As a founder, people often think my life is all about planning, strategy, and business. And yes, a big part of it is. But what surprises people is the simple, everyday things that make me happy—things that don’t really have a “purpose” but bring me joy. For example, I love collecting stationery. New notebooks (muji tops the list, mnemosyne is …
Back to writing blogs again… and hoping to continue the tradition going forward. Back in 2023, I had a bet with many of my friends. The deal of the bet varied with different people, but the core was this. Both the parties involved will write a blog once every month (published on the first full weekend of the month). If …
I promised myself that I wouldn’t do a year-end wrap blog post in December. I lived up to the promise. I promised myself that I wouldn’t write about resolutions, plans, or goals for 2024 and I’m going to fail on that promise. I’ve always believed Jan 1 is yet another regular day in the calendar and it shouldn’t be considered …
Life update: We bought a new place last year and moved to this place a month ago. Second-order effects on the life update. Life was easier for the last few years. Walking from home to the office used to take exactly 12 mins. Traffic or no other external factors couldn’t change anything this number. In fact, I could step out …
Speed Starting from the early age, speed has been a great fascination. Given dad was a math teacher, I wanted to become a mathematician when I was at school (though I’m not sure even now what mathematicians do). I still remember the quote that fascinated me the most “speed and accuracy is the motto of the mathematician”. Next experience with …
New year comes with a lot of excitement, energy and resolutions. Logically it doesn’t make a lot of sense to celebrate new year. After all, the new year is an arbitrary line that was drawn by a few Romans way way back. And it is not like we grow smarter or efficient on the day of new year. Dec 31st or …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 for 10 years and immediately got hooked by the concept. I’m not new to this and have tried to implement this many a times in …
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 had created every before my experience at IBM, the only interesting parts about my resume was my Google Summer of Code and other open-source projects. …
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”. It is 42. But what I’ve been pondering is the answer to MY life, meaning and everything. And to make things worse, I find myself …
Happy Teachers Day to everyone out there. Coming from a family of many many teachers and inspired by dad, I was very sure I’ll become a teacher later. While that surely didn’t happen, I still enjoy teaching a lot. When I just joined the college as a clueless kid, there were some folks who served as a great mentor and …
You remember some events in your life forever. Things that happened 10 years ago feels like it just happened yesterday and you can even remember the room, people, and the whole scene of action. For me, meeting Vasudha could be in a tech event in Chennai will top the list. We met each other for the first time at DevCampChennai …
