[{"content":"People often think of coding as an extension of writing and even the discourse on the internet agrees with this notion and I don\u0026rsquo;t agree with this notion. Let me explain why. Creative writing, which is the one often talked about and respected, happens when you consciously flex your creative muscles and start exploring the thought space. The tool you employ to materialize your thoughts in words is the natural language, which has a diverse set of features(metaphors, irony\u0026hellip;). There is no structure you\u0026rsquo;ve to adhere to and if you\u0026rsquo;re skilled enough you can even create space for ambiguity in writing.\nWhereas in coding the tool you employ is a language which has been stripped off of ambiguity. And also the thought space is very limited and effectively you\u0026rsquo;re dictating a deterministic system. So the claim that coding is an extension of writing and being a good coder translates to good writer is a bogus one.\nThe last thing, the tools and interfaces one uses to explore the possibilities will ultimately dictate the journey and destination.\n","permalink":"https://aneessh18.github.io/coding-isnt-writing/","summary":"\u003cp\u003ePeople often think of coding as an extension of writing and even the discourse on the internet agrees with this notion and I don\u0026rsquo;t agree with this notion. Let me explain why. Creative writing, which is the one often talked about and respected, happens when you consciously flex your creative muscles and start exploring the thought space. The tool you employ to materialize your thoughts in words is the natural language, which has a diverse set of features(metaphors, irony\u0026hellip;). There is no structure you\u0026rsquo;ve to adhere to and if you\u0026rsquo;re skilled enough you can even create space for ambiguity in writing.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Coding isn't Writing"},{"content":" CountDownLatch is effectively a centralized barrier where the gate is closed until the set timer is exhausted Using sychronized block is an effective solution for most of the problems. If multiple threads are trying to access the critical section of a particular resource, then is better to have a lock (mutex) on the resource itself. For ex: In case of ticket booking systems, every ticket must be represented as an object and it should have private Object which is used as lock for mutations. This way only the threads competing for the same resources are blocked, instead of linearising all of them. TBC.\n","permalink":"https://aneessh18.github.io/notes-on-concurrency/","summary":"\u003col\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eCountDownLatch is effectively a centralized barrier where the gate is closed until the set timer is exhausted\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eUsing \u003ccode\u003esychronized\u003c/code\u003e block is an effective solution for most of the problems.\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eIf multiple threads are trying to access the critical section of a particular resource, then is better to have a lock (mutex) on the resource itself. For ex: In case of ticket booking systems, every ticket must be represented as an object and it should have private \u003ccode\u003eObject\u003c/code\u003e which is used as lock for mutations. This way only the threads competing for the same resources are blocked, instead of linearising all of them.\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003c/ol\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eTBC.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Notes on Concurrency - 1"},{"content":"\nI abandoned some of my projects because they weren\u0026rsquo;t original enough. I was trying too hard to create something original until I realised that it was a foolish ambition. There might be a few number of people who can create something original from their very first step. Even by then they have slogged enough to exhaust all the mundane ideas that surfaced in their head. But from the vast swaths of the human population greatness/novelty/originality is more of an iterative process where you exhaust all the bad ideas (obviously with optimisations) until you start hitting with the good ones.\nThe only goal I have this year is to be a newer version of myself. A fresh perspective.\n","permalink":"https://aneessh18.github.io/trying-to-be-original/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"being-original\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/assets/being-orginal.png\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI abandoned some of my projects because they weren\u0026rsquo;t original enough. I was trying too hard to create something original until I realised that it was a foolish ambition. There might be a few number of people who can create something original from their very first step. Even by then they have slogged enough to exhaust all the mundane ideas that surfaced in their head. But from the vast swaths of the human population greatness/novelty/originality is more of an iterative process where you exhaust all the bad ideas (obviously with optimisations) until you start hitting with the good ones.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Trying to be Original"},{"content":"From very early on, we\u0026rsquo;re Trained/Prepared on multiple fronts to survive in life so much that we abandon our intuition and start behaving on a formulaic basis. This type of lifestyle (where you\u0026rsquo;re always simulating situations to tackle) requires effort and every second feels like a juncture where decisions are to be made. This sort of lifestyle arises from the assumption that patterns constitute life and you\u0026rsquo;ll do fine given that you master the patterns. This breeds a society where a situation is filtered through the training dataset to find whether we can model the situation. Unbeknownst to the followers of this philosophy, their intuitive capabilities are being sidelined. I\u0026rsquo;m not against Training regiments, rather the purpose of the regiment should serve to hone the intuition. The problem with too much training is that it gets preachy quickly and serves a gospel to the follower. Instead of being in a zone where you let your mind take control and react to situations, you\u0026rsquo;re left with the mind being in control of somebody (of course metaphorically ) and driving the situation. Now this is a spot of bother because you\u0026rsquo;re not acting naturally and playing by the rules that are established by the person who designed your preparation material. This can be observed with most of the politicians when they\u0026rsquo;re on important debates, they act by the political consultants and strategists. But some great debaters react to situations instead of facing them. And Vivek Ramasamy is one among them. When he was pressed on to take sides on a contentious political issue in All In Pod, he issued a disclaimer saying that he is forming the arguments on the fly and are subject to change as and when new evidence is found, which is a lot honest than just sticking to the rhetoric imposed by the campaign managers. Training in itself isn\u0026rsquo;t necessarily bad, but not at the cost of intuition. Ultimately, one should forego training after developing intuition and letting it drive the situation.\n","permalink":"https://aneessh18.github.io/embrace-intuition/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eFrom very early on, we\u0026rsquo;re Trained/Prepared on multiple fronts to survive in life so much that we abandon our intuition and start behaving on a formulaic basis. This type of lifestyle (where you\u0026rsquo;re always simulating situations to tackle) requires effort and every second feels like a juncture where decisions are to be made. This sort of lifestyle arises from the assumption that patterns constitute life and you\u0026rsquo;ll do fine given that you master the patterns. This breeds a society where a situation is filtered through the training dataset to find whether we can model the situation. Unbeknownst to the followers of this philosophy, their intuitive capabilities are being sidelined.\nI\u0026rsquo;m not against Training regiments, rather the purpose of the regiment should serve to hone the intuition. The problem with too much training is that it gets preachy quickly and serves a gospel to the follower. Instead of being in a zone where you let your mind take control and react to situations, you\u0026rsquo;re left with the mind being in control of somebody (of course metaphorically ) and driving the situation. Now this is a spot of bother because you\u0026rsquo;re not acting naturally and playing by the rules that are established by the person who designed your preparation material. This can be observed with most of the politicians when they\u0026rsquo;re on important debates, they act by the political consultants and strategists. But some great debaters react to situations instead of facing them. And Vivek Ramasamy is one among them. When he was pressed on to take sides on a contentious political issue in All In Pod, he issued a disclaimer saying that he is forming the arguments on the fly and are subject to change as and when new evidence is found, which is a lot honest than just sticking to the rhetoric imposed by the campaign managers.\nTraining in itself isn\u0026rsquo;t necessarily bad, but not at the cost of intuition. Ultimately, one should forego training after developing intuition and letting it drive the situation.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Embrace Intuition, Be Reactive"},{"content":"An important realisation that I learned the hard way is that don\u0026rsquo;t ever expect anything from your manager, by default. This realisation has been paramount to me because it implies a lot of other things professionally. Most managers aren\u0026rsquo;t that good, law of averages, and they are walking a tightrope. Expecting too much of them is waiting to watch yourself fail.\nI used to hold my 1-1s with my manager as sacred. But they were as worthless as empty shells. Devoid of any substance and meaningful interaction. Turns out my fellow colleagues also had similar stories to tell. This eventually led me to believe that aspiring to work under a great manager to catapult your professional career is a ludicrous goal as it is akin to hoping for a generational politician to uplift the human conditions in a country(too much, I know).\nHere is a great blog post explaining the concept of \u0026ldquo;Managers of One\u0026rdquo;\n","permalink":"https://aneessh18.github.io/manage-yourself/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eAn important realisation that I learned the hard way is that don\u0026rsquo;t ever expect anything from your manager, by default. This realisation has been paramount to me because it implies a lot of other things professionally. Most managers aren\u0026rsquo;t that good, law of averages, and they are walking a tightrope. Expecting too much of them is waiting to watch yourself fail.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI used to hold my 1-1s with my manager as sacred. But they were as worthless as empty shells. Devoid of any substance and meaningful interaction. Turns out my fellow colleagues also had similar stories to tell. This eventually led me to believe that aspiring to work under a great manager to catapult your professional career is a ludicrous goal as it is akin to hoping for a generational politician to uplift the human conditions in a country(too much, I know).\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Manage Yourself"},{"content":"I used to play safe even when there was nothing at stake. To play safe is to accept that there is an inherent risk in doing otherwise. Or else, you are not challenging yourself enough which will lead to an inanely boring life. It hit me hard when I realised that I could challenge myself in diluted terms and it would only mean personal growth.\nTackling intellectually difficult problems is one such case where there is only an upside, even when you don\u0026rsquo;t succeed. I used to shy away from them because I knew the end result. But now, I don\u0026rsquo;t hesitate to look at them. Another surprising realisation is that people gravitate towards others who tackle difficult problems. And Theodore Roosevelt agrees with me, “Nothing in the world is worth having or worth doing unless it means effort, pain, difficulty… I have never in my life envied a human being who led an easy life. I have envied a great many people who led difficult lives and led them well.”\n","permalink":"https://aneessh18.github.io/playing-safe/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eI used to play safe even \u003cstrong\u003ewhen there was nothing at stake\u003c/strong\u003e. To play safe is to accept that there is an inherent risk in doing otherwise. Or else, you are not challenging yourself enough which will lead to an inanely boring life. It hit me hard when I realised that I could challenge myself in diluted terms and it would only mean personal growth.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eTackling intellectually difficult problems is one such case where there is only an upside, even when you don\u0026rsquo;t succeed. I used to shy away from them because I knew the end result. But now, I don\u0026rsquo;t hesitate to look at them. Another surprising realisation is that people gravitate towards others who tackle difficult problems. And Theodore Roosevelt agrees with me, “Nothing in the world is worth having or worth doing unless it means effort, pain, difficulty… I have never in my life envied a human being who led an easy life. I have envied a great many people who led difficult lives and led them well.”