Work

2025 has been work, work and work alone. At work, to collaborate with teams in different time zones, my day started with SGT and ended with PST. Being available across three time zones left me little to no energy to work on things outside of work. I was able to write a couple of posts, but that was it.

• I enabled Dropbox on Kobo eReader to read books from Dropbox.
• I published my notes from the Range book.

I read the following books.

1. University of Berkshire Hathaway: 30 Years of Lessons Learned from Warren Buffett & Charlie Munger at the Annual Shareholders Meeting by Daniel Pecaut & Corey Wrenn
2. Building an Effective Dev Portfolio by Joshua Comeau
3. Software Engineering - The Soft Parts by Addy Osmani
4. Excellent Advice for Living: Wisdom I Wish I'd Known Earlier by Kevin Kelly
5. Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes by Morgan Housel
6. The Art of Spending Money: Simple Choices for a Richer Life by Morgan Housel
7. The Art of Execution: How the world's best investors get it wrong and still make millions by Lee Freeman-Shor
8. Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits and Other Writings by Philip A. Fisher
9. Peaks and Valleys: Making Good And Bad Times Work For You - At Work And In Life by Spencer Johnson
10. One Up On Wall Street: How to Use What You Already Know to Make Money in the Market by Peter Lynch
11. Getting Things Done by David Allen

I donated to Kaniyam Foundation, Free Software Foundation, Wikipedia, Let's Encrypt, and Mozilla Foundation.

Family

For the whole year, it was challenging to balance work and family. I learnt the hard way that you only have a finite amount of energy every day. You need to manage your energy levels before you manage your time. If you've time but no energy, you'll be grumpy, and your kids will sense it. So, the solution was to prioritise doing NOTHING that puts me on a guilt trip during my ME time every day. So, I had to stop all the usual things that I do every year, like side projects, reading books, to conserve energy and to be in a good mood all the time. It stayed the same way until December.

The biggest personal highlight of the year was my sabbatical. As a reward for completing 5 years of service, my company offered a 4 weeks of paid sabbatical. Ever since my school days, I had wanted to stay home during Margazhi and sleep well, so I timed my sabbatical in December to align my children’s school holidays, and to plan our family vacation better.

To avoid any regrets, I split the time evenly. Two weeks for my family and two weeks for myself. During the family time, we travelled to Kerala, Pudhukottai and two other places before the year end rush. For my personal time, I want to learn a new skill. So, I read about 8 books on two topics - stock picking and being organised. Exploring ways to get more things done with less time.

Presence > productivity: For the 2nd time in a row, I'm publishing year in review during Pongal holiday week, intentionally stepping away from my usual year-end ritual.

Looking back, the most important lesson of 2025 was fluidity: using energy as my compass, letting go without guilt, and adapting without forcing balance. Some years are about acceleration; others are about alignment. I think our 2025 was about alignment.

Previously 2024, 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2015, 2014

There are two types of domains for building your careers.

• Kind domains
• Wicked domains

• Specialists is a person who focuses narrow field. Starting early is often necessary to become a specialist since the underlying rules don't change.
• Generalists is a person who explorers many fields before committing to one. The biggest advantage he has is cross pollinates of ideas from other fields.
• Based on the domain, you might either need to be specialist or generalist. The world needs both specialists and generalists to solve different kind of problems.
• Our work and life preferences aren't fixed as we assume. We learn who we are through living, not beforehand.
• As Moravec paradox suggest, Machines and humans have opposite strengthen and weakness. If we can codifiy it, machines can do it better than us. It is the ability to integrate broadly across domains differentiates us. In open ended real world problems, humans have a huge advantage over AI.
• The best way to choose a field for building career, is through "sampling period". i.e., you try different things in and around your field of interest before narrowing down to one.
  eg: Roger federer played a varied of sports before choosing to go professional on tennis.
• Experiment to discover your possible selves. A short term, trial-and-error approach may be better for career success than following a fixed, long-term plan.
• Exploration and switching are necessary to find a good match. Don’t be afraid to quit. Quitting isn’t an admission of failure. Quitting is an art that can learnt only by practice. Persistence for the sake of persistence is unwise.
• Don't commit to anything in the future, by looking at the current options. Choose those that will give you the most promising range of options afterwards. Instead of working back from a goal, work from a promising situation.
• Finding a field that suits you through test-and-find, and working hard will set you apart. From outside it might appear to be grit, but in reality, it is your strengthens aligned with the challenges. Late specialization > early head start.
• Don’t feel behind. Everyone progresses at a different rate. Compare yourself to your yesterday's version.
• Without knowing the domain which you operate in, general advice such as start early, narrow your focus and specialize soon are unhelpful.

Work

Building on last year's foundation for my weekly system, I consolidated all my bookmarks from external services like Twitter and Mastodon into Pinboard. Additionally, I set up an RSS reader to manage individual blogs.

• I've been reading Designing Data-Intensive Applications since last year. The book is packed with at least two semesters' worth of computer science material, so I'm taking time to absorb it well.
• I created transcribe, a Python utility that uses Amazon transcribe service to extract and format transcripts from an audio file.
• Doom emacs experimentation didn't go well. I configured .vimrc for File Opening, Syntax, and Search Highlighting, and use vscodevim.vim which supports .vimrc configurations within VS Code.
• After Attending React conference 2024, I'm working on creating a mobile app as a side project using React native in Typescript.

Finally, the weekly experiment wrapped up successfully, and my blog is back to featuring a now page.

I read the following books.

1. Impact Players: How to Take the Lead, Play Bigger, and Multiply Your Impact by Liz Wiseman - My notes
2. The Daily Dad: 366 Meditations on Parenting, Love and Raising Great Kids by Ryan Holiday - Quotes, highlights
3. The Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham - My notes
4. How to Talk so Kids Will Listen and Listen so Kids Will Talk by Adele Faber

This year I donated to the Kaniyam Foundation, Free Software Foundation, Wikipedia, Mozilla, and two YouTube channels.

Health

I see a pattern emerging from my learning hours. I'm more focused in the early morning or late at night when the kids are asleep. Since there is nothing I need to attend to, getting into the flow comes naturally, but ending it after an hour is proving to be a challenge. But this is necessary to ensure I'm following all my curiosity without burning out.

Instead of obsessing over working out every day, I've adopted the weekly approach. I lift weights once a week, and for the rest of the week, I do basics like doing stretches every day, taking afternoon walks post lunch every day, taking stairs whenever I can, and evening cycling with the kids.

Family

To apply the weekly strategy over my finances, I started paying bills at the end of each week instead of waiting until the month end. This led to three interesting outcomes: (1) it tested my emergency fund, as I had to pay bills from it before I received my salary (2) it gave me a clear idea of my current burn rate (3) and how much lifestyle creep have I picked up recently.

A lot happened this year. After 6 years of career break, Lakshmi joined Amazon. Aaradhana started school, and Dhruvan has started getting homeworks as he is moving up grades. He is learning க ங ச ஞ, antonyms-synonyms, singular-plural, articles, addition-subtraction and multiplication tables. Wrapping Dhruvan's notebooks in brown covers reminded me of my school days. Lakshmi is taking care of academics.

Our household loves reading. Both my paternal and maternal grandfathers started their day with a newspaper, and my parents still follow that tradition. The ritual hasn't changed much except adding a English and a financial newspaper to the mix. Dhruvan, seeing this, is already picking up the habit early. He eagerly looks forward to சிறுவர் மலர் every week, enjoying activities like drawing pictures using numbers, coloring, and spotting 7 differences between image sections. One unindented side effect is that now, every wall is turning into a canvas.

Modern art

Dhruvan's art

Aaradhana

Team work

Though I was a huge cricket fan, I had never been to a stadium. Lakshmi changed that. She took me to the CSK vs PBKS IPL match to see the man, the myth, the legend in action.

Last time, we couldn't visit Kanyakumari due to bad weather, but this year we made it! I took Lakshmi, the kids, and Appa-Amma to the same places I visited in 2013. Back then, I was a bachelor on a career break, about to head to Mumbai to join a startup. Now, I'm married man with two kids. It's gratifying to see how far I've come in life. Thank God for these blessings. For this reason, Kanyakumari will always be special to me.

Previously 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2015, 2014

There are three types of contributors.

• Impact contributors: deliver high-value, impactful work.
• Typical contributors: talented individuals who confine themselves within defined tasks.
• Under contributors: talented individuals perform below their potential.

Being an impact player isn't about special talent; it's about adopting a differential mindset to thrive in ambiguous, dynamic environments.

Five traits that set impact players from ordinary contributors:

1. Make yourself useful
2. Step up, step back
3. Finish strong
4. Ask and adjust
5. Make work light

1. Make yourself useful

opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work - Thomas A. edison

• There is a huge disconnect between the job description and the actual work. Companies seek the right candidates but struggle to hire for specific skills.
• We can increase our impact when we find problems that need to be solved and make ourselves useful to our organization. The value must be received and perceived by the customer or stakeholder.
• Instead of contemplating the work's scope for impact, start with your bosses's top priority.

2. Step up, step back

• Be agile. You will need help to figure out everything for ambiguous tasks. Keep the stakeholders in the loop and be open to change. The goal is to win as a team instead of enforcing your agenda.
• A good strategy has many thinkers but only one author.
• You need a stewardship mentality to lead, not an authoritative title.
• The best leaders create stability for their team by absorbing ambiguity.
• When you take on more responsibility, you make more money.

3. Finish stronger

• Finishing strong isn't about delivering at all costs. It's about working on the right set of things as we bring clarity, and see it through the completion.
• Expecting obstacles from the start is the surest way to overcome them. By anticipating problems, we can finish strong, even in the worst of circumstances.
• Success is about doing the right thing, not about doing everything right. Instead of finishing at all costs, you should cut your losses and let some projects go.

4. Ask and adjust

Intelligence is the ability to adapt to change - Stephen Hawking

• Relying on feedback gathered in the annual performance review won't suffice. When targets are continually moving, you need continual feedback, guidance, and correction so you can adjust your aim.
• If you want to have an impact amid moving targets, ask for guidance and adjust your aim.
• As a knowledge worker, never tie your identity to your work. Doing so will damage your well-being as it may rise and fall based on the project, performance review, and challenges you face in completing it. You're not your work. Your self-worth remains independent of your work performance.
• With a growth mindset, you are capable of learning and changing. so, interpret the feedback objectively to refine your skills.

5. Make work light

• Be succinct: there is too much work to get done, too many new tools and technologies to master, and more information than we all can process. The same technology that enables us to work anywhere also urges us to work everywhere and at all hours.
• Being ready to go when needed is a crucial feature.

