sankara.me

June 29, 2010

Paul Graham's Hackers & Painters

Paul Graham’s Hackers & Painters is a very interesting read for anyone looking to make a living out of programming. Here is an interesting quote:

Great software, likewise, requires a fanatical devotion to beauty. If you look inside good software, you find that parts no one is ever supposed to see are beautiful too. I'm not claiming I write great software, but I know that when it comes to code I behave in a way that would make me eligible for prescription drugs if I approached everyday life the same way. It drives me crazy to see code that's badly indented, or that uses ugly variable names.

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May 19, 2010

BankBazaar is looking for Superstar Engineers

Contact Info: Iype Isac (CTO), 98844 12060, careers [at] bankbazaar [dot] com.

Do you know any company which has done the following within a span of 15 months (with a core engineering team of just 10 people)

Built a system which has completely replaced the online acquisition platform of:
- India's biggest home loan lender
- India's biggest auto loan lender
- India's biggest personal loan lender
- India's biggest credit card issuer

Why would leading portals (MSN, Economic Times) route their entire customer base to us for loan related information?

Why are leading banks asking us to rebuild their internal banking systems using our platforms?

The reason: Our superior platform has trumped existing platforms in delivering better results at much lower costs. And what's behind the platform - a world class team of engineers who have it in their DNA to improve & excel. We are expanding rapidly and are looking for more super stars to join us.

About BankBazaar
BankBazaar.com is a technology centric company providing innovative products/services in the retail banking space. Started by team that built Amazon.com's online credit card product pioneering in real time credit delivery, our team today is 35 strong with the top online technology specialists from Amazon.com, Microsoft, and Trilogy from universities such as CEG, REC-Trichy, Columbia, Georgia Tech, Virginia Tech, ISB and other top rung universities. BankBazaar has secured funding in July 2008 and we are showing strong revenue growth month over month.

What do we do?
We develop products that power www.bankbazaar.com and online loan/credit-card delivery systems of top Indian banks like HDFC Bank, ING Vysya, ABN AMRO, HDFC LTD and the finance section of popular sites like MSN India, Economic Times. The core work involves building the BankBazaar platform and highly scalable applications on top of it. This includes development of business rule engines, business process automation workflows, highly customizable web site platforms and intelligent credit decisioning and fraud detection systems. In addition, we are extending the usage of the same platform in branch banking and mobile banking.

Why work for BankBazaar?
You will be a part of a small core engineering team that is revolutionizing the banking software/services industry. We maintain a flat organization and an agile work environment. Each engineer carries a lot of ownership and adds tremendous value by working on high impact problems using innovative methods. Being a startup, everyone is exposed to the big picture and gets the opportunity to be a part of the big decisions. We are a fast growing company providing excellent learning and growth opportunities.

Want to join us?
We are seeking smart programmers who are gung ho about building large scale systems that are going to have a big impact on millions of customers around the world. These are the skills/qualifications that are preferred:

    * Bachelors or Masters engineering degree from a reputed college
    * Strong grasp of CS fundamentals and excellent problem solving abilities.
    * Experience with hands on coding and independent ownership of software components
    * Advanced knowledge in performance, scalability, enterprise system architecture, and engineering best practices.
    * Web savvy, Experience with Java, PHP, MySQL and Javascript

Send your resumes to careers [at] bankbazaar [dot] com if you are interested and spread the word around :)

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Filed under // bankbazaar job openings

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April 22, 2010

Car loan - Challenges

As some of you might have noticed BankBazaar’s portfolio is growing rapidly. The recent addition is car loan. As with any other business there were various challenges at various stages. First it was convincing the banks that our model is unlike any other lead aggregation model and that it is much cheaper and efficient. As would have known already BankBazaar doesn’t “sell” a loan. A loan application at BankBazaar is highly transparent and intent driven. The user has the option to compare various banks by the single most important parameter, the total cost of a loan, which includes interest rates, taxes and fees; pretty straightforward. In spite of the convenience provided it has never been easy to convince customers. This challenge gets compounded in the case of car loans. The dealer (who gets a significant cut of the loan, btw) hand holds the customer through the loan process. Customers fall for it not realising that the interest rate provided need not be the lowest and there is a lot of bargaining to do to get the best deal. One solution that has currently been put out at BankBazaar in association with HDFC is a discount in interest rate and processing fee. Let’s see how it goes. Do spread the word.

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Filed under // BankBazaar car loan

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March 7, 2010

Moving on - Clojure

Until recently, I was a staunch believer in Java; of course, not without reasons. Here is a short list of things I found useful & convenient. Note that this list is as per my expectations as a naïve & novice programmer.

Strong type system meant that I know what is in hand. This resulted in eliminating quite a lot of errors at compile time.
No pointers. This was kind of a shock for me. I had always appreciated the ability to store links especially when it comes to data structures. Once I figured out the trick to live without pointers life was much easier. One more source of errors is eliminated from my code. No more debugging segfaults.
Strong exception system let me anticipate errors and handle them gracefully.
A rather well defined OOP. List all advantages of OOP here. Java did a little *cleanup* of C++. Confusions and those that hamper readability of code like operator overloading and multiple inheritance were removed.
Other strong advantages. A great set of library, platform independence, strong IDE support (of course the above points played a major role here)…etc.

But as you approach “I know what I’m doing” these advantages would rather become sources of frustration. Code would be verbose than required; you feel strangled by the type system and exception system; you would find yourself having to learning a lot of best practises, industry standards, design patterns …etc. to overcome the inherent deficiencies of the language. There are two routes from here

Religiously believe Java (also name x, y and z which are in the same domain as Java) as the best language out there and never realise that you are indeed at a disadvantage.
Learn a more powerful language; a lisp preferably or a modern language like Scala, Erlang or Groovy.

I was introduced to Erlang and Clojure quite a long time ago. But I was in (i). This coupled with the inertia (a fancy term for laziness), resistance to change and the lack of a place to apply my learning meant that I never took that up. If you are in an established company it is highly likely that you could never introduce a new technology. This is definitely not a bad thing. Of course, every company runs for profit and they don’t want you to be a rather irreplaceable resource. This is where working in a startup became an advantage. The list of language and technologies used in my present company goes on and on: Java/J2EE (struts, spring, hibernate, freemarker, ognl, velocity), Groovy/Grails, Python and now the latest introduction Clojure (not to mention other front end technologies) and introducing a new useful technology fitting a particular problem domain was well accepted and was the general norm. Also, I was exposed to these brilliant and thought provoking articles by Paul Graham: Revenge of the Nerds & Succinctness is Power.

I decided to update my toolbox and started learning Clojure. Why Clojure? The reasons are pretty much covered here. My major strong point was that I felt functional programming and lisp are a totally new way of thinking but yet clojure makes them usable in your day to day life. After using clojure for well over 3 months I feel my decision was indeed wise. A direct impact of this is that my Java code is much more succinct and yet readable. The impact was not limited to Java; my entire style of thinking was altered (in a good way). It does help you if you understand the limitations and drawback of the tools/technologies that you use. Functional programming is indeed radical, fancy terms like TDD would be just a way of life. This is a direct advantage of the fact that every function is self-contained and the scope/environment is small and easy to setup. That’s just one example that I felt personally. I definitely feel more satisfied now. Take a look at an example from the book Programming Clojure:

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March 2, 2010