Working as the CTO, there are lot of assumptions people make about me. One is that the CTO is supposed to be super rich. The running joke is that whenever we go out for a restaurant for team lunch/dinner and if there is a delay, someone or other would recommend me to buy that restaurant, so that the team doesn’t …
The book I just completed. This one was hard to complete, but an interesting read nevertheless. The book is more than 29 hours (took me more than a month to complete). Also a lot of characters in the book are complete strangers. Wish I knew a little more about American politics. Three things I take away from this book Hard …
I love reading (actually listening) books. This wasn’t the case a few year back. It all changed with one single book. Radical Candor. Somehow before this book, I never imagined books to have the exact solutions for the business problems I might have. Since the author wrote the book at a different time, in a different context without knowing anything …
When we started our company (>10 years ago), we decided to visit Bangalore to meet a few startup mentors for advice. I’ve already worked from Bangalore for a year, but visiting the startup folks was a new exciting experience. One of them we got a chance to meet in person was Swaroop CH. He wrote a book called Byte of …
From wikipedia, this is the actual definition of fire and forget – “Fire-and-forget is a type of missile guidance which does not require further external intervention after launch such as illumination of the target or wire guidance, and can hit its target without the launcher being in line-of-sight of the target.” Working with different kinds of people, there are some …
I was listening to this podcast from Farnam Street (https://fs.blog/knowledge-podcast/best-of-2021/), mostly because I thought it is a shortcut to read all the good podcasts from 2021. Little did I know I’ll learn so much about trusting people and the right framework on when to trust people and when not to. These are three excerpts from the entire podcast which I …
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 to understand the state of chaos, being ok with increasing chaos in the systems, managing the chaos at the right time and ability to imagine …
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 to remind everyone of the nomenclature we use in the company. Refer to people as people, not resources. If you want an SE to help you, just …
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 sitting. For anyone reading the book, I would recommend reading this book from physical book or e-book. I missed some of the key parts of …
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 out a couple of times to balls bowled outside the off stump. So I decided not to play the cover-drive. They were bowling consistently outside …
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 rate, I had the bandwidth to learn from my mistakes. We were extremely apologetic whenever something went wrong with our customers and made sure we …
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 so reluctant to share the feedback in the first place. She had all good intentions (as you can see from the first message). But still …
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 down the rabbit hole.” Seth Godin has an interesting post about yak shaving – https://seths.blog/2005/03/dont_shave_that/ and even AMEX has an interesting post about the same …
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 2021 And my answer to the question was to… Have fun! The only reason I was able to survive all the years was mainly because …
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 Raspberry OS. The easiest way to do this from a Mac is to use a Raspberry Pi Imager. Installing Raspberry Pi Imager and installing the …
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 task from Mindy. Usually, whenever I’m assigned a coding task, it is for some customer or any feature I’ve worked on in the past. It …
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 it was 21 days gave me the confidence that if I can do something for those 21 days, I might be able to continue the …
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 course, building products at any stage comes with its own challenges. It isn’t like the early stage is the hardest and life is super easy …
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, I’ve been doing some of these mistakes earlier (probably even now). These are three principles I try to remember while making decisions, especially in meetings. …
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 is always something. He is, and will continue to be, an example and inspiration to look to for any founder, especially those who have a …
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 setup process remains the same. In this post, I’m sharing my WordPress setup. Hosting This entire website is hosted at Linode.com. Linode gives a 2GB …
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 done. One more point to add is that it’s been a while since I built something on my own. Trying to solve both problems at …
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 US Airways 1549 into the Hudson River. In fact, the movie Sully is based on this incident. And this is an interesting dialogue from this …
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 asked them to identify his mother tongue. Scholars in various languages were summoned and were asked to hold a dialogue with the guest. Each one …