\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Playing Safe"},{"content":"There are numerous reasons to prefer a Monorepo to Microrepos and this post is about the de-duplication. More often than not, when a team size crosses 20, a Microrepo fanatic raises his hand and starts advocating a move for dissolving the Monorepo. \u0026ldquo;Build times are high\u0026rdquo;, \u0026ldquo;getting blocked by other teams\u0026rdquo;, \u0026ldquo;easier path to cloud\u0026rdquo;, \u0026ldquo;drawing boundaries\u0026rdquo;, and \u0026ldquo;everyone else is doing it, why not us\u0026rdquo; would be some of the reasons that get tossed around in upper echelons of management. Unsurprisingly, no one objects to this proposal. Proposals discussed, Jiras created, and smaller pods formed to work in silos.\nBut the repercussions are surfaced only after a year. All the initial momentum of cross-collaboration gets tossed out of the window. And one immediate effect of decreased collaboration is duplication of effort. Common functionality that is supposed to sit in one modular is present across two code bases ,DRY principle is violated several times in terms of the effort, as the smaller pods are reinventing the same wheel. The general advice in such scenarios would be to have a common codebase so that the effort gets deduplicated. But in reality, there isn\u0026rsquo;t enough visibility across the pods and there is no forced collaboration between those pods which will again lead to duplication of effort.\nWhereas, if you\u0026rsquo;re operating a Monorepo there is a need for collaboration, which isn\u0026rsquo;t pleasant at first. You need the patience to weather the inertia that people have against forced collaboration. And the benefits are observed after 6-8 months when people reap those benefits of faster execution and acquire a shared understanding of the codebase across the whole team.\nTo have a noteworthy Monorepo you need a good manager who has some sort of expertise in Domain knowledge and mid-term vision. Otherwise, you will be looking down a bottomless pit of people ranting about the frequent issues and the only solution would be re-engineering the whole system. There is a caveat here if you\u0026rsquo;re operating a services-oriented (the smaller pods have different working agendas and not a singular goal) team then the benefits of Monorepos are a tad less when compared to product-oriented teams.\n","permalink":"https://aneessh18.github.io/prefer-monorepo/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eThere are numerous reasons to prefer a Monorepo to Microrepos and this post is about the de-duplication. More often than not, when a team size crosses 20, a Microrepo fanatic raises his hand and starts advocating a move for dissolving the Monorepo. \u0026ldquo;Build times are high\u0026rdquo;, \u0026ldquo;getting blocked by other teams\u0026rdquo;, \u0026ldquo;easier path to cloud\u0026rdquo;, \u0026ldquo;drawing boundaries\u0026rdquo;, and \u0026ldquo;everyone else is doing it, why not us\u0026rdquo; would be some of the reasons that get tossed around in upper echelons of management. Unsurprisingly, no one objects to this proposal. Proposals discussed, Jiras created, and smaller pods formed to work in silos.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Prefer Monorepo"},{"content":"I made the mistake of not learning Git beyond the basics and only giving a cursory glance at the list of operations it can perform. As it turns out, it is a powerful tool to collaborate and think isolatedly.\nInitially, I made myself acquainted with only the most used git operations. Commit, Push, Pull, Origin, Status, Merge and Fetch. Though I performed my daily tasks with these commands, I did a lot of work that Git was supposed to do such as stash, reset and revert.\nI was hesitant to iterate on code-review feedback because I had to make changes which may have to be discarded in the subsequent review. I figured out that this issue can be resolved by moving that HEAD to different commits (which is agreed upon by both the committer and the reviewer) There were cases where the task I was currently working on became blocked and I had to move on to the next task. But I wasn\u0026rsquo;t comfortable either completely discarding or committing the progress I made corresponding to the blocked task. As a collective result of being dumb then and the task in hand being relatively small, I copied the changes to a file and applied those changes at a later point in time when the work was resumed. As it turns out, you can just stash it. Essentially, I was doing tedious work due to my ignorance regarding Git. My life would have been much simpler, had I learned Git beyond the most used commands.\nNote to self: please keep revisting this page on a periodic basis and also experiment with them.\n","permalink":"https://aneessh18.github.io/master-git/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eI made the mistake of not learning Git beyond the basics and only giving a cursory glance at the list of operations it can perform. As it turns out, it is a powerful tool to collaborate and think isolatedly.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eInitially, I made myself acquainted with only the most used git operations. Commit, Push, Pull, Origin, Status, Merge and Fetch. Though I  performed my daily tasks with these commands, I did a lot of work that Git was supposed to do such as stash, reset and revert.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Master Git before you collaborate"},{"content":"When I joined the workforce right out of college I was expecting to do only one thing. And that was to code. Eventually, I realised that coding is one of the many things I am supposed to do. Matter of fact is that there are boring parts of my job and I don\u0026rsquo;t remember signing up for them.\nWriting emails, communicating with the stakeholders, and painfully making sure that your colleagues understand your style of working are some of the parts that constitute the boring parts. Even though I understood the significance of those activities, I still have a hard time accepting them. Diabolically it is because of those boring parts, I value the time that I spend to code.\nIf I were looking at any job profile, the first thing I would do is research the boring parts of it and ask myself whether I am ready for those activities, cause they constitute 90% of the things that you\u0026rsquo;re supposed to do.\nThe list of mundane things that I do regularly\nReviewing obvious code of my peers Standups, where I will have to communicate my progress Writing emails that don\u0026rsquo;t require intellectual effort. Monitoring the services and fixing them when they\u0026rsquo;re down for the most obvious reasons. Providing support for the services that you haven\u0026rsquo;t designed. Being helpless when you don\u0026rsquo;t have the power to prioritise meaningful things ","permalink":"https://aneessh18.github.io/doing-the-dirty-bits/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eWhen I joined the workforce right out of college I was expecting to do only one thing. And that was to code. Eventually, I realised that coding is one of the many things I am supposed to do.  Matter of fact is that there are boring parts of my job and I don\u0026rsquo;t remember signing up for them.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWriting emails, communicating with the stakeholders, and painfully making sure that your colleagues understand your style of working are some of the parts that constitute the boring parts. Even though I understood the significance of those activities, I still have a hard time accepting them. Diabolically it is because of those boring parts, I value the time that I spend to code.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"The stuff I didn't sign up for"},{"content":"It makes sense to master the tools that you spend the most time with. And Chrome sits on top of that list. Here are some of them\nCtrl + Shift + A -\u0026gt; search for both open and recently closed tabs, useful when you\u0026rsquo;ve 50 tabs across 5 different windows Naming your windows -\u0026gt; so that every window has some purpose Grouping the tabs -\u0026gt; for reducing the visual load if a window has too many tabs to fit in a screen Integrating search engines -\u0026gt; no brainer if you search the websites directly, a very handy feature. (I\u0026rsquo;m baffled that Chrome has this feature as it\u0026rsquo;s the antithesis of their advertising manifesto) ","permalink":"https://aneessh18.github.io/google-chrome-hacks/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eIt makes sense to master the tools that you spend the most time with. And Chrome sits on top of that list. Here are some of them\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003col\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eCtrl + Shift + A -\u0026gt; search for both open and recently closed tabs, useful when you\u0026rsquo;ve 50 tabs across 5 different windows\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eNaming your windows -\u0026gt; so that every window has some purpose\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eGrouping the tabs -\u0026gt; for reducing the visual load if a window has too many tabs to fit in a screen\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eIntegrating search engines -\u0026gt; no brainer if you search the websites directly, a very handy feature. (I\u0026rsquo;m baffled that Chrome has this feature as it\u0026rsquo;s the antithesis of their advertising manifesto)\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003c/ol\u003e","title":"Google Chrome Hacks"},{"content":"I have had the opportunity to write bad code and read good code in the last couple of years. I don\u0026rsquo;t think code reviews must be done through the lens of objective goals. Code reviews are prone to varied range of subjectiveness and people shouldn\u0026rsquo;t be too religious of it without good reasons.\nThe most important constituent of a good code review is common sense which is formed through experience (ex: people appreciate the value of logs truly only after they\u0026rsquo;ve experienced a terrible incident). So the below list is based off of my experiences in the Java Ecosystem.\nMake the Data Models (DTOs, Entities, POJOs) heavy with data validations. An object created during the Application\u0026rsquo;s life must be syntactically valid by default. Don\u0026rsquo;t create data in the runtime if it isn\u0026rsquo;t valid. All the public methods should consitute a try-catch block that encompass private methods that throw various type of exceptions. Use utility libraries like Apache Commons, Guava to de-duplicate code.Guava\u0026rsquo;s philosophy Always choose constructor based DI, it is easy to mock the classes and its method responses. Try to make the methods adhere to the Command Query Segregation principle. Don\u0026rsquo;t Log obvious statements. A trail of Logs should convey the progress of an application\u0026rsquo;s state Don\u0026rsquo;t design the structure of code based on its test-coverage aspect. Write the best code you can. Thoroughly understand the type of expceptions that a external library can throw and plan exception handling around it. Always handle expceptions in AOP style. It de-clutters the business logic (ExpceptionMapper is a great example) It is good to follow SOLID principles. This list will be updated on a regular basis.\n","permalink":"https://aneessh18.github.io/code-review-notes/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eI have had the opportunity to write bad code and read good code in the last couple of years. I don\u0026rsquo;t think code reviews must be done through the lens of objective goals. Code reviews are prone to varied range of subjectiveness and people shouldn\u0026rsquo;t be too religious of it without good reasons.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe most important constituent of a good code review is common sense which is formed through experience (ex: people appreciate the value of logs truly only after they\u0026rsquo;ve experienced a terrible incident). So the below list is based off of my experiences in the Java Ecosystem.