My MBA experience with Smartly

When I transitioned from Product development to Product Management I sort of was worried about "not knowing what I need to know and not being able to cover that gap". Usually that feeling is always there when you start a new project, learn a new domain in unfamiliar territory and it fades away as I read and dig more into the relevant domain/project. Before this whenever I had thought of going back to school..I always had research in my mind but this time I was wondering if MBA is what I should be looking at. Long story short...my Quest for an MBA lead me to explore many options

• In -person take a break to do MBA 
• In-person executive MBA
• Partially online, partially in-person MBA
• Mostly online MBA
• completely online MBA

Here are the few that stood out in my list ( based on my constraints (read costs and location), interests and availability)

• https://www.coursera.org/university-programs/imba
• http://jindal.utdallas.edu/executive-education/emba-programs/emba/  
• https://smart.ly/

For the convenience of pricing(free until in Beta) , location (online) and my weakness for trying out new stuff ( read technology) I decide to go with Smartly.

Here are the key highlights

• This has to be the first MOOC that I completed till the end (believe me I have signed up for many MOOCs including the first MOOC offered by stanford on machine learning but never went beyond 3/4 weeks)
• I like the bite-size approach they give to lessons
• You can not doze off during the lesson ..since you learn by answering ( it is pretty interactive in that sense) 
• I covered a wide variety of topics I had not come across during my product development experience  
• The assessments at the end of the chapter .. gave me a good estimate of how well I understand the subject
• The Exam (mid-year, end of year) gave me a good reason to brush up on everything at once and gave a really "back to school" feeling
• The discussions, debates on topics related to lessons ..helped understand the topic in real life context .. it was basically like combining current news, current trends to education .. pretty effective
• Smartly is licensed by the Washington DC Office of the State Superintendent of Education Higher Education Licensure Commission. This means that Smartly confers a licensed MBA degree. So if you motivation was learning .. its a good place to get started .. but I want to remind you it's not an accredited degree  (so not sure how it stacks up to other MBA ..but the motivation of MOOCs is learning rather than credit in most of the cases) 
• Though I was never able to participate in study groups .. but they do have that option
• The schedule does give you a little bit of flexibility .. so that if you miss some lessons in a week or 2 because you got busy in office or got sick or are out of town .. so it was nice to be able to catch up and work with that flexibility ..but trust me ,, if you fall too behind it will get hard to catch up .. so try to stay on top of the schedule if you can
• Overall I totally enjoyed learning with Smartly. I thank them for making their material accessible to me for free and giving me this opportunity (since they are in Beta and apparently they do have a selection criteria for the Beta students .. not sure how true that claim is .. will only find out if somebody was rejected for smartly MBA application .. yes I did apply for the smartly MBA and was selected) 

Note:- this review is not solicited by Smartly and I am not getting any favors from them ( I write this after I pass the smartly MBA ;)) .. I just got a couple of queries on linkedin to share my Smartly MBA experience so thought of just generally sharing it with everybody .. in case anybody is on the same pathways .. looking for something similar

Data (eyes) says it all!

I have been bitten by the"what does data say?" bug these days.

I love to find out and understand the trends these days through the eye of data ( professional hazard)


Here are come very interesting articles I cam across to understand the things that baffle me.


Brexit (today's hottest topic and am sure for many more days to come)

• https://next.ft.com/content/0260242c-370b-11e6-9a05-82a9b15a8ee7
• http://www.theguardian.com/politics/ng-interactive/2016/jun/23/eu-referendum-live-results-and-analysis

Political campaigning

• http://www.dailyo.in/politics/bjp-modi-bhakts-social-media-trolls-aap-kejriwal-thailand/story/1/11324.html
• http://presidential-candidates.insidegov.com/compare/40-70/Hillary-Clinton-vs-Donald-Trump
• https://www.technologyreview.com/s/509026/how-obamas-team-used-big-data-to-rally-voters/

I will keep adding here interesting trend explained by data :)

web application firewall vendors comparision

I plan to put our more articles regarding WAF (web application firewall).
But for now if you already know what WAF is and you are evaluating WAF vendors this post should help.
The are the top WAF vendors as per Gartner

But it's hard to compare the features etc. of the vendors without a compressed chart.


NSS Labs have evaluated different vendors extensively
Individual reports of their analysis can be found here in the test reports section for NSS Clients :-
https://www.nsslabs.com/research-advisory/library/content-security/web-application-firewalls/


More detailed analysis can be found here :-
https://store.frost.com/web-application-firewall-waf-global-market-analysis.html


Much more details (not on vendors though)  on WAF :-
https://www.owasp.org/index.php/Category:OWASP_Best_Practices:_Use_of_Web_Application_Firewalls

Mentor with your tech skills : here are few choices and my experience.

I have been volunteering on and off in past few years.
Here are the avenues I have had in the past,  to share my expertise and skills:-
1) Google summer of code
2) Google Code-in
3) In coppell-ISD schools for Engineering week, Sharktank, Science fair,  IBM gigawatt camp e.t.c
4) getMAGIC


I have been volunteering for many other organisations as well like Vibha, AID (Association for India's development), Systers but today I want to talk about the opportunities where I was able to share my technical skills and learn and grow in the process.

