Check your models Peter Drucker has a great quote that I don’t think the majority of people in the IT industry, or in general, understand, which is “There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all”. We rarely check our internal mental models that dictate how we live … Read more
Know what you don’t know I have met in my career a couple of exceptional engineers who are just moving at such a fast pace it’s very difficult to comprehend. And when I look back at that, the underlying trait that all of them share is this honesty about how little they know. They know … Read more
Compound effect We all know that the compound effect takes time, but do we? Are we willing to put in the work, be invisible for the next 10 years, but come out as an expert in one area at the end? We usually don’t think about such a long time frame, we can barely stick … Read more
Why One of the biggest problems I see in junior engineers is the fact that they don’t invest enough time in reading and exploring the SDK documentation for whatever library/framework/OS they are using. I was in the same boat when I started my career, and the main reason I was not doing this is that … Read more
With these recent layoffs at Twitter, and the expectation from engineers to stay over the weekend to finish an “important” feature, I see a lot of engineers are not familiar with the main concepts of capitalism. If you are an employee, you are disposable, end of the story. I am not saying it’s a bad … Read more
Why The brain is a prediction and pattern-matching machine. The upside to this is that we can quickly identify patterns amidst loads of information, the bad part is that we tend to assume things are related and part of a pattern but not necessarily so. Train yourself to assume things are not related and build … Read more
What? What is an opportunity cost? It’s a concept from economics where you have to think about what are you doing right now and try to identify another opportunity you could pursue that would give you a better return on investment. It can apply to money, time, satisfaction, and any resource. It’s an incredibly useful … Read more
Consumption vs Creation I did a tweet about this and I think this deserves a full article. I am a big fan of looking at the world as a series of games, hundreds of them, running simultaneously. Success in life is mostly a process of discovering what games we are in, and what are the … Read more