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Code Review Notes"},{"content":"List of good software that I use on a daily basis\nIntelliJ Idea MongoDB PostgreSQL Gitlab Postman Excalidraw Teams (it\u0026rsquo;s a considerable leap foward compared to Skype) VScode Confluence LogSeq Windows Terminal (very sleek UI) Super Putty Outlook Zoom (commendable audio quality over Meet) Matter (read-it-later app) ","permalink":"https://aneessh18.github.io/good-software-1/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eList of good software that I use on a daily basis\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003col\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eIntelliJ Idea\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eMongoDB\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003ePostgreSQL\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eGitlab\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003ePostman\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eExcalidraw\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eTeams (it\u0026rsquo;s a considerable leap foward compared to Skype)\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eVScode\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eConfluence\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eLogSeq\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eWindows Terminal (very sleek UI)\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eSuper Putty\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eOutlook\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eZoom (commendable audio quality over Meet)\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eMatter (read-it-later app)\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003c/ol\u003e","title":"Good Software Part-1"},{"content":"This list maily comprises of the libraries and frameworks I use frequently\nGuice (hard to grok initially, but it is worth) Dropwizard (was a pioneer in the Java ecosystem and I still admire the constructs it invented) Spring and Spring-Boot (love the convenience) Redis Guava (very utilitarian) Kafka (suitable for enterprise but would not be my first preference) Maven (simplest dependency management tool, I wish something like it existed in Python Ecosystem) FailSafe and OkHttp Morphia (half decent when compared to its counterparts) Webpack and TS. ","permalink":"https://aneessh18.github.io/good-software-2/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eThis list maily comprises of the libraries and frameworks I use frequently\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003col\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eGuice (hard to grok initially, but it is worth)\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eDropwizard (was a pioneer in the Java ecosystem and I still admire the constructs it invented)\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eSpring and Spring-Boot (love the convenience)\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eRedis\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eGuava (very utilitarian)\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eKafka (suitable for enterprise but would not be my first preference)\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eMaven (simplest dependency management tool, I wish something like it existed in Python Ecosystem)\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eFailSafe and OkHttp\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eMorphia (half decent when compared to its counterparts)\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eWebpack and TS.\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003c/ol\u003e","title":"Good Software Part-2"},{"content":"Lately, I have realized that Interfaces matter more than their Implementations. Key distinctions in Interfaces can give you a competitive edge like no other. Yet people get lost in the Implementation details. The Interface is the design and design requires effort.\nThe Interface is the gateway to whatever-the-thing you\u0026rsquo;re building and I feel like not enough work is being put into shaping that gateway. Jumping over the gun and discussing the details is fine, but they should be driven by Interfaces. Finally, the Interface is the agenda that acts as a direction.\n","permalink":"https://aneessh18.github.io/interfaces/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eLately, I have realized that Interfaces matter more than their Implementations. Key distinctions in Interfaces can give you a competitive edge like no other. Yet people get lost in the Implementation details. The Interface is the design and design requires effort.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe Interface is the gateway to whatever-the-thing you\u0026rsquo;re building and I feel like not enough work is being put into shaping that gateway. Jumping over the gun and discussing the details is fine, but they should be driven by Interfaces. Finally, the Interface is the agenda that acts as a direction.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Interaces are important"},{"content":"There are some instances where I try to solve a problem that has already been solved. Though this approach allows you to learn more about the core problem, it doesn\u0026rsquo;t necessarily help you to do the job. Earlier I used to believe it was the right way to tackle problems that was akin to solving a Differential Equation with just the knowledge of basic mathematics without the calculus part. There has to be Some Other Way, right?\nThe Some Other Way turns out to be more deliberate to not Re-Invent the wheel. Chamath explains this Some Other Way in an unrefined manner. It struck a chord with me when Chamath mentions that \u0026ldquo;there is not a lot of originality here\u0026rdquo;. Not all of our day jobs demand creative intensity, or else StackOverflow would have been out of business by now. So who are we kidding with this Creative Non-Chalance Talk? Back to my point, you would be much more productive if you had the right set-of tools(that have already solved their domain-specific problems) when you\u0026rsquo;re embarking on that so-called next big thing of yours.\nDon\u0026rsquo;t try to solve an already-solved problem unless it is your primary pursuit. Otherwise, you would be dancing in the troughs of those Productivity hills.\n","permalink":"https://aneessh18.github.io/not-reinventing/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eThere are some instances where I try to solve a problem that has already been solved. Though this approach allows you to learn more about the core problem, it doesn\u0026rsquo;t necessarily help you to do the job. Earlier I used to believe it was the right way to tackle problems that was akin to solving a Differential Equation with just the knowledge of basic mathematics without the calculus part. There has to be Some Other Way, right?\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Not Re-Inventing"},{"content":"For the vast majority of the art that gets produced, there is little value for it when it enters a different phase of time. Though fewer in number, there are artists that capture the core constructs of human civilization and produce art around it.\nBooks that reveal the atomic constructs of the way things are built, never go out of fashion. In the lieu of this realisation, I started reading books that are not publicised in the current news hype cycle. Keeping my news information diet to a minimum along with reading classics from the past has ensured my sanity prevails. Step-function breakthroughs are only possible when the units in the time dimension get zoomed out. But only upon careful inspection, you will get to know that the mosaic was actually formed by arranging smaller pieces together.\nI find the New Yorker to be much more information-dense than any other news outlet. I suspect it will have to do with the production frequency of their content. Instead of publishing pieces that are still unravelling, NewYorker has a sufficient amount of time to contemplate. With the time factor on their side, their content has a much larger shelf-life.\n","permalink":"https://aneessh18.github.io/timeless-art/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eFor the vast majority of the art that gets produced, there is little value for it when it enters a different phase of time. Though fewer in number, there are artists that capture the core constructs of human civilization and produce art around it.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBooks that reveal the atomic constructs of the way things are built, never go out of fashion.\nIn the lieu of this realisation, I started reading books that are not publicised in the current news hype cycle. Keeping my news information diet to a minimum along with reading classics from the past has ensured my sanity prevails. Step-function breakthroughs are only possible when the units in the time dimension get zoomed out. But only upon careful inspection, you will get to know that the mosaic was actually formed by arranging smaller pieces together.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Exploring timeless art"},{"content":"I used to be the guy who got hyped for every new database that got released in HackerNews and I assumed that every new release was tied with a significant improvement in the underlying tech. That assumption turned out to be wrong. Sure there were some improvements, but most of them were non-significant.\nEven though I use databases a lot daily, I couldn\u0026rsquo;t build one up from scratch till I read Martin Klepmann\u0026rsquo;s Designing Data-Intensive Applications(DDIA). Reading DDIA was being in a Database-Anatomy class, where Martin ripped apart a database and explained its fundamental parts. As a result of it, I can smell bullshit from a mile away if someone wants to overengineer their application by using something they don\u0026rsquo;t need, the power which I didn\u0026rsquo;t possess earlier. This was possible only because Martin gives you the right set of tools and frameworks which help you see right through the marketing crap and evaluate a database\u0026rsquo;s core offering. In short, you have a non-trivial type of information which facilitated you to evaluate a database objectively.\nHaving first-hand knowledge of underlying systems helps you make rational decisions. Honestly, I would be clueless, if I had to choose between Docker or Vagrant. Both do the job, but how they do it differs significantly and this is the difference I was referring to earlier, I know how to make them work but not how they work.\nAt the end of the day, making the right decisions depends on a lot of factors and one of them is your technical depth.\n","permalink":"https://aneessh18.github.io/depth-to-discern/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eI used to be the guy who got hyped for every new database that got released in HackerNews and I assumed that every new release was tied with a significant improvement in the underlying tech. That assumption turned out to be wrong. Sure there were some improvements, but most of them were non-significant.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eEven though I use databases a lot daily, I couldn\u0026rsquo;t build one up from scratch till I read Martin Klepmann\u0026rsquo;s Designing Data-Intensive Applications(DDIA). Reading DDIA was being in a Database-Anatomy class, where Martin ripped apart a database and explained its fundamental parts.  As a result of it, I can smell bullshit from a mile away if someone wants to overengineer their application by using something they don\u0026rsquo;t need, the power which I didn\u0026rsquo;t possess earlier. This was possible only because Martin gives you the right set of tools and frameworks which help you see right through the marketing crap and evaluate a database\u0026rsquo;s core offering. In short, you have a non-trivial type of information which facilitated you to evaluate a database objectively.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"You Need Depth To Discern"},{"content":"The medium by which you get modelled (the brain’s perception of different things) changes with every passing generation. Earlier it was an essay now it is a blog. At their core, Words have the same power as they had at the beginning of human civilisation. And technology updates the representational medium of those Words now and then.\nYour core opinions are formed through the transfusion of other people’s Words with your thoughts and experiences. And due to this fact, Twitter has a good chance of shaping your opinions than either Instagram or Linkedin. Governments and Politicians use Twitter to exploit its superpower to various degrees.\nBlogs hold the same regard as Tweets for shaping your opinions, if not more. There is a reason why Developer focussed SaaS companies are hiring good content writers to ship their copy, product narrative is a feature in itself which can be advantageous in a competitive market(most developer tools rarely differ from others).\n","permalink":"https://aneessh18.github.io/one-blog-post-away/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eThe medium by which you get modelled (the brain’s perception of different things) changes with every passing generation. Earlier it was an essay now it is a blog.\nAt their core, Words have the same power as they had at the beginning of human civilisation. And technology updates the representational medium of those Words now and then.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eYour core opinions are formed through the transfusion of other people’s Words with your thoughts and experiences. And due to this fact, Twitter has a good chance of shaping your opinions than either Instagram or Linkedin. Governments and Politicians use Twitter to exploit its superpower to various degrees.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"You’re just one Blog post away from being modelled"},{"content":"Repetition is a very peculiar term in the English language, as its contextual dependence is damn high. For me, my mind always repelled at the idea of Repetition of anything. But lately, I have been appreciating Repetition a lot, especially Iterative Repetition.\nPeople think Repetition is boring and is a dead end when it interferes with your career. And I agree with the latter, you can’t just assume that you’ll climb up the career ladder with repeating things day in and day out. But Iterative Repetition is a game changing way to model your career.\nIterative Repetition is repeating things over in a different set of environments. This means that you gain different insights and perspectives over a period of time until you’ve mastered the domain of that thing you’re repeating all along, post which you got to replicate this phenomenon with a different thing.