I want my “smart” phone to be just smart enough not too smart. “Smart” phones were revolutionary when they came out in the market around 2007 with iPhone announcement in macworld and following immediately with Android, phones exploded. We immediately had Phone, Music Player, Navigation, Browser all in one hardware that you can carry in your pocket. This was revolutionary. Our hardware become so powerful, our phones are simply a mini super computer we carry around.
According to Martin Lorentzon, co-founder of Spotify,
“The value of your company is equal to the sum of the problems you are able to solve.”
“Sometimes, your work is critical in ways you might not realize. It transforms the lives of those who use your product, solving problems for them. Often, whether you’re a junior or senior in your field, you might not grasp who you’re helping. I want to emphasize how vital your work is, as it translates to the benefits experienced by users.
This article is purely my opinion. Take it or leave it.
People don’t realize mocking someone in name of fun with their body appearances, color or height or any other form of disability is not mocking the other, but showcasing oneself in poor light. I witnessed this in a recent encounter in a technical meet up. I know both folks, but one shaming the other in the name of joke was unacceptable.
I have never been prescriptive on my learning. But I felt there is a universal appeal to this set of learning I had. Everyone have their own learnings in their career, and they use it as their guiding north star. Here are my learnings that I learned hard way. To summarize, skills I want to write about are
Being Assertive Effective Communication Healthy Boundaries Being Assertive There is a fine line between Being Assertive, Aggressive or Being an Asshole.
Before I even write about this, I have to thank my wife who supported and allowing me to take time to write. It means she took additional responsibility of dealing with newborn and elder one. So, thank you for her.
Last year 2022, I made a decision to write one blog post weekly. I didn’t believe I can do that but still that is the purpose of goal setting to aim higher.
I am self reflecting in this blog. Every year brings everyone a new learning. I was once told by my friend,“ Instead of planning what to be done at the beginning of the year, let’s start reflecting the year went at the end. It will inform what you should do next year”
We are in this world where constant education is a constant thing. We learn from books, blogs, videos, by observing others and sometimes good-hearted fellows will come and give you a suggestion.
Overthinking - Art of creating problems that didn’t exist in the first place.
I wanted to do a job that I enjoy. We all do. But the challenge is figuring out what I enjoy. We are faced multitude of choices every day. The part I struggle when faced with a choice. What I enjoy ? Or Will it give me the satisfaction in long term ? Hard choices in life appear simple in its face value.
Past few months, I am working on changing few things in my life. I thought it is good time to document them and see down the line how they worked out. Did I persist with them ? What I learnt from them ?
Notifications One I felt important to mention, is turning off notifications on my phone. It is the single influential change for me in recent times. I notice when I turned off notifications, I am picking up my phone less than what I am used to.
I work with leaders and I consider that a privilege to see them in action. I have worked with a lot of leaders from my present and past. Furthermore, I was thinking what made them to be in that position. Is it knowledge, or they know people or natural ability to lead or decision-making ?
I am sure they are humans, and they are qualified to make mistakes. But what separates them out from the rest is their ability to do basic things with exceptional precision.
I was watching a cartoon series with my kid, and it was interesting to see a part where a tiger was questioning his father about all the things he is seeing from the car. The kid was curious and wanted to know all about things. Kid was a good observer. But as we grow up, we stop being curious and lack motivation to learn about anything. We are interested about saving money and taking care of problems at hand.
“I feel that I’m not entitled to have an opinion unless I can state the arguments against my position better than the people who are in opposition. ” - Charles T. Munger
In this modern social media world, everyone has an opinion on everything. People argue to justify their position and belief. I would imagine what would world look like without arguments or dissents. But Arguments are essential to learn perspectives and to know we all don’t know a lot.
We call it peace of mind, but actually all we want is peace from mind - Naval Ravikanth
I push myself to edge or point of no return. I encounter array of constant Zoom calls and meetings. My mind races to solve one technical problem after another. I get out of work to spend time with my family but hard to unwind. Mind still churning things from work. Pending tasks and things to prepare for tomorrow or an email I need to send.
