Categories
Taiwan

Create @ Public

I can hardly believe that it is only about 3 weeks ago, that I first heard about the World Creativity and Innovation Week (WCIW). My friend, Dao Wen (creator and maintainer of the Playtivity 玩 . 創意 blog, where I’m an occasional contributor as well) was telling me about it. Every year, April 15-21, celebrate creativity, timed to coincide with Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci‘s birthday. She was telling me that even if there’s a short time left (less than 2 weeks at that time) and that she cannot be in Taiwan this time, would like to see if I can help her to set up some activities for that week. Anything’s good, she said. Well, I like creative things so I’m a sucker for this kind of challenges. Quicker than you can say “Leonardo” I was hooked, even if I had no idea what to do, who to do it with, or generally anything.

Of course, these days every project starts with setting up a Facebook page, maybe even a G+ Page, and only then start thinking what to do. Talking to a few people, brainstorming, and generally digging up ideas that I wanted to do for a long time, came up with two ideas: one for creativity and one for innovation.

The idea

Reading about what other people did around the world, one pattern came up: everyone is creative, just not everyone knows it. Some people have to be pushed a little, or more optimistically, have to be given an opportunity when they can try something without the risk of getting hurt trying. I’m not saying “without risk of failure”, because it’s always there, but just because something doesn’t work out, it is usually not bad – and that can be part of the message.

Thinking more about the most creative people I know, I remembered Hunter, from whom I always learn new things how to just let it go and make new stuff. Anything goes. He and another friend of mine, Reuben are running Swings Tampa Bay, where they make and hang up swings everywhere around town and engage the people. So I thought, why couldn’t we combine these: go to public and make stuff! Here you go, Create@Public.

Our logo hanging on the tree
Create @ Public logo

The event

Basically one fine Sunday Morning of 2012 April 15, headed out to a park downtown, with a big bag of stationery: paper, crayons, pens, pencils, glue, paperclip, patterned sheets, origami instructions, chalks, other stuff I don’t remember. It was a big bag. Found a nice place, sat down and started to do everything come to our mind.

Cobble stone Scrabble, making a model of the National Taiwan Museum just next to us, drawings, idea wall, collaborative story writing, chatting with passers by, and all kinds of other stuff…. It was such a good feeling for about 5 hours I could totally turn off and try new stuff for the sake of it. I could actually head out there and do this more often than once a year, and maybe will do that…

Group of people in the park, making stuff
People at the event, in the middle of it

Here’s our photo album where you can see all the things that happened.

Also, for the first time, here’s our collaborative story: everyone writes one sentence, then passes it on to another person, and so on. All original with misspelling and that.

The bear was running in the forest. It’s running from a hunter chasing after it. The hunter is called TinYu who likes to eat bear. TinYu is a bad girl who likes to speak bad words, so the only thing she can do is hunting. Suddenly she stopped because she saw a lovely rabbit on the grass, which happens to be another of her favorite food. Same time, Minho (the boy) also is looking for chance to hunt that rabbit. As they both reaching the rabbit, they noticed each other and look into eyes. The boy is not a very handsome one, but exactly TinYu’s type…. Big kiss. When they open their eyes, they both were actually kissing the cheek of the bear, who is smiling now. 1 year pass, they decide to get marry in the forest. The witness is the bear. and Tin-Yu given birth to the child, the child looks like a bear – a cute Teddy bear. The most scary part is about to come…. she relize that it was dream after wake up. And the most horrible part is that: how come “she” dreams about “herself” being a girl named TingYu…? Actually, TingYu is a fictitious girl who is imagined by a sad, lonely and desolate boy named “Ray” who is currently dating a boy called Cliff… So this “bear dream” is it kinda of a self-consciousness that, Ray he wants to be a girl in the real life, so his underground relationship with Cliff can be accepted by the public, and they can get married, have a lovely baby afterwards, happily life afterwards. THE END#

Probably you can guess the names of a few of the people there that day… :)

