Harpreet Singh

Find the middle way in a hyper opinionated world

> Opinion A: The Muslims are out to kill Hindus. The Hindus will take control and finally get back for the 1,000 years of subjugation. Opinion B: The Hindus are out to kill muslims but Muslims will push back and will build an Islamic sharia in India. The above

Entrepreneurship

Step up and lead. It is expected.

Today, I met an ex-colleague piqued with his current organization. He asked me for input to navigate his environment since I understand its ebbs and flows. My analysis… He is waiting for someone to give him permission to offer his perspectives. He has opinions but he is holding them back.

Entrepreneurship

6 tips to finding mentors

Life as an entrepreneur is exciting because it throws completely new challenges your way. In the last few weeks, a new challenge popped up on my radar that requires stretching way outside my comfort zone. Handling this challenge requires velvet gloves. Though, the interwebs have an article for every situation,

Entrepreneurship

User centered thinking - whats the right speed limit in a garage

What is the right speed for driving a car in a car parking lot? What is the acceptable speed range that we should be driving in a car park? Is it 8, 15, 22 mph? Coming to think of it — Who thinks about the user experience of driving through a

Entrepreneurship

Framework to build loveable products

Recently, I came across a pictorial that showed all the products in the DevOps market and the sheer number was mind boggling. As the head of products at CloudBees, I am often asked about recipes to build standout products in such markets and I will share my thoughts here. I

Meditation

Happiness - easier done than said

Lately, I have been ruminating on happiness and joy — a lot! I live in Silicon Valley and work in San Francisco. I see a number of individuals in a constant state of stress and anxiety despite being paid salaries that will qualify amongst the top 1% earners in the world

Meditation

Meditation - Happiness not mindfulness

It is disheartening to see people struggling with meditation. Meditation is not supposed to be hard but we have made it so. There seem to be three equations prevalent in the meditation domain: Meditation = mindfulness where Mindfulness = no thoughts Meditation = no emotions The second and third equations are messing with

Meditation

Prem Narula - lessons from an extraordinary human

About 3 months back, when I heard that Prem uncle passed away in his sleep, I broke down and cried. I cried like I haven’t in a long time. His passing away has left a huge hole that can never be filled. I was 18 when I had my

Productivity

Get more done with the Pomodoro technique

I have long believed and now I know that is backed by research that multi-tasking doesn’t quite work. When you switch context to check that beep from your phone, it takes your brain about 15–20 minutes to come back into the flow state. A surprising research in the

Travel

The four surprising things about a Santorini sunset

So you made it to Santorini. You flew half-way around the world, changed flights in Athens and were surprised that there was such a huge plane could land in a decidedly small island with a minuscule of an airport. Hired a car and drove into Oia — the village to be

Entrepreneurship

The super hero anti-pattern in teams

You know her; you have seen him in action; and too often you have been one — a superhero who flew down, laid yourself on the broken tracks and let the train pass over your shoulders and saved the day. Have you been one? I know I have. There is an

Entrepreneurship

Run a success product management summit

As product managers, product roadmapping and planning is one of the most rewarding activities that we do in our jobs. Determining the most valuable problems to solve and finding the shortest path to bringing them to the market is the engine that drives business growth. The biggest challenge that I

AI

Deep learning to detect faces in pictures

//embedr.flickr.com/assets/client-code.js I was fascinated when Facebook launched the feature where it put a box around a human head (and a bit creeped out when it started suggesting the name of the human next to the box). I always wondered how they did it and filed

Travel

Things to do in Oia Santorini

(If you rather see the pictures, here [https://www.flickr.com/photos/singh_harpreet/with/42628753392/] they are) Describing Oia in a blog post is very easy — we went to Oia and stayed there for 2 days :-). Because there isn’t anything else you do in Oia — you get

AI

What is softmax in neural networks

A softmax function squashes its inputs to be between 0 and 1 and also normalises them so that the sum is equal to 1. Let’s take a problem where we have to classify between three classes. Softmax is used to classify for greater than 2 classes for less than

Travel

The walk of thee three bells of Fira in Santorini

Caldera, dinner viewThe first day in Fira definitely got into the island mode after a gorgeous sunset and dinner overlooking the Caldera. We decided to head to the Three Bells of Fira which is part of the iconic church that is often used in pictures. Church enroute to FirastefaniThis walk

Travel

The poor donkeys of Santorini

One of the things that Santorini is known for, is, donkeys. You cannot really miss them on t-shirts, refrigerator magnets and stuffed toys that show these cute loveable creatures smiling away and living the island life. A thing to do in Fira is to take a donkey to climb up

AI

Understanding cross entropy in neural networks

Let’s say that there are a bunch of events and a bunch of probabilities, cross entropy predicts how likely are those events likely to happen based on the probabilities. A high cross entropy means that an event is unlikely to happen while a low event indicates that the event

Travel

Visiting charming Fira in Santorini

Fira in Santorini is the “it” town and this is where the tourists head to. Our driver dropped us off near the main square after picking us up at the airport and I was taken aback to see the number of tourists in the main square. It seemed like Goa!

Entrepreneurship

Entrepreneur of the year - Street photographer in Istanbul

Yesterday, I was at Emononu, a ferry station in Istanbul and spotted one of the most entrepreneurial person that I have seen. I was blown away by his entrepreneurial spirit. The Sultanahmet area in Istanbul is teeming with tourists and so if you are a tourist and have spent anywhere

Travel

The Turkish bath - Istanbul Hamam Experience

One of the questions that a traveller has to inevitably make in Istanbul is whether a traveller should do the Turkish Bath/Hamam experience. The answer is a definite yes. Types of Hamam You have a choice between many types of Hamams — traditional (Cemberlitas Hamami [http://www.cemberlitashamami.com/index.

Entrepreneurship

13 principles to build successful and vibrant communities

Lessons learnt from leading one of the most successful open source software projects My colleague Kohsuke Kawaguchi, has built Jenkins, one of the most popular open source projects in the market. He has built a vibrant and thriving community (by conservative estimates, 2M+ people use Jenkins) that continues to grow

Entrepreneurship

The money framework for decision making

2017 was the year I agonised over buying a Tesla Model X. I ran through all the reasons I needed it — beautiful, gorgeous, drives fantastic, best technology and green. I just couldn’t come to a conclusion, because the price was a serious consideration. The problem at hand was that

Entrepreneurship

Four leadership principles to become a good leader

“Look at what you have built — did you ever imagine that this was going to be so big?” A colleague asked me this question at a team event fairly recently. My answer — “always”. I was confident in my response because I had laboured over for years on the degree of

Meditation

Reaching a deep meditation stage quickly

Just as with the circle of life, every meditation session is bookended by a starting up and a closing phase. Just as with birth where a good nine months with a good delivery will set the baby up for a healthy life versus one with struggle, a good startup phase