I have my handful and far too many things pending in my to-do list. I am not sure where to focus. Let’s say 2 things in my to-do list like,
Read the book that is sitting on my shelf for months Write the article for my blog These two to-do are from my current list. I am not able to pick which one to do first. Also, while doing one thing, I am thinking about the next on my list.
Successful innovators are conservative. They have to be. They are not ‘risk-focused’; they are ‘opportunity-focused. - Peter Drucker
When Amazon reported a strong third-quarter revenue growth in year 2011, but indicated that they will spend more money to invest in continued growth, stock plummeted and traded lower at $181. Stocks was always bumpy when it came to Amazon in those years. It was due to the fact investors were derailed by short term results while company and its founder Jeff Bezos were playing long term game.
This is final part 5 of me documenting my journey into economics. In this I want to write about trade economics, generally called - Global Trade. Trade has grown so much in the past century, you can even define that it is an important development that has changed world. This integration of national economies has materialized into remarkable growth in trade between countries. World data from 2019 shows that trade openness (defined as country’s import-export as share of country’s GDP) has an average of 30% increased from 1950.
This is the part 4 of my economics journey series. You can read part 1, part 2, part 3. As I am summarizing my learning as a beginner here, I found growth theories more relatable than many before. This part covers the growth aspect of economics. So here we go with few definitions before we jump into theory.
Key Glossaries Positive Economics - Branch of economics that uses fact-based approach to explain an economic model.
“Stability is unstable.” - HYMAN MINSKY
Warning - This might be a boring part of economics in my opinion and it depends on how you see it. I personally love this part as it is the core in many respect.
This is continuing from my Part1 and Part 2 of my journey into economics.
Free Market Capitalism Understanding capitalism is key to understand many countries policies and growth. If you are working for a pay to maximize the profits for the owners, you are a part of capitalist system.
My Journey into Economics Part 2 - Classical Theories
An economist is an expert who will know tomorrow why the things he predicted yesterday didn’t happen today. - Laurence J. Peter
In Part 1, I laid out some key glossaries and here I want to write about some classical economic theories in a simple format. Obviously this is to offer a big picture to consume theory in less than a minute.
I have some basic idea of what economics is, mostly from reading news. Apart from that I don’t know much. I was asking to my ex-collegue on what is Stock and how to start investing. I googled a bit in parallel. He guided me into this journey. For me, stock is more of a practical way to learn the market. I learnt that I am not a theoritical person. You learn by doing is my way of learning a thing and read theory when you need.
“What you don’t know, you don’t miss” — Cecelia Ahern
Do you say, “I don’t know”? We rarely say and if you observe it is mostly to our inner circle. It is the place you are not being judged. We feel confident when we are not constantly being judged. We all want to look good to others. Furthermore, we dress to impress and tune our body language to look confident.
I wrote something like this back in 2020 during the peak pandemic. I want to write something I collected from then and put it down here.
Processes harden into routines.
When company decides to do something new, employees try out different approaches. But once it is locked down we don’t try to change much as it increases productivity and predictability. But established process have life of their own.
To know why, we have to start the story from Ashoka and his edicts he installed all over India back then.
Brahmi script is base for all Indian languages that is in use. Popularly known as Stick Figure script. This is an earliest writing system of South Asia, India after Indus Script. This script is adopted for Sanskrit, Prakrit, Tamil in its own way. The timeline of origin of this script is debated by scholars.
This is a guest post from my friend. I know this is first of many. I am excited that my friend decided to give a try in writing. He has chosen to remain anonymous. He lives in India with his wife and a daughter. Furthermore, he recently had a trip with friends. This article is his perspective and what he gained from the trip.
By the way, this is his first time writing an article or post of any kind out in public.
It’s always, “All About People”
The world we live in today often fails to recognize the value of human beings
Month of June was rough for our family with back to back illness. We were down and tired. I assume most had their phases like these. But then I organized a small mini party for my daughter’s birthday. A close group of people. 4 families. Few I knew in last couple of years and few bit more than that.