Chatting with others also had interesting consequence. There was this guy, who came by and started to tell us how the Taiwanese language and English are quite similar, so many expressions have the same pronunciation. Actually, he was twisting things around quite a bit, but apparently it is very funny if you understand Taiwanese. Which I barely do, but it was good enough. One of the guys there took a video of it, and put it up on Youtube:

Apparently it got quite popular on the student message boards, and in a day or two it was up to 20.000 views, and several friends were messaging me, whether it is me in it. Not bad, feature in a viral video – achievement unlocked! I also know the Taiwanese TV channels – they quite often just go on the message boards, pick out the latest popular videos, and present those as news. Didn’t have to wait for long:

Lessons learned

All in all, it was a fun event, and I’m really glad to have done it. Some things I’ve learned from this:

  • Activities which don’t need much preparation can still be very rewarding
  • Many people just freeze when presented with the opportunity of “make something, anything”, they don’t know how to start
  • On the other hand, once you do something yourself, those who are interested and just been watching, will take part and contribute cool things
  • It’s hard to engage the people in public
  • It’s easy to try to engage the people in public
  • Have to find some better way to spread the word than Facebook (this comes up every time, and I don’t have a solution), it is just too limited and too much noise/too little signal
  • I have to check my spelling, because it seems very bad
  • Just a mere couple of good people can turn an event from so-so to great

What’s next

Let’s see if we can do it another time, maybe another place. Also, there was the other event for the week, Hack+Taiwan, just being written up as well.

Categories
Startups Taiwan

No dream too big, or Startup Weekend Taipei 2

Despite that I haven’t started myself any project yet, I’m a big fan of startup events. Startupbus, Entrepreneurship Challenge, Startup Weekend Taipei, they were all really amazing. Because of this, normally I wouldn’t have thought twice about signing up for Startup Weekend 2. Too bad, that it wasn’t normal situation, last weekend it was in the same time as Ignite Taipei #4, which I was co-organizing (and speaking in Chinese, oh the horror!), and wasn’t sure if I can do the two things in the same time. My friend and team member from last time, Pandey, was pushing me quite a bit, and couldn’t show fear or uncertainty – signed up anyway. Thought I will figure out what to do once we get there. As with many things in life, every issue worked out, probably even better than I could have planned, and I had a great (no matter how busy) weekend.

Beginning

It started on Friday, we all been checked in to Taipei 101, through tight security, changing elevators and lots of access cards to the 77th floor to Google Taiwan. It’s a nice place, and a view to kill for, though I wonder if I could work there for a long time.

As at other such events, it started with snacks, exchanging of business cards, trying to gauge each other, who would be a good team mate, what to expect. There were some presentations, introduction, t-shirts and badges of course.

StartupWeekend Taipei 2 badge
Badge for StartupWeekend

After about 2 hours the time came for pitching. From the 60 participants I think at least 20, maybe even more were sharing their ideas. The two language (English and Chinese) made it quite rough to sometimes understand what’s going on, though the 30/90 second time limit for single/dual language pitches is pretty tight as well.

I usually decide by following my intuition, and for the first 10 or so, I haven’t heard anything that ticked my interest really. Then there was one guy who was pitching a subscription based wine discovery service (something like sending people each month some new selection, with a guide, and help them understand those better while discovering new tastes). I thought for a moment of Cerealize (that took home 1st place at this year’s StartupBus), Candy Japan (that just looks such a simple and brilliant idea, and seems to work extremely well), ShoeDazzle (subscription clothes)…… (Semi)-custom food and such service sounds just such a brilliant idea, and wine is very well suited for that. Also, recently I had more exposure to wine and wine tasting, just wanted to use this myself and would know plenty of other people who would too.

I got to say, I pretty much stopped listening to all the other pitches, already been planning this, because I felt this would so easily win the competition – and turning profit by Sunday. Went and talked to the guy, and at the idea voting stage (where people could select the most interesting pitches, so the 11 most voted one will be allowed to build a team) I was canvasing for that anyway. Should have had some feeling, when the idea guy was saying that “good that you are interested, but it’s not sure you can be on the team” – sure, why not, no problem.

