At Pycon Japan 2014

I've never gone to a programming conference before. I am an avid coder and only attended small meet ups from time to time. Listening to talks and seeing what is on the minds of other coders, who is attending on what talks and the trends in the industry are interesting.

In order to stay relevant it's important to see where everyone is going and what people are up to. Common sense, especially in the coding world changes very quick. I've seen some impressive architectures developed by just teams of 10 people. The idea that you need a big dev team to accomplish something is changing. Small groups people people can and will out code large organisations.

Attending other programming conferences will be an interesting thing for me to do, I wonder if other people doing modern languages are thinking the same thing.

Of an interesting note, lots of people here are live tweeting during the conferences, some of the tweets are interesting. I've never been much of a twitter user, but following some of the stuff is kind of neat. Only curios about "inherent filtering" (i.e. the characteristics of people that tweet are different compared to those that don't).

Tomorrow is going to be a coding sprint, the first time I'll be attending one. Going to be interesting to see what can be developed in the time span of a single day...

Also.. I need a notebook with a better battery life. My 2008 macbook just dies too quick!

Take the Challenging Route

A friend of mine had moved where I had worked to another recently citing that the work load at where he was at was too demanding. I can't say for sure if it was the right decision or not but for one thing for sure, he seems a lot happier now compared to where he was at before.

I've had calls to join other firms compared where I am at now. I work in a challenging environment in the sense that the technologies are used and "enterprise driven" usually means out dated workflows and arduous levels of justification to make change. There are times where it is a must to use an archaic system which costs $100k to develop where I could replace in a month. I've probably mentioned that many, many times before.

Going back to my friend that had left, things seems to be a lot easier in that the work days are shorter and tasks are a lot simpler. Somehow, knowing what I know and going into an environment that was too easy would leave me not as intellectually challenged and possibly bored.

Given the choice of 2 routes, between the one that seemingly looked like the easy route vs the possible but challenging route, I'd generally take the more challenging one. Doing things the easy way was never in my genes and the mysteries of trying to solve a challenge has always been in my blood. The more right way of putting it would be the satisfaction of going through the challenge.

Taking challenges seems like an unnatural thing, because for most people why take the harder route when an easy one exists? And for the ones that to take the harder routes, little do they realize later one, they are the ones to grow the most. There are to obvious reasons that a person would accept a challenge, either 1) by necessity or 2) for the satisfaction of taking on the challenge.

Anthropologically, cultures whom have have lived in climates of scarcity have appeared to be the ones that have best evolved or have become technologically advanced. Perhaps it is a generalization, but take for existence of cultures that existing around the earth's equator where food is plentiful and you'll find the life styles to be more bohemian, compared to those that have lived through somewhat more scarce climates. I should qualify that this isn't a necessary and sufficient condition for advanced cultures to evolve, taking for example of say people living in barren and cold areas near the poles of the earth.

Compare those cultures of Northern Europe or Asia where more advanced cultures have evolved (note that I do not necessarily mean "modern", but relative to the time period) and we would see that the most advanced cultures have generally have been the ones that have had to struggle through environments of scarcity and some hostility. But I would say that it is the necessity of the challenge that forces people to develop.

I for one would say that I am in a challenging circumstance, perhaps not in an ideal way but it has forced me to grow and develop skills in ways that I've not expected. Though I work in sort of a support function to ensure that systems run, I've taken on roles that would land me as a hybrid developer, business analyst and client relationship manager between the technology departments and business users simply because of the isolation of our office from our global centers.

The irony of it is, despite the number of people being smaller in a subsidiary office, we are forced to run the entire business chain with less people compared to our other locations which allows me to oversee much more of the activities than most people would in HQ. This has the interesting impact that I do a better job of coordinating the different teams in HQ from afar that what some people are able to do locally and I know for sure that I'll be able to leverage these skills in the future should I go up or outside the current organization where as I would probably would learn less if I was somewhere else.

Last 3 years of run data

I've been using an application for the last 3 years to keep track of my run information and some interesting trends come out.

