Aneesh Indavarapu

Coding isn't Writing

Fri, 26 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0530

People often think of coding as an extension of writing and even the discourse on the internet agrees with this notion and I don’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…). There is no structure you’ve to adhere to and if you’re skilled enough you can even create space for ambiguity in writing.

Notes on Concurrency - 1

Sat, 13 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0530

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.

Trying to be Original

Mon, 01 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0530

I abandoned some of my projects because they weren’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.

Embrace Intuition, Be Reactive

Wed, 20 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0530

From very early on, we’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’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’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’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’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’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’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’t necessarily bad, but not at the cost of intuition. Ultimately, one should forego training after developing intuition and letting it drive the situation.

Manage Yourself

Sun, 28 May 2023 00:00:00 +0530

An important realisation that I learned the hard way is that don’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’t that good, law of averages, and they are walking a tightrope. Expecting too much of them is waiting to watch yourself fail.

I 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).

Playing Safe

Sun, 28 May 2023 00:00:00 +0530

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.

Tackling intellectually difficult problems is one such case where there is only an upside, even when you don’t succeed. I used to shy away from them because I knew the end result. But now, I don’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.”

Prefer Monorepo

Sat, 27 May 2023 00:00:00 +0530

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. “Build times are high”, “getting blocked by other teams”, “easier path to cloud”, “drawing boundaries”, and “everyone else is doing it, why not us” 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.

Master Git before you collaborate

Tue, 09 May 2023 00:00:00 +0530

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.

Initially, 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.

The stuff I didn't sign up for

Sun, 30 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0530

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’t remember signing up for them.

Writing 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.

Google Chrome Hacks

Sun, 23 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0530

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

Ctrl + Shift + A -> search for both open and recently closed tabs, useful when you’ve 50 tabs across 5 different windows
Naming your windows -> so that every window has some purpose
Grouping the tabs -> for reducing the visual load if a window has too many tabs to fit in a screen
Integrating search engines -> no brainer if you search the websites directly, a very handy feature. (I’m baffled that Chrome has this feature as it’s the antithesis of their advertising manifesto)

Code Review Notes

Mon, 27 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0530

I have had the opportunity to write bad code and read good code in the last couple of years. I don’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’t be too religious of it without good reasons.

The 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’ve experienced a terrible incident). So the below list is based off of my experiences in the Java Ecosystem.

Good Software Part-1

Sat, 04 Feb 2023 00:00:00 +0530

List of good software that I use on a daily basis

IntelliJ Idea
MongoDB
PostgreSQL
Gitlab
Postman
Excalidraw
Teams (it’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)

Good Software Part-2

Sat, 04 Feb 2023 00:00:00 +0530

This list maily comprises of the libraries and frameworks I use frequently

Guice (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.

Interaces are important

Mon, 28 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0530

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.

The Interface is the gateway to whatever-the-thing you’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.

Not Re-Inventing

Sun, 09 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0530

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’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?

Exploring timeless art

Sat, 24 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0530

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.

Books 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.

You Need Depth To Discern

Sat, 24 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0530

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.

Even though I use databases a lot daily, I couldn’t build one up from scratch till I read Martin Klepmann’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’t need, the power which I didn’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’s core offering. In short, you have a non-trivial type of information which facilitated you to evaluate a database objectively.

You’re just one Blog post away from being modelled

Sat, 17 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0530

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.

Your 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.

Iterative Repetition

Sat, 03 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0530

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.

People 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.

Mid Year Review - 1

Sun, 07 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0530

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’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’t time box my day-to-day tasks. Huge mistake. Everytime task has to be time boxed, you can’t keep dragging it till you can.
Didn’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’re on Support. The kinda of skills that get acquired when you’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’t respect the human aspects that arise from code. I didn’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’t experiment enough and didn’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’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’ol research papers, you have to follow your curiosities.

Mistborn taught me more about Trust than anything will

Sun, 10 Jul 2022 23:30:00 +0530

Long before I started reading Mr Sanderson’s books, I felt excited about reading Mr Sanderson’s books. As I got sucked into Mistborn’s universe, the line between reality and Luthadel blurred. Mr Sanderson must be appreciated for holding the reader’s attention for extended periods.

Then 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’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.