In the end the idea was selected, team started to build and we had 7 people altogether. I was really psyched. Since due to Taipei 101 regulations we had to get out of the building in 1 hour, got to work right away. Got the team members emails together, set up organization doc, the others were working on the name (Advintage), once they had one they liked the Facebook page was already set up, sent email to someone I know to know lots of wine-tasting people so we could get good info about what are the good ones to choose and maybe help to write the promotion material. Seen a couple of mentors idling around, and went to talk to them a little before they they kicked us out – running the idea with them, get some feedback, get pretty much a first customer, very interesting info and some thoughts I haven’t considered before.

5 minutes before we had to get out the building, I got back to the team and started to update the idea guy:

“Hey, talked to the mentors and just a quick summary, they said (this and that)”.

“Ah, wait. Wait. Greg, we don’t have much synergy here.”

“What are you talking about?”

“While everyone was working on the things, you didn’t help just went and talked to other people before asking us that we should do that.”

“Come on, we have very short time, we had to talk to them to get feedback. You don’t need me to choose a name ….”

“I’m sorry. We don’t have much synergy here. I don’t want you on the team.”

“Okay, I understand.”

So this is the story of me being fired for the first time. It’s interesting feeling, quite illuminating as well, I haven’t felt a lot of feelings like that before. So 5 minutes after I talked to the mentors, run into them again, and when they told me a couple of things, my only answer could be – sorry, I’m not on that team anymore. “What? They fired you?” “What, they fired him, why?” “Because he did something without asking permission.” “You are probably better off.”

Thus instead of going home to work on the project more, I carried on with the preparation for Ignite the next day. Oh, I needed that.

Drimmit

In the evening I was thinking what other team to join – since I basically didn’t hear anyone else’s pitch, but there was Pandey and his group where I knew a couple of them, maybe will join that team if they want me. For a short while I was thinking of getting the teams try to woo me, but that was just silly. I realized that I was doing the “I’m here to win not to make friends” routine that I previously laughed a lot at, so instead just followed my heart and went with the team where I wanted to know the people more.

And how well that was – I learned a lot of interesting things with them that I wouldn’t have otherwise. So here it is, Drimmit:

The Drimmit team at StartupWeekend Taipei 2
Meet the Drimmit team

It’s more or less a site to collaboratively help you achieve your dreams, give advice to each other, and find and manage milestones along the way to give you a clearer path and higher probablity of succes.

It was weird not to be the tech lead, but good to let some things go. Instead of that I was trying to take care of the front-end, while half the team was working on the model and product pitch for the finals.

So, some lessons learned along the way:

  • We spent a lot of time trying to figure out the model, everything had some problem, nothing was completely logical. Pretty much more than a day went buy, where we had ideas how things would look, what’s the flow, but then had to scrap that. One cannot really develop like that.
  • I overestimated my front-end skills, though it’s usually quite tough to turn a Photoshop mock-up into a working site. Also had to get used to the terminology that when someone asked: “Do we have this page” and the team replied “It’s done!” it meant there’s a picture of it, not at all that it works.
  • For a while I was annoyed by this, but it also gave the spark: for the pitch we don’t have to code down everything, just make a show-and-click: things look like they work, but the functionality doesn’t have to be created. That means we could just scrap (or rather: abandon) the work so far (that’s about Sunday noon, for 5pm start of the finals) and concentrate on looking good. This gave us a demo better than others
  • Learned about coding some more, though I haven’t had to do much this time. One lesson is to practice a lot beforehand. Another is to prepare some tools to make development easier. And of course: do whatever it takes.
  • Because I didn’t do much and I was too cocky in the beginning, I hereby revoke my “hacker” badge until the next time I build something. No problem, I have just the project on my mind I want to do next.
  • One of the strength I seem to have is asking questions, and that way at least I could help. It can be pretty annoying, to also very useful, I could see the gaps in thinking, asking the details, figuring out where we are not good yet. Does that mean that I would be a better mentor or consultant than creator?
  • It’s fun to work with people I know and like, the team is very very important. Also important not to take anything personally, too much stress of the 54 hours drives people to the edge.
  • If I were to start a team outside of such events, I would probably do it with 2-3 people instead of 6-7, it’s easier to get on the same page. On the other hand, much fewer ideas as well, so it might not be a good call.
  • Would have to think how to replicate the pressure of a Startup Weekend outside of it. Amazing how much one can get done when he/she has to.