Namely:

• I like running in the summer
• Run distances have been getting longer
• My speed drops after a running hiatus and as my runs get longer

Unfortunately, I didn't have my phone with me when I did the half marathon, but the 2 18 km runs before the marathon really improved my 10 km run speeds. I'll need to set some time again to run 21 km on my own again to see if there are further improvements to my 10 km speeds.

Currently trying to fit in 1 10 km run per week and noticing speed increases after each week. May up this to more frequent runs later on.

Running my first 1/2 marathon

If it weren't for hanging out with friends one day after riding support on bicycle for a 5 person relay where each person runs a half marathon that starts from Tokyo to Hankone, I probably would never have signed myself up to run for a half marathon.

Of an interesting thing recently, I've found myself doing more and more fitness wise with the help of trainers pushing me to do things that I would have never thought of doing. And it's not just the matter of being pushed, but watching other people do things that I would never have thought about doing. 

Fortunate for me I have been surrounded by people that are pretty keen on doing things like long distance bike rides, running and fitness challenges a la crossfit (of which I have signed into doing starting from last year).

For the past few years, dropping percent body fat has been one of those things that I've been trying to do. It's challenging as it takes dedication, avoidance of going out for drinks and finding time and energy during the day to pickup the weights or go out for a run. My experience doing crossfit for the past 6 months has shown me that while the workouts are intense, in order to truly reap the benefits of the high intensity exercise, you've also got to supplement those workouts with other activities such as running to build lasting endurance or to really build upon what the workouts provide.

A 10 km run will generally burn 750 calories and the general consensus is that burning 3500 calories will allow a person to drop about 500 grams (or 1 pound) in body weight. Meaning on average you'll need to do 5 runs to drop about 1 pound. A high intensity crossfit work out for approximately 20~30 mins will only burn about 250 calories and I will admit that these workouts can be really tough to get through but to have lasting change in dropping body weight, you'll need to do 3x more classes as compared to doing a regular run session to burn the same number of calories. Well back to running.

I've gotten to the point where running 10 km is no longer a challenging feat for me to do as it's something that I regularly do, but kicking this up to the 21 km range has brought me back to facing the same challenges that I faced while trying to do my first 10 km run, which was pushing through running while running out of gas at the 6 km mark. I think that every runner while trying to extend their running range will face this at some point when trying to run new distances. For me in running half marathons, it's pushing past the 16 km mark where I can feel the legs get heavy and my speed drops. Depending on how you're running out of gas while running, you're either able to push through it or you've pretty much hit the physical limit of the body for that run. 

I remember pushing to my first 18 km range run was the toughest as I ran out of gas during that run and it was very tough to keep on going. The second time around was much better and I was able to cut my running time down by 10 mins. I've never had the chance to run a full 21 km before the half marathon date but pushing through from the 17th km all the way to the end was both mentally and physically demanding. One of the goals that I had put out for myself for the 21 km run was to do the entire run unbroken (without needing to break into a walk). There were several instances where I was close to doing from mental and physical fatigue, but I managed to push through to the end. It was one of the toughest runs that I've ever had to do and I am pretty glad to have finished it (and event tempted to attempt another 1/2 marathon run in the future).

On good positive impact that I managed to find today is that my 10 km run speed has vastly improved since doing the 1/2 marathon run. After doing a long hiatus from running since starting crossfit, my running speed from the beginning of the year were pegged at just under 6 mins / km. After completing the 1/2 marathon run I managed to run 5 km all below 5 mins / km and the remainder at below 5:20 mins / km. I would say that I am pretty happy with those speed considering how few times that I've been running for the past few months. 

Some great tools that I've been using for running are both the "Runkeeper" application for my phone where it keeps track of my distance and speed and the second is a heart rate monitor which I wear strapped to my chest and a wrist watch that displays my current heart rate which allows me to maintain a constant rate of physical exertion instead of having it unknowingly drop while running on feel.

As Japan is finally coming out of a very cold start of spring, I'll also be looking forward to doing long distance rides to the coast which will be about a 110 km round trip on bike.