To be a successful investor, you need two things.

• A framework for making investment decisions.
• An ability to keep your emotions in check.

If you want to pick stocks for the intellectual challenge, then Graham's investing framework can significantly help.

• If your investment horizon is at least 25 or 30 years—there is only one sensible approach: Invest in a diversified low-cost index fund every month.
• The whole point of investing is not to earn more than average but to earn enough money to meet your needs.
• Measure your investing success not by what you make, but by how much you keep after inflation.
• Have two accounts. One for investment and one for speculation. Doing both from the same account will delude you into thinking you're investing when speculating.
• Invest 90% of the money in an index fund to create your investment foundation and experiment with a balance of 10%.
• Allocate a maximum of 75% to stocks.
• Allocate a minimum of 25% to bond: A minimum of 25% bond is sufficient to support your portfolio even when the market crashes. A 50-50 stock bond split or allocating bonds for 100 - your age would severely impact your returns when the investment horizon is over 20 years.
• Diversification is the easiest and most cost-effective way to increase the margin of safety. It reduces the risk of being wrong and improves the chances of being right.
• Own between 10 to 30 diversified stocks with a higher likelihood of profit than loss.
• Reserve some amount of cash.
• We invest in the present, but we invest for the future. Choose industries that are most likely to grow and identify promising companies.
• Avoid overexposure to one sector.
• Narrow down to companies with a long record of profitable operations that generate more cash than they consume.
• Read at least the last five years' annual reports before buying a stock.
• Never buy a stock immediately after a substantial rise or sell one immediately after a significant drop.
• Avoid companies with high projected growth rates. A company can be a giant or deserve a giant P/E ratio, but not both.
• Avoid companies which pay no income tax since it raises questions about reported earnings.
• Prefer companies that build their businesses from within rather than through acquisition funded by debt.
• Prefer companies that buy back their shares when they are cheap not when they are at all time highs.
• Good management is one that allocates capital wisely; and do not pay themselves hundred-million-dollar of stock options.
• If you live, work in US and earn in the U.S dollar, you are already financial tied to the U.S. economy. It’s risky to keep all your money in one country. Eg Japan. To be safe, diversify some of your investments internationally.
• Investing in your company's stock isn't risk free since you know the business more than an outsider. Eg: Enron, worldCom.
• Never buy into a lawsuit.
• No matter how good its products or how powerful its brands, a company must spend some money to develop new business.
• Repeated selling by the insiders without a valid reason is a bright red flag.
• Company executives should say what they will do, then do what they said.
• Risk in investment can be managed, but can't be avoided.
• Characteristics of a bull market (1) a historically high price level, (2) high price/earnings ratios, (3) low dividend yields as against bond yields, (4) much speculation on margin, and (5) many offerings of new common-stock issues of poor quality.

Margin of safety

The current stock price reflects not only the past but also reasonably formed expectations of the future.

The function of the margin of safety is, in essence, that of rendering unnecessary an accurate estimate of the future.

Every stock is a bargain at some point and expensive at another. While there are good and bad companies, no stock is inherently good—only its price matters, and good prices come and go.

The value of any investment is, and always must be, a function of the price you pay for it. A great company is not a great investment if you pay too much for the stock.

Many security analysts make the fundamental mistake of buying companies with the best management and growth prospects at any price. They avoid less promising companies no matter how low the price may be.

The margin of safety is always dependent on the price paid. By refusing to pay too much for an investment, you minimize the chance of losing your wealth.

If you have formed a conclusion from the facts and if you know your judgment is sound, act on it— even though others may hesitate or differ.” (You are neither right nor wrong because the crowd disagrees with you. You are right because your data and reasoning are right.) Similarly, in the world of securities, courage becomes the supreme virtue after adequate knowledge and a tested judgment are at hand. In investing, as with life in general, ultimate victory usually goes to the doers, not to the talkers.

Without bear markets, anyone waiting to "buy low" will feel left behind. Unless the investor has emotional discipline, they are more likely to jump back in with both feet, ignoring their investment framework. Invest only if you see the margin of safety else, refrain.

Parenting is a topic that every philosophy and religious tradition has spoken about.

Teach by Example

First say to yourself what you would be; and then do what you have to do. - Epictetus

I think of myself as a philosopher only in the sense of being able to set an example - Friedrich Nietzsche

Don't worry that children never listen to you; worry that they are always watching you - Robert fulghum

Without a ruler to do it against you won’t make crooked straight. - Seneca

Love unconditionally

Future love doesn't exist. Love is a present activity only - Leo tolstoy

Put your family first

Sometimes you will never know the value of a moment until it becomes a memory - Dr. Seuss

Master your emotions

Every event has two handles, one by which it can be carried, and one by which it can’t.
If your brother does you wrong, don’t grab it by his wronging, because this is the handle incapable of lifting it.
Instead, use the other—that he is your brother, that you were raised together,
and then you will have hold of the handle that carries. - Epictetus

Anger always outlasts hurt.
Best to take the opposite course.
Would anyone think it normal to return a kick to a mule or a bite to a dog? - Seneca

These things are not asking to be judged by you.
Leave them alone - Marcus Aurelius

Old people are always very impatient with young ones.
Fathers always expect their sons to have their virtues without their faults. — Winston Churchill

Character is fate

Character is fate - Heraclites

If, at some point in your life, you should come across anything better than justice, truth, self-control, courage — it must be an extraordinary thing indeed—and enjoy it to the full - Marcus Aurelius

Don't neglect yourself

The most important decision you make is to be in a good mood - Voltaire

Keep company only with people who uplift you, whose presence calls forth your best - Epictetus

Sleep is the interest we have to pay on the capital which is called in at death;
and the higher the rate of interest and the more regularly it is paid,
the further the date of redemption is postponed. - Arthur Schopenhauer

Raise a reader

A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies.
The man who never reads lives only one. - George R.R. Martin

I would rather have questions that can't be answered than answers that can't be questioned - Richard Feynman

Time flies

This is the real secret of life -- to be completely engaged with what you are doing in the here and now.
And instead of calling it work, realize it is play. - Alan Watts

Work

The learning system that I built last year is serving me well.

• Learnt about Two-Phase Commit, Paxos, and Raft distributed consensus ideas.
• Discovered prismjs, a 15 KB lightweight utility for code syntax highlighting instead of using Github gists.
• Discovered mermaid.js(.mmd file) for creating and embedding diagrams within the github repo. eg: TwoPhaseCommit.mmd
• Read and cleared bookmarks: from 10257 to 7425.
• learnt Basics of Google Cloud Platform.
• published summary of Rich Dad Poor Dad.
• published 27 weekly issues.
• published 4 versions(1.5.10, 1.5.11, 1.5.12 and 1.5.13) of onebible

I'm going to make only one change to my system. Dust off my RSS reader and start adding blogs, youtube channels to manage them in a single place.

In terms of My toolbox, I made three changes.

• After having multiple false starts with learning Vim and emacs, I've realised that mastering an editor is a lifetime pursuit. You need to strike the right balance between learning the editor vs being productive. Doom emacs seem to have the right set of defaults that can make you productive instead of tinkering the editor. so far going good.
• Moved to VS Code for all my JS/React/Python.
• Started using Google Keep for all ephemeral notes.

I read the following books.

1. The Dhandho Investor: The Low-Risk Value Method to High Returns by Mohnish Pabrai
2. Wit and Wisdom from Poor Richard's Almanack by Benjamin Franklin
3. Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity by Peter Attia
4. Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World by David Epstein - My notes
5. Rich Dad Poor Dad: What the Rich Teach Their Kids About Money That the Poor and Middle Class Do Not! by Robert Kiyosaki - My notes.
6. Life Without Principle by Henry David Thoreau - My notes || 2nd reading

The biggest highlight of the year was meeting Derek Sivers on Valentine's Day when he came to Chennai.

This year I donated to the Free Software Foundation, Wikipedia, and Mozilla.

Health

The single best thing that has increased my mobility is going office. I walked 1.8x more steps than when I worked from home.

Except for a medical challenge, I was fairly regular to the office. I'm learning and experimenting more with health routines optimizing for energy, see family section.

Family

After understanding NPS and learning how it compares with index funds, I added NPS to my financial strategy. Rest all stays the same.

Dhruvan had couple of firsts in 2023

• He visited Chennai Book fair for the first time. His picks were a globe, a storybook (because it had two horses on the covers) and a bag of toys. We started with the stories from the book as bedtime stories but soon realised he had a different expectation. He likes Spiderman + Batman and Paw Patrol to save the world from cruel Mayor Humdinger, and robo cars taking on monster trucks. Partly inspired by her brother, Aaradhana wants crocodiles to take on dinosaurs and elephant finger family songs. We would have never imagined our bedtime stories taking such wild turns each day ;)
• He had first-ever summer vacation for real. We went to my in-laws place. Every day had an agenda. Hot noon had cool rose milk, ice creams and Badam milk. Evenings had cricket(IPL) for entertainment. It sort of reminded my vacation during my school days. Nostalgic.

Appa-amma had moved in with us. kids: Dhruvan, Aaradhana and their cousin Adhiyan are having a blast with playing with them every day.

Except for attending the marriage of a close friend to Trichy, I didn't travel much. We had plans to visit a few places down south of Tamil Nadu. But December weather thought otherwise. So Lakshmi insisted we continue our theme of visiting natural scenic places. Last year it was beaches and aquariums in Chennai, so this year we picked a hill station.

One noticeable observation is that, be it attending functions, during vacation, or just going out in general. My exercise routine is no match for the kids' energy levels. I and Lakshmi are experimenting with health routines that would help us to achieve this need. Maintaining the Energy level throughout the day is our only goal, everything else seems unnecessary. So in this phase of life, our goal is to try matching (50% from each of us) the energy levels of kids ;)

Previously 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2015, 2014

The main reason the rich get richer and the poor get poorer is because the subject of money is taught at home, not in school. School focus on academic and professional skills rather than financial skills.

You have to understand three things to be rich.

• Job mindset.
• Taxes.
• Financial literacy.

Job mindset

The regular recipe of getting up every day, going to work, paying bills, and investing some savings in mutual funds won't make you rich. You need to map your work's impact on your paycheck. Strive to be a generalist who knows a little about many things to deliver a holistic value instead of perfecting a specific skill set.