\n","permalink":"https://aneessh18.github.io/iterative-repetition/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eRepetition is a very peculiar term in the English language, as its contextual dependence is damn high. For me, my mind always repelled at the idea of Repetition of anything. But lately, I have been appreciating Repetition a lot, especially Iterative Repetition.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePeople think Repetition is boring and is a dead end when it interferes with your career. And I agree with the latter, you can’t just assume that you’ll climb up the career ladder with repeating things day in and day out. But Iterative Repetition is a game changing way to model your career.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Iterative Repetition"},{"content":" Should have been more aggressive in the start while I was being onboarded to my first job. Took more than a month to get the whole picture of the internal tooling and abstractions. Should have found out someone who was willing to help me understand the internals of the company. Was not comfortable asking people for help as I was afraid of getting no from them. But it turns out to be a bad assumption to make in the first place. People are willing to help, you just need to find out a good time. Should have set out personal 1-1\u0026rsquo;s with all my teammates in the beginning itself. Should have been more proactive with the follow-ups w.r.t to an Issue or an MR. Context is everything. There were some instances where the effort I put in without realizing the context had gone futile. Could have saved a ton of unnecessary work. Became lazy with documentation after a while. Initially, I was very enthusiastic about documentation, but I lost interest after a while. Big mistake on my part. Documentation is the most important skill that can reduce the repeated effort, lubricate and delegate communication in an effective manner. Was unsure about the priorities of many tasks. I am getting better at managing tasks with differing priorities. Didn\u0026rsquo;t time box my day-to-day tasks. Huge mistake. Everytime task has to be time boxed, you can\u0026rsquo;t keep dragging it till you can. Didn\u0026rsquo;t think reading existing code was a good idea. Again a huge mistake. Code and Tests are the best documentation of the codebase. Getting comfortable reading code is paramount to debugging. Learning is exponential when you\u0026rsquo;re on Support. The kinda of skills that get acquired when you\u0026rsquo;re on Support helps you to be more than a programmer. Communication, Delegation, Prioritization, Debugging, How-not-to-write-code and what not. Was not a good code-reviewer at the beginning. Was thinking too much about design patterns and other idealistic shit. Instead, could have focussed on common-sense and instincts. Any code should meet basic readability and making-sense aspects. Should have googled more about any unknowns I was encountering on day-to-day basis. Basic googling infuses much more context than anything will. Didn\u0026rsquo;t respect the human aspects that arise from code. I didn\u0026rsquo;t care much about the backward compatibility and constraints of various surrounding systems. Used to propose audacious things which have 0 percent of materialization. One word, was not realistic enough. Didn\u0026rsquo;t experiment enough and didn\u0026rsquo;t invest enough time in mastering the fundamental tech. Having code samples which can help you to play with things and mastering CLI tools can massively come to your aide when the situation arises. Gotta work on this more. Hands on experience beats everything. Didn\u0026rsquo;t pay much heed to my curiosities. Again a big mistake. Whether it is making small POCs and understand how they work or reading some good\u0026rsquo;ol research papers, you have to follow your curiosities. ","permalink":"https://aneessh18.github.io/mid-year-review-1/","summary":"\u003cul\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eShould have been more aggressive in the start while I was being onboarded to my first job\u003c/strong\u003e. Took more than a month to get the whole picture of the internal tooling and abstractions. Should have found out someone who was willing to help me understand the internals of the company.\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eWas not comfortable asking people for help as I was afraid of getting no from them\u003c/strong\u003e. But it turns out to be a bad assumption to make in the first place. People are willing to help, you just need to find out a good time.\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eShould have set out personal 1-1\u0026rsquo;s with all my teammates in the beginning itself\u003c/strong\u003e.\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eShould have been more proactive with the follow-ups w.r.t to an Issue or an MR\u003c/strong\u003e.\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eContext is everything\u003c/strong\u003e. There were some instances where the effort I put in without realizing the context had gone futile. Could have saved a ton of unnecessary work.\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eBecame lazy with documentation after a while\u003c/strong\u003e. Initially, I was very enthusiastic about documentation, but I lost interest after a while. Big mistake on my part. Documentation is the most important skill that can reduce the repeated effort, lubricate and delegate communication in an effective manner.\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eWas unsure about the priorities of many tasks\u003c/strong\u003e. I am getting better at managing tasks with differing priorities.\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eDidn\u0026rsquo;t time box my day-to-day tasks\u003c/strong\u003e. Huge mistake. Everytime task has to be time boxed, you can\u0026rsquo;t keep dragging it till you can.\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eDidn\u0026rsquo;t think reading existing code was a good idea\u003c/strong\u003e. Again a huge mistake. Code and Tests are the best documentation of the codebase. Getting comfortable reading code is paramount to debugging.\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eLearning is exponential when you\u0026rsquo;re on Support\u003c/strong\u003e. The kinda of skills that get acquired when you\u0026rsquo;re on Support helps you to be more than a programmer. Communication, Delegation, Prioritization, Debugging, How-not-to-write-code and what not.\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eWas not a good code-reviewer at the beginning\u003c/strong\u003e. Was thinking too much about design patterns and other idealistic shit. Instead, could have focussed on common-sense and instincts. Any code should meet basic readability and making-sense aspects.\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eShould have googled more about any unknowns I was encountering on day-to-day basis\u003c/strong\u003e. Basic googling infuses much more context than anything will.\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eDidn\u0026rsquo;t respect the human aspects that arise from code\u003c/strong\u003e. I didn\u0026rsquo;t care much about the backward compatibility and constraints of various surrounding systems. Used to propose audacious things which have 0 percent of materialization. One word, was not realistic enough.\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eDidn\u0026rsquo;t experiment enough and didn\u0026rsquo;t invest enough time in mastering the fundamental tech\u003c/strong\u003e.  Having code samples which can help you to play with things and mastering CLI tools can massively come to your aide when the situation arises. Gotta work on this more. \u003cstrong\u003eHands on experience beats everything\u003c/strong\u003e.\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eDidn\u0026rsquo;t pay much heed to my curiosities\u003c/strong\u003e. Again a big mistake. Whether it is making small POCs and understand how they work or reading some good\u0026rsquo;ol research papers, you have to follow your curiosities.\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003c/ul\u003e","title":"Mid Year Review - 1"},{"content":"Long before I started reading Mr Sanderson\u0026rsquo;s books, I felt excited about reading Mr Sanderson\u0026rsquo;s books. As I got sucked into Mistborn\u0026rsquo;s universe, the line between reality and Luthadel blurred. Mr Sanderson must be appreciated for holding the reader\u0026rsquo;s attention for extended periods.\nThen suddenly in The Well Of Ascension, it hit me that the relationship between all of the Kelsier Crew along with Elend was built with trust. Even though the Trust factor was emphasised in The Final Empire (Vin kept referencing Trust being the differentiating factor that drew her towards Kelsier\u0026rsquo;s crew and the Job). But in part 2 the whole Trust thing gets elevated to the next level when Sazed advises Vin on how to approach their relationship(Vin was in great turmoil then, remember that she was not sure of herself, Zane distracting her, feeling unworthy of Elend). Sazed tells her that to love Elend means to trust him, no matter what. The decision to trust Elend pays off in The Hero of Ages, as Elend realises the same and relies on Vin to take down Ruin.\nWhen Vin starts to trust people around her and gets to terms with her environment, she goes into this Nirvana state when her character is freed from the apprehensiveness. Although this might be a little-to-none revelation to some, it has been a major one for me. Lately, I have been employing Trust in my day-to-day activities, which has put me into a better state of mind.\nFiction is much more than coming up with plots, it\u0026rsquo;s about the power given by the writer to the reader through which they conjure up the characters while reading the book. And producing this power is no mean feat and involves building up characters as complex as Vin.\n","permalink":"https://aneessh18.github.io/mistborn/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eLong before I started reading Mr Sanderson\u0026rsquo;s books, I felt excited about reading Mr Sanderson\u0026rsquo;s books. As I got sucked into Mistborn\u0026rsquo;s universe, the line between reality and Luthadel blurred. Mr Sanderson must be appreciated for holding the reader\u0026rsquo;s attention for extended periods.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThen suddenly in The Well Of Ascension, it hit me that the relationship between all of the Kelsier Crew along with Elend was built with trust. Even though the Trust factor was emphasised in The Final Empire (Vin kept referencing Trust being the differentiating factor that drew her towards Kelsier\u0026rsquo;s crew and the Job). But in part 2 the whole Trust thing gets elevated to the next level when Sazed advises Vin on how to approach their relationship(Vin was in great turmoil then, remember that she was not sure of herself, Zane distracting her, feeling unworthy of Elend). Sazed tells her that to love Elend means to trust him, no matter what. The decision to trust Elend pays off in The Hero of Ages, as Elend realises the same and relies on Vin to take down Ruin.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Mistborn taught me more about Trust than anything will"},{"content":"Many people mistake knowing a bunch of jargon as competence. In some cases, it might even suggest otherwise. It doesn\u0026rsquo;t matter if you know the most esoteric programming language in the world if you can\u0026rsquo;t get the damn job done.\nPeople usually look down upon Mercenaries(who get the job done). Though Visionaries are tainted as the Hero of Ages and hailed for their Visions(obviously), most of them fall into the con-artist category. There are good odds that you\u0026rsquo;ll be rich(not filthily) by being a Mercenary.\nI respect Acquired Jargon(which somebody has obtained from being in the trenches by doing something). But I despise Superficially acquired jargon(memorizing a bunch of stuff). The problem with Superficially Acquired Jargon is that there is hollowness underlying beneath it. And trained people can easily sniff out the hallow people.\nMost people are Visionaries since birth. But without being a Mercenary they fail to become a true ones.\n","permalink":"https://aneessh18.github.io/competence/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eMany people mistake knowing a bunch of jargon as competence. In some cases, it might even suggest otherwise. It doesn\u0026rsquo;t matter if you know the most esoteric programming language in the world if you can\u0026rsquo;t get the damn job done.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePeople usually look down upon Mercenaries(who get the job done). Though Visionaries are tainted as the Hero of Ages and hailed for their Visions(obviously), most of them fall into the con-artist category. There are good odds that you\u0026rsquo;ll be rich(not filthily) by being a Mercenary.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Knowing Jargon isn't a sign of Competence"},{"content":"There is a lot of dispersion between the skills one needs to be good at interviewing and the ones that are required to get the damn job done. The former requires math problem-solving abilities which essentially boils down to playing the game and gaming the system. It\u0026rsquo;s that classic human construct to which everybody adheres to establish a standard. You can observe this pattern whenever the demand side of things gets exploded. An objective filter gets developed and is used as a metric to screen the best. In the software industry, most of the big tech, where the pool of applicants is high, resorted to interviewing the applications using algorithmic tests. It makes sense for them to do this. But the repercussions may not be immediate.