Promoted

I did in 1.5 years what I couldn't achieve in 4 years working at my last place of employment; getting promoted. I wouldn't say that my last place of employment was a bad, it's just the way their HR was setup was bad; they couldn't keep talented people like me around long enough and thus I had to go.

In all honestly, I do miss working in a fully technical field. Research and developing technology is a romantic concept, like the idea of the starting a successful business. It's a story with risk, uncertainty and with perseverance the protagonist will prevail. It is the dream story of the everyman.

I've been in corporate culture for the past 6 years. Working in a corporation is secure because the budgets are big and there is less fear of where the next pay cheque is going to come from. But the problem is as organizations become larger, the visible impacts that a person has on the outcome of a project or operations become less pronounced. Especially top players within teams. The person that would know who their top players are are probably the team members and the lead but without proper promotion to the rest of the organization most top players will go unnoticed. I've been in that situation several times in the past and I've since learned the importance of developing a solid reputation.

In the span of 2 years I've solidified my position as the god of what I do. When shit hits the fan, I am the guy that people call. When there are changes to be made I'm the person that is consulted. The interesting thing in large corporations is that everyone loves to blame IT for things that go wrong. I've come to the point where I can monitor what is going on so well that I actually tell the traders that they've forgotten to turn on their price contributions when they forget or tell them when their prices are off. People don't come to me to complain, I catch things before they happen and help people when they unwittingly make mistakes.

Oddly enough, becoming a person that is well recognized doesn't require tons of brains to achieve. It's is one of those counter-intuitive things that most people subtlety know to be true. I've come from a brainiac place to somewhere where those kinds of skills are less important, but a go getter mentality is what will drive home successes.

There will be more stories to talk about going forward, but those are for later.

Self censorship and its impacts on thinking

As one person had once put it, self-censorship is like violence against the mind. I for one would have to agree.

The ironic thing about the interconnectivity of the internet and the social networks that it brings along with it is a tidal wave of share information. When Facebook was in it's infancy, you'd only have a few circles of friends and they would represent the closest of your friends, then you would reach out to old acquaintances that you might have lost touch after middle of high school. When young, you could write about anything and you wouldn't give it a second thought. Social networks at one point were "fun."

Then came people of influence or judging people by what they post in to the mix of social networks. When everyone is watching everyone at some point, the things that do get posted onto social networks becomes sterile. As of late the only things that are of any notes are of people getting engaged, married, having kids, baby photos, food and the like. Posts of what people honestly feel and think have for the most part disappeared from the posts of social networks. The same goes for when family, friends of family and even some colleagues starts to appear on to one social network-- the choking scent of bleach and lysol starts to creep in. The problem is that you just can't everything with everyone.

Infinite loops and unfinished thoughts

There are thoughts that you can't share with everyone because it will end up rubbing someone the wrong way. The fear of writing something down, kills the hashing out process of thinking through an idea and all that remains is that unhatched seed of an idea that doesn't go away, but cannot be explored further without the medium of writing it down. One of the greatest cleansers of the mind is to keep a journal of thoughts to off load things out of the mind. But this makes the assumption that you are able to complete your throughs to a satisfying degree on your own. What if you need the opinion of a few others is needed to close the thought? Somethings without closure can sometime be left spinning in the mind for a long time, like that last word to a crossword puzzle, what you should do in some business situation or what not.

That in essence is the problem that current social networks today have changed the way that we interact with people, we've grown too accustomed to dropping things into an ocean of ideas and expecting the right ripples to come back to us. It just doesn't work like that anymore-- there is too much that you can't say and you simply just can't be yourself (not to mention what the NSA might be watching of you). Which is to say that from what I see of social networks now as a facilitator of self repression or violence of the mind which is unhealthy. For those that do not take heed properly and post whatever they choose can lead to real world consequences.

Sharing is slowly getting smarter with lists and circles. But I think the next killer app is something that lets you control who gets to see what.

Due dates, motivation and a morbid curiosity

Nothing like a due date to motivate a student to get something done. I remember seeing an interesting  watch once that counted down the number of days that you had to live. I don't remember exactly the name of the product but the idea had stuck with me since.