Learn

• accounting: profit, loss, pricing strategies.
• valuing: identifying opportunities and market size.
• visibility: branding, position, sales & marketing
• communication: writing, speaking.
• risk mitigation: learning to manage

Always have something to show to yourself as an outcome. Don't toil the best years of your life in a job with no learning opportunities, even if it is high paying. Job security is an illusion. The sooner you realize better it is. Also, basing your lifestyle solely on your employer's paycheck is a bad idea because it is a single point of failure.

Taxes

Number one expense for most people is Taxes. There are two things that you need to note

• investors & business owners: Lesser tax slab than individuals incentivizing them to invest back in the economy.
• workers: Govt takes its share of tax even before you receive it. The higher you earn, the higher the tax outgo will be.

In a nutshell, Taxes punishes those who frequently take their money out and reward those who stay invested. Even if incentivized with tax credits, Mortage takes cash from your pocket, whereas every $ invested becomes your loyal employee and works 24 hours for you. So you need to factor in tax + inflation when building your cash flow.

Financial literacy

financial literacy = understanding your cash flow.

The main reason for the financial struggle is the ignorance of handling money. It is not how much you make; it's how much money you keep and invest matters. Our spending habits reflect who we are. Avoid consumer debt at all costs. Keeping up with jones won't make you rich. Instead of buying investment instruments focused only on wealth building, learn how money works. Understand the fundamental difference between asset and liability.

• Asset: puts money in the pocket.
• Liability: takes money from the pocket.

So, Focus on acquiring income-generating assets instead of assets that take money out of your pocket.

Money without financial intelligence will be, money gone soon.
E.g. athletes making millions during their careers were miserable when they were on their retirement.

Learning alone won't cut it. You need to refine these skills through practice. So, start small, and expect failures to be part of the process. We learn by mistakes, and people who avoid failure also avoids learning. Action beats inaction every single time.

Work

The most significant change I made this year is I started going office. Since the office environment has an ingrained work context, I quickly get into productive mode. Commuting to and fro from the office served as a signal to my brain to warm up and wind down from work. It helped me to meet colleagues who were working on different initiatives and helped me learn new things. Overall, it has improved my mental well-being by setting where-how I work context.

I read the following books.

1. Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential by Tiago Forte - My notes.
2. Just Keep Buying: Proven Ways to Save Money and Build Your Wealth by Nick Maggiulli
3. Show Your Work!: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered by Austin Kleon
4. How to Live on 24 Hours a Day by Arnold Bennett
5. What The Heck Do I Do With My Life by Ravi Venkatesan - My notes.
6. How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life by Scott Adams
7. Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change by Kent Beck

This year I donated to the Free Software Foundation, Wikipedia, and Mozilla.

Family

The year was full of celebrations starting with our own. We celebrated 5 years of togetherness. We are a much different person now than how we were 5 years ago. Optimizing each other's schedules for continuous downtime, helping each in taking care of the kids, and having do-nothing weekends have taken priority over things in our life. It is interesting to see us evolve into this but at the same time, I'm sure we will have a different set of priorities at the end of the next 5 years.

We took kids along with us where ever we went. We took them to all the marriages we attended this year, and they got to know the extended family and enjoyed playing with other kids.

Dhruvan has started going to school from the beginning of the year. He uses the TV remote himself and instructs GoogleNest to play his favourite cartoons on Youtube. It is interesting to see how kids learn things by observing us these days.

Aaradhana turned one. Just like we did for dhruvan, we captured everything she did leading up to walking on her own as memories. She misses her brother when he goes to school. But when dhruvan returns from school, he teaches her what he learned. Be it a new rhythm or a game. Then they play together :)

With No lockdown restrictions, I'm exploring Chennai again through kids, taking them to parks, beaches and aquariums. They are getting to see the animals, mountains and the sea in the real world than from youtube.

I think 2022 was the year of celebration for us. I hope 2023 will be a good year for all of us.

Previously 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2015, 2014

Channel

The purpose of Channel element is to define the overall website information. so, the following elements are required.

• title - Title of your website. REQUIRED.
• link - Link to the posts. REQUIRED.
• description - A HTML content of the page. If the page has the HTML content, wrap it within <![CDATA[your html content]]> REQUIRED.
• pubDate - Publication date for the post in RFC 822.Optional

There are also other elements like image, category, generator and others but they are optional. Pick as you see it fit.

Item

Here again elements like title, description and link are REQUIRED. Item provides the information about the individual posts that goes into the website. So, we need to create item per posts that our website contains. There is no limit to the number of item a channel can contain.

Updating

Once you publish a new blog post, you need to update both sitemap.xml and your rss.xml. Next add the reference to the rss on the index page - <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" href="https://example.org/rss.xml" title="Example site">.

Schema Validation

Once you generate the RSS, you can validate it using Feed Validator, W3C Feed Validation or any other relevant RSS validators.

A Second brain essentially means developing your own digital note-taking system that helps you achieve your purpose.

• Calendar app - an extension of your brain's ability to remember events.
• Smartphone - is an extension of your ability to communicate.
• Cloud storage - an extension of your brain's memory.

Similarly, a Note taking system is to extend your brain's ability to retain and process information.

A Second brain note-taking system has four stages in it

• Capture
• Organize
• Distill
• Express

It is also called CODE.

Capture

A note can be an extract from a book, or text from an article, or an image. The idea here is to capture anything that would be useful for your future self and put it in a single, centralized place. It is okay to be an information hoarder in the beginning. Holding information in the brain doesn't scale. By offloading, you are leveraging time to build your knowledge over time.

If you capture everything that has caught your attention, your digital notes would be no better than scrolling through social media. Instead, capture things that you think can help you move forward with your goal. Also, trying to organize while creating the note increases friction in the process.

Organizing

It does not make sense to put fresh, dried, and frozen fruit together in one place because they all happen to be fruit. Yet this is how most people take notes. They put notes from books, podcasts, quotes, and images separately.

Instead of organizing by source, organize by outcomes. Create a project and collate related ideas within it.

For example: Everything in a kitchen is being organized to support one goal - preparing a meal. The culinary process can offer us insights into how to effectively organize.

• Putting mixing spoon in a separate place where is expected.
• Wiping a knife clean immediately after using it to be ready for the next cut.
• Laying the ingredients in the same order as they were used.
• The infrequently used items are in the deep freezer.

Life is too short to spend time organizing notes that haven't proved their worth. Organize while executing, only when you visit the note for the second time, edit, and move around. This conservative approach would help you build a working system that aids your flow instead of a perfect system that requires hours of organizing.

Working system > Perfect system

Distill

Don't copy the entire chapter or the transcript. Be picky. Every time you touch a note, better it. Prune the ordinary and spotlight the key points. Add a highlight, bullets, commentary anything that would benefit your future self.

Express

With access to the wisdom personally gained from your conversations, mistakes, victories, and lessons learned, Your note-taking system isn't just a medium for storage but a tool for thinking. And a good test for that is knowledge applied through execution. It should help you to move forward with your goal. You should be able to deep work on complex problems that you may have at hand, or improve your learning potential, better your judgment skills, or transform your relationships.

Being organized isn't a personality trait we are born with, nor is it merely a matter of finding the right apps or tools. It is the habit one should inculcate to put the information to use in today's world.

Milestone

1. Setup GraphQL server with pinboard integration - Completed in Week 3
2. Adding Mutations for CRUD on links - Completed in Week 7
3. Adding Mutation for CRUD on rules
4. Integrate pin-tweet with cron setup
5. Rules: Build React screens for adding, editing, and deleting rules
6. Links: Build screens for Adding, Listing, Updating, and Deleting links
7. Build screens for login, collect Twitter token
8. Retire pin-tweet

I'm planning to use Apollo Client for integrating the frontend with the GraphQL backend. One another thing to note here is that pin-tweet stores both twitter-token and pinboard token in the .env file. Since this is a onetime activity while setting up and it isn't going to change. I'm leaving it as it is. PinQL is meant for personal single user use only. So should be okay. For the sake of simplicity, I'll continue to stick with a JSON file for storing rules instead of using a database.

Learning agility

It is the ability to learn, adapt, unlearn, and equip yourself in an environment you've never experienced. It is not about acquiring new skills, rather, it is about honing the behavioral trait. As darwin said - not the strongest but the most responsive to change survive.

A rising tide lifts all boats.

A big wave can catapult even a mediocre talent to extraordinary success. An average person in the raising industry will do better than a star talent in a less dynamic one. Be curious, and read widely. And this will equip you to ride a wave when you spot one because none has ridden it before.

For example: Globalization, the Advent of The Internet, Financialization of services.

Your experience working in volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous environments will be a differentiator. Success happens because an opportunity meets a prepared mind at the right place at the right time. Each time you take a risk to learn things outside your comfort zone, you are strengthening your learning agility muscle. The more you use it, the stronger it becomes. It can't be taught except through experience. It means you should take on new challenges deliberately.

Entrepreneurial mindset

Work gives us the identity and should best be viewed as a launch pad for your long-term goals.

Standout and differentiate. Attract opportunities instead of hunting them. Think marketing instead of sales for doing so. Shift your mindset from job-seeker to self-employed. To be one, you first have to identify your core skill. It can be writing a code or ability to fix things, being a clear communicator, or anything that people might need. Once identified, build on it until it is valuable enough for others to pay. This would mean you should never consider your job as long-term employment but rather a gig or a project. The goal is to learn things along the way and build a good reputation at the end of it. Think of it as an adventure instead of a ladder.

At any moment, be prepared to be independent and stand on your feet. We are better served with a self-employed mindset than disillusioned to think of retiring from a single company.

Job loyalty without upskilling will lead to job insecurity.

Leadership skills

Leading people by building trust is the ultimate timeless skill that can never be automated. Leadership cant be characterized by a single personality trait. Some are quiet, some loud, some charismatic, and some soft-spoken, yet all are effective.

Dwight D. Eisenhower was a great coalition builder. Gandhi was a visionary who led by personal example. George S. Patton and Douglas MacArthur were brilliant military leaders. Churchill was a good wartime leader. Horses for courses.

Leaders are not born but made. And the first step toward becoming one is to take ownership and personal accountability. You need to develop this mindset and foster trust. It is more about the act than a title. A title can give you subordinates but not followers. What matters more is the ability to inspire others through your action.

We'll be living longer and would desire to be productive till much later. The only way to stay relevant is to keep working on these meta-skills. Take charge of both your life and career. Live deliberately.

Work

2021 officially marks a decade since I took up Software Development as a profession. Though I have been programming since high school, I'm still enjoy it. Programming languages I use might have changed, but never has my interest.

