Tuesday 26 August 2014

[W3] Some growth hack techniques are wrong and you shouldn't use them. Here's why.

On the grounds of ethics, I disagree with a good portion of what was said in today's growth hacking class. The question I am going to answer here today is: Does the end justifies the means?

In this context, "end" would refer to the final sales figures and "means" is of course, whatever that took place to get there.

I am going to start with a disclaimer first that I agree with a good portion of the presentation. He has very good points, and we ought to learn from other people's successes and failures. Social metrics, A/B testing, targeting authorities/media from the relevant fields for outreach (and some very innovative methods of reaching them), video marketing, etc are all methods that I find interesting and valid.

However, as with everything in life, we ought to step back, and think for ourselves what is the purpose behind these actions, and whether they are right or not. Unfortunately, this isn't always easy and there are many gray areas where our judgement needs to be exercised.

Just because it is legal, doesn't mean it is right to do so.

I am not talking about exploiting bugs, etc, but the more abstract ideas of morals, intent, purposes and values. For example, exploiting the heartbleed bug to spoof others' identity is clearly wrong. Exploiting a bug in Craigslist to mass-post your listings isn't. That's just stupidity on Craigslist's end. It's quite a clever hack though I must admit.

In the case of the presentation today, the example of impersonating as a user on online forums and recommending your own app is clearly wrong. You are misrepresenting yourself and your products to your potential users. While it may seem ingenious or amusing at first, if you give you more thought, what you are essentially doing is deceiving people and employing deceptive sales tactics.

This is very different from presenting yourself as the app developer and selling the benefits to the members on the forum. This is not allowed on most forums either so you will still get banned anyhow. However, you are not trying to misled people into using your product by pretending to be one of them.

Another point that I have major contention with as well is buying your way into the top grossing charts. Downloads and reviews are what users rely on to judge the quality of the app. Manipulating these figures through unethical ways only serve to compromise the integrity (of yourself primarily and then the app).

You can place your product beside popular ones to anchor users' perception. That's a clever trick to make people download. Buying downloads? Hmm, things get a little subjective, but still you aren't directly misleading people, so it can be argued. Buying reviews or writing fake reviews? Now, that's clearly an ethical breach. The intent is to explicitly make people believe that your product is good through deception. Basically you are lying through your teeth. Imagine if buying reviews become a social norm in the future, will these reviews serve any purpose any more? In such a scenario, a seller with bad rating could possibly be the most honest merchant around and every other 5 star ratings are untrustworthy.

Surely, these techniques will make you more successful than your competitors over the same period of time. However, I won't feel proud with this "success" I obtained, embarrassed even. I feel that it is important to be ourselves and maintain a moral compass, even through trying times. While this may limit the intended "success", I would have upheld my values and my conscience, which to me, are more important than material success. At this point, it should be obvious to you that I strongly believe that the end does not justify the means. The means must be justified as well.

That being said, everybody has a different yardstick for ethical issues. It is a sensitive issue and I was not prepared to spark any heated discussion in class. Definitely, you (the reader) will disagree with me at some point in this post and I will be glad to hold a discussion with you on this topic.


Friday 22 August 2014

[W2] Clap along if you feel like that's what you wanna do

Some food for thought. I wonder how many students in Computing are aspiring to start their own company.

From what I can see, the CS3216 class is buzzing with entrepreneurial spirit, with much talk about starting your own company and all. Many alumnis/tutors seem to have certain success in their venture; students talk about starting their company without any "if"-s or "if not"-s. Sometimes I wonder if that's how silicon valley feels like as well. I really hope to explore the USA one day but that's a story for another day. This class makes me think that the entrepreneurial scene in Singapore is not as dead as it seems and Singaporeans may not be as risk averse as I have thought us lot to be.

The catch is that this is a small class and the nature of the class itself may already cause a sample bias. I would expect entrepreneurial students to want to take this module over the others.

If it is truly representative, computing school would be where the entrepreneurs are made, instead of the business school. Well, before I started university, I had a preconceived notion that business school is where you learn how to do "business" and by extension, starting a business as well. (I wasn't a really informed kid back then) The reality of the business school scene is that it is filled with talks about which big corporations has the best remuneration or the best work-life balance. It is very much similar to how it is in the UK, where top business graduates are absorbed by the investment banks and consulting firms. The start-up community in business school is niche at best.

Well, both has its good and bad. In the end, the path one takes really depends on one's priorities and expectations of life. Among the 1001 reasons for and against entrepreneurship, the only significant ones would be those that matter to us. If any NUS start-up becomes truly recognized globally, that would be an accomplishment worth celebrating for.

/end food for thought.

Sunday 17 August 2014

[W1] A Saturday Date

So, I was in school on a Saturday on the first week of school. This has never happened in my past 3 years of education. Walking down the empty canteen, staircase, and corridors only reinforces that fact. Nonetheless, it was a fruitful day, especially for someone without a programming background such as me.

