Leader = Reader

Interesting & inspiring quote; isn't it? Itz 100% true too.  To me,
"Apple a day keeps Doctors away; Book a day keeps Descend away."

Why Reading?
Leadership requires storytelling; the story can be the vision of the company. As a leader, telling a compelling story and listening with empathy might contributed much to their skills.

1. Confirms or challenges ideals
Reading can reaffirm your values. It can help strengthen your beliefs by giving you additional reasons as to why you believe what you do.

2. Provides new ideas/different perspective
Reading can give us a different perspective on a view as big as the world or as small as how we schedule our time on a daily basis.

3. Gives us a necessary break from reality
We can enjoy the lives of the characters in the books we are reading or feel their sorrow. Simply, this break from reality is what might help us to get through a tough day.

4. Provides stress relief
For stressed executives, reading is the best way to relax, as reading for six minutes can reduce stress by 68%, and some studies suggest reading may even fend off Alzheimer’s, extending the longevity of the mind.

What to Read?
Relevancy is the key factor. Based on your traits and colors, you can choose the relevant list with this socially connected world.

Two decades ago (when I started to work), fetching the content used to be a nightmare. Now, itz all at your fingers. Few methods are:

• Get recommendations from friends and/or mentors
• Online search for your relevancy
• Follow the industry leaders; Buffett shares his favorite picks & Gates shares in his blog
• Not a bad idea to visit your local library / book club.
• In my view, Age / Experience / Title, etc. are not the factors of reading till you live.

How?
Reading more can lead to a host of benefits for business people of all stripes, and broad, deep reading can make you a better leader. So how can you get started?

Few tips are:

• Join a reading group.
• Vary your reading. 
• Apply your reading to your work. 
• Encourage others. 
• Read for fun.

The research, published in the journal Science, showed that reading cultivates a skill known as "theory of mind," which describes as the "ability to 'read' the thoughts and feelings of others."

Who?
Cherry pick of few use cases:

• Warren Buffett spends 80% of his day reading. 
• Bill Gates reads for an hour each night before going to bed.
• Mark Cuban credits part of his success to the fact that he is willing to read more than anyone else.
• Mark Zukerbuerg set a goal to read one book every two weeks

Leaders' DNA is always wanted to grow with their team by learning & growing. Continuous Learning & Sharing is the mantra.

I have found I am more engaged & motivated in life, work, and other ventures (like IIT, Industry Contributions, etc.) when I am in the midst of reading. What about you?

Collection Pipeline

Collection pipelines are a programming pattern where you organize some computation as a sequence of operations which compose by taking a collection as output of one operation and feeding it into the next. (Common operations are filter, map, and reduce.) This pattern is common in functional programming, and also in object-oriented languages which have lambdas.

In many programming environments, there are usually two composite data types:

1. Hashmaps are a key-value data structure, which may be called associative arrays, hashtables, maps, or dictionaries.
2. Lists are simple sequences. They're not quite the same as traditional arrays as they dynamically resize as you add or remove elements (some languages do call them arrays, however). They can be indexed by integer keys.

A list 'n' hash structure is by default schemaless, the lists can contain disparate elements and the hashes any combination of keys. This allows the data structure to be very flexible, but we must remember that we nearly always have an implicit schema when we manipulate a schemaless data structure, in that we expect certain data to be represented with certain keys.

A strength of the list and hash structure is that you can manipulate it with generic operations which know nothing of the actual keys present.

List and hash structures can easily be serialized, commonly into a textual form. JSON is a particularly effective form of serialization for such a data structure, and is my default choice for this. Often XML is used to serialize list 'n' hash structures.

The presence of rich lists and hashes as standard equipment in modern languages has been one of the definite improvements.  Most major languages now provide standard versions of these data structures, together with a rich range of operations, in particular Collection Pipelines.

IITM First Phase Placement

The Indian Institute of Technology Madras is one of the most reputed institutes for technological education and research in India. Known for its strong relations with the industry, the Institute has always been a favorite destination of recruitment for many firms.

The Training and Placement office is the nodal point of contact for companies seeking to establish a fruitful relationship with IIT Madras. As our logo says, "Siddhirbhavati Karmaja" - Success comes through hard work.

The Indian Institute of Technology Madras is one of the foremost institutes of national importance in higher technological education as well as basic and applied research. In 1956, the German Government offered technical assistance for establishing an institute of higher education in engineering in India. The first Indo-German agreement in.....

During 1st week of this year 2016, IIT placement was conducted with its first phase.  Happy to share the score card of placement details on comparison with the last year phase.

IIT Grade

2016 is getting started with the fruits of last year effort.

As the result of last year course on 'Searching and Indexing Large Data Set', I received the (good) grade certificate on this week. Itz entirely different system in his educational career.  Relative Grading, which induces the healthier competition among the intellectual group.

Students joining IIT's have already proven that they are better in certain skills. Now, if they are competing among themselves, it is certain, due to relative grading, that despite being performing decently by relative standards.

As the second item on this week, I cleared MapR big data certification on Hadoop Essentials.

Stay tuned for more updates..