Books

I read about 12 books in 2021

• வீரயுக நாயகன் வேள்பாரி, தொகுதி 2 (வீரயுக நாயகன் வேள்பாரி, தொகுதி 2) by Su.Venkatesan
• HDFC Bank 2.0 by Tamal Bandyopadhyay
• Fooled By Randomness by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
• The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel
• How to Live: 27 conflicting answers and one weird conclusion by Derek Sivers
• The Passionate Programmer: Creating a Remarkable Career in Software Development by Chad Fowler
• So Good They Can't Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love by Cal Newport
• The Richest Man In Babylon by George S. Clason
• Masterclass with Super-Investors by Vishal Mittal
• Food Rules by Michael Pollan
• No Limits: The Art and Science of High Performance by Mukesh Bansal
• Gamechanger: Forget Start-ups, Join Corporate and Still Live the Rich Life you want by Pattabiraman

Donations

This year I donated to the Free Software Foundation, Wikipedia, and Mozilla.

Personal

I made 4 significant changes with respective to finance.

1. I used cash over cards. It gave me control over my spending behavior by giving psychological feedback on my cash flow for a given month.
2. I disabled ATM cash withdrawal for my credit cards and have enforced 3-digit limits for contactless payments.
3. I currently hold a few blue chips and a couple of mutual funds.
   1 - Sensex index fund
   1 - S & P 500 index fund for international diversification.
4. I had stopped investing in the ELSS mutual fund last year. I improved on it by opting for the New Tax regime. This is to decouple my long-term investments from tax planning.

Health

I got our family(including parents and in-laws) vaccinated 100% with both doses. We accidentally discovered a major health challenge for my mother-in-law when we did a master health checkup. Since it was an early diagnosis, we had ample time for treatment and recovery.

Family

The biggest highlight of the year came when we realized that we were on a journey of welcoming a new member to our family. We'd wonderful memories in welcoming Dhruvan. We wanted to recreate similar memories this time as well but unfortunately, we ran into unforeseen medical challenges that required frequent in-hospital observations.

Switching between work and attending to medical emergencies took a toll on my mental health. Fortunately, Working from home helped me to strike a balance between working and taking care of my family. It has helped us to stay together in difficult times and be supportive of each other.

Aaradhana, our baby girl was born during such tough times. All the struggles we endured, vanished the moment we received her for the very first time on our hands. With her, our family is now complete. We'll be ever grateful to God for her.

Dhruvan has started attending school this year virtually. He has neither visited nor has any idea how the physical school would be. But Lakshmi is going to great lengths in compensating for that with a lot of physical and social activities. He has started to do many things on his own just by observing us.

It warms my heart to see Dhruvan assist Lakshmi in taking care of his little sister, slowly fitting into his big brother's shoes. Time flies.

Previously 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2015, 2014

Professional

Books

I've read the following 8 books as a part of the Goodreads 2020 challenge.

1. When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi - My notes
2. Atomic Habits by James Clear - My notes
3. JavaScript Patterns by Stoyan Stefanov
4. Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari
5. வீரயுக நாயகன் வேள்பாரி, பாகம் 1 by Su. Venkatesan
6. Hell Yeah or No: what's worth doing by Derek Sivers
7. Your Music and People: creative and considerate fame by Derek Sivers
8. Coffee Can Investing: The Low Risk Road to Stupendous Wealth by Saurabh Mukherjea

Side Projects

Released TabPro, a Firefox add-on to manage tabs, and updated pin-tweet to v1.1. Open sourced Onebible, my first Android app. I got started with GraphQL but yet to do a side project using it.

Stack Overflow

I was not active on StackOverflow yet my reputation grew from 6856 to 7975, a 16% increase.

Mobile

I had a tough time getting my iPhone's battery replaced due to the pandemic. With all my contacts, 2FA codes in it, I found it painful to configure the replacement device. It made me realize how dependent I've become on a particular platform. I took this as an opportunity to move all my digital dependencies to open standards that are independent of both Android and iOS. I started consolidating all my contacts across accounts in a single vcf file. If I need to make any contact change, I'll do it on this file, and then have it imported to all my devices. Similarly, moved away from standalone authenticator apps to Authy to sync my 2FA codes across devices.

I'm planning to switch between Android and iPhone frequently to keep my dependency in check. I intend to format the device before using it to check the reliability of my tech-independent strategy. Currently, I'm using an Android with minimal set of apps.

Donations

This year I donated to the Free Software Foundation, Wikipedia, and Mozilla.

What is a habit?

A habit is a behavior or routine that you do to solve life's problem spending the least effort.

Why do habit matters?

Habits matter because they can change lives.

• If you've the habit of learning a new thing in your field every day, you can build a vast knowledge.
• If you've the habit of being considerate in all your interactions, you can build a strong network.
• If you've the habit of spending more than you earn each month, you'll end up in a debt trap.
• If you've the habit of saving at least a little from your income irrespective of your spending, you'll attain financial independence.
• If you've the habit of exercising every day, you'll stay healthy.

You can leverage habits to improve your knowledge, network, finance and health. The key thing to note here is that you need to stick with them for years, for it to pay off. Because this is how habits work. They don't add up, they compound. Once you reach the tipping point, you'll start to see remarkable results.

How can one make/break a habit

Making/breaking a habit is a 4 step process

If a behavior is insufficient in any of the four stages, it will not become a habit.

Eliminate the cue and your habit will never start. Reduce the craving and you won’t experience enough motivation to act. Make the behavior difficult and you won’t be able to do it. And if the reward is unsatisfactory, you won't do it again in the future.

Without the first three steps, a behavior will not occur.

Without all four, a behavior will not be repeated.

I. Cue

The environment sets the bigger context for our behavior. Making or breaking habits becomes easy once you understand this. The cues within an environment initiates a behavior. This is why the people from the rehab center become re-addicted, once they stay in the same locality. The clue that caused the addiction in the first place still exist there.

Two common cues are [Time] and [Location]. Create a separate environment for work, play, cooking, and entertainment

Eg:

• Bedroom, an environment to sleep.
• Home Office, an environment to work.
• Living room, an environment to use mobile, read the newspaper, relax, watch TV.

Essentially, One place One use. Instead of relying on motivation and self-control, start filling these environments with clues that encourage the intended behavior.

• Bedroom: Invest in a good mattress and blackout curtains to improve your sleep.
• Home office: Invest in getting a highspeed Internet connection. Get a decent chair that takes care of your back and neck posture. Put your mobile in silent mode.
• Kitchen: Use smaller plates to reduce the amount of food you take. Keep nuts and fruits over the dining table. Always keep a bottle full of water over the table.

To break a habit - Make it invisible

Remove the cue from the environment, your habit will disappear.

• Bedroom: Remove the TV from your bedroom and avoid taking a cellphone into the bedroom.
• Home office: Don't watch movies on your laptop.
• Living room: Don't take your laptop to your living room.

II. Craving

Habits are dopamine-driven feedback loop. The more rewarding an opportunity appears to be, the more likely it is to become a habit. Every habit has a motivation and serves a purpose either good or bad. That is why we continue doing it.

• Smoking a cigarette -> relief it provides
• Brushing teeth -> clean mouth
• Watching TV -> wanting to be entertained

Friends and family have a huge impact on your habit formation. The Polgar sisters grew up in a family where chess was prioritized above all. It was praised and rewarded. In their culture, the obsession with chess was considered normal. Bill Gates's childhood had a similar obsession with solving puzzles and reading books.

We mimic our peers. If you want to improve your health, enroll yourself for a martial art or marathon. If you want to improve your knowledge, join a Meetup or book reading clubs. Essentially, join a culture where your desired behavior is the normal behavior. Surround yourself with people who have the habits you want to have.

Increase the friction to attain the reward.

• To leave social media addiction, uninstall all social media apps, and use them only on the web browser on your phone. Don't post things. This breaks the dopamine feedback loop.
• After watching a movie, uninstall the Netflix, Amazon app on your TV. Increase the friction of having to reinstall the app to keep a check on your mindless watching.

III. Response

The response is the actual habit you perform. They deliver the reward and forms the end of every habit. Practice is the most effective way of learning. So, instead of waiting for motivation to strike, act.

Lesser the friction to act, more like it to be a habit. Whenever possible, automate things. Automation can free you up for other tasks. You need to get started, before optimizing anything. Start with something that you can do within 2 minutes to build the momentum.

• If you want to eat healthier. Subscribe to the monthly vegetable pack of the nearby grocery for the home delivery.
• Set automatic payments to move 10% of your salary into saving, once salary hits your bank account.
• Set up automatic bill payments to save time that can be spent on knowledge building.

• To be more present, uninstall all the mail apps on the phone and use a web browser to check your email.
• Mute all groups by default in whats app and telegram. And selectively mute groups in slack.

IV. Reward

We remember only the ending experiences of the habits. This experience needs to be satisfying for it to last. Our mind enjoys immediate rewards over the delayed results. You need to feel progress on the completion of a behavior. Our mind anticipates these dopamine surges to be satisfied, to be able to trigger the craving which is required for repeating the behavior in the future. Get analytical about reward and quantify it. The reward needs to be measurable, to denote progress. Only progress triggers a satisfying feeling.

You can use a habit tracker to build a streak of how much you did an activity. Keep the streak alive. Eg: Github code streak.

You can count the number of days you didn't watch TV. The longer the chain goes, the more motivated you'll be. Don't break the chain.

How to pick a habit to form

First, focus on who you wish to become instead of what you want. The "who" here refers to the type of person who could get the result that you aim for. A writer. A programmer. A musician. An entrepreneur. Work backward from the result. Start building deliberate practices and processes to set yourself in that path.

Habit + deliberate practice = mastery

Eg: If you want to be a writer, start writing every day.

Identity is what you believe yourself to be. Your habit shape your identity, your identity shape your habit. It is a two-way street. True behavior change is an identity change. The more you do, the more you reinforce the identity associated with that habit. The more pride you have in a particular aspect of your identity, the more motivated you will be to maintain the habit associated with it.

If you want to increase your chance of success, choose the right field of competition that suits your personality. Michael Phelps, who won the most number of gold in Olympics history was a 6 feet 4-inch tall guy with strong back and arms. He was well suited for swimming, besides being trained for that. You can stand out by combining your personality with your skills.

