long-term relationships and build brand loyalty. It is fascinating to learn that Biyani, has in numerous occasions has lead this by an example.</li><li>Experimentation and Risk-taking : Biyani encouraged his leadership team to take risks and embrace experimentation. What matters is the importance of learning from failures and adapting strategies accordingly.</li><li>Localization and Cultural Sensitivity : In a diverse country like India, Biyani stresses the significance of understanding local cultures, traditions, and preferences. He cites examples of how his retail store in one state is different from the same store in another state. Typically each store is tailored to the local population and culture.</li><li> Trust and Delegation : How Biyani trusts the folks he works with and delegates the work expecting his leadership to take ownership and accountability of the delivery and the mechanics of the delivery is something that many leaders fail to do even in this age.</li></ol><p></p><p>The same review of the book is also posted on <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/5495964540?book_show_action=false" target="_blank">Goodreads</a>.</p>Karthikhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13054295982718010059noreply@blogger.com