Tiklu's Blog

Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu My rating: 5 of 5 stars So much wisdom is condensed in the pages of this book that I believe I will keep visiting the book again and again. Loved this book. View all my reviews

Our Iceberg Is Melting: Changing and Succeeding Under Any Conditions by John P. Kotter My rating: 4 of 5 stars I initially read a couple of pages back in 2016 and finally I picked up the book a few days back and finished reading it. This is a very easy read. Don't go by my number of days guys. The whole thing follows the same style as "who moved my cheese". This is a good story based explanation of Kotter's change framework. One of the best thing about this book is you can gift it to anyone you know who needs a change within their organization, life or something similar. You can also use it to find out a framework that you can use within your organization or in your life to get rid of old habits or products. View all my reviews

Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramahansa Yogananda My rating: 5 of 5 stars This is really an interesting book. If you really want to know the power of yoga and what you can achieve with it, you must read this book. Immensely loved reading this book and I highly recommend it to anyone interested in learning more about yoga or an aspirant yogi. View all my reviews

The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It by Michael E. Gerber My rating: 5 of 5 stars This book is a gem. In case if you want to build your own small business it is often not clear what do we want to do. Also many of the time we do not think very systematically and when the business starts growing it falls apart as the founding system was not very good. This book will help the reader to build a system and process from day 1 of your business that would ensure that when your business grows your system keeps your business processes together. It also ensures when your business grows the system helps your employees to know how to operate it and everything work like a clockwork. A definite read for anyone running a business or planning to start a business. View all my reviews

Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future by Peter Thiel My rating: 5 of 5 stars This is truly an awesome read. As Mark Zuckerberg has said "Peter Thiel have built many successful companies and he have said how in this book". This book contains all the concepts and rules that you need to create a successful business. Loved it. View all my reviews

Who Moved My Cheese? by Spencer Johnson My rating: 5 of 5 stars Okay it comes exactly at advertised. takes are a evening or two to complete the book cover to cover. You start as skeptic and at the end laugh at yourself. There are just so many things at which we get stuck and don't want to move on. Our job, relations, work, processes, etc. Problem is once we succeed doing something in one way we kind of get stuck in that and don't want to try something else. This book is good for everyone who feels that he is stuck or you may not even realize that you are stuck in the old and you need to move on. You need to find "new cheese". View all my reviews

Unshakeable by Tony Robbins My rating: 5 of 5 stars Okay, I am from India and this book does talk a lot of rules and specifics of finance and tax rules for the US. So maybe someone from the US would get a lot more benefit from this book than me. But what I was able to get is a lot of points that I can look into. The fine prints, that I must read through in mutual fund or one a similar investment. It also gives a very good idea of how to best do insurances, so that you can maximize the benefit. Finally, no financial freedom can come without freedom within. So loved the last chapter about how to achieve mental happiness. So overall time well invested, reading this book. View all my reviews

The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses by Eric Ries My rating: 5 of 5 stars Well, I do not think I can add anything more in terms of review of this book. This now classic book has been reviewed and re-reviewed multiple times. It is THE book that is driving the main innovation accounting engine in today's startup markets. Also, it is the book that can help any small startup or any big organization thinking to reinvent themselves as a lean organization. What this book provides a very good framework upon which the organization can do their innovation and experiments on building new products in a more cost-efficient way. View all my reviews

The Art of Living by Thich Nhat Hanh My rating: 4 of 5 stars Thich Nhat Han is a master Buddhist monk. And this book shows how deep his knowledge is. The book is full of a lot of good Buddhist philosophical ideas. The book also has some very practical ways like how to calm your mind even under the most adverse situation. Also loved the concept of how you are changing constantly and how everything around us is changing. This is a good way of accepting change as a way of life and not being afraid of it. The book also shows how to be more mindful of our current situation and be more present in the current moment. Loved this book. View all my reviews

Management Mantras by Sri Sri Ravi Shankar My rating: 5 of 5 stars When I saw a book on Management by Sri Sri I could not believe. So completely out of curiosity, I started reading the book. But when I read the book, I was surprised to see the depth of knowledge the author has. This book contains some of the really beautiful management strategies. How can you not just start a business just for the sake of business, instead start a whole movement in the process? How can you truly inspire peoples to do great? Don't start a business instead start a movement with a social cause, that is designed to solve a social problem, and a way to solve that manifests as mean of a business. Really beautiful concepts. Loved it a lot. View all my reviews

How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie My rating: 5 of 5 stars This book provides a very good framework about how you can communicate better and be mindful. This is a must-read book for leaders, peoples in sales and marketing, customer support executives and anybody dealing with a lot of peoples. Though this book was written almost 90 years ago, the wisdom of this book is still relevant today. View all my reviews

#AskGaryVee: One Entrepreneur's Take on Leadership, Social Media, and Self-Awareness by Gary Vaynerchuk My rating: 5 of 5 stars Gary Vee is a master salesman and social media marketing guru. This book contains his wisdom in the format of questions and answers. A book full of ideas about how to do social media marketing how to do run a business in today. Loved it a lot. View all my reviews

Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill My rating: 5 of 5 stars You either control your mind or the mind controls you. A very powerful idea about how we can get anything by controlling our thoughts are given here. Though the title says think and grow rich - it is a profound philosophy which can be used to becoming anything in life. You want money, fame, spirituality, good health, you name it. You can use the same philosophy to get those. The GRAND DADDY of all self-help books. This is something, anybody and everybody who wants to self-help should carry around. It is so amazing that even after so many years the philosophy is still legit. View all my reviews

15 Secrets Successful People Know About Time Management: The Productivity Habits of 7 Billionaires, 13 Olympic Athletes, 29 Straight-A Students, and 239 Entrepreneurs by Kevin Kruse My rating: 5 of 5 stars A truly awesome book about productivity. A very easy read. I have read it almost at the beginning of this year and this book has helped me manage my time better. The strategies in this book really works. If you feel you do not have enough time to complete your personal goals, your projects, then you must read this book and follow the tactics given in this book. Many of the tactics like living via the calendar and processing emails on a scheduled time have really helped me a lot. I am able to complete a lot more task now and I do not feel stressed at all. This is a real gem for any one who wants stress free productivity. View all my reviews

Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action by Simon Sinek My rating: 5 of 5 stars This book is just wow. I have read the book in almost in one breath. Truly amazing book. I now believe the earth have only two type of peoples, who have read the book and who didn't. Every entrepreneur, every business owner, every student and all other professionals must read this book. Because everybody needs to know his or her why in life. We all need to know why it is important to know "Why". View all my reviews

I was using Kaggle for over a month now to mainly learn Machine Learning using the Jupyter notebook. Yes, I am just lazy and prefer a hosted Jupyter notebook than installing one in my laptop.  I came to know the Azure also have a hosted Jupyter notebook environment. You can go to the environment by following this link           https://notebooks.azure.com You just need a Microsoft account to get started using this. In case you need any help getting started. You can use this link to explore more. https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/uk_faculty_connection/2016/11/15/jupyter-notebooks-on-azure-with-notebooks-azure-com / I have written a small code to test the performance of vectorized and non vectorized version of vector multiplication. The notebook can be downloaded from https://gist.github.com/tikluganguly/36109c9509ace6e14fae05bb8696e207 The interesting thing is, how it performs in Azure and Kaggle.  Bellow is the s...

The Man Behind the Wheel: How Onkar S. Kanwar Created a Global Giant by Tim Bouquet My rating: 3 of 5 stars The book started really great. How the OSK's dad Raunak Singh came to India after the partition with nothing in hand and how the build an empire of Tyre business from scratch was really inspiring. I really loved the book halfway through. But after that, the book starts to lose steam. Complicated details on court cases and who told what was not really something interesting and adds any value to me personally. So overall I would still recommend this book. Do read the first 50%. The next 50% is your choice. View all my reviews

I recently joined Kaggle . This is an awesome site to visit if you are a to be, new or experienced data scientist. This site has a lot of open data set which can check here . A lot of peoples have done very interesting things with those data. You can see those in the Kernels link.  In case you just want to learn about data science. You can also start by visiting the tutorial kernel " Welcome To Data Science ". The most popular feature of this site is the competition that they host on the site. And finally, this site serves as a community meeting place for all the data scientists. So if you are a data scientist and if you still have not joined this site. I would highly recommend joining Kaggle. They have been recently acquired by Google so hopefully, a lot of new things are gonna come in future.

Why are we in service business? Or why do we do anything at all. I got a very nice answer to that from a very unexpected place. My 4 year son loves to see Princess Knight. So I was also seeing it with him. They all were on a competition to be the first one to see a dragon's egg hatch. Because nobody have seen it before. Now there was this guy who always want to win, he said I will be the winner and would be the first one to see it. Princess knight said, "it is ok that you like to race, but don't forget, the whole idea of this competition is to see the dragon egg hatch" - wow, and something struck in my head. Why do we do anything at all. Are we aiming toward the right target? We want our kids to get hight scores in the school exams, we want to go up an up in our career. But real reason for education is to educate a person, make him or her a better person, and not getting high marks. Many of the time we choose a career because we love doing what we do, but instea...

This article describes the process of creating a CI (Continuous Integration) pipeline for PHP projects using Jenkins server.  The Architecture The above diagram shows a graphical representation of the whole process. Here we have a git repo, the Jenkins CI server, and its build agent.  The Process   The process begins when the user checks in the code in the git repo. The git repo via its commit hook calls the build URL of Jenkins server.   The Jenkins server pulls the code from the git repo and sends it to build agent.   The build agent then executes the ant script and builds and validates the PHP code via various validations mentioned the ant script    The successful build can be deployed in a deployment server to complete the CD part of the process.  The configuration To configure this solution, we have used a Microsoft Team Foundation Server Online git repo and a Bitnami Jenkins server VM from Azure. I am ass...