Some closing tips on how to approach habit building

1. To quickly get started with habit formation. You can pair up your newer habit with your current ones. After [current habit], I'll [new habit]
2. To master a habit, start with repetition, not perfection.
3. The greatest threat to success is not failure, but boredom. Stick to the schedule; don't let life get in the way. Focus on the progress than expecting immediate results.
4. Building a system that supports your habit steak is the most effective way to maintain a habit. Relying on will power to maintain the habit streak isn't effective.
5. Since habits compound. Never interrupt it unnecessarily. Never miss twice in a row. Missing once is an accident. Missing twice is the beginning of a new habit.
6. Establish a system for reflection and review.

Professional

I read just enough books to complete the Goodreads 2019 challenge. Following were the books that I read.

1. Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse
2. Vetri Vendumenil by Balakumaran
3. Refactoring UI by Adam Wathan
4. The Art of War by Sun Tzu
5. Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World by Cal Newport
6. Fullstack React: The Complete Guide to ReactJS and Friends by Anthony Accomazzo - My Notes

Github

I made 780 contributions to GitHub. Developed and Open sourced two utility scripts - goodreads-parser, pin-tweet. Moved all of my scripts and configurations to GitHub. I have done a Github 365 this year.

Managing two domains, code.sridhar.co and blog.sridhar.co seemed a bit too much of an effort. So, I consolidated all my works under sridhar.co

Side Projects

I launched recommendedreads.in, a site that helps to choose the most recommended books for book lovers. This site was built using newly acquired Python skills. Also, Django was an incredible fit for a site which required heavy admin features for the data management. For this year, I learnt react.

I and arunmozhi built a visual dashboard to analyze the LokShaba 2019 Election Results in a record 24 hours.

My Stack Overflow reputation grew from 5207 to 6856, a 31% fetching me a node.js silver badge.

Mobile

My mobile is still minimal. I'm using Screen Time to manage the internet access and time I spent on my mobile. On an average, my mobile usage is about 43 mins/day.

Donations

This year I donated to the Free Software Foundation, MiniKeePass, Wikipedia, Mozilla and Debian

Personal

Finance

Based on the learning that I got, I consciously started working on creating my own financial plans to meet my needs. Got a term insurance that covers 5 times of my annual salary. I think I'll continue to improve on this throughout 2020.

Health

When this year started, I was 74kg, now I'm at 78. This is one of the action item for me to work on 2020.

Family

What they say about having a kid is true. Your day slows down. You start to think in ways that were unknown to you up until then. You have to constantly reprioritize all your work to get anything done. You have to learn to plan your work to be done in a discrete fashion. This is what I and Lakshmi mostly were doing all this year. Keeping dhruvan as our only priority and having everything else around him. Putting our conveniences away, just to be available to him all the time.

We created memories in as many things as we could. Happiness to us, at this phase of our life, was to watch dhruvan turn 1. Everything else can wait.

In a true sense, Life becomes more meaningful once You become a parent.

Goals for 2020

I have set myself 5 goals for 2020 based on my priorities

1. Bring down mobile usage to 30mins/day.
2. Ship at least one side project.
3. Complete at least one item from my bucket list.
4. Go deep and reinvent the wheel for at least some of the items I do.
5. Focus on health.

2019 was unique in its own way. Hope 2020 will be great for all of us.

Prospecting

Prospecting means seeking new territories with a clear end goal. Taking your product to someone you have sought out, whom you didn't know before and who doesn't necessarily have a stated need for what you are selling.

1. Segment the people
2. Cast wide net among them
3. Figure out the customers who is most likely to make a purchase.

Step 1 needs to be wide open so that you have a decent number at Step 3. For Step 2, you can use email to send information, schedule a phone call or face to face meeting at a convenient time.

The idea that prospecting is successful only when a particular connections and negotiation results in a closed deal is a narrow way of viewing the sales process. Many connections that you make when you are out prospecting may yield rewards of different kind.

Importance of Google quotient

Before you search the prospects, the clients searches you. They use LinkedIn to know you professionally, Google you to know your products and services that you offer and Social media to know the pulse and review of them. If you aren't on any of those places, or there, but without strong presence, then you're a commodity.

If the client considers you to be a commodity even before you approach them, there is a lesser chance for you to have the deal. End of the day People don't like to buy from someone who is not special. Even if you manage the deal, you can't command a premium because value is in the eyes of the beholder. So, Always dress up; do not dress down.

Product and pricing

You really need to believe in your product. Since the value of a product is determined by the perception of the customer. Belief in the value your product delivers, is necessary to persuade the customer. If you don’t believe in your product, do not sell.

Never go play with single story and single pitch. Have variations.

Also, when you are pricing a product, quote perceived value instead of the cost to manufacture the product.

Connecting with your customer

You should be selling a solution to customer's pain instead of pushing your product. Be bold and ask questions. Don't presume things. Asking questions brings clarity. It is a strong indicator that you understood the pain right. Spend time in knowing Who is who. Play well with them and other partners of your clients to understand the pain before jumping into solution creation. Understanding the why-what and taking responsibility shows commitment.

Good news can arrive in mail but a bad news in person. No one is perfect. but you will be judged for your response to the situation.

Present a human face at each step of the interaction. At each step, it is about the individuals. Customers need to see the names on the back of the jersey.

Once the project is over, thank the partners and others who worked along with you. People move on and change jobs and you are bound to get called again.

Make it visual

People are visually driven. Prefer mock ups, prototypes over documents where ever possible. Show them the POC that you've built. Do things that will help them to see and experience what your proposed solution would look like.

Ask

People who sell must be supremely comfortable with the act of asking. The point is to never fear rejection and not to give up on a chance by giving into fear.

Ask for directions, ask for leads, ask for referrals, ask for the request for proposal, ask for order above all ask for money. Ask you have nothing to lose.

Presentation

Spell check your slides, provide proper attributions to logos and charts that are taken from the Internet. If you don't do it, it is unprofessional.

Arrive early instead of on time, pre test the video that needs to be played.

Allow people to settle down, and calculate how much time is left for the presentation. Pay attention to those who joined on the call late. After understanding the mood and time limit, present the personalized deck with what you’ve learned about the Client and their needs before proposing the solution.

When presenting maintain an eye contact. Pause and look often if everyone is following. Keep ample time for QA, seek feedback. Listen before answering. Reply in short. If you don’t know, follow up when you know the answer.

To be champion seller, read up a lot on history, science, culture. Play for the long haul to outsmart the competition. Be informed and interesting all the times. At times, failing is necessary to improve and innovate.

Book recommendations: Art of war

To be successful, you need to be genuinely interested in people and their emotions. So, be curious and learn to tell a story.

Idea

As a book reader, one of the challenges I face is, "How do I pick my next book to read?". Jeff atwood has Recommended Reading for developers, Dhh has 5 programming books that means most to him, Stack Overflow community has Most influential book every programmer should read and Steve Yegge has 10 great books. Though eventually, I might want to read all the books mentioned in those list. Which list should I start first? or better Which list has books that can have maximum impact on my life and work? What would be the cost, if I wrongly choose a list to read.

How

After thinking about that, I arrived at a simple logic. Instead of burning through the recommendation list, build your own list. i.e., Built a list of most recommended books based on the number of times it was recommended by the curators in their list.

Why

If I carefully pick the most recommended books, I can have maximum impact on my life and career with minimal reading. Also, choosing books this way, will be of good mix since the curators are from different domains.

2 & 3 are straight forward. Shelves is something like grouping based on a common attribute. For eg: Jason Fried has shared book recommendations on multiple places. The books that he has shared on the Twitter will be grouped under Twitter shelve and similarly the books that he has shared on ProductHunt will be grouped under ProductHunt shelve I invite you all to check recommendedreads.in and share me your thoughts :)

Professional

Reading

I completed Goodreads 2018 challenge reading 9 instead of 6 books. Following were the books I read.

1. Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus by John Gray
2. 20 Years of KDE: Past, Present and Future by Lydia Pintscher
3. The First Step is the Last Step by Jiddu Krishnamurti
4. Natural Language Processing with Python by Steven Bird
5. Eloquent JavaScript, 3rd edition by Marijn Haverbeke - My Notes
6. Dive Into Python 3 by Mark Pilgrim
7. Sell: The Art, The Science, The Witchcraft by Subroto Bagchi - My Notes
8. Think Python: How to Think Like a Computer Scientist by Allen B. Downey
9. Mastering Emacs by Mickey Petersen
10. Parthiban Kanavu by Kalki
11. Ponniyin Selvan I by Kalki
12. Ponniyin Selvan II by Kalki
13. Ponniyin Selvan III by Kalki
14. Ponniyin Selvan IV by Kalki
15. Ponniyin Selvan V by Kalki

I reread book 10 through 15 this year.

Stackoverflow

I unlocked a minor achievement, when my Stackoverflow activity had an impact of ~1.0 million people. My reputation grew 3294 to 5207, 59% increase from last year.

Github

I consolidated my codes repos by moving them from BitBucket to private Github account and made 260 contributions in 2018.

Other than few upstream commits to bible database, I mostly worked on couple of new side project which I couldn't finish. Hope, I'll be able to launch them in 2019

I learnt Python-Django this year. My android side project, Commithub - a sleek client for BitBucket has crossed 100 downloads in play store.

Mobile

Uninstalled most of the apps, to cut down on the amount of time I spend on mobile. This is my current mobile screen. No reading/surfing apps except utility. I intent to maintain it this way.

Personal

There are few events in life that you shouldn’t miss. Events that your mind has no reference in the past, to relate to. Events that will make you discover yourself as you undergo. There is magic in such events when they happen for the first time.

We(I and Lakshmi) had one such moment as we were expecting to welcome a new member to our family this year. To make sweet memories, we consciously choose to spend most of our time offline. Living out one day at a time. No Twitter, No Movies, No TV. Spending time together instead of alone. We read books together. Just books and books alone, with Lakshmi. I resumed my daily diary writing habit that I’d stopped years ago. I started writing every day, capturing our progress, mindset, and excitement of each passing day. Each and every moment as it unfolds.

In the past, I’d read both Parthiban Kanavu and Ponniyin Selvan(I-V). But Lakshmi hasn't. So, we decided to read them together. We got started with Parthiban kanavu in May, Ponniyin selvan - Part I in June, Ponniyin selvan - Part II in July, Ponniyin selvan - Part III in August, Ponniyin selvan - Part IV in September and finally Ponniyin selvan - Part V in December. Dhruvan, our son was born with such memorable moments.

The best moment of the year came when I took Dhruvan for the first time in my hands right after being born. Words can't express the joy I had. We’re ever thankful to God for him.

Overall, 2018 was a blessing both personally and professionally. Hope 2019 too will be great for all of us.