There were 3 main takeaways from the lessons, and I am going to list what I liked and disliked about each lesson. I know the tutors would be reading this, but I thought you might appreciate some honest feedback from your audience. :P

AWS 
IMO, this is the most interesting part of the day. It may have to do with it being the first class in the morning but I think Su Yuen did a good job with it. She only focused on the essentials, which is very helpful. I found the class very easy to follow. It is a little slow when it comes to debugging though. Understand there will be unseen technical difficulties here and there but with only her answering the questions, the waiting time for the rest gets a little long. I thought it may be more efficient to have the neighbours of the affected students to help as well. Since probably at least half the class are pretty proficient in AWS, that should speed up the lesson a lot (especially at the last part).

Got a web server up and running, and I had a personal space for about half an hour online. (Yay) Too bad AWS microinstances is only free for a year... The search for a free web server continues... I miss the days of GeoCities where I first set up my own web presence more than a decade back.

Git
After lunch (Pizza yum yum), it was Git by Minqi. The pace of this lesson was a lot faster, because only 1 or 2 of us have not used it before. Hearing its functionality, I got to agree it is a really powerful collaboration service. No more manual consolidation! It's like Dropbox supercharged for developers. My only pet peeve is that now, my laptop's right click is sooo long now.

This is also the part where I spend the most time setting up, and rightly so, given the need for integration with my local folders. I still don't know what some of the programs do though, TortoiseHg for example. I guess I have to figure it out on-the-job or when I manage to catch a breather.

I was barely able to follow the lesson (but I did) throughout. Upon introspection, I think my learning pace was hampered because I could not follow what Minqi has entered into the console. It was mostly covered by the output, and even if it wasn't, I still have a hard time trying to see what exactly he has entered. It would be perfect if the presentation was split screen (one for the console, one for the deck).

Just a side comment, Minqi has an accent every now and then (I don't know, British?) during the presentation, and it would amuse me every time it happened. Hahaha.

PHP/MySQL
Now we enter a language where I've been focusing most of my self-learning effort on. I was expecting a re-cap on the basics of PHP but Joel went straight into the caveats of PHP. I think the assumption was that the concepts underlying the languages are very similar anyway, and can be picked up on the fly, and what's important is knowing what mistakes to avoid. That's very valid IMO and he covered many flaws that I never knew existed (probably because my level of programming is probably that of a Novice and never got complicated enough to realise it)

He has a lot of energy during his presentation, which is very appropriate for the last lesson. Although I can't say I understand some of what he is saying, I feel that it will be useful if I were to become a PhP programmer somewhere this semester. When that time comes, I will refer back to the slides and perhaps all will make perfect sense to me.

I wonder if he used any programs to assist with "slides" creation though. Given I have some webpage design experience, I know that formatting it from scratch is not easy and will definitely take significantly more time than just doing it in Powerpoint. If he used some programs to create his presentation, they will be very useful for the HTML5 project later on...

Conclusion
I don't know why I am writing a conclusion but maybe because of the number of reports I have written, any posts just doesn't feel right without it. I wrote this over National Day rally and the good initiatives are pretty good. /offtopic. Yes, Nala has 1 owner and 276,496 followers. Cardinality. #nonsenseconclusion


Thursday 14 August 2014

[W1] The Beginning

I was warned on Monday by Colin and a CS3216 alumni that as a biz student, I can tend to get alienated. Well, I believe that's for my own good to get me mentally prepared for what's coming up. I do believe in my ability to learn and integrate, especially with my affinity for all things tech.

Nonetheless, the bar has been set for CS3216. Unlike other modules which are still slowly introducing the topics and presenting interesting tidbits, the class started with everyone's engines all revved up. The extent? Already formed group for the final project and started thinking about what to do. The only other module I have that has achieved this level of intensity is the Business Field Service Project, which I have started months ago.

Definitely not a relaxing start to school hahahaha, but it's not bad either.

Friday 8 August 2014

[W0]

A year 4 Biz student, taking 3 modules this semester (Business Honours year project for the rest). A little old, I know..

My motivation for taking up this module is very simple. I am interested in app development and this module is the short-cut for me to pick up the ropes of app development within a structured learning environment (albeit minimally structured) as well as know people who are awesome at it.

^ That's my expectations for this module. 1. Learn programming. 2. Meet friends. ☺

Now for what I bring to the table for my (future) team. (Passion alone does not make me a useful member in these fast-paced project after all) I have some basic programming foundations, and rather decent designing skills. By designing I am referring to both my technical and artistic ability. This positions me nicely as someone suitable for front-end UI design, though I wouldn't say I am really that good at that. I am probably more suitable marketing the idea since, (excluding the MKT1003 Marketing module I have done 3 years back as a freshman) I have taken both MNO2009 Entrepreneurship and IS1112 e-Business Essentials which gives me a good amount of paper experience in marketing ideas and writing business proposals. Of course, amidst all the seriousness, I hope to inject some fun and laughter here and there as well!

Thanks for reading this. I hope to know all of you better, course-mates and tutors alike. Cheers!

P.S. In case you were wondering, I can't S/U this module because I only have 4 MCs of S/U left. ;)