Envy kills happiness. By comparing ourselves with others takes focus away from oneself. By complaining, we forget to fix ourselves first.
In my native language Tamil, there is a work of ethics and way of living - Thirukural ( one of the best collection of work on ethics and morality). In fact, I made a website for my own reading - https://randomkural.herokuapp.com
ஏதிலார் குற்றம்போல் தங்குற்றங் காண்கிற்பின் தீதுண்டோ மன்னும் உயிர்க்கு. (190)
I personally do not have a routine. But I am seeing every single productive pundit out there is recommending to have one. It helps reduce the decision fatigue. Agatha Christie’s (a popular English writer known for her mystery novels) hero - Hercule Poirot, a famous fictional detective, always insist on method and order. He will have his routines and process on how he approaches his murder cases. It helps him to have a mind which is like a still water.
I thought I should title this “How to make effective decisions ?”, but sounded like click bait. But rather true to the content of this article, I mentioned, “Decision Fatigue”. This is real and many don’t realize this.
Do you know why Mark Zuckerberg wears a monotonous grey t-shirt, or why Steve Jobs used to keep his morning routines almost the same ? They are all trying to avoid making decisions when then can.
I use to quote in my workplace, “OLD is GOLD”. It doesnt mean I support all the old things, but we have to learn all the lessons we got from the past and use that to move forward. In similar vein older people have a radically different view point than the younger folks. Old people have seen life and again it doesnt we have to take everything but certainly if you talk to many old folks, you will see a pattern.
Many people might have heard of language Sanskrit. It was recently I personally came across language named Avestan. Before we dive further, I want to draw out this quick language chart for your reference so you can follow along.
If you notice, Avestan and Sanskrit had a common ancestor. It branched out while retaining some traits. Languages affect cultures and vice versa. Old Avestan is quite close in both grammar and lexicon to Vedic Sanskrit, the oldest Indo-Aryan language (Most of the Vedic texts are written with)
Of course I browse Twitter, favourite way to spend time in an unproductive(mostly true!!) way. But I did come across some fascinating parts of history. So, thought to put them together here. Let’s go.
Eiffel Tower Eiffel Tower during construction. 1887-1889. pic.twitter.com/QajO8H9xcN
— History Defined (@historydefined) May 29, 2022 Roman Facial Cream 2000 year-old Roman face cream/lotion. Dating back to II AD. Object was found in the temple complex dedicated to Mars.
You might think that’s a straight forward question. It is an animated cartoon series, with vivid colors and ear warming rhymes that revolves around a small baby JJ. In year 2020 cocomelon YouTube channel had the highest viewership traffic. It is also the top watched series in Netflix. Would you believe that ? They make $11 million in advertising revenue. Don’t doubt it, as they have 2.5 billions views every month on YouTube.
I wanted to learn about Lithium and its future. Personally all I write in this article is much browsed and written for my future reference. I learnt a quite new in here. Hope you too.
World you can say now relies much on technology. Increasingly any kind of business now rely on technology in one way or the other. There are many contributors to it. More underwater cables, powerful and cheaper devices (computers, phones ), Automations ( think Robots), Cars running with software products on it (think Tesla, Electric Vehicles, new version of cars).
Are you mentally strong ? How do you know ? By the way, do you know yourself well enough ? These are some questions I thought to write about. Of course, I am not here to motivate anyone. But rather I want to write based on me watching people and my close friends. How some differentiate themselves being strong minded and face adversity.
For example, let me share some stories without naming my friends ( they know who they are :) ).
One thing that always make people turn in their seats is when someone disagrees. We generally don’t disagree well and end up burning bridges. I have my own experiences in the past where I learned some lessons on disagreements. As with everyone, I too learn from experience, some are hard lessons to swallow. Nevertheless, they are lessons and I make sure not to repeat them.
So I ended up making some notes and as always I keep notes and reference with what some of the people I follow and observe from distant.
