Posted on

Overheard : Market share and Profitability

Herb Kelleher‘s, the iconic co-founder and long time CEO of Southwest Airlines, thoughts on profitability. He shared this with Guy Raz on his “How I built this” podcast.

If we have 4% of the market and are being profitable, that is better than having 90% of the market and being unprofitable.

The entire podcast for your listening pleasure is at https://www.npr.org/2019/01/04/682174446/remembering-herb-kelleher

Herb passed away on Jan 3, 2019. RIP Herb.

Posted on

How not to design a website

Etrade is one of the largest stock trading service providers in the US. One would think they want to make it easy for their customers to trade. Guess not :). I recently logged in to check on my account and place an order. Capital One recently sold their stock trading portfolio to Etrade (why???), so I didn’t get a chance to get oriented with the etrade interface…

So I logged in and was presented a good overview of the account.

Good so far.. I want to place a trade. what do I click?.. let me try the detailed account view

Hmm.. no luck.. How about the orders menu? That sounds like a place where one can place a trade

Nope.. that doesn’t even remotely look like a place I can place an order..

I am amazed at how companies get away with this..

Posted on

HOW TO : Set $GOPATH

Been dabbling in go recently and I was surprised that the default install doesn’t setup the $GOPATH environment variable.

If you are running it on a Linux box, here is how your can set the $GOPATH variable

Add the following lines to ~/.bashrc file 

export GOPATH=$HOME/go
export PATH=$PATH:$GOROOT/bin:$GOPATH/bin

Posted on

Overheard : BODMAS

Trying to sharpen my programming skills :). Just heard about BODMAS and mind blown about the simplicity of the acronym. 

Essentially BODMAS is a simple way to remember the order a programming language (that follows this standard) processes operators in a statement.

BODMAS = 
Bracket, Of, Division, Multiplication, Addition and Subtraction

Posted on

Overheard : Call to action

I don’t even recall where I heard this :)..  but it stuck with me for me to write it down

For somebody to do something.. three things much happen at once. The person must want do do it, they must be able to and they must be prompted to do it.

A trigger – the prompt for the action – is effective only when the person is highly motivated, or the task is very easy. If the task is hard, people end up frustrated; if they’re not motivated, they get annoyed.