Growing with chaos
I’ve come to realise that one of the most underrated skills for anyone to grown well to a senior position in a company – “Growing with chaos”. By growing with chaos, I mean the ability …
People are people
We have this principle at HackerRank to treat people as people and not refer them as resources. This is from an excerpt from email Vivek to the entire company On that note, I would like …
The Little Prince
This book was recommended by Manas & Geetanjali as a part of our monthly book we read. In fact, the fact that this is just a small book made it easier to finish in one …
Three Cricket Stories
Sachin Tendulkar When Sachin Tendulkar arrived in Sydney for the fourth Test between India and Australia 2003-04, he had scores of 0, 1, 37, 0, and 44 in his five Test innings on the tour. Tendulkar recalled later I had got …
CISO Notes – Part 1
When I started building HackerRank, I was expecting to get promoted (rather pushed) from an SDE to CTO. I was expecting the change and it wasn’t so bad. Since we acquired customers at a steady …
Critical Feedback
A very good friend/well wisher pinged this over chat. I’m always glad to listen to the critical feedback (especially from the people I trust). But I was equally surprised by the fact that she was …
Terms I learned this year
Yak Shaving Yak shaving refers to a task, that leads you to perform another related task and so on, and so on — all distracting you from your original goal. This is sometimes called “going …
Theme for 2021
I was recently asked this question and made me think what I want What do you want your theme for 2021 to be? Think of one work that you want as your constant theme for …
Setting up raspberry pi & touchscreen display
This is a step by step guide to build a raspberry pi with the touchscreen display. Before we get started, this is the final result of the setup at my work table. Step 1 Install …
Thank you generator
This task/project started with a simple comment from our team. Mindy (who is the EA to Vivek) shared this comment in one of the internal Google documents. It was very unusual to get a coding …
3 weeks of Masterlife
It all started with a simple post while scrolling LinkedIn. This sounded very interesting when I read the post. I liked the five categories of sleep, diet, exercise, mind, and productivity. Also, the fact that …
Leap of faith
Building early-stage products require a big leap of faith on the ideas/products which don’t exist. In fact, I think there is some level of “stupidity” needed to build products at a very early stage. Of …
Three management principles
Three management principles I read while browsing the internet (of course over the past few years). I had this WOW reaction when I read about these for the first time. While it totally makes sense, …
RIP Tony Hseih
Never got the chance to meet him in person, but Delivering Happiness is the one of the best books I’ve ever read. The pure energy and passion about listening to the story from the founder …
WordPress Setup
I set up my first website using WordPress way back around 2007 or 2008. I was amazed by the simplicity to install WordPress. My website was up and running within 2 minutes. Even now, the …
Time Tracking
I’ve always wanted to track how I spend my day working on various projects. More often than not, I’m usually wondering how my day or week just got over while I feel nothing significant was …
X factor
I’m a huge fan of planes, learning about accidents of planes (both Air Crash Investigation and National Geographic Investigation are my favorite). Among all the aircraft crisis, of the best is the landing of the …
Tenali Rama & HackerRank Hiring
It so happened that a polyglot visited the court of Sri Krishnadevaraya. He told the king that he could read, write, and speak impeccably in 18 languages. He challenged the scholars of the court and …
Doing things that don’t scale
Startups are all about doing things that don’t scale. In fact, there is an interesting and famous article by Paul Graham on the same topic. http://paulgraham.com/ds.html. If you are an entrepreneur or planning to start …
10 types of people
I’ve enjoyed the above quote when we were in college. It sounded geeky and fun to share the quote from partially technical folks and make them go in awe. It sounds super silly now though. …
Experiments with digital detox
This whole idea triggered from the blog post from Ishani about Digital Detox. Especially I liked the Ted talk What I Learned from 10 Years of Digital Detox. I can’t believe someone could do this …
Sapiens
This book was recommended by Geetanjali & Manas. We decided to read a book every month. This is a massive book. It took me two months to finish this book. This is a totally different …
Resume
Last week, I had to find the resume I created when I was in college. It was funny and weird to look at it after so many years. In fact, since this was something I …
Three principles
Meaning of Life This is something I (and I’m sure many others) have been pondering for many years. We all already know the answer to the question for “The answer to life, meaning, and everything”. …