The guys were practicing a lot our pitch and here’s the result:

Also, there’s a rehearsal video, also good to see the progress (and the tension) people had before we went in.

The results of the finals

Advintage won – which is pretty much making me happy, because I predicted that. It helps that they had about 50x the revenue over the weekend (30 subscriptions at 2000NT) than any other team. They have won on the product, clearly. On the other hand, it also made me happy that I realized I still wouldn’t like to work for the guy. “Work for”, that was my impression, he wanted employees, instead of co-founders out of this weekend. Fair enough.

On the other hand, Drimmit came 2nd. We clearly won on presentation, the energy, the preparation, the polish (as much as you can get in a day) worked. We had the team to pull it off. I was very proud of them, and glad to help no matter how much. Also, the presentation worked since many other people keep asking whether we’ll continue working on it, because they’d like to use such a service.

It was a great time and let’s see where does it take us later. I was wrong enough times and right enough time this weekend to learn plenty.

Future

Among the most inspiring picture, though, came from another team, posting (literally) their first revenue, regardless of the value:

Another team posting 100TWD revenue at StartupWeekend Taipei
Another team posting their revenue (100TWD = 3.4USD = 2.1GBP)

Also, I’m thinking that next time I would try to pitch as well, been developing enough, now it’s time to see if I could sell my ideas to others, whether I can get them excited about something. You know, it’s not the ideator but the first follower that counts.

The rest of the pictures are in this album, click to see, CC-BY to reuse if liked.

 

Categories
Life Programming

StartupBus rolling again

If there was a place I’d like to be now…. then it would probably be actually 11 different places. It’s that part of the year, that crazy and incredible people get on a some buses, travel across the US to the SXSW festival, while building companies. Altogether dozens of them. While riding freakin’ buses…. I know, I can still hardly get over my own experience last year, though I don’t want to get over it, I want to cultivate, nurture and expand that feeling. Pretty much the whole last year was about that expansion, and it just continues to motivate me.

Fortunately I still keep in touch with some of the people from there, and when they are on the way right now as I write this, I cannot help but show my affiliations.

Wearing my StartupBus shirt for work today
Silicon Valley Bus 2011 represent

I’m really glad that I could contribute something as well. One of the core features of their site is the ability to see where everyone is right now. Cheer all the way as they fight through several states towards their destination, how they converge onto Austin, Texas in the end. For this to work, there has to be some way to track those buses. And as it is the tradition – and inevitable if you have a pile of the best hackers together – everything is pretty much custom built. The site, the virtual stock market game, the map – and the tracking app as well. This last thing is made by me, after a few evenings back last year while hanging out in San Francisco before getting on bus. I can’t believe that I even had time for sight-seeing while doing this…. Anyway, it worked like a charm on 6 buses, and I was quite satisfied. Pretty surprised, but also satisfied. It was great, especially because if something, then I didn’t want to let down this guy – one the craziest and most kick-ass person I had a chance to know.

Then again in the winter there was StartupBus Europe, which worked out fine, beautiful trace on the map from the Netherlands, through Scandinavia, then back to the continent all the way to Paris.

For this year’s event, I wanted to change it a bit around, make it more independent from me – and a bit less hackish. I gave up on improving the looks, but the functionality should be better.