My IBM-ISD mentoring sessions have been mostly event based but I totally love to get into the class meet the students in person and get infected by their enthusiasm and innocence.

My GSOC( google summer of code)  and GCI (google code in) has been equally enjoyable but in some sense it's been a little different. I don't get to meet my students but we work together like we would in a office setting but we work towards a humanitarian open source project..which is what makes it soo cool! Not only are you mentoring .. your work is actually being used for a good cause!!!
These are time-lined volunteering assignments ( in summer vacation or winter vacation for students) and everything is do-able remotely ( which is super convenient). I love the humanitarian opensource aspect of this soo much that this year I am organizing (actually co-chairing)  the Grace Hopper Conference Open Source Day ( GHC-OSD-2016).

My Magic mentor has been a very exquisite one. I got assigned a student in bay area and I started meeting her weekly (remotely over skype or gchat) and we made a personal connection. My assumption were soon shattered since she proved out to be a very mature, tech-savvy, hands-on little lady who did not need the "get-started" links for programming. She already had done a arduino project and this time we wanted to do a more advance complex and artistic project. We went ahead on that journey and how much a learned about this new generation of technology at their tips is incredible!!
I am looking forward to meeting her and helping her with her final presentation on magic project (and I guess I will updated the post once I am done with that)

I highly encourage all of you to consider volunteering your tech skills as a mentor .. it's always an amazing experience. Choose based on the time commitments you can make and your passions and interest .. but do choose one!!

If you're also a woman in tech/STEM, and have considered volunteering, please feel free to ask me and don't hesitate to reach out to me with anything i can help you .. if we share the same passion then also lets get in touch :) would love to hear from you.

How to start managing your offering?? by understanding your product/offering

How do you go about understanding where you stand??
ANALYSIS!!!


If you are wondering on to manage your product/offering.
Here are the questions you need to ask (hope this serves as a template for you) :-
1) What all do you offer to customers in that product/offering?  lets call it offering XYZ ?
2) How easy it is for customer who has some idea that he/she is interested in XYZ ?
3) How easy it is for customer to find everything related to XYZ ?
4) What are others ( competitors) offering in the field of XYZ ?
5) What are the gaps in XYZ offering as compared to competitors?
6) Are those gaps worth chasing?
7) What is the scope of improving current offering XYZ?
8) What else do customer demand or ask for when they order XYZ?
9) What are the pain points for customers of XYZ?
10) What is the data related to customer orders ( time , location, price points, industry, motivation  e.t.c ) regarding XYZ orders
11) Return on investment on the changes you want top bring
12) Cost to company of the not doing bringing those changes or of bringing those changes (resources, time, finances, marketing, reputation, e.t.c.)
13) growth rate
14) market predictions
15) domain knowledge and data around that domain
16) adaptability of the customer
17) what could replace your offering ? any threat of becoming obsolete?
18) customers drivers(motivation) and restraints when their think about XYZ
19) are there any compliance issues regarding XYZ that you solve (can solve)
20) and probably the most important one .. User experience!!
21) Benchmark your offerings 

Push your package to pip

Finally after a long time .. a PR on my git project  https://github.com/Neetuj/python-wns
reminded me that i still need to push it to pip.

Given the hits I get on my notification entry (most popular so far) push-notifications-on-apns-gcm-WNS 
I felt bad for not putting in the effort before to push python-wns to pip
Anyways I finally did it today and now you all can avail the power of pip for python-wns by

pip install python-wns

Now if you are the one who are not interested in my pyton-wns package but want to push your own package here are the steps I followed  (order can be important so follow it :)

• Register on https://testpypi.python.org/pypi
• Register on https://pypi.python.org/pypi
• Confirm all verification emails for the new accounts 
• create a .pypirc file "vim ~/.pypirc" which looks like this 
• [distutils]
  index-servers =
    pypi
    test
  
  [pypi]
  repository=https://pypi.python.org/pypi
  username=name
  password=pwd
  
  [test]
  repository=https://testpypi.python.org/pypi
  username=name
  password=pwd
• package your library like this  

• python-wns/
    setup.py
    setup.cfg
    LICENSE.txt
    README.md
    wns/
      __init__.py

      wnslib.py 

   
•  The setup.py needs to be in a certain format you can checkout mine here setup.py
• Then test 
•  python setup.py register -r test
•  proceed if you get Server response (200): OK
• python setup.py sdist upload -r test
• proceed if you get Server response (200): OK
• python setup.py register sdist upload
• and you are done!!  test "pip install python-wns"
  

Install docker on MAC

I had docker on my ubuntu and I do not remember going through much for installing docker on ubuntu .

But for MAC i had to follow these instructions ( in case anybody is looking for these)

    brew install docker
    brew install boot2docker
    boot2docker up
    boot2docker init
    boot2docker up
    export DOCKER_HOST=tcp://192.168.59.103:2375
    export DOCKER_CERT_PATH=/Users/yours/.boot2docker/certs/boot2docker-vm
    export DOCKER_TLS_VERIFY=1
    boot2docker ip