Friday Musings – Infinite Possibilities

Friday Musings – 18/Nov/2022

Vikram Ramakrishnan — Fri, 18 Nov 2022 16:07:35 +0000

Articles I’ve read.

Engineering Management: The Pendulum or the Ladder – I’ve personally encountered (even just a couple weeks ago) the question from senior engineers on whether they should explore Engineering management. This article shares many of points that I share personally and provides a way for engineers to analyze and determine how to move forward. While I don’t agree with some of the points mentioned in the article around skill deterioration, it still has a lot of valuable information that’ll help engineers evaluate career options.

Videos I Watched

What Happens If A Star Explodes Near The Earth? – Another great video from Veritasium that proves that educational content can definitely be made in a very entertaining, crisp and joyful way. I learnt a lot of astronomy 101, long forgotten from my days at school. I wish schools adopt these techniques.

Podcasts I’m Listening

The problem with setting goals, with NFL linebacker Emmanuel Acho – From Adam Grant’s Work Life Podcast, this is an interesting perspective on Goal setting and why we should pursue a life of significance instead of a goal based one and how that would be built-in with meaning and purpose becoming a source of motivation and propelling us towards success.

Tech Readings

Intel’s FakeCatcher – You’ve heard me share in the past about how the latest advancements in AI around GPT-3, DALL-E2, Phenaki etc can potentially help create Deepfakes and why we needed another powerful AI to help us discern the difference. This was Intel’s announcement a couple days ago doing exactly the same. The tech behind this is interesting and accuracy rates are 96%!

Quote I’m thinking about

In a world where you can be Anything, Be Kind!
Anon

Friday Musings – 11/Nov/2022

Vikram Ramakrishnan — Fri, 11 Nov 2022 10:45:12 +0000

Articles I’ve read.

Technology that lets us “speak” to our dead relatives has arrived. Are we ready? – Personally, I believe tech like this would only worsen grief than help. With AI getter significantly better each day, there’s going to be more dilemmas like these that we need to be prepared to handle.

Videos I Watched

Could one vaccine protect against everything? – This is the same question I had when taking 3 shots of the COVID vaccine. I wonder how a world without diseases would look like and what would happen to the entire healthcare sector (apart from these vaccine makers) when this becomes true.

Podcasts I’m Listening

Dr. Layne Norton: The Science of Eating… – From the Huberman Lab podcast, this is by far the most comprehensive information I’ve seen on diet, nutrition, Health & the entire science behind it. Dr. Layne and Dr. Huberman cover a wide variety of important topics in this really long form episode, but you can find timestamps to sections that you can use to know about things you feel important.

Tech Readings

Age of PageRank is Over! – With search patterns increasingly moving over from traditional search engines to products like TikTok, Instagram etc, it’s only natural that we’ll very soon have AI powered, hyper-personalized search systems that’ll determine what I see, read, use and recommend.

Quote I’m thinking about

You don’t stop having fun because you get old; You get Old because you stop having Fun
Anon

Friday Musings – 04/Nov/2022

Vikram Ramakrishnan — Fri, 04 Nov 2022 11:29:29 +0000

Articles I’ve read.

How to Think for yourself – In this article, Paul Graham talks about importance of independent thinking. He also lists out what it means to be an independent thinker and the components of independent thinking and how we can nurture it. I resonate with the thought that you are largely influenced by the kind of people you surround yourself with, so be open to diverse experiences, meeting and learning from new people.

Videos I Watched

Mathematics is the sense you never knew you had! – I wish I had a Maths teacher like Eddie woo. In this inspiring TED talk he makes a case for why Mathematics is a sense just like touch & sound and in the process inspires us to think differently about it. I wish schools taught these early on.

Books I’m re-reading

The First 90 days – This book is a roadmap for how to navigate career transitions, organizational changes and internal promotions in a way that helps speed up the process of you becoming effective, faster and smarter.

Tech Readings

Architecture Notes – Redis – Architecture Notes is quickly becoming my go to place to reinforce fundamentals. I like the way the content is organized and presented in an effective way to makes learning fun.

Quote I’m thinking about

The world suffers a lot. Not because of the violence of bad people but because of the silence of good people
Napolean

Friday Musings – 28/Oct/2022

Vikram Ramakrishnan — Fri, 28 Oct 2022 11:25:00 +0000

Articles I’ve read.

Non-linear workdays changing the shape of productivity – 9 to 5 work model is dead and as the world shifted to the hybrid work model employees now can craft their work schedules that suits them the best and takes into account their natural working rhythms. While greater flexibility will lead to greater productivity, it is important to have a clearly defined process and guideposts that prevent employees from straying too far away from a collaborative working schedule.