Previously 2017, 2015, 2014

Time

Time is one of the crucial things that you need to understand in your 20’s. Understanding the weightage of timing will help you prioritize things in your life. Your time is very limited. Be judicious about the things that you spend time on.

You’ll learn a lot by doing, than sitting on the fence. You’ll fail, but that is necessary to gather first hand experiences. Any worthy pursuit lies outside of work-life balance and your comfort zone. Choose the one that has a positive impact on your life.

There won’t be an ideal time for anything. Just get started with things and go with the flow. Ship the first cut, before perfecting. Release, when things are good enough. Iteration > Perfection

Use the time to your advantage. Pay for things and save time. Avoid things that don’t fit in into your grand scheme of things.

Money

There is no correlation between how much you know and how much you get paid. Just like your career, you need to take care of your financials. Financial planning is more than avoiding taxes. Insurance is not an investment. Have an adequate health insurance cover in addition to the one that your employer provides. Planned debt is not a bad thing. Contingency fund needs to be at least 3 months of your salary.

Relationships

Maintenance is hard. More so in relationship than in software.

Talk to real people. You need to break your introvert mold. Don’t label people good or bad. Listen without judging them. Everything depends on the context. No one is pure evil or absolute altruist. Different people have different views. Empathizing with people is the first step towards understanding them. Trust people by default, unless they give you reason not to.

Be explicitly clear in explaining what you want the listener to understand. Writing seem to work for you, write more.

Pick values over idols. If you need help, ask without holding back. Accept favors, when offered.

Life

You’ll discover your own meaning for love, success-failure, and happiness. In the due process, you’ll make a ton of mistakes. It’s okay. Don’t be hard on yourself. Only through that experience, your mindset will change. Be prepared to shoulder responsibilities, handle stress, and deal with depression, all at the same time.

Science can be understood but it can’t give you hope. You need HOPE to survive in testing times. Also, you seriously need to acquire some people and survival skills besides your primary.

Take tons of photos without questioning, make memories. It is the only means to port you to the state of mind then. Celebrate little things. After every major event in life. Take time to pause and reflect. Document things in a journal. Write more year-in-reviews.

Travel, your money will return, your time won’t. Travel often and travel unplanned. Plan places, but not events. Expose yourself completely without holding back. Read widely about subjects. Read classics. It is through reading and traveling you’ll explore yourself more.

Be an enthusiast. Try out new things. Embrace life with both hands open. Be more involved in this thing called life.

Career

Family > career. A career is necessary to provide means for the life but not the end. Understand this and allocate your limited time appropriately.

Being a generalist is far more rewarding than going in depth beyond a certain point. Learn to Sell. Never feel bad about promoting yourself. Do things in public.

You’ll figure out what you are good at quickly. Don’t overlook it. Charge more for it. The only way to know what is the right amount for you is by constantly visiting the marketplace or checking with your peers. Remember, the value is in the eyes of the beholder.

Any big decision will take 3-5 years to pay off. unlearning is just as important as learning

As they say it, I guess 20’s are for discovering how the world works. I am excited to know what the next decade could teach me.

Personal

First, a major change in my life. I got married :). What they say about marriage is true. I am starting to see things in a different light than how I use to. Life has changed for good.

With this new perspective, I tested few strong opinions I held, pursued things that I was curious about. The results were interesting and I have documented all the learning I got. Will be sharing them soon.

Professional

I wanted to learn a tech and ship apps in it. I chose Android for this year. After being in JS land for a couple of years, I choose to do the app in Java instead using a js-framework like iconic.

Launched the following android apps

Onebible.in

Offline ads free bible in Tamil, Hindi, Telugu, Malayalam and Kannada.

This was my first Android app. It is approaching 1000 downloads.

CommitHub - a sleek client for BitBucket

All YOUR repos in one place

The description says it all. It is nearing 100 downloads.

I started answering nodejs related questions. As a result, my SO reputation grew from 1341 to 3294, a 1.45x growth.

I wanted to learn a web framework other than node.js. Laravel seemed to be a decent option. Learnt laravel and built a sample application using it.

Towards the end of the year, I switched jobs. I'm now a Senior web developer.

Reading & blogging

I read more articles online than books. Dint complete the 2017 Goodreads challenge. I want to improve on this in 2018. I want to read at least 6 books and write a post for each of them.

I wrote 8 posts on my coding blog mostly on what I learnt, observed. In this blog, I just wrote 1. I am planning to improve on this front as well.

2017 turned to be a great year for me. Hope 2018 will be a great year for all of us.

Previously 2015, 2014.

Concepts in Node.js

• Node.js uses an event-driven, non-blocking I/O model. Functions like Querying Db, file system read/write operations are designed to be asynchronous non-blocking. Task completion will be signed through callbacks. Special care needs to be taken to avoid callback hell

• Node.js is single threaded. You need to use process managers like pm2 to spin additional instance of your application to efficiently use the available cores on the server.

• Node follows the Unix principle. One utility per file. Npm modules should be used like Lego blocks for building the software.

• Validation logic, post records insertion logic are all written as middleware. It is Middleware not middlewares

JavaScript VM - Chrome's V8

V8 engine, written in C++, is the only JavaScript VM that is currently being used. There are also proposals to use Microsoft's Chakra core and Mozilla's Spider Monkey. Once the options are viable, execution engine can be switched. This shouldn't be a problem as the engine themselves will be implementing the TC39 standards. V8 compiles the JavaScript code directly to native machine code. There is no interpreting or compiling phase.

Dependency management – npm & bower

npm, a word play, is the dependency manager for Node.js. Dependencies are maintained in package.json and are installed in node_module folder.

Bower It used for installing front-end assets like HTML, CSS, JS. The dependency details are maintained in bower.json and are installed in bower_components/ folder. These days, more frontend framework are preferring npm over bower for managing dependencies.

Frameworks

Express is the most popular, widely used framework in the Node land. It is partly, because it is the "E" of the "MEAN" stack. Also, it is unopinionated. You can use routes to handle request - response, controller for db model interaction. It is easy to set up and run with it.

There are also other notable frameworks such as Walmart's hapi.js, Paypal's kraken.js. If you're coming from Rails background, you can check sails.js. It tries to solve the same problem that Rails had solved for Ruby.

Tool set - IDEs, Linting, task runners

Statically typed language have IDEs that will prevent you from making errors while coding. but JavaScript is a dynamic language. Hence the IDE's assistance is very limited. You need to pick individual tools and build your tool suite.

Workflow activities like running tests, linting the source code for quality, transpile the source to ES5 version can be automated using task runners using Gulp. PHP's Laravel framework too uses gulp.

For linting, you need to use eslint and jshint.

For break point debugging and live reload, you need to use a combination of node-inspector and nodemon and run them combined.

IDEs like WebStorm will have everything integrated into the environment out of the box.

Guides - indentation

Node.js uses 2 spaces. npm uses 2 spaces. Google JavaScript style guide uses 2 spaces. Felixge's node-style-guide uses 2 spaces. Even Ryan Dahl, the creator of Node.js uses 2 space. So you're better off using 2-Spaces for indentation.

For Java developers

package.json is the equivalent of pom.xml. npmjs.com is the dependency repository like maven central. Equivalent of Jar is npm packages.

Deploying

You can run the Node.js application in any port you want, but it is highly desirable to have a public url address without port number. Since the default HTTP port 80 falls under 1024, you could require a sudo access to run the application on this port. This may lead to conflict with the web servers like Apache or Nginx that require port 80 to run. We can avoid this by the starting the application in ports > 1024 using process manager like pm2 and then fronting it with Nginx.

What's the problem with the existing apps

• They are invasive. They require access to my location to show ads.
• They show me flashy ads in the likes of Your phone is infected. Scan now.
• These apps gives sub par reading experience to the user. Verses get buried under ads in the layouts and an accident tap might open an ad banner.
• They market their brand at the cost of the user. When you share a verse using them, they append "shared via xyz app" with play store link.

Purchasing ads free version seems to be the quick solution. Though, I am all for paying for the software I use. I generally don't buy their ads-free version. Ads is one of the problems I find with them. Removing ads alone won't help it.

• They don't update the app often. Their iOS and android app looks identical and dated. They use non native components and styles (in my case, android). The entire app looks like a weekend hack.
• I find "we need to add more features" mindset predominately among this category of app developers. Though, this might not be a problem. I've my own conviction against it.
• They are bloated with features that I don't require.

They are still badly designed, slow apps. These apps just don't seem worthy for the ads free purchase. I still wouldn't get the clutter free, pleasant reading experience that I am craving for.

Why a native android app?

After thinking about this for a long time. I decided to take the plunge and built an app. Then came the question. Should I build the app using iconic or similar frameworks to deploy it other OS or stick with the native one? Having worked in Angular for a good amount of time, I was tempted to choose it. But not being native app was one of the issues I'd with the existing apps. So, I went with the native app building using Java. It wasn't difficult at all since I already know Java and had work experience using it. The end result using this approach has come out really well.

The app is fast, clutter free and uses the android material design guidelines. Any android user can install and run with it. I've decided on the necessary functionalities that this app is supposed to have. This being the first version, I've built few from that list.

This App requires only couple of permissions from you

1. Network Communication (for sending email to the developer and sharing to other apps)
2. Device access to storing and sharing the favorites.

What you'll get from this app

• Clutter free, fast and smooth reading experience. No ads when reading the bible. We promise ;)
• Powerful multiverse sharing at one go. You can share random verses like 1,3,6 at one shot
• Swipe left to a share/favorite verse quickly.
• Share verses without painfully removing "shared via xyz app" in whats app, telegram etc.

I welcome early adopters, beta testers, android developers and anyone interested in general to head over to tamil bible. Feedback are welcome :)

Email

Every unread email is a psychic weight. Naturally, It is the first thing that you need to gain control of.

• Unsubscribe from all the blogs and switch to a RSS reader where ever possible.

• Use Github notification center instead of subscribing by email alert for the repos you watch.

• Email list is the key medium to get your focus. That's the reason marketers consider email lists to be gold. But not all the emails are worthy. Ruthlessly mark SPAM when you receive an unsolicited email. By doing so, You're making others life easier by saving few seconds for them. This is how you contribute back to community knowledge.

• Disable service notification emails for all the trivial activities. Twitter's email alert for new followers, direct message. Medium-Quora what's trending are all examples of it. You're better off without those engagement emails.

• Email is an Aysnc communication medium. So, turn off all the mobile notification for it.

I receive emails, if and only if, I make financial transactions. With these changes, I get about 4-5 emails/week. I archive them once I read them. Inbox Zero isn't that difficult at all.