“Adventure in life is good; consistency in coffee even better.” ― Justina Chen Headley, North of Beautiful
In part 1 article I wrote about the history and how coffee roasting is a first key step for a great coffee. Location influences coffee’s taste, also the cultivation methods. In this part, we will see how cultivation, harvesting, milling and roasting all contribute to a great cup of coffee.
A favorite drink for many, consumed historically for many hundred years. A drink consumed at an estimated 2.25 billion cups everyday globally. Coffee has history and story of its own. As a coffee lover, I want to share its origin and spread and its first step in process - Roasting. Moreover, I come from southern India where Coffee has a strong presence culturally. Now being in U.S, which is a coffee drinking country, writing about coffee naturally fits in my blog.
Somewhere along the way, you hear a story. It doesn’t matter who said it but stays with you for long time or forever. I thought I want to write them down as these stories had an impact on me.
Good thing about these stories, they are short. If you have not heard these stories before, let me know, I will be glad that I shared something new.
Story 1: Please tie a cat ?
This article is a long due for me. Idea originated like 6 years back when I was in my low of lows. People who know me then, know what I am referring to. Even if not it was a phase where I realized life’s worth.
I recently came across this phrase - Memento Mori. It translates to Remember you will die . Death always has a negative connotation. But remembering death brings a sense of humility to your life and urgency towards your goals and living the life way you want.
Success is a target but a wrong metric by which you should measure how well you are doing. We all want to win but when focus is on winning, we are too late to change anything. It is a Lag Measure .
Recently, I was in a meeting were team was analyzing an Issue report. Issues have a time before which Team has to resolve them. If they are past time, it is marked late.
When there is a learned or observed understanding on how things work in life, they usually come to see a pattern. Pattern’s purpose is to help one navigate and understand this world better. So here’s a small list of laws or fallacies that I find interesting.
Pareto Principle 80/20 rule - came about in context of quality control. Can be applied in many fields. E.g 80% profit comes from 20% customer 80% land is owned by 20% people 80% activity comes from 20% of people in the community 80% of work is done by 20% of people and it goes on and on.
Writing is need of the hour Writing is so essential in these days that many think it is only for writers or novelist. But if you turn around everyone writes in one form or other. You write email, documentation, chat, tweet, a facebook post. With the advent of pandemic, face to face interactions have reduced. We need to write more than ever.
what is that really stops you from reading this text that is this long and why cant I continue to write this like and still have your attention and what in this sentence is something making you hard to follow what I am writing.
Chennai is a mega city or metro city. Capital of TamilNadu, India. Houses major port and an important city both politically, historically, culturally. I want to go backward in time and find when history of Chennai starts. Let you join my journey of findings. I am from this city’s suburb. I was trying to see what I could see Chennai from historical perspective. During british rule, it has been center for many important historic events.
Every year there will be certain articles that standout. I want to record for the fact what I read and revisit them when I can in the future. If it also interest you, take a read. It has everything from general reads, technology and long reads. I like to read whatever I get my hands and found fascinating and couple YouTube videos. These have definitely expanded my view a bit.
There is always this fight between should do things to fix it for now or fix it for good. You might think it’s an easy choice. Fix it for good. But it ain’t that easy as it sounds like. Too many variables come into the play that deter you to take you away from fixing it for good and will make you take the easy way out.
Life is all about choices.
Title is so ambiguous, that I thought I will keep it this way.
Let me start with defining Ambiguity. [Ambi] as a term means Two, two meanings. A statement interpreted in 2 different ways, it leads to ambiguity. Ambiguity is not uncertainty. Uncertainty is more of things we cannot deduce or where it can lead us to. But Ambiguity is more of, possibility of admitting more than one interpretation.
I came across this Blog Post. I liked it for its analogy on importance of big picture in our life. We get lost in details when sometime have to step back to see why those details matter. I guess we can apply this analogy for everything in life. Some fights over minor details might not matter when you step back and analyze.
I recently read a story which goes like this -
Lagom is an idea which I was introduced to by a youtube video
I want to write my thoughts over this concept. When searched youtube, many videos popped up. The core concept being everything in moderation. We can also think as just about right. Everything right sized keeps you away from impressing others and start living. Nothing should not be too much or too little.