Videos I Watched

Why you procrastinate even when it feels bad – I’m a master procrastinator and have been trying hard to overcome it for many years now (maybe procrastinating too much the actions required to overcome procrastination!) While I’ve gotten progressively better it’s important to understand the underlying reasons for why we put off things so we can learn to become better. This video talks about the importance of balancing emotions and how they can affect why we put off certain things and what we can do to change.

Podcasts I Listened

How to Work with a Passive-Aggressive Coworker – From the HBR channel, this is an 8 min video episode with some great tips to deal with passive aggressive folks at work. We’ve all been there on both sides of the table and understanding this a bit more can help us all become a bit better.

Tech Readings

Career Roadmaps for Developers – By far one of the best organized contents I’ve seen to help developers in picking up a path and guide their learning. Best part – it’s open source, so if you want to add something you don’t see and think it’ll be useful for the community, submit a PR.

Quote I’m thinking about

Don’t be fooled by the calendar. There are only as many days in the year as you make use of. One man gets only a week’s value out of a year while another man gets a full year’s value out of a week.
Charles Richard

Friday Musings – 21/Oct/2022

Vikram Ramakrishnan — Fri, 21 Oct 2022 08:52:00 +0000

Articles I’ve read.

How much would you pay for a box that beeps! – This article had interesting nuggets on how to pitch a product to the customer and set the price for it. It underscores the fact that customers don’t buy your product for its cutting-edge spec or features, they are buying it for solving their problem, so focus on the problem and you’ll never have to worry about lack of customers. This is applicable for everything that we do, day in and day out.

Videos I Watched

The Man Who Accidentally Killed The Most People In History – How did one man’s effort or a specific business’s interest create a long standing health problem and environmental catastrophe of the modern world is the premise of this video. I personally learnt a lot of new and interesting things in the video. Some parts chemistry, some parts psychology and a bit of economics!

Podcasts I Listened

Thriving In The Face Of Contradiction – Another good one from Hidden Brain. From the podcast excerpt – “We all face tough decisions in life, whether we’re juggling the demands of work and family or deciding whether to take a new job. These situations often feel like either/or choices. But psychologist Wendy Smith says this binary way of confronting dilemmas contains a trap. She offers a different way to think about difficult choices, one that opens unexpected possibilities.”

Tech Readings

Advice for Junior Developers – I wish I read this before talking to a bunch of junior devs a couple days ago. This article presents an important list of things that budding devs should start assimilating as part of their work. While many of us would feel this is intuitive, actioning it needs intentional practice.

Quote I’m thinking about

Someone with half your IQ is making 10x as you because they aren’t smart enough to doubt themselves.
Ed Latimore

Friday Musings 14/Oct/2022

Vikram Ramakrishnan — Fri, 14 Oct 2022 08:56:00 +0000

Articles I’ve read.

3 Types of Meetings — and How to Do Each One Well – A refresher on how to handle meetings in a hybrid work model and how to ensure everyone can make the most of meetings.

Videos I Watched

Locked in a machine for 70 years – Inspiring story of Paul Alexander, a polio survivor, who beat the odds and continues to be one of last surviving people living in an Iron Lung. It was emotional for me to know the hardships he had to overcome and still achieve things many can only dream about.

Podcasts I Listened

No Stupid Questions – What’s wrong with holding a grudge? – Another good conversation between Angela and Stephen where they talk about the emotional cost of grudge, how to let go of resentment, whether Apologies work.

Tech Readings

Make-A-Video & Phenaki – Following Meta AI’s announcement 2 weeks ago of their “text to Video” generator, Google has release 2 of their own text to video generators this week. It’s amazing to see the acceleration in text to image, video and audio models. Looking forward to a full-fledged movie created by AI only with story prompts!

Quote I’m thinking about

It does not matter how slowly you go as long as you do not stop.
Confucius

Friday Musings 08/Oct/2022

Vikram Ramakrishnan — Sun, 09 Oct 2022 04:58:04 +0000

Articles I’ve read.

How to have better Arguments? – Arguments are inevitable these days and it’s extremely important for us to understand the basics around arguing (why/how/when etc.). In addition to arming us with information, knowing these will help both us and the other person to get more out of the exchange.

Videos I Watched

You don’t actually know what your future self wants – Profound talk by one of my favorite podcast hosts, Shankar Vedantam, this video is about coming to terms that our future self will not make the same decisions as we are making today and learning some ways to help craft the person we are to become.