Twitter

I've said it earlier that twitter is my third place on the internet. This is my most tweaked medium. In following-unfollowing a bunch of people, tailoring my timeline as per my needs I learnt a few things.

Follow

Cut down on the number of people you follow. Though there is no optimal number, keep the following count manageable.

• Follow people who have been there and done that. They are the ones that make things, have insights to share about them.

• Don't let twitter be your echo chamber. If you're a bootstrapper follow a VC like a16z. Follow them for their perspective on things.

• In general, follow the real people who are interesting

Unfollow

• Unfollow all the brands and companies. Most of their tweets will be promotional in nature. Those who work there will retweet the major announcement. Also, few other companies use twitter as a support medium.

• Unfollow people who are constantly sharing just the buff.ly links. They are into some sort of brand building exercise than sharing something interesting.

• Unfollow meetup groups, conference. They tweet rarely, it's not worth following them for that once-in-a-month tweets.

• Unfollow news channels since everything is breaking news for them. They are more focused on writing click baity titles that garner views than delivering a quality news. Rely on the community's retweet to know the breaking news.

RSS reader

RSS reader should be the aggregator for all your your blog feeds and podcasts. Since you don't give away your email. You can be sure of spam free content. They won't clog your email inbox and can be read leisurely.

Aggregator

I particularly like Scott Hanselman's trusted aggregators

I used to have 1,000 blogs that I would read. And then who's the greatest blog reader in the world? It's Robert Scoble, he's always talking about how many blogs that he reads. So I finally decided, 'I'm not Robert Scoble.' He's a freak, and it's not healthy to keep up on that many blogs. So you know what I do? I read his blog. So I took the thousand blogs that I read and I pick five link blogs. I found my Scobles. And I read those five blogs and they give me an aggregated news. It's like why we listen to the BBC news on the hour, because it tells us what's going on so I don't have to watch all the other news. Find your aggregator inside of the company.

A few trusted aggregators I follow on twitter.

• @kentcdodds: for anything related to JS
• @BenedictEvans: he sends weekly tech round up.

Reading

Every article you read should be considered as part of your reading habit. So, have a modest reading goal. Goodreads challenge of reading 6 books per year is good enough for me. Having an unrealistic goal like reading 36 books will add extra pressure and wont' do any good.

• Develope a taste for quality content. Skip the rest quickly. If you don't find the article interesting within first two paragraphs, skip it. Chances are less for it to turn useful when you are done.

• Don't bother clicking on the link that has click bait-y titles unless it is heavily shared by the people.

• Avoid clicking on the links that are within the pay wall. but post from hbr.org are of good standard.

• No other medium vets links like twitter. Number of retweets, replies, likes, and trust on the person who has shared, are all the indicator of the quality of content. If you find something useful, retweet. Support the good content. It's a good karma.

Notifications

Cut down on the number of notifications you receive each day. Turn on mobile notification only for the real time apps like telegram. Rest all can and should wait. News app like NDTV, economic times will keep sending notification. Being disturbed by that many notifications through out the day isn't healthy. Similarly, don't allow websites to send you notification. Not all news is a breaking news for you.

You don't have to check Medium, Quora, Reddit, hacker news everyday to keep up. Rather use very few platforms that you can optimize to get maximum value for your time spend. Optimizing is the way of life. Only those who find the inner balance between creation and consuming would survive stress free in this digital world.

Emacs

• Guido van Rossum, the creator of pythonuses emacs.
• Matz, the creator of rubyuses emacs.
• Pmarca, marc andresson of Netscape fame uses emacs.
• ESR, uses emacs
• Linus torvalds uses MicroEmacs, a variant of emacs.
• Steve yegge uses emacs.
• Jamie Zawinski, one of founders of Netscape and Mozilla.org uses emacs
• Sanjay Ghemawat of Google uses emacs
• Peter Norvig of Google uses emacs
• Martin Fowler of thoughtworks uses emacs
• Donald Knuth uses emacs
• Obviously, RMS uses emacs

Vi

• Larry wall, the creator of Perluses vi.
• Paul Graham of YC guy uses vi
• Tim O'Reilly of O'Reilly uses vi
• BrendanEich uses vim
• Aaron Patterson of GitHub uses Vim

These two editors make you do things using keystrokes, forcing you do programming without using mouse. To truly the understand the potential of these editor one has to pick one of them and drive into it. This is what I concede after reading stack overflow answers, Hacker news comments, flame war threads relating to it. For now, I'm starting with Emacs.

Terminology

⌘ is the Command
⌃ is the Control key
⌥ is the Option (alt) key
⇧ is the Shift key

Pain

• To open chrome developer tools, you need to press Ctrl + Shift + I instead of F12.
• I missed Home, End, Pg up, Pg dn, backspace keys. For Mac, you need use ⌘ with the combination of arrow keys. Wanting to pressing two key in combination to do this seemed counter intuitive to me.

Similarities

• Shortcuts for Cut, Copy, Paste, Select All, Close Window, Close tab are same as windows. We need to use ⌘ for these key combinations.
• For deleting an item, it is ⌘ + Delete. Just like how it is in Gnome.
• For navigating to the browser's address bar, We need to use ⌘ + L instead of Alt + D.
• To right click, gently tap with two fingers.

Differences

• For terminating a process, you need to use Control + C.
• For using intelligence in IDE, you need to use Control + space bar.
• To open a new tab in terminal, you need to use Ctrl + T just like opening a new browser tab.
• Doubling clicking a folder, select the name for the renaming instead of opening. And also selecting a folder and hitting enter renames the folder.
• To switch applications, you need to use ⌘ + Tab instead of Alt + Tab.

Developer notes

Though Mac OS is UNIX, you might find it to support only limited Linux command. .dmg is the extension for application installers . You can get those installers from respective software site or install it via Appstore . App store is like Debian's Synaptic Package Manager except you need to sign in using your apple Id to use.

Brew and Mac ports are the third party package managers that provide most of the software required for developing application. Except meld , I didn't have any issue in installing software.

In addition to being a package manager, brew also manages the services it installs. brew services start mysql is the equivalent of sudo service mysql restart

Life

This world is a place of business. .. There is no sabbath. It would be glorious to see mankind at leisure for once. It is nothing but work, work, work. There is a coarse and boisterous moneymaking fellow in the outskirts of our town, who is going to build a bank wall... and he wishes me to spend three weeks there digging with him. The result will be that he will perhaps get some more money to hoard, and leave for his heirs to spend foolishly. If I do this, most will commend me as an industrious and hardworking man; but if I choose to devote myself to certain labors which yield more real profit, though but little money, they may be inclined to look on me as an idler. Nevertheless, as I do not need the police of meaningless labor to regulate me..

One word for it. Enterprise.

Time = Money

Men during his time were busy spending their limited time on getting a living than actually living. If someone chooses to do a labor outside established societal norms to get his livelihood, he was in danger of being called an idler. Because, society simply couldn't understand why someone could labor for a little money.

Another problem, he observed was, men were busy drowning themselves in trivial things, such as reading newspaper. Instead, he wanted them to focus on things that matters to them.

Just so hollow and ineffectual, for the most part, is our ordinary conversation. Surface meets surface.. We rarely meet a man who can tell us any news which he has not read in a newspaper, or been told by his neighbor; and, for the most part, the only difference between us and our fellow is that he has seen the newspaper, or been out to tea, and we have not. In proportion as our inward life fails, we go more constantly and desperately to the post-office. You may depend on it, that the poor fellow who walks away with the greatest number of letters, proud of his extensive correspondence, has not heard from himself this long while

For Thoreau, what mattered was the solitude to know himself. We can know that from Walden.

When our life ceases to be inward and private, conversation degenerates into mere gossip. I do not know but it is too much to read one newspaper a week. I have tried it recently, and for so long it seems to me that I have not dwelt in my native region. The sun, the clouds, the snow, the trees say not so much to me. You cannot serve two masters.

Stretching it a bit to suit today's context. I find Thoreau's days had newspapers, my dad's generation had televisions and my generation has it as social media.

It requires more than a day's devotion to know and to possess the wealth of a day.

They have far too many things in common. They inherently force you to catch up with the happenings around. They instill the fear of missing out. They are the modern day fire hose of overwhelming information. By being there all day, you can be a consumer, not the creator. By Thoreau standards, it's simply a hindrance to think and reason out the priorities in life.

Labor

Thoreau was of the strong opinion that everyone needs to be worthily employed. The honest labor, that will add value to the common stock, that men would love do with honest and sincerity, and strive to excel in it with each passing day. Such a labor could also be rewarding to pursue yielding more than tangibles such as a pay check.

The aim of the laborer should be, not to get his living, to get "a good job," but to perform well a certain work; and, even in a pecuniary sense. .. Do not hire a man who does your work for money, but him who does it for love of it.. Furthermore, don’t hire someone who’s only in it for the money.

.. All great enterprises are self-supporting. The poet, for instance, must sustain his body by his poetry, as a steam planing-mill feeds its boilers with the shavings it makes. You must get your living by loving.

He calls gold diggers of his days as the enemy of the honest labor and the greatest disgrace of the mankind. Because they aren't sustaining themselves by the wages of honest toil but at the cost of less fortunates. For the same reason, he deems living off an inheritance, charity to be shameful.

On the contrary, Thoreau being a land surveyor, was asked to do his job coarsely and not well enough, so that the sellers could make the most. He could not do his day job with the sincerity, he wished.

Remember that what is valuable about a thing is not the same as how much money it will fetch on the market.

Another business he had was, lecturing. He would travel around the country critiquing the society on all his lectures. Even if the society then, won't value it well enough. He being an outlier, won't care much of others opinion, continued to do it. Because he thought it to be a meaningful labor of his life. The result is, this and many other lectures. I think it is this labor of Thoreau, that was valuable to him, keeps him relevant to us today.

Livelihood

What I think actually differentiates Thoreau from other philosophers is the way in which he connects both of life and labor.

There’s no shortage of gold, of tobacco, of alcohol, but there is a short supply of “a high and earnest purpose."

What truly matters in life? Is it the livelihood or the life itself.

If it's the life, why are we spending our precious-finite amount of time in getting a livelihood and why aren't we doing a meaningful work for earning.

So far I am successful. But I foresee that if my wants should be much increased, the labor required to supply them would become a drudgery. If I should sell both my forenoons and afternoons to society, as most appear to do, I am sure that for me there would be nothing left worth living for. I trust that I shall never thus sell my birthright for a mess of pottage.