I idly decided to checkout my life expectancy, because why should just the life insurance companies be the only ones to know when would you pass? After popping in my numbers the calculator came out says that I'd be around to 2060. From now till 2060 is another 46 years and the years at the end wouldn't be my best. There is a theoretical maximum fulfilment limit for each day that you live and my understanding is that maxima gradually wanes as time goes forward after hitting your personal plateau. From this point forward, everyday that you will have will be in effect the "best day that you will have," physically speaking of course.

Time is too easily taken for granted, like the adage "the sun will rise another day," we assume the near infinity of the universe where our time spans are much different. Why is it easy to take time for granted?

I read a financial article today "Why Elon Musk and Tesla Motors Inc. Stock Are Having a Great Week", it's not even worth linking to this article, but the idea that the stock price of a company trying to revolutionise transportation is some how relevant to the goals it is trying to achieve and even at the time span of a week? I doubt that the writers of articles like these understand the amount of work that can be achieved in a week to truly understand what it takes to execute no a plan as big as this.

I, myself had been privy to a project that I worked on for 4 years to make something new in the display industry. It hadn't become a commercial product by the time I decided to move on, but there are too few "great" things that can be accomplished in such a short period of time. People don't understand the about of preparation that goes on behind the scene before getting to any sort of visible stage. It's all been condensed in the success story like how the words "4 years"  can be said in under a second that represents a much different time span.

But this also leads people into a trap, the need to be thinking about doing something or forcing once self to do something to achieve some long term goal. I myself am not immune to this trap as I myself have caught myself to be thinking what could I be doing better, being bewildered at the time span at getting good at it and some how launching into some personal tirade to get myself to be more motivated to do things.

Motivation is unhealthy, like sugar is unhealthy-- it is sweet and it feels good but there is a crash when one is deprived of it. I will agree it is a great tool to encourage people to get things done and I have often used it as a tool when tutoring-- my students do great when I am providing them with incentives to do better, but it often stops when I am no longer teaching them. The most successful students that I have taught are the ones that are inherently curious and will dive deep into a subject as a matter of curiosity or habit and I would argue that true curiosity and habit are independent of one's motivational mood.

There is a wonderful book that I recall reading by Dan Airly called "Predictably Irrational" and for $8 is it a wonderful read with great insights on human success factors and how we find ourselves making the decisions that we make. I would sum that the decisions that we make are the result of either having no choice or when we derive pleasure out of it. Understanding these 2 factors will give immense understanding how many decisions are made.

Excel and databases should go hand in hand

Data is database driven and I am really surprised at the lack of good tools to visualise and update data in databases. Why is it that for every application that we need specialised applications used to connect to some database in some model? It doesn't make sense to me.

Even now after working with databases for about the past year, the current way that data management in databases is terrible, where we are restricted to using queries, inspecting the data and then writing update commands to update the data. This entire step needs to be done away with and there should be something in excel that could be used to go straight into the database and modify the data instead of using this currently terrible method. The market is huge for corporate users and I am willing to bet that given right pitch, it would be easy to get corporate users to use the product.

How things in Vancouver have chanced

I touched down in the morning and did a quick spin through the city. My, how things have changed. My first impression of the place is that there are condos everywhere and the property prices are going through the roof. $800k for a property with a decrepit house? Where do people get the money for all of this?

Obviously the money is not being made locally as the salaries are not high enough to support it. More  or less, the GVRD area is turing into an exclusive club where membership is paid through property. Rich people from other areas are coming in with wads of money are buying up property like crazy. Is this sustainable? I don't think so, but obviously time will tell.

As for me, there is no rush to buy property out here just yet, not sure what is in store for the economy of BC. I don't know what exactly we are producing with great efficiency here that warrants this, but it is most likely the intangible comfort of a laid back west coast kind of life.

I am curious to see at how the rest of real estate along the entire west coast of North America is faring. Is it only Vancouver? or the entire region that is being impacted.