\nThe problem with having standard algorithmic tests is that people resort to gaming the system in innumerable ways. Leetcode is the test book material that one refers to while prepping for an interview. No domain expertise is being tested. Hence there is no incentive for the interviewee to ramp up their specific knowledge cause it has no use. Now, this is where things generally start to fall apart. In the good old days, the average lifespan of the software used to be around 5 yrs. Whereas, now it plummetted to 2 yrs. Essentially you have to rewrite an application that has been written 2 yrs ago. This can happen for a bunch of reasons, but the thing I am most interested in is the lack of deep specific knowledge that is required to write reliable and maintainable software.\nIf you start cramming leetcode questions day in and out, how can you develop the knowledge required to write software that is well tested and maintainable? If all you practice is writing helper functions in test prep platforms, how do you plan to write software from scratch and deploy it in the modern infrastructure? When faced with these questions people come up with some version of this answer. Training people. Yes, training people is good for upskilling, but you can\u0026rsquo;t expect many of the folks to write a good frontend application by running a react bootcamp for 4 weeks. All you can get from them is spaghetti code. This can work for startups where software rewrites are common in the early days but not for a big corp where the tech debt grows exponentially with every passing year. And nobody wants to address this tech debt.\nIf there is no value to being a specialist in this industry, then don\u0026rsquo;t expect people to write code that spans decades. Then there is a serious attrition problem in the tech industry. As Chamath says \u0026ldquo;how can you expect people to do any meaningful work if the average stay of a person is 3 yrs?\u0026rdquo;.\nThere is another extreme of interviewing people. That is interviewing for framework ninjas. You can generally observe this kinda behaviour in DBA(database admins). They know to make a database performant by optimizing the queries and stuff but they can\u0026rsquo;t spin up another database. They are specialized in using the tool and that\u0026rsquo;s what they are good at. But what you are looking for in a good hire lies in the middle of this skills spectrum. You want people with some sort of specialization who can also develop a solution in the case a situation demands it. These are the people you develop a new database technology by some means if they aren\u0026rsquo;t satisfied with the ones they are using it. And they belong to the mythical 10x engineer group and ninja coders. And to become one takes more than munching leetcode day and night. It needs a holistic methodology where you focus on upskilling yourself on a greater time horizon rather than attending a day bootcamp.\n","permalink":"https://aneessh18.github.io/software-premise/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eThere is a lot of dispersion between the skills one needs to be good at interviewing and the ones that are required to get the damn job done. The former requires math problem-solving abilities which essentially boils down to playing the game and gaming the system. It\u0026rsquo;s that classic human construct to which everybody adheres to establish a standard. You can observe this pattern whenever the demand side of things gets exploded. An objective filter gets developed and is used as a metric to screen the best. In the software industry, most of the big tech, where the pool of applicants is high, resorted to interviewing the applications using algorithmic tests. It makes sense for them to do this. But the repercussions may not be immediate.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Software Premise"},{"content":"Best Podcast Shows Mission Isro with Harsha Bhogle\n22 yarns with Gaurav kapur\nBest Podcast Episodes Ali Ghodse - Invest like the best\nAli Rowghani - 20 minute VC\nGavin Baker - Invest like the best\nSteward Butterfield - Invest like the best\nChamath Palihapitiya - Invest like the best\nJohn Collision - Invest like the best\nKeith Rabois - Invest like the best\nBen Thompson - Invest like the best\nJames Goslin - Lex friedman\nAndrew Chen - The Tim ferris show\nShould release a new set of them soon.\n","permalink":"https://aneessh18.github.io/best-podcasts-1/","summary":"\u003ch2 id=\"best-podcast-shows\"\u003eBest Podcast Shows\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/2JXFCMLGVhTBtdz1WYxd4H\"\u003eMission Isro with Harsha Bhogle\u003c/a\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"https://open.spotify.com/episode/670USqyRD00MkZ9QpOX2rG\"\u003e22 yarns with Gaurav kapur\u003c/a\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003ch2 id=\"best-podcast-episodes\"\u003eBest Podcast Episodes\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"https://open.spotify.com/episode/3c9Gj8fK1y39NJ3S5mSfnr\"\u003eAli Ghodse - Invest like the best\u003c/a\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"https://open.spotify.com/episode/47vwTmQWANOasWp8V5giFj\"\u003eAli Rowghani - 20 minute VC\u003c/a\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"https://open.spotify.com/episode/201Yg3V9rvpvRgvTZfb3UP\"\u003eGavin Baker - Invest like the best\u003c/a\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"https://open.spotify.com/episode/7plmmeYfSwhjUedOmyD6ZE\"\u003eSteward Butterfield - Invest like the best\u003c/a\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"https://open.spotify.com/episode/2ZK2WaYzl6Qn2z3cE2DSES\"\u003eChamath Palihapitiya - Invest like the best\u003c/a\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"https://open.spotify.com/episode/0Ok2HlpJ06C8c2Wrhm8Nkv\"\u003eJohn Collision - Invest like the best\u003c/a\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"https://open.spotify.com/episode/1GVHo2dUR3YgGiiLe897IH\"\u003eKeith Rabois - Invest like the best\u003c/a\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"https://open.spotify.com/episode/5D86jI85XmErtUjSp8U5dh\"\u003eBen Thompson - Invest like the best\u003c/a\u003e\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Best Podcast shows and Episodes-1"},{"content":"Tech has been the poster child of this culture where the Davids win against the goliaths. Apple, Google, Facebook, Netflix, Amazon earned most of their wealth by displacing the incumbents in their respective fields. This all happened in the last 2 decades. And like every party this had to end. Google has a pipeline right from the demand to the supply. There are no middlemen and, other companies like Apple and Netflix have the same strategy, though Netflix moat is hard to defend though. The powers at the top have consolidated the power and it is just to beat at their own game. As a result of this, you can\u0026rsquo;t have stories titled \u0026ldquo;Burgeoning Facebook trumps Google\u0026rdquo; anymore. The only stories that get played on from now will be something like \u0026ldquo;X company got acquired by Big Tech\u0026rdquo;. Chip companies have hit Moore\u0026rsquo;s wall and the data harvesting party is also about to end.\nThis essentially also means that the VC ecosystem that thrived in Silicon Valley is about to end. It doesn\u0026rsquo;t mean that there will be no VC, the number of VC firms who make a bang on the buck will get significantly get reduced as there is no next Google to fund Sequoia. Even Stripe, the darling of the startup world, is merely at 100B even after 12 years whereas Facebook\u0026rsquo;s valuation rocketed to 200B in 8 yrs. The era of growth on steroids is over. Instead what you have is unbundling of these big tech companies which will result in a specialized market. An example of this would be Cloudfare offering R2 service to Indie developers. All the enterprises have been onboarded by Azure, AWS and Google Cloud sales teams. All the Big tech have entrenched themselves in the global supply chain, right from the start to the end. Unless and until their supply chains get disrupted, it is highly unlikely that somebody\u0026rsquo;s going to displace. For the foreseen future, they are the undisputed kings.\n","permalink":"https://aneessh18.github.io/tech-isn't-special-anymore/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eTech has been the poster child of this culture where the Davids win against the goliaths. Apple, Google, Facebook, Netflix, Amazon earned most of their wealth by displacing the incumbents in their respective fields. This all happened in the last 2 decades. And like every party this had to end. Google has a pipeline right from the demand to the supply. There are no middlemen and, other companies like Apple and Netflix have the same strategy, though Netflix moat is hard to defend though. The powers at the top have consolidated the power and it is just to beat at their own game. As a result of this, you can\u0026rsquo;t have stories titled \u0026ldquo;Burgeoning Facebook trumps Google\u0026rdquo; anymore. The only stories that get played on from now will be something like \u0026ldquo;X company got acquired by Big Tech\u0026rdquo;. Chip companies have hit Moore\u0026rsquo;s wall and the data harvesting party is also about to end.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Tech isn't special anymore"},{"content":"Blogs have been the avenues that amateurs flock to when they crave lighter opinions. There are no serious incentives for bloggers to write a 3000-word post that is deeply researched. Even though the masses don\u0026rsquo;t yearn for these deep posts, humanity as a whole needs them. These are the posts that document human civilization\u0026rsquo;s behaviour as a whole or write well balanced opinionated posts. And to write these posts is no mean feat. You can only find these breeds in New York Times, New Yorker or Washington Post and they attracted all these talents by providing a platform(already established audience) and lucrative career options. But the underlying thing of these entities is that they had a distribution moat. Not anymore.\nWith the advent of the Internet, creating a distribution channel is as easy as clicking on the \u0026ldquo;Create Channel\u0026rdquo; button in YT. Distribution is still the undisputed king of the world and companies get differentiated by how strong their distribution channels are. But what has changed is the cost of creating a distribution channel. By leveraging YT as their primary distribution channel many Indian Edtechs have even achieved the coveted Unicorn Status. The sky is the limit for the type of Media behemoths you can conjure. It was only a matter of time, for these individuals, who wrote for these corporations, to go independent. The incentives were waiting.\nEnter Substack, the internet company which put these professional writers in drivers\u0026rsquo; seat w.r.t to their audiences. Many companies have failed trying to crack this problem including some prominent ones like Medium and Quora. Despite attracting these talented writers to their platforms, Medium and Quora, they treated these writers as a secondary goal. Their primary goal was to establish their Networks so that the much-aspired network effects can kick in and bolster the company\u0026rsquo;s moat. The bottom line is that they played the game of Facebook and Twitter where the network precedes the users in terms of priority. Quora\u0026rsquo;s top writers were so frustrated with its policies that they had to flock to writing pieces on Medium, which at least was the lesser evil. Quora on its part played the correct game where it tried to monetize the user\u0026rsquo;s data through ads(later they launched all sorts of bs programs, that\u0026rsquo;s another story). There is no excuse for Medium though. I mean what were they thinking? that just by helping people to launch a pseudo blog on the internet and making a bunch of recommendations they can milk the money of the users? This is where Substack played a different game. It made these writers first-class citizens and handed back the subscriber\u0026rsquo;s data(emails) to them. And this created ripple effects.\nThe writers can now play a positive-sum game with substack and the readers. They can produce high-quality pieces that can be funded by the audience. The best and worst part of Substack for a publisher is that you can\u0026rsquo;t achieve the escape velocity by starting in it. This is good for Substack though. Because it only gets the best of the writers. Most of the accomplished writers on Substack are the ones who built their audience via Twitter. Substack leveraged Twitter\u0026rsquo;s distribution network and should thank Twitter for its initial take-off. Later Twitter itself acquired Substack competitor Revue. Substack shouldn\u0026rsquo;t just worry about Revue yet. Because Twitter prioritizes users over the publishers. Substack will win eventually because it prioritises readers. Twitter can be the lever that Substack can use to pull off a brilliant heist.\n","permalink":"https://aneessh18.github.io/substack/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eBlogs have been the avenues that amateurs flock to when they crave lighter opinions. There are no serious incentives for bloggers to write a 3000-word post that is deeply researched. Even though the masses don\u0026rsquo;t yearn for these deep posts, humanity as a whole needs them. These are the posts that document human civilization\u0026rsquo;s behaviour as a whole or write well balanced opinionated posts. And to write these posts is no mean feat. You can only find these breeds in New York Times, New Yorker or Washington Post and they attracted all these talents by providing a platform(already established audience) and lucrative career options. But the underlying thing of these entities is that they had a distribution moat. Not anymore.