Too bad that this time I wasn’t there in SF, working together with the team, inspiring and motivating each other. This made everything much slower for me, and much more “normal”, in the bad sense of the word. In the end I had a new version that worked, and was kinda okay, but wasn’t as well tested as I hoped to.

BusDroid interface
I wish there was a Taipei bus – not sure how to cross the Pacific, though

Of course bits are rotting when they are not developed, and one year in Android world is more than I’ve expected. Too bad that many of the problems came to light when the buses were about to head off. Turns out that aiming for the oldest version of Android to cover all different versions is not necessarily the right thing to do. I don’t need anything fancy, but the APIs changed a bit, some things got depreciated, and looks like some phones can’t run my very simple app. After all this craziness dies down, will have to investigate and figure out what went wrong.

In the meantime, fortunately 10 out of 11 traces are on the map, there’s only Las Vegas missing last time I’ve checked, and not sure what happened to them. I don’t like unsolved mysteries, especially when it’s my job to get them solved.

Screenshot of live map with buses
Startup Bus buses 2012 on their way

Let’s see if I can get a seat next year again. And also see if that year in the meantime is long enough to figure out some better solution. Will likely need to do things very differently as I was, will likely have to rewrite the whole app onto new foundations, and make it work on iPhones or iPads (do those actually have GPS in them? I actually don’t have any iProducts…), and more reliably work in general. Feels a little sucky, that I’ve let some people down that things didn’t work better. That’s what startups’ life is a little bit as well.

Now let’s pivot, and back to doing awesome.

Categories
Physics Thinking

The Two Things about Physics

Yesterday I’ve read an article that  about every topic, one has to know only Two Things.

For every subject, there are really only two things you really need to know. Everything else is the application of those two things, or just not important.

Of course it is a fascinating idea, and I started to think about my profession, physics. If I simplify my experience and knowledge down to this minimal level, what would be the two things I get to? I do think it is not a straightforward stuff, and one can only get to the bottom of this, can find the hidden truth below, if one spends a lot of time with the subject, gets to know it inside and out. I feel that I’m still just scratching the surface of the wast knowledge of the universe (even after being a physicist for about 12 years now). Still this doesn’t stop me from trying.

Drawing in my Wreck This Journal
At Geek Dinner Taipei someone contributed this drawing of the Einstein Field Equations to my Wreck This Journal. Of course, this is ignoring a possible non-zero cosmological constant.

I’m an experimental physicist, worked in Solid State Physics first, now mostly in Atomic & Laser Physics – all kind of fun stuff. I had very good professors, great inspiration and I have learnt a lot from them. If I think back all the things I’ve learned there are still things that come to me as my first thoughts, and usually those are the right guesses, for whatever intuition I have.

My Two Things about Physics:

  1. Pure math can take you very far along the way, though in the end still need experiment to see whether the results describe something real.
  2. Everything is an approximation, but that’s fine. Just pick your approximations carefully.

Maybe it is worth expanding a little bit on that these:

Pure math can be used to describe things extremely well. It’s maybe even too good at that, which got other, much cleverer people to think as well, like a fellow Hungarian physicist, Wigner Jenő (or Eugen Wigner), writing about The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences. I frequently got myself really excited when after doing some complicated calculation to predict the behaviour of a physical system, the experiment matches up to all of its nuances. Let it be atomic spectroscopy, polarization of light reflected from metallic mirrors, magnetic field of a Zeeman-slower, I had a lot of fun figuring out the physical theories of different phenomena then matching it up with what happens in the lab. Of course, there were loads of times when they didn’t match, but it turns out my math was off. Really, if I want to understand the world, math is one of the most useful and versatile tool to have.

Having that tool is of course not enough. When people come up with new and interesting math trick, it often turns out (to many people’s amusement) that those tricks have some physical meaning, they often also give some insight into the world around us. It’s often, but not always. Mathematics can really easy take one to very strange places and give a result, which is completely aphysical. To complicate things even further, those aphysical results sometimes turn out to be actually correct and predicting real but insofar unobserved things. An example of this is the Dirac equation which gives two solution, one for electron, and one particle with negative mass that first people dismissed, but later it was understood as the representation of positron. How to distinguish between really wrong solution and “wrong as current understanding”, that’s a whole different level of problems.