2.5 Months into Crossfit

One thing that I've been doing for the last 2 years is trying to work out. Now working out is an interestingly challenging thing. It's already tough enough to get the motivation to do on your own and the second punch to the puzzle is trying to figure out if you are doing the right things to get the results that you want.

After floundering for the last 2 years among a variety of different exercises, I've decided to start cross fit. Though the program is quite pricey, I am quite happy with what I have learned so far from the program and from the people that I have managed to meet through it. I've started learning a variety of barbell exercises which I have learned to do with proper form which I would have never been able to learn without the assistance of a decent trainer. The other aspect of this training is that it is intense and will push you to hit your limits frequently, which is quite different from what most people would do on their own.

All in all it has been a good experience. I also have a membership to a 24 hour gym that I use in my off hours when I am not going to cross fit to exercise on my own at my own pace. The results so far have been pretty good and hopefully things will pick up even more the more I go at it.

A correlation of effort vs likes on facebook

Not that I care much about likes on facebook, but I've noticed a strong correlation to personal accomplishments vs simply posting interesting content onto facebook. Good narratives also tends to garner more attention to posts and it would be interesting to see it's impact onto marketing.

Been ultra busy with work among other things lately and hadn't had time to do any posting or even think about posting. And the feeling of having too many things to do simply just kills the brain cycles.

I thought that working for a French company that I'd have more time off, but apparently I am working just as hard as I did at my last place of employment. Looking forward to the winter holidays indeed!

Arbitrage Opportunity

One stock I've been following had just announced a secondary public offering of stock recently. They'd been trading at $65 in the morning and the offering would be at $62 on Friday. Within an hour the price had dropped to $63 by the time I noticed.

I am a fan of the company and invested in this company at a good price, unfortunately the price won't be going up for the next few days so I've dumped my position and taken a short to take advantage of this arbitrage opportunity. Come Friday, the price of this stock should be at $62 at which my limit buy will kick in to turn my position around.

Within 15 minutes of taking the short position, the price has already dropped below the $63 I shorted it at. I've already setup a stop limit at $63 and a buy at $62 to make a tidy profit, it'll be interesting to see how things go.

Building an Application is a Hard Problem

I've been interested in application design recently. I used to always crunch data using code and then spit it out in some excel friendly format, but I've come to the appreciation of the amount of data organization that is possible by using an application.

But the question is how does one organize data and what is the best way to display it? This is also not a trivial problem either as it takes a considerable amount of time to make the data interface interactive, meaning when you click on something somewhere, you will need to fill fields with whatever you selected. Then throwing left vs right click, multiple selections and menu based selections and things can get very busy very fast.

I've started to understand the use of using a database and using queries to get information out, then on top of that once can use data models to make data manipulation more native to the language that one programs in.

How to make a good application design is a tricky question, since I cannot fully imagine how I would want to manipulate / interact with the data just yet because the user's relationship with the data is defined by the interface.

I've been interested in building stock pricing models recently and have been building a database of stock instruments and data. Sure it would be ok to spend a considerable amount of time to create an interface to do something, but I am quite not sure if what I would be doing is the right thing just yet and programming with that kind of fear is simply not productive.

For now, I'll be more than happy to stick with excel to figure out how I really want to interact with my data first.

How not to get Pigeon Holed

An interesting problem facing many people with specialized knowledge is pigeonholing. The problem is pervasive especially in engineering. Why is that? and how does one avoid it?

I get contacted from recruiters from once in a while and that prompts me to look into what different jobs are out there (and for fun, what kind of skills are in demand for high paying jobs). From the engineering perspective, the number of different jobs as an engineer is nearly countless, all of them looking for specialized skills requiring 'X+' number of years of experience.

These job descriptions are misleading, which is the problem-- they lead the reader to believe that if you worked in a field for X number of years, they'll eventually have these kinds of skills. If you're lucky and so happened to work in a manner that led you to have exactly those skills after X years, then you'd have to be really lucky, but for the rest of us we likely won't have that kind of experience.