Places I’ve Travelled

Completed a long pending trip to Sikkim & Darjeeling with the family. I’d highly recommend this as a place to visit for your next vacation. Sikkim is mind bogglingly beautiful with friendly people, interesting culture and history. Did you know that Sikkim was an independent country/Kingdom until 1975 when it was officially annexed and made the 22nd state of India. Here’s some photos from my trip.

Tech Readings

Resiliency in Distributed Systems – A good read on some fundamentals to consider when working on large scale systems specifically around downstream and upstream resiliency.

Quote I’m thinking about

Give the ones you love wings to fly, roots to come back, and reasons to stay.
Dalai Lama

Friday Musing 23/Sep/2022

Vikram Ramakrishnan — Fri, 23 Sep 2022 05:33:00 +0000

Articles I’ve read.

Why It’s Hard To Learn From Our Mistakes – Though a clickbait-y title, there’s some key information shared in this article around common reasons for why it’s easy to make mistakes and how neuroplasticity can help overcome this.

Videos I Watched

The Biggest Myth About Climate Change – With increased occurrences of extreme climate events, it’s hard to ignore the fact that climate change is real, and we need concrete action to minimize its adverse effects. In this video, Joe explains how Climate change naysayers are incorrect and why there’s nothing “natural” about climate change.

Podcasts I Listened

All-In – Adobe acquires Figma for $20B, TPB SPAC, FedEx CEO’s recession warning, macro picture & more – It takes some getting used to this podcast format of multi-participant discussion on varied topics, but once you are over it, you’ll come to appreciate the depth of analysis on topics and the amount of critical thinking involved and the kind of questions raised. In this episode Chamath, sacks and others dissect the Adobe-Figma deal & fears of a global recession.

Tech Readings

QR Codes! In fascinating that the Toyota subsidiary that invented the QR code never exercised its patent and released it for free making these pixelated blobs omnipresent and so useful these days.

Quote I’m thinking about

The ability to observe without evaluating is the highest form of intelligence.
J Krishnamurti

Friday Musings 16/Sep/2022

Vikram Ramakrishnan — Fri, 16 Sep 2022 17:45:23 +0000

Articles I’ve read.

How to deal with difficult people without losing your mind – Conflicts are inevitable in all walks of life and having an approach that works for us and learning the alternatives definitely helps. From the article – “While most of us admit we are far less than perfect, we often find it quite difficult to accept others’ imperfection. If we are to handle difficult situations successfully, we must accept that people can be both flawed and fabulous.”

Videos I Watched

Why Genghis Khan Refused to Invade India – My weekly dose of a little bit of history and this one is a refreshing take on Genghis Khan.

Essays I’ve read

Preventing Technology Turf Wars – Thanks to Grahame for recommending Chris’s writings. It’s amazing to see the kind of research and references on these Essays. I’ve found this one particularly interesting as many organizations are going through the exercise of improving efficiencies by consolidating functions.

Tech Readings

MemLab: An open source framework for finding JavaScript memory leaks – Interesting read on how Facebook detects in-browser memory leaks and how it’s benefitted them.

Quote I’m thinking about

When you see someone doing something that doesn’t make sense to you, ask yourself what the world would have to look like to you for those actions to make sense.
Shane Parrish

Friday Musings 09/Sep/2022

Vikram Ramakrishnan — Fri, 09 Sep 2022 03:09:00 +0000

Articles I’m reading.

Chesterton’s Fence – A Lesson in Second Order Thinking – As Modernization, Reorganization, Consolidation etc. become part of our usual work vocabulary, it’s imperative we understand the importance of second order thinking. As the article points out “A core component of making great decisions is understanding the rationale behind previous decisions. If we don’t understand how we got “here,” we run the risk of making things much worse“

Videos I’m watching

Why You Are Lonely and How to Make Friends – Pandemic has decreased social interactions than before, limiting mostly to virtual connects. This video explains why it’s important that we seek out friends and social connections and practical tips of how to go about it.

Documentaries I’m watching

“The extraordinary Genius of Albert Einstein” (Youtube)- reflecting on the principle of relativity in terms of social relations and individual identities or thought processes, asking the question – how was Einstein able to make his breakthrough?

Tech Readings

Taking it light and doing a small tech history lesson, Where GREP Came From – Computerphile – Computerphile was recommended to me by Hari and I found some of their content very informative with some interesting speakers on the lineup.

Quote I’m thinking about

If you set your goals ridiculously high and it’s a failure, you will fail above everyone else’s success.
James Cameron