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Why Substack will win over everybody"},{"content":"Believe it or not, you\u0026rsquo;re getting validated by someone (or by yourself) all the time. Consciousness and Validations are intertwined in many ways that your brain can\u0026rsquo;t comprehend. Validations in some way shape your behaviour and important characteristics of your life. For example, longing for your parent’s validations can turn you into a conventional, orthodox person and your risk-taking abilities, perceptions are capped not by your ambitions but by your parents.\nAs you grow up and are being amalgamated into the societal structures, the source of your validators changes and again this might stir up your personality. According to the mimetic theory proposed by Gerald, models implant the desire and this desire carves out a course to follow in your life. Models can be conflated with Validators in some scenarios, but there is a serious distinction between them. In the case of models, you want to mimic them, whereas you appease the validators. This is a subtle yet important demarcation. The models who mould your desires may not be even aware of your existence, the classic case of this being the brand influencers. Validators, altogether, live and occupy different parts of your brain than their counterparts(Models).\nDuring the course of my life, the source of validators has changed from time to time. Parents, family, friends, inner society, professors, colleagues, managers and to be continued. Up and until friends were validators the journey was good and awesome. But once it got up to the point of inner society, all hell broke loose. I am still amazed at how I managed to surmount various stages of validations. That doesn\u0026rsquo;t mean my validators ceased to exist. No, new ones will be born. This validators phenomenon isn\u0026rsquo;t universal. I\u0026rsquo;ve observed some of my friends where they themselves are the validators. Although they are far and few between, validating one\u0026rsquo;s own self is no less than a superpower these days.\nSo, who are your validators?\n","permalink":"https://aneessh18.github.io/source-of-validations/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eBelieve it or not, you\u0026rsquo;re getting validated by someone (or by yourself) all the time. Consciousness and Validations are intertwined in many ways that your brain can\u0026rsquo;t comprehend. Validations in some way shape your behaviour and important characteristics of your life. For example, longing for your parent’s validations can turn you into a conventional, orthodox person and your risk-taking abilities, perceptions are capped not by your ambitions but by your parents.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"How are you getting validated?"},{"content":"There is a lot of buzz around to network like hell with all the people around you and this is based on the premise that networking yields better opportunities in the future. And as a matter of fact, it is true. India\u0026rsquo;s ascension to the space program is simply the by-product of networking. If it isn\u0026rsquo;t for Vikram Sarabhai\u0026rsquo;s network, India Space Program wouldn\u0026rsquo;t be in its current form. It was Sarabhai\u0026rsquo;s contacts around the world who helped India in the nascent stages of its space program.\nWhat people miss out in the above example is that Sarabhai held a core competency in the domain of physics. In the kindest of terms, if you start networking with people (random introductions) without holding a strong foot on anything, you are just an intermediary and don\u0026rsquo;t hold any significance. Rather build a knowledge repertoire that can attract and help people.\n","permalink":"https://aneessh18.github.io/networking/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eThere is a lot of buzz around to network like hell with all the people around you and this is based on the premise that networking yields better opportunities in the future. And as a matter of fact, it is true. India\u0026rsquo;s ascension to the space program is simply the by-product of networking. If it isn\u0026rsquo;t for Vikram Sarabhai\u0026rsquo;s network, India Space Program wouldn\u0026rsquo;t be in its current form. It was Sarabhai\u0026rsquo;s contacts around the world who helped India in the nascent stages of its space program.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Networking"},{"content":"Nothing is more important in your material life than optics. The stories you tell yourself to live. The narratives that are woven in your subconscious mind get propagated through different filters and biases, and finally manifest in your future self. People advise you to think positively precisely for the same reason. The way you portray yourself in your mind weighs something in the path forward.\nSince I got into college, I primarily interpreted my current standings in a glass half empty way. There was always something incomplete in the way I saw myself which resulted in dystopian dreams and prophecies of my future. To this day, I can\u0026rsquo;t get enough of these half-empty views and takes of myself. Let\u0026rsquo;s take an example to dig deep into what I mean. Imagine you worked on a project where your effort moves the needle by 5 degrees. At the end of the day when you measure your progress, it isn\u0026rsquo;t much compared to your friend who just delivered a banger project and reduced their team\u0026rsquo;s engineering budget by 10 percent. Without you knowing, a narrative keeps popping in your mind, \u0026ldquo;man, I haven\u0026rsquo;t contributed anything significant to my project and I haven\u0026rsquo;t learned anything new\u0026rdquo; even when the reality is a bit different. This sort of narrative sucks the joy out of you and knocks you into a downward spiral w.r.t your professional career. This doesn\u0026rsquo;t mean that you should just inflate your contributions like that friend of yours in your college final semester project. Rather it should be that something along these lines, \u0026ldquo;I wrote some code, made some decisions, learned something\u0026rdquo;. Now that you can objectively measure these things you can evaluate yourself much better than that negative critique whom you\u0026rsquo;ve been using till now. This effectively helps you to answer everyone\u0026rsquo;s favourite question, \u0026ldquo;what did you do till now ?\u0026rdquo;.\nAs I said, having no-bullshit narratives help you to get your current standing of yours and clear some air in that buzzing mind.\n","permalink":"https://aneessh18.github.io/the-optics/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eNothing is more important in your material life than optics. The stories you tell yourself to live. The narratives that are woven in your subconscious mind get propagated through different filters and biases, and finally manifest in your future self. People advise you to think positively precisely for the same reason. The way you portray yourself in your mind weighs something in the path forward.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eSince I got into college, I primarily interpreted my current standings in a glass half empty way. There was always something incomplete in the way I saw myself which resulted in dystopian dreams and prophecies of my future. To this day, I can\u0026rsquo;t get enough of these half-empty views and takes of myself. Let\u0026rsquo;s take an example to dig deep into what I mean. Imagine you worked on a project where your effort moves the needle by 5 degrees. At the end of the day when you measure your progress, it isn\u0026rsquo;t much compared to your friend who just delivered a banger project and reduced their team\u0026rsquo;s engineering budget by 10 percent. Without you knowing, a narrative keeps popping in your mind, \u0026ldquo;man, I haven\u0026rsquo;t contributed anything significant to my project and I haven\u0026rsquo;t learned anything new\u0026rdquo; even when the reality is a bit different. This sort of narrative sucks the joy out of you and knocks you into a downward spiral w.r.t your professional career. This doesn\u0026rsquo;t mean that you should just inflate your contributions like that friend of yours in your college final semester project. Rather it should be that something along these lines, \u0026ldquo;I wrote some code, made some decisions, learned something\u0026rdquo;. Now that you can objectively measure these things you can evaluate yourself much better than that negative critique whom you\u0026rsquo;ve been using till now. This effectively helps you to answer everyone\u0026rsquo;s favourite question, \u0026ldquo;what did you do till now ?\u0026rdquo;.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"The Optics"},{"content":"After having worked with Jira and Todoist in professional and personal contexts respectively, I have come to a conclusion that if you can code then you ought to create your own productivity tracking app. This conclusion has been made after seeing a high-performing senior member in my org dogfood his own to-do list app and achieve high levels of productivity. Though Jira is good for conducting sprints in a collaborative environment it doesn’t kill to have a to-do list for yourself with bare minimums. I know this sounds crazy because you gotta develop and maintain it, but if you take the exponential outcomes into consideration, it’s one of those low effort and high impact projects where the project itself gets better along with time. It’s not like you’re conceiving a startup idea, cause it has no commercial viability. It’s just that it helps you organize your shit better in a more customizable manner which can yield better productivity.\nOf course, the pre-requisite to building this in-house productivity cum todo-list application is to observe a lot of existing ones and strip off the complexity which gets added because it has to be commercially viable. Notion, Todoist, Jira are all actually great but they all fall apart when you put them to personal use. What you need is a programmable todo-app like Emacs ( I didn’t get a chance to use Emacs in a professional context, but it is quite daunting than Vim even for simple tasks). The absolute minimums to build a customizable productivity app is a database and the ability to build views on top of it. Nothing more than that, just the ability to manipulate data of your own will.\nSo if there were a way to compress this post into a one-liner then that would be “build a productivity app that facilitates to manipulate your data at your will”.\n","permalink":"https://aneessh18.github.io/programmable-productivity/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eAfter having worked with Jira and Todoist in professional and personal contexts respectively, I have come to a conclusion that if you can code then you ought to create your own productivity tracking app. This conclusion has been made after seeing a high-performing senior member in my org dogfood his own to-do list app and achieve high levels of productivity. Though Jira is good for conducting sprints in a collaborative environment it doesn’t kill to have a to-do list for yourself with bare minimums. I know this sounds crazy because you gotta develop and maintain it, but if you take the exponential outcomes into consideration, it’s one of those low effort and high impact projects where the project itself gets better along with time. It’s not like you’re conceiving a startup idea, cause it has no commercial viability. It’s just that it helps you organize your shit better in a more customizable manner which can yield better productivity.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Programmable Productivity"},{"content":"There is a widespread notion in the tech industry that most of the day-to-day operations of a software engineer doesn\u0026rsquo;t involve optimizing code, rather it is providing reliable functionality for the piece of code you write that in turn manifests itself in a feature. And mostly it is true. Now providing reliable functionality means that your code shouldn\u0026rsquo;t break when exposed to the unknown actions of the user and should also account for conveying meaningful messages in case it observes them.\nWriting code in your college is different from the way you operate in the industry, in the sense that there is little to no economical value of the code and the shelf life typically ranges from 1-day (for weekly assignments) to 4 months (for capstone project). And after that mostly it is discarded or it is shoved into Github.\nWhen the code you write has an economical value, it changes the whole way of producing code in a programmer\u0026rsquo;s brain. Suddenly you should account for the downtimes and budget for undocumented user actions that can potentially bring down the service at worst. But the service going down isn\u0026rsquo;t that much of a big deal if the code is functioning properly and can produce reliable results in case of documented actions. It isn\u0026rsquo;t that easy to write a reliable piece of code when you are not the one using it and worse you also use some external services in getting the job done.