Keeping yourself relevant in the job market as an employee or as the kind of person that would start a business is a tricky game, and the most important thing is to not believe everything that you read about a job posting. You don't have to be a perfect match, or even an 80% match. You just have to be ahead of other applicants and the better choice than what they could have transferred into that position internally.

I have seen what an internal transfer in a large company looks like; it could be a person from a very different field that they'll be training from 30% to get them started up. Not all engineering jobs are so specialized that they are impossible to train yourself to do. I've seen this in both engineering and financial companies, all that is the most important for you to be is to look like the kind of person that can execute in the position.

Getting through the through the resume filtering process and acing the interview is less about talking about what you have done in the past, but more about the challenges you expect to face in the new position. The more you're able to imagine the challenges that you'd expect to face and the solutions that you can come up with, you've pretty much hacked the pigeonholing problem-- instead of using your skills to do the same thing over again, you're finding new ways of applying them.

Many interesting people with fascinating/successful careers never took the b-line that would eventually lead them to what they are doing as they've changed tack multiple times through out their lives (do a search you will find plenty enough). The challenge is to always be looking forward, look to create value somewhere new and ignore the 'X' number of years in the job description.

Tesla: Incredibly over valued

I've been following Tesla for the last few months. Reading about the company and Elon Musk has been great reading. I believe that the technology is there and the company is a technology darling.

The only problem is that the shares are grossly over valued. I've put the numbers through several different models and the valuation of the company just doesn't add up, unless everyone else that is investing in the company is expecting some kind of hyper growth which I have yet to ever see.

In Tesla's Q1 report, they report 4,900 in Model S sales and expect 21,000 cars to be sold by the end of 2013. Quarter by quarter, this is a 5% growth rate and an annual growth rate of 25%. Being generous and allowing for 50% growth and calculating against multiples of EBITDA it will take 5~6 years for the operating profits to reach anything near what the stock prices are right now. Based on PE multiple calculations, maybe after 4~5 years for the multiple to EPS will be in sync with it's current stock price of ~$125

TSLA is a great company but it's is grossly over priced and it's valuation is overly optimistic. I have no idea how long prices will continue to rise and holding a short position against the company seems risky because it is tough to tell how long the irrationality of price will continue to go.

When will the price come back down to something reasonable? I have no clue, but the next big event for Tesla is next month during the 2nd week of August when they report on their Q2 results. 

Predicting Future Stock Performance using Historical Data

For the lack of a better word, signal bias; the one thing that everyone is looking for which appears to be a recurring truth, or is it? I decided to put it to the test today with a stock picking game that I decided to make. I've gone into Yahoo finance and picked up historical stock prices for over 5000 companies and decided to work on the premise that if the price of a company is growing now, what is the probability of a company growing in the next time frame in the future?

My motivation for this experiment was to determine how would it be possible to select stocks that given growth in a certain time frame would continue to grow in the future. It is a naive question to ask, but every stock that has gone through a meteoric rise in share price over many years would appear to show growth over an initial period of time and then continue to grow. Those examples that would illustrate this would be companies like Apple, Google and Amazon. What company would be the next to follow in their pattern and how would one be able to recognize it?

Initial testing has been dismal and yet humbling as I have run the most simple test of filtering for stocks that have increased by 25%, looked at the chart and told the computer either a thumbs up or down signal and then calculated my average performance using the next 6 months of historical data. The results say that I'm in the market average based on that strategy. It just goes to say that I am not (yet?) a very good technical trader or the concept of technical trading is not very useful.

I figure that if one is going to be putting money into investments into the long term, that they should really dive into how things work and optimize to see if this is really the right place to be putting my capital or be doing other things. I may release a game based on this principle later on, but for now, this experiment was very educational.

Time to start reading what the quant people are doing and what does the academic field look like in this area.

Pay goes nowhere after 40

I have a personal salary goal for myself, in that I want to break 6 figures in my early 30's. And I've been doing some research to determine what my numbers are against other people in my age group and profession. While doing that research I've also found a rather depressing article, laying out that salary caps out in your 40's. More so now than ever, I find new ways of pushing my boundaries and climbing up faster and getting in a position to where that salary cap does not apply to me in my 40's.

