Email me at awais@post.harvard.edu
This summer, I read Apple in China by Patrick McGee, which Stratechery called “one of the best books about Apple ever written” . It prompted me to look in more detail at Steve Jobs’s return to Apple in 1997. I had assumed that Steve Jobs's
I am a software engineer turned founder / CTO. My O-1A petition was approved in ~1 week with premium processing, and was sponsored by the company I co-founded. I met 4 of the 8 ‘extraordinary ability’ eligibility criteria required for the O-1.
100,000 - 200,000 years ago → Homo Sapiens evolve 50,000 years ago → Humans acquire language 10,000 years ago → Agriculture develops 3300 BCE → Start of the bronze age 2600 BCE → Great Pyramid at Giza built 1325 BCE → Death of King Tutankhamun 1200 BCE
Like, I assume, everyone else, I have days when I am more focused and motivated and other days when I am less so. What I have found helpful on the low-focus days is to work through the list of questions below. If a question triggers a response beyond a
A Crowdsourced Religious/Spiritual Text | A Programming Language for Argumentation | Showing Historical Timelines Side-by-Side
There are always multiple ways to do the same thing. The thing you want is deprecated. Examples only serve to make the documentation bloated. You will always forget which xml property you need. The inline error will disappear in 30 seconds, or when you rebuild, whichever is later. When in
Most conversations are not consciously structured ahead of time. Rather, the shape they take emerges organically through the people who are present. A few recent experiences have led me to believe that while there is nothing wrong with these kinds of organic, unstructured conversations, there are lots of incredibly effective
Over the new year, I spent 9 days on a meditation retreat at the Insight Meditation Center in Barre, Massachusetts at a course run by the folks at the Insight Meditation Society (IMS).
Winners Take All Anand Giridharadas I first came across Anand Giridharadas in an "Authors at Google" talk on YouTube which was part of his book tour for this book. I remember that he was pulling no punches as he critiqued the neoliberal elite in general, and the tech
About a year ago, I came across this blog post by James Routley, where he explains his approach to keeping track of work-related notes. His "logbook" is a collection of Markdown files, stored in a single folder, and named according to the date they were created. This
This article contains spoilers! This week I read Jhumpa Lahiri's "The Namesake". My favourite sections, I think, were the scenes of Ashima and Ashoke (Gogol's parents) at the beginning of the book. They are plucked from their familiar homes in East India and pulled
When I was in London, I tried on several occasions to write down the frustrations I had with life in the city. Each time I failed because I could not avoid, in my own mind, coming across as embittered or defective - as though I had made a mistake (or a
It is a hot day. I’ve been told the Wagha border ceremony is something worth seeing, but I don’t yet know about the peacock hats, the funny dances, the 6ft tall soldiers and the fanfare. In a few weeks, I will travel from India to Pakistan
I think a lot about “complexity”, in an abstract sense, and the mechanisms we have for coping with complex situations. In the physical sciences, there is a concept called “coarse-graining” which essentially means simplifying a system in a way that captures its most relevant properties.
Under what conditions is a person qualified to hold an opinion? This is a question that to me feels especially relevant in the modern day where it’s possible to quickly learn about a new topic, to feign expertise, and to get opinions out into the world. On one