This Week I Learned - Week #136

This Week I Learned -

* Ivan Ristic started  SSL Labs as a side-project in early 2009...after he joined Qualys in May 2010 and became the company's director of engineering, he showed the project to Qualys CEO Philippe Courtot, who fell in love with it. Ristic remains the only developer, but the production servers are now maintained by the Qualys's Ops team

* H-1B visas are designed to bring foreign professionals with college degrees and specialized skills to fill jobs when qualified Americans cannot be found. 13 outsourcing companies took nearly one-third of all 85,000 H-1B visas in 2014.With more applications, the number of visas given to outsourcing companies has risen sharply. Many H-1B workers earn salaries below market rates. The vast majority of H-1B workers are from India. - NY Times

* The mobile commerce market will grow to $19 billion, according to a Forrester report and most of this will come from tier-II towns. For companies like Shopclues & Paytm, browser and app are both equally important. As of the 2011 census, there are 3,000 tier-II towns. Shopclues calls itself the shopping destination of the tier-II and III cities. According to the analysis of Shopclues, high-value transactions are still done on a desktop and low value on the phone. Consumers in tier-II towns have low memory, low processing power in phones. It means they can’t have an app constantly asking them to update or sending them notifications. So, every time there is a sale, they install, shop and uninstall an app. The real estate on the phone’s memory is very expensive.

* Gene Roddenberry, the creator of  the Star Trek television series, survived 3 plane crashes

* "I see folks misusing Scrum and using it as an excuse to be sloppy. They'll add lots of telemetry and use it as an excuse to avoid testing. The excitement and momentum around Unit Testing in the early 2000s has largely taken a back seat to renewed enthusiasm around Continuous Deployment." - Scott Hanselman

* "It's difficult to have a good plan when you are forced to react to external events" - Ivan Ristic