Living your life with purpose which is something Ikigai from Japan introduced us.
I want to make a quick note for myself about this idea on this concept “Braving” from this Book “Dare To Lead”. Couple of things stand out for me in here. Change starts from us. Another thought is Leader needs to get comfortable saying NO and have a long term thinking. It starts from doing the right thing over easy. All the more, we can lead others only by knowing oneself well.
Simple means focusing on essentials. It’s hard to keep our focus on main things. To let main things be main things. Focusing on few things at a given point in time is important. Simple things when done consistently yield results in long term. Similar to how you start your meditation practice, by focusing on your breath or When you start your training in gym, by doing focusing on basics. Before we dive deep into anything, it is important to focus and train hard on basics.
Life is short to get stuck in a rut, learning is the only way out.
When you go to work, you are working with bunch of people. Every one of them have their own aspirations and style of working. Work in today’s world is not done by force but by mutual support and coordination.
In a Corporate setup, we all work towards the same goal by contributing in our respective roles.
I read articles, blogs, podcast, follow people I respect and like. In year 2020 it was bit more consumption as I was home most of the time. I like to read up something outside of what my profession is to help me connect dots. I am not including any Covid-19 articles, as I believe everyone would have read so much about it in the past year.
Some of best articles I read in the past year for me to revisit and share.
What we believe is who we are. Mind is constrained by our beliefs. When we are born into this world we don’t have belief. We are born with only fear of falling. Child lacks fear and does not believe in anything. As we grow up, we start forming our belief system based on our experiences. Should our past experience define us ?
Self-Comforting State Humans generally avoid risks when possible. We don’t see further down the road how a particular action can have a damaging effect.
Art of War - a work of 5th century BC by Sun Tzu, having 13 chapters. Every chapter is about warfare strategy and tactics. It explains general’s tactics and has influenced east-asian military warfare. Many generals have drawn inspiration from this book.
More you absorb this book, you can see through the text and you realize the text can be applied to modern leadership even in this industrial age. So my idea with this post is to my interpret and apply to current context of leadership and management of a team.
Awesome Falsehood - a curated list of Links How to Estimate UseNet Archive How to Ask Questions - Etsy Debriefing CDNs are not only for Caching How to answer well to a question Managing Technical Quality Mathematics Better Explained Linear Algebra-4th edition Distributed Systems Distributed Systems Patterns Random Architect Notes
Howard Schultz
Being Entrepreneur Cost to starting business today is lot easier due to technology Have a great discipline and thoughtfulness Balancing responsibility for customer and investors.
Self-Doubt All people have some insecurity. Self-Doubt is common. Personal decision—are you willing to sacrifice for this endeavor. Have courage and conviction Ability to look back and live your life to the fullest. If you know you have it, just jump into the pool.
My notes don’t do justice for the videos I watched. Clarity in his words and their crispness, careful selection of insights of his time as CEO. No nonsense beating around the bush kind of lessons.
I personally believe leader needs to have clarity, eye for details and empathy for people. But there are other facets of being leader, which is:
Good Negotiation skills Risk Taking Ability Oozing Optimism Fairness But what I believe is being reinforced and opening new set of skills into the toolbox, these lessons are priceless.
Your time is limited. Have courage to follow your heart and gain experience. Live your life and not anyone else’s. Avoid stupidity. Find the points that’s hurting the most and fix it. Basically figure out the low hanging fruits Always focus on bottlenecks. read this wiki Humans desire what others desire. Its called Herd mentality. Develop your own desire and specialize Only way to do a great work, is to enjoy while you do it Closer you are with people, who share the same equality , will tend to fight more Avoid competition.
Communication is a secret sauce for success in any field. Communicate an idea in a concise,simple way. We are social creatures, who interact on constant basis for various needs. Words matter a lot. It can show others if you are empathetic or arrogant. It can connect, blossom new friendship, or break it.
Let me tell you about my experience a bit I spoke for the first time on stage while I was in my school.
