About me

Amin Ariana (résumé) is a Senior Software Design Engineer from San Francisco Bay Area (M.S., B.C.S., MCSD), in the social, mobile, and advertisement domains. 

As an engineering manager, he advocates for lean and responsive engineering practices and architectures; and as a software entrepreneur, he envisions, contextually designs and technically develops Android Mobile and Internet-based consumer-facing products. 

Amin Ariana

@aminariana

Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes.

- Edsger Dijkstra


Entrepreneur Colleagues

Paul Hounshell

What I'm doing these days ...

  • I love San Francisco! Yes, this is an announcement: I love San Francisco.My love affair probably started 20 years ago when I didn't quite know about the city and used to play ...
    Posted Jun 7, 2011, 4:16 PM by Amin Ariana
  • Calling on Android entrepreneurs Copied from my blog:"I have partnered up with a friend from CMU. We are writing a brand new  location-aware social Android Mobile App with a comprehensive road-map ...
    Posted Feb 5, 2011, 6:35 PM by Amin Ariana
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Essays on software

Software Engineering Management

  • Common Pitfalls in Software: Pay Your Taxes These are some excerpts from the article "How to write a good PRD" by Martin Cagan from Silicon Valley Product Group:"One of the common pitfalls, especially with follow-on ...
    Posted Feb 5, 2011, 5:48 PM by Amin Ariana
  • A $300M acquisition and the Agile question In Searching for Safety (1988), Aaron Wildavsky argued that trial and error, rather than the precautionary principle, is the best way to manage risks (Wikipedia). In the 1999 book "The ...
    Posted Feb 5, 2011, 5:48 PM by Amin Ariana
  • Technical Interview Questions One of my roles in my new position at Adify is to interview computer scientists and software engineers who wish to join our team and company. When I look at ...
    Posted Apr 13, 2012, 3:50 PM by Amin Ariana
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Early Stage Startups

  • Quotes on changing the world Ambition"Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great."- Mark ...
    Posted Dec 2, 2012, 11:25 AM by Amin Ariana
  • Lean Startups and Early Markets I'm quoting a golden paragraph from the "High-Tech Marketing Enlightenment" chapter of Geoffrey A. Moore's amazing book, Crossing the Chasm: "... the basis for reform is the principle ...
    Posted Jul 11, 2011, 11:15 AM by Amin Ariana
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Software Technical Interview Questions

  • Binary Tree Topologies It's my birthday today. Now why in the name of a thousand coders on an "unplugged" vacation would I be writing the answer to a coding question on my ...
    Posted Jun 11, 2012, 6:03 PM by Amin Ariana
  • Cycle Detection Tags: Moderate, graphsProblem descriptionYou have a directed connected graph. (for bonus points, drop the "connected" assumption) Write an algorithm that detects a cycle, if any exists, and returns ...
    Posted Feb 15, 2011, 4:11 PM by Amin Ariana
  • Maximum contiguous sub-matrix Tags: Moderate, dynamic programmingProblem descriptionGiven an N-dimensional matrix of n elements of signed integer type, find the contiguous sub-matrix with the maximum sum.Simplified version: Given ...
    Posted Feb 4, 2011, 5:53 PM by Amin Ariana
  • Least common ancestor Tags: Moderate, data structure transformationProblem descriptionYou have a tree data structure. The ancestors of a given node are defined to be the node itself, its direct parent, or ...
    Posted Nov 30, 2011, 3:30 PM by Amin Ariana
  • Levenshtein edit distance Tags: Difficult, dynamic programmingProblem description(From Wikipedia) In information theory and computer science, the Levenshtein distance is a metric for measuring the amount of difference between two sequences (i ...
    Posted Feb 4, 2011, 5:21 PM by Amin Ariana
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Thoughts on hacking

  • Facebook Social Applications Introduction(Aug. 25, '07) I wrote a few Facebook apps for fun. This is an opinion article I wrote based on the experiences I learned from the first few efforts ...
    Posted Feb 15, 2011, 4:58 PM by Amin Ariana
  • Applied Computer Science Interesting (and not so interesting) problemsRubik's Cube:Rubik's Cubes are, in contrast to Sudoku puzzles, problems. They require a strategy to make choices from a number of ...
    Posted Feb 5, 2011, 6:12 PM by Amin Ariana
  • Going after motivation with a club (Dec. '08) After returning from Europe in October, I visited family in Canada and then moved to Seattle again. I needed the mountains and the tall trees to be able ...
    Posted Feb 15, 2011, 4:27 PM by Amin Ariana
  • Nevermind the bollocks (Oct. '08) I took some time off. I went around Europe for about 80 days and backpacked through 22 countries. It's amazing how much your perspective about life and ...
    Posted Feb 4, 2011, 6:28 PM by Amin Ariana
  • Haskell programming language Why Haskell?A letter from my friend Sean E. Johnson on the virtues of Haskell:"Hey Amin,I mentioned Haskell while I was over at your place, but I did ...
    Posted Dec 6, 2010, 2:02 PM by Amin Ariana
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