Influx makes another key hire in 2020; HAT tells a story about it. Sound familiar? Read on.

My wife Mat and I went on a holiday to South Africa in 2017. Coming off the back of a difficult 2016 when I moved to Dubai to set up our office there and was thus away from her for nearly six months, this was the year to make amends. And thus, a luxury holiday was well deserved. We did the usual; safari, game-sighting (saw all of the Big 5!), stayed at one and visited over nine wineries (in two days), ate and drank ourselves silly, got robbed in Cape Town, and even made new friends who then flew all the way to India to stay with us! Yet, the highlight for me, looking back at that trip, was something that happened on July 11 in a small town about 162.5 km (101 mi) out of Cape Town, called Gansbaai. Dyer Island, off the coast of the quaint town, is arguably one of the world’s greatest venues to...

Pssst.. he’s moving to Chennai, India!

Okay, so we had a plan for 2020. And it was in the works, well before people started buying their New Year Eve’s party tickets. We were going to announce key, strategic hires at Influx, through the year, for as long as we could. We announced Tina joining us in January and Mahesh’s entry as CTO in February. And then a pangolin pissed all over our plans. However, we’re not done yet. March and April were blips, but we have regrouped, course-corrected, and are ready for the rest of the year.

I’m delighted to announce and welcome Mark Waldman as our new Senior Vice President of Operations. Originally from New York but now a long-term resident of The Netherlands, Mark will be relocating to India to work out of Influx’s Chennai office. Needless to say, until the time is right to fly and move about, he will be working from home in Maastricht.

Mark and...

| Daniel Anandaraj Garnipudi | - @dodosamuel

So, unless you have been under a rock or at a silent retreat for a while, you do know that the world is going through a medical crisis right? I’m not even going to talk about that.

Rather, I think in the context of the Indian workplace there is a consequence for many companies that needs to be thought about.

WFH / Work From Home!

Sure, you have all heard about it.
Sure, you may have used it occasionally (if you were eligible to or as per your company policies)
Sure, you may have called on that practise when you wanted to play hooky from work, or wait for the plumber or electrician or whoever, or were feeling under the weather.
But.
This time it’s for real isn’t it?

Even governments are asking people to try and work from home, social distancing and all of that. This is not about that.
This is about the fact that tough times call...

Following up from the excitement of onboarding Tina to lead our product team, our CEO, Harish Anand Thilakan (HAT), writes to welcome Mahesh Shankar as CTO of Influx. Mahesh joins us from his immediate past role as CTO of online retailer, Zivame, besides having previously run TenTenTen Digital with Ramesh Srivats where together, they built Fandromeda and the IPL’s first-ever fantasy gaming app.

Like I often do, I felt the need to tell this story on why we’ve never had a CTO and how the partnership with Mahesh fructified. Read on for more.

There are many things strange about us at Influx. But the most perplexing is perhaps how we’ve come this far as a tech company, without a tech co-founder or a CTO.

Now to give you a bit of context, Influx was born in 2004 when I reconnected with my high school buddy, Anuj Sawani. He’d moved out of Chennai to Delhi to complete his last two...

Harish Anand Thilakan (HAT) narrates how they met and he convinced her to get on board Team Influx

A lot of you often react with varying emotions to all of my travels. While some of you display pure pity for as you know, traveling (like I do) isn’t fun, others usually marvel or are even openly envious for the miles I manage to rack up.

So while meetings or events generally fill up most of my travel days, what exactly do I do in the evenings or nights? I generally tend to open up Tinder or Bumble to discover fun people to hang out with at fun places in the city I am in, generally aided by Yelp (US) or Google (rest of the world). Okay, no, that stopped in 2013 :-)

What I really do is try and attend networking events that I discover on meetup.com. I generally gravitate towards startup, technology or design related events and love chatting up the attendees to get a flavor of the...

| Prashanth Gurunath | - @17_prashanth

The following blog was posted on Medium by Prashanth Gurunath, a Software Research Engineer at Influx.

In this tutorial, we will be learning to integrate our Android App with an Android Intent Library that will simplify the concept of Intents.

By using this library you can use any of the functionalities that’s present in it in a single line of code.

So let’s get started!

Expected Output:

Through our app, we want to implement the following functionalities using the Intent Library:

1. Open a browser link that’s entered by the user
2. Open Facebook, Amazon, Twitter on the Browser
3. Dial a number that’s entered by the user
4. Open and view the developer’s LinkedIn Profile ;)
5. Search the meaning of a string/query that’s entered by the user

Create An Android Studio Project

1. Open Android Studio and click on File -> New -> New Project

Enter your...

| Vaidehi Bhashyam Mehta | — @mehta_vaidehi

Young people aspiring to be content writers regularly send me articles to review. I appreciate their efforts.

Beyond that, there’s little to appreciate in them. Most are mundane and very boring. There’s no originality; they swipe from the Internet quite unabashedly. Control+C and Control+V build the bulk of their articles. They are very minimalistic when it comes to punctuation, including the use of the upper case. Apostrophes, when used, are more like decorations to create plurals and, often, just dispensed with for possessives.

For example: “Kumars code’s are superb….”

The title of this blog is self-explanatory. In this post I am going to tell you what is wrong with the way people—especially those under the age of 40—write today, my understanding of why this is so, and how it is quite simple to make them better.

Exceptions:

Of...

| Sankar Nagarajan |

The key to minimising your business risks during Cloud Migration is understanding the Cloud Service Level Agreement.

If you are an enterprise looking at moving your IT operations including business software applications to the Cloud , evaluation and monitoring of the Service Level Agreements (SLAs) of the Cloud service providers as a part of your risk management plan is crucial to your business outcomes.

Recently, in the press, was news about a massive Cloud services outage in Alibaba Cloud hit businesses—both small and large in size—in North China hard.

The primary objective of the SLA-based risk assessment of a Cloud Vendor is to ensure high availability of your IT operations on the Cloud so that your business continuity is taken care of in a predictable manner with low financial risks.

Illustration

Amazon Web Services (AWS) with its cloud compute SLA...

| Daniel Anandaraj Garnipudi | - @dodosamuel

Wondering why Influx did not do a social media post this year on 08 March? Here’s why…

Per Influx tradition, the ladies took themselves off for a company-sponsored lunch on Women’s Day. While we were out, our CEO decided to pen us a letter. Having stuffed ourselves silly, we returned to office to this treat:

Dear Ladies @ Influx,

I hope you all had a lovely lunch without us noisy boys around. :)

The world decided that on 08 March, we will celebrate International Women’s Day to express our gratitude to the women of the world. And so, today, we celebrate you—celebrating the social, economic, cultural, political and, of course, personal achievements of women.

You know how they always say—there are angels around us protecting us from harm every single day. I look around at my life and background and all I can say is that’s what in many...