Pitch your Idea Negative/Self-Critical “WhatIf” Scenarios Overcome Fear of failure Present the Big Picture. Sell your Idea Kindle their imagination Timing Follow up Promiseland Let me tell you a story from my little experience I had Help them make the Decision Black & White Be the messiah What happens next … ? One more thing.. Everyone has Ideas. Converting an idea to real life thing is hard.
Library Explorer Eloquent Javascript Modern Javascript Info Regex for Beginners - Visual Guide How Browsers work Deep Javascript Practical Python Programming Teach yourself CS Math basics for Deep Learning Robust Client-Side Javascript BEAM Book Intense Intro to Cryptography Emergency Remote Book on WebRTC ML from Scratch Architecture of Open Source Linux from scratch Shape Up - Product Management from Basecamp Strategize - Product Management
My take away From CEO of Shopify and 5-hour energy drink. Need a good product Need bit of luck You can do everything right, but without a good product you will still fail Need to figure out who your audience or target customers are. There are different kind of normal people with different background. Identifying and focusing on them is very important. On parenting, from Manoj Bhargava if you raised your son bad, why give him money.
One of a prominent person I follow on Twitter. Some of his tweets are really profound and to the point. If you don’t know who is he here is the wiki link
His Twitter handle here and some of my good reads have been in his blog post
His tweets and blog are wealth of knowledge if you looking for advice on enterpreneurship, wealth and life in general.
So I try to put together some of his words here which I have read over a period of time.
Munger explained in a 1994 speech at University of Southern California What is elementary, worldly wisdom? Well, the first rule is that you can’t really know anything if you just remember isolated facts and try and bang ‘em back. If the facts don’t hang together on a latticework of theory, you don’t have them in a usable form. You’ve got to have models in your head. And you’ve got to array your experience—both vicarious and direct—on this latticework of models.
You can see more reading links here
Physics Feynman Lectures on Physics (vol 1) Feynman Lectures on Physics (vol 2) Front End Javascript - ReIntroduction Finance Whats a financial statement in simple words System Design System Design for Advanced Beginners DataStructures & Algorithms CS50 Open courseware http://www.project5050.org/ CS50 TV CS50.tv Startup Ycombinator Library Soft Skills How to write in a plain english Presentation- Speaker Deck Java Best Practies for Testing in Java Data Kaggle Datasets Product Management Notes on PM
HTML and CSS is hard - Good basic tutorial HTML - Notepad javascript algorithms Writing Modular code Node JS Module Patterns Modern network load balancing and proxying Youtube - Joe Armstrong Youtube - TCP/IP and Subnet masking My Tech Stack Blog Machine/Deep Learning Markdown Cheatsheet Boomerang Chrome Extension Processor Design Mindset Kit - Growth Mindset Mentoring Google Code Review Hacker news alternative Startup Decks networking in AWS U1 chip Revolution kubernetes networking kernel Linux doc Calculus - The best intro you ever get - from MIT What is OAuth - Illustrated Guide SSH Handshake explained db performance Freecodecamp - Docker Primer on Database Replication Intro to ZFS AWS Architect Prep System Design Concepts Books E-Books in public
Original Article I wrote here is Essence of Scrum Guide
Lightweight Simple to understand Difficult to master Bind together events, roles, artifacts and interactions between them Based on Empiricism - Knowledge comes from experience and making decisions based on what is known Three Pillars Transparency Inspection Adaptation Transparency - Process must be visible for those responsible for the outcome. Inspection - Frequent inspection of scrum artifacts and detect undesirable variance Adaptation - Adjustments to be made ASAP to minimize further deviations from acceptable limits Four Formal Events Sprint Planning Daily Scrum Sprint Review Sprint Retrospective Scrum Players Scrum Team
Hey, I am Ram. I started as Software Engineer. Over the course of my career, have taken up different roles. As a programmer, Tech Lead, Solution Architect, Product Lead. I enjoy creative work. I try to see if I can do things any better and there always is a better way.
Projects Json Server Framework I worked on this as quick hack to build it for some mocking for a project.