Thoreau had lesser need for things. Even if the needs increase, he won't care to off-balance his stand to meet his needs. Sustain yourself by the life you live, not by exchanging your life for money and living off that.

Recommendation platforms

Medium
It was a pleasing experience to read the articles in sleek typography with no ads. But soon things started to go down the hill with people starting to write open letter to their ceo. But occasionally you might also stumble upon gems like open to the open letter. I also feel that Medium's primary motto with recommendation is tuned, to keep you engaged within the platform than anything else. Less informative article, articles that are gaming the system are getting huge page hits than the deserving ones. These days, I will read an article only if multiple people share it on Twitter. Medium for me, is just an attention craving platform. Me..Me..and Me.

Quora
Exceptional one-off-late-stage YC company sadly is, noisy and less moderated. People are too busy in asking questions like What can I learn right now in 2 minutes that will be useful for the rest of my life? I don't visit it unless my search engine takes me there and I haven't got what I was looking for elsewhere.

Commenting platforms

Reddit
It is the geeky corner of the Internet. If you're interested in finding more about few stuff, then Reddit is the place to go. Content curation is the key here. You can customize your front page of the Internet.They have sub reddits to hang out with communities like selfhosted, freesoftware. At the same time, finding a valuable content is time consuming.

Hacker news
I have decided nested comments is not for me. For the same reason, I don't read all Slashdot comment. I may be biased, the best commenting system I've used is stack overflow's. Enforcing strictness to just one level nesting benefits the reader. In the long run, post will have more reader than participants. I also feel that comments can be of more value when its just below the same post than lying around in some other part of the web.

Blogging platforms

Personal blogs
If something ever has challenged me for a change, It is the personal blog. Particularly that of Joel and Jeff. Reading their post has shaped my thought process and helped forming opinion on things. This platform has always delivered value to me. The post that impacted me most was written years ago. I don't know what makes it work, whether my attention when am on it, or just their perspective without monetary motivation behind it, or just the long form with their argument, or the human touch. I don't know what it is. I am still an avid reader of blogs. On any given day, I will prefer things on personal blogs than hosted content on Medium or elsewhere.

Business blogs
Only in our industry, People are sharing what worked for them. They teach how to trick the visitor for their email in the name of give aways, X things they did to increase their email list, How did they increase the revenue from $1000 to $XXXXX. Click baits. You will find their pitch somewhere inserted into them. Their intention is to collect your email now and sell something later. I believe you can't a deliver value if your intentions are tied to monetary gains. On the contrary, such articles on personal blogs will be of different tone, you won't feel odd.

Micro blogging

Twitter
I agree with Fred wilson's reasoning on why he is bullish on Twitter but Not on Facebook. Not on Instagram. Not on Snapchat. Not on Pinterest. I too consider twitter to be more of micro blogging platform than social network because people don't often share their personal things. Following strangers isn't creepy. There is no login wall for consumption and also most people are mindful of how they use 140 characters to say what they wanted to say. Crowdsourcing and amazingly different people on twitter make it interesting. Retweets by people are far more sensible than a platform's recommendation.

To sum it, this is how my third place on the Internet looks like

Personal blogs > Micro blog > Recommendation platforms > Commenting platforms (reddit/HN) > Business blog > the social platforms

The restriction and moderation within the platform seems to be the key in driving the value out it. If it occurs to you, that you're spending way too much of your time on your chosen third place instead of doing things you want to do. I hope, now you know what to look for when choosing a third place to spend your finite time.

1. Iterating over a list

Array.forEach is the ES5 standard for iterating over a list of items. It is better than conventional for loop, without needing a separate variable for keeping track of index.

2. Transform a list into another by property -- map

Array.map returns a new array with results by calling the provided function.

3. Find an element -- find

Array.find is an ES6 standard. It returns the first matching element, If it is not present, it returns an undefined. _.findLast is identical to this, except it runs the search from right to left returning the last matching element.

4. To get a subset of item matching a specific condition -- filter

Array.filter makes it easy to get list of items based on specific property.

5. To compute an aggregate value for the each item of an array - reduce

Array.reduce is used to apply the given function to each item of the collection and reduce them to a single value.

6.To test if some elements from the array implements the function -- some

This function will be handy to test, if at least one element in the array implements the function.

Using lodash over the native functions has few advantages.

• Lodash provides consistent API to work across browsers. Though most of these functions except Array.find are supported by the modern browsers starting from IE9. Legacy browsers could require polyfills to work.
• Accidental undefined are handled better by lodash than native ES5/6 functions. When the input turns undefined they don't error out.

This post uses few ES6 features like fat arrows function, string template, let. For the complete list of ES6 features, head over to babel docs

1. Listen before you act

This has topped the list. With India, being the home of 2 eCommerce unicorn. I had this experience for both of them. I'd ordered a book from one of them. When I checked the book after delivery, I noticed few pages were upside down, I'd written an email to them about it. To my surprise, I was given refunds along with the reply to my email. Firstly, I dint ask for refunds. My initial reaction, was WTH? I reported them this problem and I receive a refund without apologizing. I understand when you operate at scale, things can go wrong. But at the same time genuinely say sorry when you empathize with the customer after listening to customer could have given you a better position than rudely sending refunds. I could have patiently waited for 2 more days to get the replacement instead of refunds. It certainly isn't proactive measure. It was an assumption made because the agent has cast customer into a refund stereotype.

2. Stop acting like you care

I can't stress this enough. Sending birthday, new year wishes as SMS or email isn't caring. I am not excited to receive your wishes. In fact, I hate such things. I am a developer and I know what it takes 'to care' for users at scale. So stop pretending. If you really care for the customer and my call was really important to you. Add more support agents to the customer service center. Show that you meaningfully care by reducing the time I had to hold on, on a call.

3. Value your customer's time

I find it to be the trickiest of all. With the advent of lean start up methodology, people know that feedback is essential for the product improvement. It involves two parts When and How. Be specific when you ask for feedback. I would say a minute after the purchase could be the ideal time to ask for, when it is about "purchase experience" and 3 days later if it is about the product, depending on first usage. They are better without mixing them and asking at one shot. Feedbacks will be greatly helpful when it comes from early adopters. Not everyone will give you feedback and that should be fine. Now comes the second part, How. Sending survey like emails with strongly agree, disagree, neutral options do more harm than good.
I remember how painstakingly I deleted emails from CEO enlighten me on what Swachh Bharat means to them? And what they are doing for it. Earlier it was mailers informing me that they are now available on Instagram. Sending promotional emails with obscure unsubscribe links.

4. Don't use customer's data other than necessary.

No one can beat banks when it comes to cross selling data within its internal divisions. I get annoying calls from them stating that average quarterly balance of salary account is eligible for personal loan, home loan, etc. To top it up, When I make purchase for more than 10k using card swipes, I could get calls from them explaining why it is beneficial for me to convert that into an EMI. It is to be noted that I've registered for DND. I was tired of their service and finally closed the account with them.

Similarly, Indian eCommerce startups flood my inbox with my shipment tracking. I didn't find the preference to turn them off.

Enough on this side, lets move on to the other side.

1. CITI bank does it right. I haven't received marketing calls from them. I don't get other than statement emails from them. There is this neat feature on their credit card PDF statement. Any transaction over and above 10k will be hyperlinked. Clicking that you can convert that into an EMI without speaking to anyone. I've been using their card for 5 years now. When it was about to expire a year ago, they sent me an email a month prior with an option to submit the form for card renewal. I don't remember when I lastly spoke with their customer care regarding an issue. It in itself is a testament to their service.

2. This is the 3rd year with SBI insurance. Every year around February, I will collect all the proof of investments I made to file for Tax. Multiple receipts for different investments. Its a tedious work. But this year I was surprised to see SBI Insurance send me a consolidated email of the all the policy proactively without having me to generate them by date and policy. This you can call it a delight. Readily usable without hassle, saving me time.

When I see in retrospection with all my experience, I think setting an expectation is the problem. I as a customer chose a product knowing what service it would offer. Any amount of hard work done to provide that level of service will be appear to be normal. It deserves the appreciation of "customer satisfaction". Over doing few items goes creepy. In fact, there is scope for you to fall short of my expectation and get a worse rating from me. Delight is when you offer me something which I'd not expected.

Mobile

In 2020, I learnt the hard way not to rely on a single phone without backups. But these days, I'm mostly on Android after my iPhone died due to a lack of OS Updates.

One obvious difference here is the screen size. Other than that, rest all remains the same.

• Utility - BHIM, Gpay(for making payment via phonenumber), Dropbox, Authy(for all 2FAs), Pluxee and Spotify.
• Work - Slack and teams.
• Family - Telegram and Google Meet.
• Necessary evil - what’s app

For everything else, Firefox.

System

Debian OS - Initially, I got started with Ubuntu 9.04 and stayed with it until 11.04. But over a period of time, I got tired of having to keep with the latest version of the OS. I wanted a stable distro that had less releases than Ubuntu. That's when I found out Debian 6. Since then I am sticking with it. I use Debian 10 with Gnome 3 desktop as my primary OS. If you want to try GNU/Linux, I still recommend you to get started with Ubuntu. Switch to Debian once you're familiar with the Linux way of doing things

KeePassXC - To generate and store passwords. I prefer stand alone, non-cloud, open sourced, desktop only password managers. For mobile, I use KeePassDX.

Note taking

• Google Keep: for ephemeral notes.
• Git based journal: for all note taking.
• calendar in pdf: for planning all things with dates.

Browsers & Add-ons

My browser configuration - browser-configurations

1. Firefox developer version - for all My personal and casual surfing.
2. Chrome - Strictly for development and for chrome only use case.

Text Editor/ IDEs

1. VS Code - For all My Node.js/JavaScript/Python works. My configurations here
2. Vim/Emacs - the editor that I'm constantly learning. My .emacs config here

DB visualizers

1. MongoDB Compass - cross platform GUI for MongoDB
2. Sqlitebrowser - GUI for SQLite database when building android app.

Services

1. Pinboard - for managing my bookmarked links. For moving the links to my pinboard I use pin-tweet + pintelegram, a telegram bot.

Utility Tools

1. Meld - For occasional code comparison. I like its 2 & 3 way comparision between files and folder.
2. Shutter - For taking and annotating screenshot.
3. Apparix - For bookmarking folders in terminal. After bookmarking you can go directly to the project by to project1 than painstakingly typing cd ../../github-repos/npms/project1. You can find the resource file that holds all the location details at $HOME/.apparixrc