Life in Balance: Amit Chaudhary’s Blog
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I ran some queries to get a feel for salaries and job openings for different programming languages in the SF Bay Area aka Silicon Valley.

Number of Job openings as per Craigslist:

• Java: 352
• C++: 113
• Python: 114
• PHP: 371
• Rails: 48
• C#: 88
• Perl: 180

Observations:

The above comparision has some bias including the fact that Perl & Python are regarded as Scripting language and only in some case get a job on their own, unlike say Rails or Java.

Right now Craigslist is the best Job search website for Tech Jobs in the bay area

Average Salaries from Indeed.com:

Observations:

Rails & PHP average salaries are about 5% lower than all others and they drop further if paired with Developer instead of Engineer.

I picked Mountain View, CA which has a fair share of different companies and the radius will pick up San Jose, Redwood city, etc.

Nation-wide Salary Trends from Indeed.com:

Observations:

The top four programming languages are PHP, Java, Perl & Rails. Caveat, Due to the fact that indeed.com searches other job sites, the duplicate posting rate might be high, however it would apply to all postings.

For a different view on the same topic, see my earlier blog post, Top Programming Languages as derived from book sales and TIOBE Programming Community index.

Wordle.net is a Java applet which creates a tag cloud based on input text, increasing the text size for more frequent words. The arrangement of the text is very appealing visually.

I gave Wordle this blog’s titles till date, finetuned a few setting and voila, a visualization of what the general focus of last 2-3 years of my writing\blogging has been about.

You can click on the above image for a large version

The Java applet with the above data
I would not get to use the Unicode “non-breaking space” character, so silicon and valley show up as two words above.
It is created by Jonathan Feinberg, who works at the Collaborative User Experience (CUE) group at IBM Research.

Thanks to Ned for pointing Wordle out.

TED started as Technology, Entertainment & Design and is now a very broad conference covering talks about Life and the World in general, this has included insights into the Human Mind, notes from Africa, World changing Ideas, Adventures, on Designs and Visualization and many more. TED speeches are typically 15-20 minutes and a lot of them are available for viewing online or can be downloaded at http://www.ted.com

I first got a glimpse of it when I watched the documentary, The Future We Will Create: Inside the World of TED It was a great experience, and I learnt about many things outside my current world.

So this year when the TED 2008 was going on, I attended a virtual TED conference of my own, watching speeches from previous TED conference.

Here are the Top Presentation Videos from TED, The Life and World Conference:

• Ben Saunders: Three things to know before you ski to the North Pole

To explore the limits of our potential. The title says it all, he did it solo.

• Gever Tulley: 5 dangerous things you should let your kids do

Very practical, loved it. Few worth noting, let kids dismantle appliances and learn to handle fire

• Dan Gilbert: Why are we happy? Why aren’t we happy?

Insights and experiments into synthetic happiness(being happy with what you get) and how it is same as real happiness. Too many choices will reduce your chances at synthesized happiness.

• Burt Rutan: Entrepreneurs are the future of space flight

On why Joy is defendable and what inspiration for kids changes a field.

• Hans Rosling: Debunking third-world myths with the best stats you’ve ever seen

Outstanding visualization of changing status of developing countries like India over the previous five decades.

• Majora Carter: Greening the ghetto

On a project to create a park in New York.

• Malcolm Gladwell: What we can learn from spaghetti sauce

Why there is no perfect spaghetti sauce and what it teaches us about creating products

• Neil Gershenfeld: The beckoning promise of personal fabrication

Making things

• Jeff Han: Unveiling the genius of multi-touch interface design

The idea for new form of interacting with computers that we see in the iPhone.

• Jeff Bezos: After the gold rush, there’s innovation ahead

Amazon.com’s Jeff Bezos on what Internet industry is like the Electrical one.

• Seth Godin: Sliced bread and other marketing delights

When creating something, when working for somebody, target it at people(customers) who care and it just might take off.

• Jonathan Harris: The Web’s secret stories

Projects on datamining and visualizing people interacting on the Web

• Rives: “If I controlled the Internet” (a poem)

A humorous poem

• Tony Robbins: Why we do what we do, and how we can do it better

Motivation talk. Some points. Seek to create and thereby get to achievement. Then up the ante and do it faster, better. Grow or stagnant. Use uncertainity to stay out of boredom.

• Jeff Hawkins: Brain science is about to fundamentally change computing

Using the human brain’s prediction methods for computing

• Roy Gould, Curtis Wong: WorldWide Telescope

A telescope controlled by anyone.

• Dan Dennett: Ants, terrorism, and the awesome power of memes

Ideas such as Freedom, Capitalism, Religion are Memes. Memes are viruses, spreading, affecting everyone, changing the world, killing scores of people.

• Moshe Safdie: What makes a building unique?

An architect and his buildings including Exploration Place, Wichita, Kansas, Children’s Memorial at Yad Vashem, Israel and Khalsa Heritage Memorial Complex, Anandpur, India

• Ray Kurzweil: How technology’s accelerating power will transform us

On how technology grows at a increasing rate.

• YouTube – Frozen Grand Central

Do watch a few which call out to you.

Economist has an article on Evan Williams, Founder and Creator of Blogger, Odeo and Twitter: The accidental innovator

Some snippets with minor grammer changes for continuity:

Ideas:

First insight, that genuinely new ideas are, well, accidentally stumbled upon rather than sought out; second, that new ideas are by definition hard to explain to others, because words can express only what is already known;

Controlled Passion:

Mr Williams’s passion is solving new problems. In theory he could have done this at Google with his “20% time” on the side, but in practice he found it tedious to pitch ideas to the Google bureaucracy. Left and right brains clashed in other ways.

Radical Constraints:

One mental trick is to ask “what can we take away to create something new?” When he took Blogger and took away everything except one 140-character line, he had Twitter. Radical constraints, he believes, can lead to breakthroughs in simplicity and entirely new things.

Loves Frustration:

For the same reason, Mr Williams loves frustration. Blogger revealed itself when he was frustrated with something bigger: collaboration software.

This year, if you would like to have a different way to send a holiday greeting, post it on any yahoo webpage.

me2u.yahoo.com allows you to create a greeting or any message as an ad and send it to a yahoo.com user (sorry no international users rights now.)
They will see the ad on any *.yahoo.com page when they login next.

If it is displayed and not ‘viewed’ (incase it was missed), they get an email mentioning it and it will be displayed again a few times.

Pretty nifty stuff!

Greg Linden wrote in Show advertising people might want about showing Consumers the ads that they want.

Advertising can be useful information about products and services we actually want. The advertisements we see should be helpful and interesting, not annoying and irrelevant.

I use to believe in that and have skipped\avoided ads due to the noise there is. But working in Advertising field in someways (I am in a Software Engineer Yahoo Display Advertising department), I came to believe, another thing, that sometimes Consumers might not know what they want or might try out, this includes a new cereal, a new updated car model, a new serial coming up, until they learn about it and try it out. To re-quote,

If I’d asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said they wanted faster horses. Henry T. Ford, inventor and entrepreneur.

So, there is a balance between desire and needs and another angle is creating awareness.

Greg is right on about Personalized advertising. If you are interested, take a look at the Targeting options, Yahoo provides, specifically Yahoo! Behavioral Targeting or BT as we call it, which has been in place for a while now.

Personalizing advertising — targeting to advertising to individual interests — can make advertisements relevant, useful, and helpful. By learning from what each person likes and does not like, personalized advertising can use that fleeting glimpse of our attention to show us something we actually might need.

Disclaimer: The blog entries and opinions mentioned in this blog are my own personal viewpoints and do not represent my employer’s view in any way.