CME Margins go up thus gold prices down

I've been looking at my portfolio account recently. Been doing a little bit of rebalancing because I've just had no time at all to do some real investing. Oddly enough, the date I did my rebalancing was on April 16th, right after the big drop in gold prices and parked some cash in gold because of the terrible tail spin that the yen was going through. I suggest that you don't do what I did but I noticed a mail that came in a while back on April 15th; margin requirements for commodities would be going up by about 18.5% effective April 16th.

And now there is this huge chatter about gold being cheap and all the ordinary folks are jumping into buying gold. Gold prices are up about 7% since the bottom. I am going to set a target to get a little more out of this position, get out and put cash back into equities.

Digitizing documents

One thing I've grown to have a liking for are document scanners. When I was a university student, the only kinds of documents that I ever needed to worry about keeping were my study notes.

Growing up had required me to keep track of letters of employment, rent contracts, insurance policies and more. One thing that I've noticed is that every 2.5 years, I tend to move to somewhere new to live and with that, my heaviest objects to move around are books and paper documents.

I still have my university notebooks and binders of research papers. I keep them around as a link to my past and inside them are all sorts of ideas that I've scrawled upon my notes while in class. Even though I nearly never look at my notes, I take comfort that they are with me, though I do feel that they do take up a lot of space. I've been lugging around the same book case that I've bought since living in Sendai for the last 7~8 years and the book case has become full for quite some time. I've not started stacking more documents on the very top of the book case and sometimes on flat on top of my books and binders.

Rather than solving a systemic problem by buying a second book case, I've decided to go a different route and bought a scanner with an auto-document feeder. I'll finally be able to scan volumes of documents and have multiple digital backups of these documents.

One thing that has surprised me though is that even with being able to scan so many documents is that I have yet to find a decent reader that is able to allow me to go through digital documents with equivalent or greater ease than my paper documents (going through different pages is still sometimes slow).

I think there ought to be something out there for this.

Weak links in the chain of command

It is quite famous for where I work, that our IT systems are pretty bad. We have an insane number of applications supporting a large variety of different business processes. I've never seen so many in my life. In Paris, they have a single team supporting a single application. In Tokyo, we have no such luxury and we need to support the entire business chain while Paris sleeps.

For a guy that worked in R&D in Sony, one of the miraculous things that I never had to deal with were business applications. Perhaps the only things I ever used were in house sites for procurement, holiday booking systems and career reviews. That was about it.

For where I work now, there is a system for referential data, booking, position keeping, making deals, risk management and more. If anyone of them breaks, our traders could be in for a bad time.

But from software chains there are also chains of command. The global head of IT came out from our Paris HQ and had a Tokyo onsite visit on Monday. I am part of the non-infrastructure IT team in Tokyo and we are not particularly big team-- a team of 5 people supporting over 100 people in their daily operations.

For once in a long time, this is actually the first time I met or spoke with a global boss that I was actually impressed with. Most other bosses are true management types (ie the pointy haired boss), but with this person, you could tell that there was things that were different about. He could look in your way and already understand the kinds of struggles that you'd have to deal with in great detail and we'd also listen to him and find out that even with great power, that he isn't super human and the struggles for change he is working for (which are worthy goals), are real challenges. I don't envy him but he certainly does have the right plan in mind.

I would have thought that an organization with a good leader would have great positive impacts, but as I understand now the more I learn about middle management that these people are the weakest links in this company-- because they are the biggest barriers between good people at the top and the people below that really get things done. That and a lot of things that get done at the lower levels can and do get filtered on the way up, because it is in the best interest in middle management to say that things are ok when reporting to the people higher up. It's all pretty standard stuff when you come to think about it.

How is that to change? Well, that is a good question. But the one thing that I really learned from this experience is that getting ahead in organizations like these is only part about getting your job done and knowing how to pick up the phone and convincing other people to help you.

Learning the power of soft skills is incredibly important and probably one of the strongest takeaways from the job that I work in now.