The second point was really a revelation for me. Whatever equations we have, they all just describe things to a certain level. If we can look closer, we often find differences from the theory, that are harder and harder to explain as we get closer. On the other hand, using intuition and physical understanding, people often choose to ignore certain parts of the situation, or certain features of the problem since it cannot affect the results to a level that would be observed in the given experiment. This makes everything solvable, and once solved, one can advance on top of the new understanding even deeper into the problem. Finding the good approximations is almost as valuable as finding the right theory, that’s why often these approximations are named after the people who came up with them, or given other shorthand names so everyone can quickly recall and use them.

There’s a whole methodology built to help come up with approximations and handle them, called perturbation theory: if the given problem is very similar to a simpler, already solved problem, then treat it as the simple one plus some small effect that changes relatively little on the behaviour of the system. Not everything can be handled like this, but surprisingly many problems fit very well.

Others’ Two Things about Physics

On the original site there were other people’s Two Things as well:

1. Energy is conserved.
2. Photons (and everything else) behave like both waves and particles.
-Tim Lee

1.  Draw a diagram.
2.  Get the dimensions straight.
-Eric Schafer

I personally don’t like these that much. The first one is just stating two theories that can be superseded in the future, and right now they kind of limit instead of enable. The second one is good advice, but can’t say that’s the only thing there about physics. Having said that, I have more adventures with incorrect dimensions and units than I’d prefer to have.

What other Two Things choices one can make, in physics or in other sciences, other topics?

Categories
Programming

Facebook Hacker Cup 2012 Qualifier 1

This is that time of the year once again, when coders gather to take part in some good programming fun, the Facebook Hacker Cup. It’s only the first qualifier round, and while I hoped it will go better than last year, well, it didn’t. Not that I’m really surprised.

My Facebook Hacker Cup 2012 Qualifier score
I needed one right to qualify, but I wish I haven't messed up the easiest problem.

After that 72 hours results are in, as is the explanation and example source code for the solutions. It’s good that the example solutions are in Python, I might even learn a trick or too.

Alphabet Soup

The problem setting is easy enough. Funny thought that no matter how many times I counted the letters in the world “HACKERCUP”, I didn’t notice that there are two Cs. I mean, duh! As usual, the example input set was designed such that it wouldn’t trigger the bug of miscounted Cs. This carelessness is one thing that comes up quite often in my programming, probably should take better care of it.

Billboards

This problem actually worked, which means I’m in Round 2, but I guess it can be improved quite a bit, make it more efficient or come up with some heuristics. Or maybe it doesn’t matter much.

Auction

This problem was on a whole different level. While the first two had apparently more than 5000 and 3000 correct solutions respectively, this had only 28… I was thinking about it for quite a while, drawing diagrams, trying to use my intuition and imagination to see where the trick is since the naive O(N^2) algorithm is definitely unusable on the N~10^18 level. On the other hand, I might have tricked myself. Reading the solution the trick was completely different than I expected – I thought there’s some weakness in the random number generator that can be used to express everything analytically, while it is actually just about keeping good track of things. There’s no fancy algorithm to break this problem, just pure logical thinking. Now that’ll teach me as well…

Looking out

This of course means that I have a lot more to learn, and most likely I’m not cut out to be a Facebook caliber hacker. That’s no problem, but good to know. Whenever I think about it, the picture that comes to me is the hacking competition scene from The Social Network, where they hire their first employee. I’d love to be in the middle of such brainfest, such intense creation, such inspired learning from one another while having an an amazing time. Well, fortunately there are other places where I can have that experience, like the Startup Bus. And maybe, I can also set out to create that environment over here in Taiwan.

But first, let’s get ready for round 2, should make that one better.