Knowing Jargon isn't a sign of Competence

Sun, 24 Apr 2022 01:00:00 +0530

Many people mistake knowing a bunch of jargon as competence. In some cases, it might even suggest otherwise. It doesn’t matter if you know the most esoteric programming language in the world if you can’t get the damn job done.

People 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’ll be rich(not filthily) by being a Mercenary.

Software Premise

Sat, 02 Apr 2022 00:30:00 +0530

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’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.

Best Podcast shows and Episodes-1

Fri, 18 Mar 2022 03:00:00 +0530

Best Podcast Shows

Mission Isro with Harsha Bhogle

22 yarns with Gaurav kapur

Best Podcast Episodes

Ali Ghodse - Invest like the best

Ali Rowghani - 20 minute VC

Gavin Baker - Invest like the best

Steward Butterfield - Invest like the best

Chamath Palihapitiya - Invest like the best

John Collision - Invest like the best

Keith Rabois - Invest like the best

Ben Thompson - Invest like the best

Tech isn't special anymore

Fri, 18 Mar 2022 03:00:00 +0530

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’t have stories titled “Burgeoning Facebook trumps Google” anymore. The only stories that get played on from now will be something like “X company got acquired by Big Tech”. Chip companies have hit Moore’s wall and the data harvesting party is also about to end.

Why Substack will win over everybody

Fri, 18 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0530

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’t yearn for these deep posts, humanity as a whole needs them. These are the posts that document human civilization’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.

How are you getting validated?

Sun, 13 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0530

Believe it or not, you’re getting validated by someone (or by yourself) all the time. Consciousness and Validations are intertwined in many ways that your brain can’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.

Networking

Thu, 03 Mar 2022 20:30:00 +0530

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’s ascension to the space program is simply the by-product of networking. If it isn’t for Vikram Sarabhai’s network, India Space Program wouldn’t be in its current form. It was Sarabhai’s contacts around the world who helped India in the nascent stages of its space program.

The Optics

Tue, 01 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0530

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.

Since 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’t get enough of these half-empty views and takes of myself. Let’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’t much compared to your friend who just delivered a banger project and reduced their team’s engineering budget by 10 percent. Without you knowing, a narrative keeps popping in your mind, “man, I haven’t contributed anything significant to my project and I haven’t learned anything new” 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’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, “I wrote some code, made some decisions, learned something”. Now that you can objectively measure these things you can evaluate yourself much better than that negative critique whom you’ve been using till now. This effectively helps you to answer everyone’s favourite question, “what did you do till now ?”.

Programmable Productivity

Sat, 26 Feb 2022 01:25:00 +0530

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.

Writing Software Well

Sat, 05 Feb 2022 01:25:00 +0530

There is a widespread notion in the tech industry that most of the day-to-day operations of a software engineer doesn’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’t break when exposed to the unknown actions of the user and should also account for conveying meaningful messages in case it observes them.

The Wannebes

Sat, 29 Jan 2022 22:30:04 +0530

There is a growing voice inside me that acts and talks like an entrepreneur but isn’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.

He 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.

Delegating Communication to Share Culture and Experiences

Tue, 25 Jan 2022 20:10:00 +0530

More often than not, you’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’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).

Switching between Specialization and Abstraction

Tue, 25 Jan 2022 01:01:00 +0530

Crack this nut, and boom you’re on top of the corporate career ladder and way above your peers. Of course, it doesn’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.

It’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’t everybody’s cup of tea. The initial attempts may resemble throwing darts in a pitch black room insulated from sunrays.

Therapeutic aspect of Note taking

Tue, 25 Jan 2022 01:01:00 +0530

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.

Project Hail Mary

Sun, 01 Aug 2021 00:00:00 +0530

The one thing that I liked most about this book is the writing style. It’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’t get my head around time dilation.

The Pursuit of Learning

Mon, 28 Jun 2021 20:55:04 +0530

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.

I 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.

Craving for inclusivity

Wed, 16 Jun 2021 21:28:04 +0530

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.

Meditation

Tue, 18 May 2021 21:28:04 +0530

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.

In 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.

Negative Interest Rates

Tue, 11 May 2021 21:28:04 +0530

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.

Now before we go into the details of why Europe implemented negative interest rates it’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.

Gym Conundrum Plaguing the humanity

Mon, 15 Mar 2021 12:35:04 +0530

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.

But 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’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.

Links

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Best Podcast Shows and Episodes-1