\nOnce you add a lot of variables to this process, you\u0026rsquo;re left with pondering over for at least hours even in case of a small change. Because it should satisfy all the unwritten requirements. I felt sad for my inability to produce reliable and compatible code quickly enough until I realized calculating and evaluating all these components in my head was the bottleneck as it was an obscure process. So I started writing down the high-level functionality of what the code should do (in the editor itself) and initiated the process of churning out code. This way also ensures that I can do robust testing.\n","permalink":"https://aneessh18.github.io/writing-software-well/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eThere is a widespread notion in the tech industry that most of the day-to-day operations of a software engineer doesn\u0026rsquo;t involve optimizing code, rather it is\nproviding reliable functionality for the piece of code you write that in turn manifests itself in a feature. And mostly it is true. Now providing reliable functionality means that your code shouldn\u0026rsquo;t break when exposed to the unknown actions of the user and should also account for conveying meaningful messages in case it observes them.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Writing Software Well"},{"content":"There is a growing voice inside me that acts and talks like an entrepreneur but isn\u0026rsquo;t one. He lives and operates in a realm where he is friends with fellow entrepreneurs like Chamath, David Sacks, Kunal Shah (just to name a few). He feeds off Shark Tank India and Silicon Valley to supplement his entertainment diet.\nHe dunks, valuates, re-evaluates public and private markets, government bonds, crypto narratives and everything that can be valued from an armchair. He reads Stratechery, popular VC Substacks, free Economist articles and listens to The All In With Besties, My First Million, Time Ferris show and hopes that satiates the ever-growing needs of his thought leader personality.\nHe can\u0026rsquo;t disassociate from anything that has capitalistic manifestations, even remotely. He thinks of building a cosy SaaS startup by using Stripe for International payments, RazorPay for domestic payments and using its wide catalogued products of running the company (all the accounting stuff), AWS for scaling the servers and databases, New Relic for monitoring the systems, Mix Panel for marketing and tracking, Figma for designing and making mockups and other gazillion building blocks for that non-tangible business idea that has been conceived just a few hours ago which in turn will be destroyed in a few minutes from now.\nThis Wannabe entrepreneur is a state of mind. It\u0026rsquo;s like being in a state machine where the inputs are just keeping in those self reinforcing loops. It\u0026rsquo;s completely normal for this Wannabe to argue about every aspect of macroeconomics and capitalist machines.\nThe only way the Wannabe is going to get out from the self-loop is taking some advice from someone like Ashneer Grover(not kidding). \u0026ldquo;Chalo ab dhande ki baat\u0026rdquo; is the call to action that knocks you out of that cosy fictitious world. Yeah, you need some cynics like Antonio Garcia Martinez to spill the beans over that world. Otherwise, you continue living in a world where you\u0026rsquo;re friends with every VC, entrepreneur in SV and BLR. And when that world starts to fall apart, there is a blood bath waiting out for you.\n","permalink":"https://aneessh18.github.io/wannebes/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eThere is a growing voice inside me that acts and talks like an entrepreneur but isn\u0026rsquo;t one. He lives and operates in a realm where he is friends with fellow entrepreneurs like Chamath, David Sacks, Kunal Shah (just to name a few). He feeds off Shark Tank India and Silicon Valley to supplement his entertainment diet.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHe dunks, valuates, re-evaluates public and private markets, government bonds, crypto narratives and everything that can be valued from an armchair. He reads Stratechery, popular VC Substacks, free Economist articles and listens to The All In With Besties, My First Million, Time Ferris show and hopes that satiates the ever-growing needs of his thought leader personality.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"The Wannebes"},{"content":"More often than not, you\u0026rsquo;ve hit the dead-end of trying to explain a system/convey-your-opinions to a person who has neither shared culture nor experience w.r.t you. I didn\u0026rsquo;t notice this strange phenomenon that was playing out in my career ventures. You see all this while, up until my under-graduation, I was always out with somebody with whom I shared something in the cultural aspect. But now, I am left alone in the Sub-sahara African desert with nothing but shared technical vocabulary(which itself manifests in different forms).\nSure you can pull up all the technical words from Wikipedia to explain the systematic working of a microservice and a monolith, but have tried the battle-tested do doing the aforementioned thing using shared-lingo to a friend. Yeah, nothing beats that. That is what I call true optimization and evolution in human behavior.\nI mean why blabber over something in 15 min call when can you just express the same emotion in emojis and memes(which are superior most of the time).\nInjecting new vernaculars between 2 different communicating entities (to trade) is akin to building a bridge between two islands that trade something for a living. You are effectively improving the quality of life of all the merchants on both islands. Remember bullet trains are far more superior and economical than cargo ships to transfer the goods. And once you build the bridge, the countries achieve an equilibrium state which neither of them wants to leave.\nBack to my point, the whole notion of team bonding exercises in a corporate setup is to build a shared sense of vocabulary which in turn translates to shipping products at higher velocity. So indeed, there is some validation to my idea.\nTherefore, we should strive to achieve this shared equilibrium with our fellow Homo Sapiens by not intruding on their privacy totally.\nI was triggered to write this post when I was having a conversation with my friend, where he replied \u0026ldquo;Reading too many Kunal Shah\u0026rsquo;s Tweets ?\u0026rdquo; to my question of \u0026ldquo;Common let\u0026rsquo;s write a substack to build our distribution\u0026rdquo; (a reference to Kunal\u0026rsquo;s \u0026ldquo;Jiska Distribution, Uski Bhais\u0026rdquo;).\n","permalink":"https://aneessh18.github.io/delegating-communication/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eMore often than not, you\u0026rsquo;ve hit the dead-end of trying to explain a system/convey-your-opinions to a person who has neither shared culture nor experience w.r.t you. I didn\u0026rsquo;t notice this strange phenomenon that was playing out in my career ventures. You see all this while, up until my under-graduation, I was always out with somebody with whom I shared something in the cultural aspect. But now, I am left alone in the Sub-sahara African desert with nothing but shared technical vocabulary(which itself manifests in different forms).\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Delegating Communication to Share Culture and Experiences"},{"content":"Crack this nut, and boom you\u0026rsquo;re on top of the corporate career ladder and way above your peers. Of course, it doesn\u0026rsquo;t merely apply in the narrow use case of professional life but also in the grand scheme of things of the universe as well, the life.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s not that easy to acquire this skill though, i.e Switching between Specialization and Abstraction. You need to adopt a lot of reading-the-room kinda strategies to pull this off, which is harder given the context of Pandemic enforced Zoom meetings. Feeding of the subtle clues that our fellow human beings toss off in the air and switching gears isn\u0026rsquo;t everybody\u0026rsquo;s cup of tea. The initial attempts may resemble throwing darts in a pitch black room insulated from sunrays.\nOk enough of the abstract explaination of this mystic concept. Let\u0026rsquo;s get into details. Say you\u0026rsquo;re a engineer managing a group of freshly minted college grads working on delivering a product to the stakeholder. Imagine a situation where you\u0026rsquo;ve to give a demo to the stakeholder and collect feedback which should essentially distill into Jira\u0026rsquo;s, bits and electrons so that the mercenaries can start working? That kinda of stuff I am talking here.\nGiven the normalistic distribution of every possible human skill, more often that you would piss exactly 1 of the 2 groups, either the mercenaries or the visionaries(stakeholders, com\u0026rsquo;on). Piss off the visionaries, that extra raise is sure not coming from here. Piss off the mercenaries, your project is as good as dead.\nSo, this is where you should take some inspiration from the Maestro(the musical orchaestrator). Communicating with the Musicians in the vernaculars of the music and hope that comes off pleasant to the ears of audience.\n","permalink":"https://aneessh18.github.io/blog/specification_vs_generalization/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eCrack this nut, and boom you\u0026rsquo;re on top of the corporate career ladder and way above your peers. Of course, it doesn\u0026rsquo;t merely apply in the narrow use case of professional life but also in the grand scheme of things of the universe as well, the life.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIt\u0026rsquo;s not that easy to acquire this skill though, i.e Switching between Specialization and Abstraction. You need to adopt a lot of reading-the-room kinda strategies to pull this off, which is harder given the context of Pandemic enforced Zoom meetings. Feeding of the subtle clues that our fellow human beings toss off in the air and switching gears isn\u0026rsquo;t everybody\u0026rsquo;s cup of tea. The initial attempts may resemble throwing darts in a pitch black room insulated from sunrays.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Switching between Specialization and Abstraction"},{"content":"I decided that from now on I will stick to the process of compulsive note-taking. Since my college days, I have felt that the lack of note-taking has bitten my chances of executing an impactful project and has also been holding me back from having an anxious-free life. For the past few days, I have applied this always-novel strategy to meetings especially and it really works like a charm. First, it channels your focus on the thing that is happening in the present moment which in turn leads to faster lookups in the future.\nI always find it difficult to focus in meetings when I am not the one actively contributing, as my mind wanders off into the different realms of this modern world. Due to this, meetings had a fleeting effect in the time aspect(time dilation to be precise). I also didn’t retain most of the information. Not to mention the amount of anxiety I was left after the meetings. Because I couldn’t really distill or retain the information.\nBut this really changed quickly, when I made the decision to take notes obsessively. I am no longer distracted by the forces of the internet during the meetings. I note down all the things that interest me and form a gist and list of to-dos after the meetings. This would effectively reduce a lot of mental load from the subconscious part of my brain where I needn’t necessarily worry about keeping the state of mind intact. It’s like you have discovered database and memory again. And the best part is that by the end of the process you’re left with a stateless mind which is what you expect from therapy.\n","permalink":"https://aneessh18.github.io/note-taking-therapy/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eI decided that from now on I will stick to the process of compulsive note-taking. Since my college days, I have felt that the lack of note-taking has bitten my chances of executing an impactful project and has also been holding me back from having an anxious-free life. For the past few days, I have applied this always-novel strategy to meetings especially and it really works like a charm.  First, it channels your focus on the thing that is happening in the present moment which in turn leads to faster lookups in the future.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Therapeutic aspect of Note taking"},{"content":"The one thing that I liked most about this book is the writing style. It\u0026rsquo;s so subtle, neurotic pleasing, and sarcastic. This book has probably the best climax I have ever read till now. It is shame that I watched martian before reading the book. The world that the author built with primitive biology, physics, chemistry concepts is over the roof. There is no complicated scientific jargon where you have to rub your head against a rock. Ofc I didn\u0026rsquo;t get my head around time dilation.\n","permalink":"https://aneessh18.github.io/books/project_hail_book_review/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eThe one thing that I liked most about this book is the writing style. It\u0026rsquo;s so subtle, neurotic pleasing, and sarcastic. This book has probably the best climax I have ever read till now. It is shame that I watched martian before reading the book. The world that the author built with primitive biology, physics, chemistry concepts is over the roof. There is no complicated scientific jargon where you have to rub your head against a rock. Ofc I didn\u0026rsquo;t get my head around time dilation.