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If you read a book, how much of it do you retain a few months after finishing it? If you try to recall, can you recall more than the summary on the back? I’ve always found it really hard to retain anything more than broad strokes of any book I’ve read. I was in San Francisco for a Stripe event where Andy Matuschak gave a talk about why books don’t work . While I’m not sure I agree with the premise…
2020 was not a normal year. With the pandemic and the lockdowns, I had a lot of time on my hands. Given that every plan I had made was cancelled by the virus, I put some time in on building products from scratch that people would want to use. Overall, I built two things with friends: soluchan.com , a website to help people preparing for competitive examinations in India, and funnel.fyi , a tool to…
I read a blog today that really resonated. The basic idea is that you should build stuff even if it doesn’t feel like the best thing that you could be building. It’s hard to come up with the best thing that you should be building. As such, it becomes very very easy to fall into a trap and feel like you need to postpone actually building your stuff for other things in favour of other stuff like…
It’s a month and 20 days late but my 1st Stripeversary badge came in!
I read this blog post and spent some time thinking about how writing skills have helped me become a better engineer so far (and how they could help in the future!). My first job was at a place where ALL communication happens in a public IRC channel. This basically meant that you need to be good at written communication to be able to have meaningful impact. So I understood the need to be able to…
You wake up, brush your teeth and decide to check Instagram. There’s the friend that’s doing better than you at life. There’s the friend that’s having fun at the vacation while you work your job. You decide that Instagram is too self-obsessed and decide to do something constructive. Maybe read the news, that’s a good thing, right? You should know what’s happening around the world. Well, another…
The East India Company started off innocently enough. In the 16th century, India accounted for 22% of the entire world’s GDP. The company decided to cash in on that and make some money trading with this exotic rich part of the world. The first century of their trade went relatively well, with everyone in the process getting rich. This is where corruption comes in. People in the company got rich in…
It’s been almost 5 months since I joined Stripe and I was recently looking at some of the culture guiding principles . I really love these and a lot of them are things I’ve lived by long before I had heard of Stripe, see optimism, urgency and focus. However, the one principle that really resonated with me was “we haven’t won yet”. Stripe is worth 35 billion dollars and processes billions of…
I watched Ad Astra today. It was a nice movie about how instead of looking at the stars and space for answers, we should maybe be looking in. But that’s not the point of this post. There was a moment in the movie that made me think. Brad Pitt is sending a message to his long lost father and a sentence in the message really stood out to me. “I’ve dedicated my life to the exploration of space”…
Thoughts on migrating a terabyte scale database to a new server in production for the first time. In the interest of making this blog an archive of interesting technical work that I do, I’m gonna write about the recent work I did while migrating the AcousticBrainz website from an old server to MetaBrainz’s relatively newer and shinier Hetzner infrastructure. This was the first time I worked with a…