Recent content on Notes to self
Stanford lecturer and entrepreneur Graham Weaver said this about getting unstuck : If you are stuck in a rut, answer these questions. What am I avoiding? Where do I start? How do I win today? What are the habits that are interfering with where I want to go?
Watched a video by Graham Weaver where he gives a “last lecture” to the graduating class of 2024 at Stanford Graduate School of Business, and he talks about what keeps us blocked from making progress on our dreams. We have two voices within us. One is the loud voice in our head which constantly protects us from danger and is very instinctive, and this is what keeps us from doing what…
My previous post about retirement was written by AI. I told Gemini that I needed to write a post, and then gave it a bullet list of things that I wanted to talk about. I also included instructions about what the tone of the post should be. Gemini did a decent job but it did not feel like I would have written that post, so I took the text and made a few changes. I removed the section headings,…
It’s been over a year since I quit my job. I think the technical term for it is “retirement,” but for a long time, I couldn’t bring myself to use that word. Stepping away from the regular grind was what I wanted, but actually accepting that my working life was over? That took a surprising amount of time to sink in. You can call it quits on paper, but it takes a while for…
In The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People , the first habit from the group “Private Victory” is “Be Proactive.” Covey defines proactivity so well that the answer to the question of how to be proactive is almost self evident. By nature, humans are proactive. If our lives are a function of conditioning and conditions, it is because we have, by conscious decision or by…
Andrej Karpathy recently gave a keynote at AI Startup School in San Francisco and he called it “ Software Is Changing (Again) ”. He laid down the current state of AI/LLM assisted programming, and where it is going. Software development has evolved in these steps: Software 1.0: code written by humans (started mid of last century) Software 2.0: programming neural nets with weights…
Move Slow and Fix Things : The author argues that moving slowly doesn’t mean you can’t make quick decisions. It’s just that the execution should be deliberate. Don’t wreak havoc along the way. Because the time to fix what you might break rarely comes. The Best Programmers I Know : The author lists some important traits of effective programmers. For example, he says, the…
Staying Relevant in the Tech Industry : Adaptability is key to thriving in tech. This article explores strategies for staying relevant, including continuous learning, embracing change, and building a strong professional network to navigate the ever-evolving industry. Digital hygiene : This article on digital hygiene by Andrej Karpathy explores practical tips for managing your online presence,…
Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years : This timeless blog post by Peter Norvig will continue to inspire software developers for years to come. It translates well to any skill because the foundation of effective learning is built upon the bedrock of being genuinely interested in that skill and pursuing it because it’s fun. Being a Technical Lead : New Technical Leaders have to quickly…
Team Topologies – Book Review : Dave Farley reviews the book “Team Topologies” by Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais. This book adds something important to our discipline: it defines an approach to using organizational structure as a tool to achieve better results in software. What it Means to be an Engineering Manager : These reflections offer one view into the realities and challenges…
Pressure to Merge : How often does the team discard a set of changes and go on to solve the problem a different way because of the discussion in the code review? The answer should be more often than “never” and less often than “usually”. Emerging Patterns in Building GenAI Products : As we move software products using generative AI technology from proof-of-concepts into…
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin delivered a lecture in Peking (now Beijing) about happiness on 28 December 1943. It was published as a book by the name On Happiness, and is worth a read. This book is now hard to find and hence I am sharing the text below for the curious. Note that he refers to Christianity a few times but if you replace that with whatever faith you like, the text still remains…
If you always wonder why managers won’t let you refactor, let us understand the reasons behind the decision. As a software developer, one of the most common frustrations is being denied the opportunity to refactor code. It’s a situation many of us have faced, where we see the potential for improvement but are met with resistance from managers and stakeholders. Understanding why this…
Untutored minds are very prone to mistake inferences for observations, and prepossessions for facts; their observations and their judgments are alike vitiated by dogma and prejudice; they do not seek to investigate, they seek to prove. The old proverb is inverted, believing is seeing. The student of science must pledge himself to do his best to eliminate prepossession and dogma from his judgments,…
Eliud Kipchoge , one of the running greats, shared the following advice with runners and others, on a podcast. Below, I present some of that guidance, rephrased in my own language. When you achieve something, celebrate. But soon start focusing on the next goal. Instead of focusing on success, focus on training and planning which can bring success. Do not sit and wait for success. Success is proof…
Reaching a goal or successfully executing a plan — one thing they have in common is that they need us to make progress. Our rate of success in reaching the short term goals is a good indicator of whether we will succeed at long term goals. This is because the one thing we need to do for the short term goal — make progress in the present — is also applicable to longer term goals but with an…
Recently I came across a nice tip in the book “Indistractable: How To Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life” by Nir Eyal. The author asserts that the solution to avoiding distractions is not to abstain from the things that are distracting us but to identify the inner triggers that lead to distraction and manage them instead. This is really powerful because now we can no longer…
Growing up, with no computers around me, the only way to know the definition of a new word was either to ask around or use a dictionary. Things changed with time and now — for decades — the fastest way to look up the meaning of a word is to check online. MacOS also provides a handy keyboard shortcut — CTRL + CMD + d to look up the word under the mouse pointer. With time, my…
Yesterday, I attended a roadshow by Google Cloud at the Novotel Hotel in Bellandur, Bengaluru. There were around two dozen attendees and a panel of six executives from some well-known companies. The panel discussion involved questions from the moderator, a Google employee, and they had said there would be time for audience questions at the end. Unfortunately, the panel discussion ran over time,…
In the world of software development, incidents and issues happen all the time; sometimes major ones but mostly minor. Some companies have well-defined checklists and rulebooks for handling incidents, perhaps because they move fast and break things often. Others do not have a rulebook because incidents are a rarity, and they let people’s best judgment prevail in terms of how these incidents…