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Project Hail Mary"},{"content":"Everything in the world that has been created is based on the world view perceived by the creator excluding those which portray universal truth like fundamental science(fundamental chemistry and physics). And more often than not understanding deeply a product in a category is a gateway to the inner workings of the creators who are working under the same shed.\nI can attest to this notion in the field of programming languages. All those single and multi-threaded, functional and object oriented, static and dynamic language comparisons are not the best use of my time. Rather than trying to keep the foot on all these language boats, it is wise to learn one deeply, understand what the author is trying to convey which in turn helps me to understand or appreciate other languages. This advice was given to me by my senior but eventually, I had fallen prey to shiny object syndrome and it really sabotaged my progress.\nNot long go, I tried to learn Rust, Golang, flutter, and god knows what not. But I stumbled across a talk by DHH where he emphasized the programmer\u0026rsquo;s happiness. I really love python to the core because of the simple abstraction it provides. The main reason for this unconditional love is Jeremy Howard. That guy literally blew my brain with his exquisite simplistic thinking. Jeremy is the epitome of first principles thinking even when he shits.\nIn awe of DHH and rails developer happiness, I decided to try ruby and rails. When I started learning ruby I scoffed at the idea of learning for loops and conditional statements. It\u0026rsquo;s because those things portray the same meaning across different languages and they don’t mean dog shit. Python is preferred to java for prototyping as you don’t have to create those shitty classes for every line of code you write. Hence I stopped learning ruby the traditional way and started lurking around the interpreter and firing up my editor.\nThis way I will be able to understand what a new language has to offer rather than me trying every shiny feature it has to offer. Even a small deviation can cause anxiety to become your dear friend.\n","permalink":"https://aneessh18.github.io/blog/the_pursuit/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eEverything in the world that has been created is based on the world view perceived by the creator excluding those which portray universal truth like fundamental science(fundamental chemistry and physics). And more often than not understanding deeply a product in a category is a gateway to the inner workings of the creators who are working under the same shed.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI can attest to this notion in the field of programming languages. All those single and multi-threaded, functional and object oriented, static and dynamic language comparisons are not the best use of my time. Rather than trying to keep the foot on all these language boats, it is wise to learn one deeply, understand what the author is trying to convey which in turn helps me to understand or appreciate other languages. This advice was given to me by my senior but eventually, I had fallen prey to shiny object syndrome and it really sabotaged my progress.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"The Pursuit of Learning"},{"content":"For the past year, many of my thoughts and actions have been majorly towards one goal. That is for inclusion. Never have I felt this much urge to feel included. I go to a specific subreddit to find tribes that radiate my vibes. Even in the programming languages or frameworks, I yearn to be are the result of their communities. I am even learning a new language just to understand the system programming streams of youtuber.\nThis enormous feeling of inclusion when added with obsessiveness and shiny object syndrome is a perfect recipe for disaster. You get sucked into a vicious cycle wheel that is propelled by anxiety. To feel inclusive of some group the exploration for your tribe begins. Normally when you know internally the vibe you want to search then within no time a discord server or subreddit will be found. But if it is outbound(that means you don’t know your vibe yet) then most probably all our thoughts will be plagued by shiny object syndrome. When this happens you fall prey to the abundance of the internet. You try to fit into a tribe by cultivating their culture.\nThis is fine if you’re going after a few niches. But remember you are still trying to fit and if by chance (most probably) you get hit with another tribe that oozes swag then you’re doomed. This causes you to run on a treadmill that has an infinite power supply. And FOMO helps in expanding the list of tribes and this induces anxiety (the baap). Once anxiety enters the game there is little chance for escape. It further deepens the misery and the needle barely moves. The progress of oneself will be a distant dream. The only answer which has some remedy to this excruciating cyclic process is minimalism.\n","permalink":"https://aneessh18.github.io/craving-for-inclusivity/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eFor the past year, many of my thoughts and actions have been majorly towards one goal. That is for inclusion. Never have I felt this much urge to feel included. I go to a specific subreddit to find tribes that radiate my vibes. Even in the programming languages or frameworks, I yearn to be are the result of their communities. I am even learning a new language just to understand the system programming streams of youtuber.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Craving for inclusivity"},{"content":"There is something about meditation that produces an indescribable experience. To weed out the constant noise around meditation is the way forward. There are mainly 2 phases which the practitioner goes through while meditating. The first one is Distillation and the latter phase is Nirvana.\nIn Distillation your brain gets bombarded with a constant stream of thoughts and your eyes hesitate to close. This is the most difficult phase as the brain is resistant and does not want to confront those thoughts. Mostly this phase gets over within 20 mins. And what comes hereafter is a purely blissful experience.\nNirvana is attained when you don’t remember the last thought that hit you. Forgetting everything becomes the most sought out feature in Nirvana. Even though noise can permeate through your brain, it does not recognize or allocate resources for the incoming signals. They just hit the cerebrum and get dropped off.\nEnduring the first phase bears the fruit in Nirvana.\n","permalink":"https://aneessh18.github.io/blog/meditation_notes/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eThere is something about meditation that produces an indescribable experience. To weed out the constant noise around meditation is the way forward. There are mainly 2 phases which the practitioner goes through while meditating. The first one is Distillation and the latter phase is Nirvana.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn Distillation your brain gets bombarded with a constant stream of thoughts and your eyes hesitate to close. This is the most difficult phase as the brain is resistant and does not want to confront those thoughts. Mostly this phase gets over within 20 mins. And what comes hereafter is a purely blissful experience.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Meditation"},{"content":"Have ever thought, even in your wildest dreams, that you will be paid to borrow some money? I know it sounds dumb but it actually happened in Europe.\nNow before we go into the details of why Europe implemented negative interest rates it\u0026rsquo;s crucial to understand the concept. When an economy is in a deflationary spiral i.e where prices are tanking to everyday lows, profits are down, decreased spending there has to be some sought mechanism to boost public spending. Which effectively means that people need to borrow at lower interest rates. If the circumstances are dire then the central bank has to step in and decrease the rates below zero. You might ask why would the banks be willing to lend to loss in the first place. Well, it turns out that private banks park their money at the central bank to earn small interest which the central bank then lends to the government. Remember that the incentive to deposit is to earn some interest. But as the interest rates have tanked you have to pay the bank to store your money. I know it sounds scary!. So why would a bank deposit when it has to cough some of its own money ?. Hence lending in the short term is the only way banks can survive in the deflationary cycle.\nNow coming to the case of Europe, most of the investors\u0026rsquo; money was put to no good use. Literally, they were sitting idle. And now buy slashing interest rates first they devalued the euro. The idea was to discourage the foreign investors parking their money in Europe and private banks from holding cash. And of course, it also boosts exports.\nThis all boils down to one thing. You can buy new Apple products by borrowing !!.\n","permalink":"https://aneessh18.github.io/blog/negative_interest_rates/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eHave ever thought, even in your wildest dreams, that you will be paid to borrow some money? I know it sounds dumb but it actually happened in Europe.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eNow before we go into the details of why Europe implemented negative interest rates it\u0026rsquo;s crucial to understand the concept. When an economy is in a deflationary spiral i.e where prices are tanking to everyday lows, profits are down, decreased spending there has to be some sought mechanism to boost public spending. Which effectively means that people need to borrow at lower interest rates. If the circumstances are dire then the central bank has to step in and decrease the rates below zero. You might ask why would the banks be willing to lend to loss in the first place. Well, it turns out that private banks park their money at the central bank to earn small interest which the central bank then lends to the government. Remember that the incentive to deposit is to earn some interest. But as the interest rates have tanked you have to pay the bank to store your money. I know it sounds scary!. So why would a bank deposit when it has to cough some of its own money ?. Hence lending in the short term is the only way banks can survive in the deflationary cycle.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Negative Interest Rates"},{"content":"The silliest problem that poses threat to your finances is the gym subscription problem. Whether you take an annual or monthly membership , we all can agree that most of that goes down the river. We might comfortable say that gym owners are next to government employees in the way they earn. I know what you have been thinking. Just bill the amount of days you visit the gym.\nBut I think you should step back a little bit and ponder over this. Subsidizing other humans is not new, throughout your whole life you have been subsidizing some parts of others life. The most complicated financial instrument runs on this simple principle (insurance). Maybe in the future you get treated in a fancy hospital with money from your health insurance friends. And maybe you also paid for your friend while you\u0026rsquo;re studying. If we think deeply, we might also say that the billing should be done on the amount of time you spent with the equipment. Probably this problem can be compared to OTT subscriptions. If your friend, who is a movie buff, consumes 80 hrs of content per week whereas you consume merely 20 hrs. Will your friend agree to pay more than you ? Probably not because you can’t gauge the films. If that’s the case then you should be willing to pay more for blockbuster films.\nMaybe then it\u0026rsquo;s the right time to talk about this. Until then sayonara.\n","permalink":"https://aneessh18.github.io/blog/gym_conundrum/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eThe silliest problem that poses threat to your finances is the gym subscription problem. Whether you take an annual or monthly membership , we all can agree that most of that goes down the river. We might comfortable say that gym owners are next to government employees in the way they earn. I know what you have been thinking. Just bill the amount of days you visit the gym.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBut I think you should step back a little bit and ponder over this.  Subsidizing other humans is not new, throughout your whole life you have been subsidizing some parts of others life. The most complicated financial instrument runs on this simple principle (insurance). Maybe in the future you get treated in a fancy hospital with money from your health insurance friends. And maybe you also paid for your friend while you\u0026rsquo;re studying. If we think deeply, we might also say that the billing should be done on the amount of time you spent with the equipment. Probably this problem can be compared to OTT subscriptions. If your friend, who is a movie buff, consumes 80 hrs of content per week whereas you consume merely 20 hrs. Will your friend agree to pay more than you ? Probably not because you can’t gauge the films. If that’s the case then you should be willing to pay more for blockbuster films.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Gym Conundrum Plaguing the humanity"},{"content":"Best Podcast Shows and Episodes-1\n","permalink":"https://aneessh18.github.io/links/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"/best-podcasts-1/\"\u003eBest Podcast Shows and Episodes-1\u003c/a\u003e\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Links"}]