Bytes Bite

linkedin stats

Chaitanya Kuber — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 23:55:11 +0000

I have posted about this in the past, but over the last few months I have noticed a huge change in the “how many times your profile appeared in search results” stat (see image below) for my profile. If you have noticed a similar change I would love to hear your thoughts.

There are likely to be a combination of factors at play here. The first is that there are more people searching for people with my skill set. Second could be that LinkedIn has changed their ranking algorithm’s and is providing better matches for people’s queries. Although, this seems very unlikely based on job recommendation emails I get from LinkedIn as about 1 in every jobs they email are actually relevant.

The third, and most likely scenario, is that my position title changed to Senior Software Engineer in early August (2011). Now I know what the word Senior actually means in terms of my day to day work and what it does not, however I get the feeling that people searching on LinkedIn are doing so based on position titles and not skill sets. In the software engineering world this does not seem to be a good strategy because an engineer (no matter how senior) with Java or PHP background is not likely one who has a finance background or wants to work with .net and vice-versa is probably also true.

Have you tried searching for people to recruit on LinkedIn? What search queries/strategies did you use?

new look

Chaitanya Kuber — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 00:10:34 +0000

trying a new look in an attempt to get regular about posting to this blog. i think the first topic will be around SOA design concepts (as thats a current focus) and then some posts on refactoring design patterns.

from search to ecommerce

Chaitanya Kuber — Fri, 12 Aug 2011 01:38:31 +0000

In 2010 we decided to move back from London to Sydney and to aide that move I took a position of leading the vertical search development work at Yahoo!7. Vertical Search is web search but restricted to a specific data set, i.e.: data that a property/website is presenting to it’s users. The main aim is to provide another content access tool to the users to find content and of-course to monetise the process. The process of implementing this for a given data set is rather interesting as it involves understand the data set, what metadata is captured for each item, how the website itself is structured, creating indexes, creating appropriate ranking profiles and building the search user interface.

Over a short period of time (not to blow my own trumpet here) I was able to understand the inner workings Y!7 and make a dent in their search roadmap. I lead the implementation for Yahoo!7 Sports, Yahoo!7 Lifestyle and Yahoo!7 TV.

A few month’s back I had heard rumblings about a startup (of sorts) in Sydney which was going gang busters within the e-commerce space called BigCommerce. BigCommerce is a e-commerce SAAS platform which enables a Joe Blog to create a e-commerce presence for their business. The setup is a short process and importantly without the need to invest technical resources.

To cut a long story short, after 3 gruelling interview rounds I accepted their offer. The main attraction for me is to be in an environment where everyone is working on the same product and pulling in the same direction. This, based on my experience, is generally possible with small/startup companies and I am really looking forward to starting and getting my hands dirty again. The other attraction was working in the SAAS space, it’s not something I have done in this shape before and I am really excited by the challenge.

This news, given that I took the plunge, is very heartening indeed! If you are interested or know anyone who is then look here for open positions.

Onwards forwards!

#cityrail service board is rather funny

Chaitanya Kuber — Fri, 22 Jul 2011 00:01:38 +0000

expedia’s location autocomplete

Chaitanya Kuber — Mon, 09 May 2011 07:37:37 +0000

@CerealBoy here u go

Chaitanya Kuber — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 03:36:21 +0000

latest google chrome dev buld (11.0.696.12) has a rather strange logo :

Chaitanya Kuber — Thu, 17 Mar 2011 00:02:37 +0000

typical … quickflix won’t let me cancel online

Chaitanya Kuber — Fri, 11 Mar 2011 06:31:48 +0000

mini-skirts and linkedin

Chaitanya Kuber — Mon, 14 Feb 2011 13:14:24 +0000

Someone said “Statistics are like mini skirts. What they reveal is tantalizing, but what they hide is crucial”.

I was reminded of this when I was browsing Linkedin earlier today and saw the following two graphics. As far as I can tell the aim here is for LinkedIn user’s to convert from a basic account to a paid account.

I am not sure how many people see this and actually upgrade their accounts. Despite wanting to find out who is viewing my profile, I certainly have not upgraded. My reason for not upgrading is the cost is prohibitively high.

The Upgrade link seems to have tracking information in the link the page and hence we can only assume LinkedIn certainly has the stats for the conversion rate based on such UI design. I would guess that the conversion stats are favourable and hence this user interface is in place.

Did you upgrade your account upon seeing these statistics? I would love to hear from you if you did (or did not) and your reasons behind the decision.

creative note taking

Chaitanya Kuber — Mon, 07 Feb 2011 01:05:57 +0000

I found these sketchnotes taken during 2009 & 2010 as a set on Flickr. I absolutely love the note taking style, as (to me) it shows the creative thinking in the writers mind. Writing notes in this fashion is especially strange for me as I always jot stuff down in bullet point format. I would be interested to know how others take notes.

Here’s an example that I randomly shown from the above linked Flickr Set…. the addage “a picture speaks a thousands words” is quite true

David Merrill - Cookie Scale Computing

Do you have an interesting note taking format? Please feel free to share….