Weekly Notes - 10

We have been of multitasking between tax returns, feature prototypes and code reviews for the last two weeks.

We discovered Section 54F this time. This section exempts capital gains (with no upper limit) if the proceeds are invested in buying or constructing a house. Very interesting. This is something that my Dad does. He creates a physical asset in every bull run.

Last year we discovered section 115BAA. It allows companies to opt for lower tax rates of 22%. Awesome!

Bulk and Block Deals on Screener

We added a lot of things in bulk and block deals over the last …

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19th July 2022

Organisational Structures

I love reading how software companies work.

We are a very small tech team at Screener. Just 4-5 of us. Yet it becomes chaotic sometimes.

At the same time, there are companies which have 10s, 100s and 1000s of developers. They have fabulous products and keep rolling out new features. I admire them and try to learn a few tricks from them. About how they distribute work, how they keep the codebase sane and how they drive innovation.

These are few of the learnings and mental models from various books.

1. The E-Myth Revisited
This book introduced me to the …

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17th July 2022

Weekly Updates - 9

We had some trivial engineering challenges over last 2 weeks.

Reducing diff speed from 30+ seconds to 300ms
We have a wiki feature at Screener. It allows anyone to modify and add key-insights for companies. In the backend, we use Google's diff-match-patch library. It generates diffs between multiple versions and merges them.

The Python version of the library had a long processing time for some edits. The moderation page was taking over 30 seconds to load.

We found a faster version of the library which is a wrapper around the C++ version. It had a few issue around installation. We …

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2nd July 2022

Weekly Updates - 8

This was a busy week loaded with code-reviews, designs, meetings and coffees.

Investor Presentations on Screener

We added a section for investor presentations. It was built on the similar lines as concall transcripts.

The backend was developed by Mukesh and me. The frontend was trickier due to the paucity of space.

Design versions for investor presentation feature

Fun with Aeropress

While I have been pretty happy with the cappuccinos brewed on Bialetti Mukka, I wanted to give black coffee a try. Got an Aeropress this week.

Nothing much else this week.

26th June 2022

Weekly Updates -7

Paul Graham suggests avoiding matters of money and disputes from taking up our mental bandwidth. This week had a bit of both.

B2B customers at Screener

We haven't served B2B customers on Screener because of two primary issues.
1. Data rights
2. Complexity

The raw data for personal use is costly. Data for commercial or website use is 20x costlier. And it still comes with certain restrictions. We wanted to have a clarity on these restrictions before we can serve B2B customers.

We also want to keep our team and code-size small. Adding people slows down software innovation and we …

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19th June 2022

Weekly Notes - 6

We had a good family get together this week as one of my cousins entered courtship.

Progress on Concall Tools
I have been wanting to extract structured information from concall transcripts. We started by trying to extract the names of various call participants and their associated firms.
We made some progress last week. The algorithm is working pretty well with most concall transcripts now. We increased the test coverage and added 2 algorithms for extracting speakers.

Peoples module on Screener
The larger idea is to create a "people" module on Screener. A way to allow users to "follow" investors. …

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5th June 2022

Weekly Notes - Concall Tools

This was a rather busy week. I was mostly catching up with the pending emails and logs.

Extracting data from Concall Transcripts
Concall Transcripts contain a wealth of information. I started working on a library to extract structured information from concall transcripts.

Initially, we are trying to understand how to proceed with PDFs. We started with a single function for extracting the names of various participants in a call. Along with the name of the firms they are associated with.

Would love to have contributions from anyone having experience or interest in this: Concall Tools on Github

[Book] Karma Yoga …

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