😎 Two years of Swag for Developers
Exactly two years ago, swag-for-dev blew up on Product Hunt! It was quite a roller-coaster experience for me. This is a follow-up post to this. Year-2...
📚 Book Notes: Shoe Dog
Loved the candid account of everyday struggles. It’s motivating to see someone’s behind-the-scenes (while the system tends to focus only on the highlight-...
🤝 The OEPS Framework of Giving Feedback
You’re 99.99% guaranteed to not like every single part of every single person. But don’t let this discourage you. To become good friends / have a good...
📚 Book Notes: The Obstacle is the Way
Could’ve been a blog post. 🤷♂️ Here are my notes from The Obstacle is the Way: Objectivity means removing “you” — the subjective part — from the equation....
🎤 Submit that CFP right now!
What if it gets rejected? Oh, but my dear, what if it doesn't? In life, you have to ask for things. Nobody is going to know your potential unless you put in...
📚 Book Notes: Indistractable
I liked the part on raising indistractable children. Rest was skippable - I’ve already learnt these over the years; would’ve been super helpful 5 years ago!...
👼 Early Retirement
I have given a lot of thought into this: What do I want? Freedom. Freedom to do things without worrying about money. And the logical conclusion follows: Earn...
🎉 Life is too short not to experiment. #HappyNewYear2020
I have been setting yearly themes from the last few years. Last year, it was "Create More, Consume Less". This year, it's "Life is too short not to...
🧘 Year in Review 2019
This is the first time I’m making my annual review public! What went well? I started journaling. Wrote 247 entries last year. Reading them again for this...
🧙 Want to Read More? Join a Book Club!
I had a goal of reading 25 books in 2016 but failed. The gap was so large (I couldn't even read 10!) that I almost gave up on reading. I had a goal of...
📚 Book Notes: The War of Art
Have you experienced a vision of the person you might become, the work you could accomplish, the realized being you were meant to be? Are you a writer who...
💌 Inbox Zero
After reading Getting Things Done by David Allen, here are the changes I incorporated in my daily workflow: Inbox Zero I archived 50k+ unread emails in...
📚 Book Notes: Getting Things Done - The Art of Stress-free Productivity
If you feel like you have too many tasks on your plate, this book is for you! After implementing GTD in my life, I felt like some burden had been lifted off....
🌱 Plant Seeds Strategically
If you take-away one thing from this newsletter, let it be this! Plant seeds strategically. Figure out your long-term goals and move in baby steps towards...
📚 Book Notes: Nudge - Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness
Here are my notes from Nudge - Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness: Simply by rearranging the cafeteria, Carolyn was able to increase or...
🎖️ Keeping Track of your Little Wins in Life
When the number of things that I wanted to keep tabs on increased, manually checking them started becoming a chore! Swapnil Agarwal @SwapAgarwal How do you...
📚 Book Notes: The Happiness Hypothesis - Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom
A 4/10 for me, it didn’t have anything new, and I probably slept a couple of times while reading this book! Here are my notes from The Happiness Hypothesis -...
🔥 Were we let in for our looks? No. Will we be judged on them? Yes.
The Nudge On one fine morning of our final semester, we got an email asking us to fill some details for use in the graduation certificate. There was a black-...
📚 Book Notes: Nonviolent Communication - A Language of Life
I’d rate this book as my second best among the ones I read this year, after The Mom Test. This teaches you a valuable life-skill of dealing with conflict in...
🎓 The Art of Being a Good Mentee
The fastest path on your growth journey is getting a good mentorship in place. I have been fortunate to have learnt a lot of things from the masters...
📚 Book Notes: Flow - The Psychology of Optimal Experience
The introduction is quite intriguing - I was looking for this answer for long! I could relate with the existential dread: Is that all there is? I have added...
👨🏫 Lessons Learnt from Open-Source
This is a reflection of my open-source journey, from which I had some invaluable learnings along the way. I joined GitHub back in 2012, primarily to use it...
📚 Book Notes: The 48 Laws of Power
It contains a lot of anecdotes involving Tesla - how he was deceived out of money and credit, for the greatest invention of his career. It’s also the longest...
💊 Digital Detox
So I spent 10 days without my laptop this month. It might not seem like a lot, but it’s my longest stretch in recent years. On top of that, my mobile got...
📚 Book Notes: Man's Search for Meaning
Here are my notes from Man’s Search for Meaning: He who has a Why to live for can bear almost any How. Life is not primarily a quest for pleasure, or a quest...
🧸 Dragoon, Dranzer, Driger, Draciel
When I was younger, Beyblade was the hot talk of the town. I was playing it all day. I remember making custom mods, putting two attack rings on one beyblade,...
📚 Book Notes: The Culture Code - The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups
This is the perfect book for anyone building a company or a community. It's a 11/10 for me; I'm gonna read it again sometime! Starlings (small song-singing...
🧞 Fighting the Imposter Syndrome
I’ve felt like an imposter many times during my life, even at my workplace. Christina Zhu @cszhu this is @ all my ppl with imposter syndrome Aug. 16, 2019,...
📚 Book Notes: The Art of War
This book has a different format. The content is in the form of bullet points spread across 13 chapters. It's quite short (less than 100 pages). I'd give it...
😕 Differential Pricing
I recently came across this concept, which I'm not sure how to process. So the theory goes like this: The demand curve resembles the graph of 1/x, going...
📚 Book Notes: Why We Sleep
Here are my notes from Why We Sleep: Bits From a prescription written long ago in our ancestral genetic code, the practice of natural biphasic sleep, and a...
🗣️ My Old Nemesis, It's Time to Say Goodbye
Not able to sell has bitten me time and again. Somehow, I was wired to look down on the sales aspect of a project. I used to live under the impression that...
📚 Book Notes: Quiet - The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking
Here are my notes from Quiet - The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking: Bits Introversion is a preference for environments that are not...
🏃♂️ From Couch to 10K
So I ran a 10K this Sunday! Looking back 4 years, it started with a mild disappointment. I just hopped on a treadmill one fine day and found that I struggled...
📚 Book Notes: The Black Swan - The Impact of the Highly Improbable
Here are my notes from The Black Swan - The Impact of the Highly Improbable: Bits A private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool....
🚯 Ethical Marketing
Ever lured into something that promised upto 30% discount, only to find out that it’s applicable only above a certain order amount? I dabbled in the...
📚 Book Notes: The Mom Test - How to Talk to Customers & Learn If Your Business Is a Good Idea When Everyone Is Lying to You
Wow, I think I’m going to read this one again in a few months. It’s short, practical, and full of great advice! Here are my notes from The Mom Test - How to...
📖 Read all Medium stories for free
My current situation is this: I'm subscribed to a lot of newsletters that curate content in the tech domain and almost all of them are behind a paywall! I...
📚 Book Notes: Thinking in Bets - Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts
To be very honest, I found the book very repetitive (and therefore quite boring for me). I almost left the book just around the halfway-mark! I’d rate it the...
💎 The Netflix of Mac Apps
I love curation! ❤️ With the amount of content being created every day, there's not enough time to check out everything. The same goes for Mac apps as well....
📚 Book Notes: Made to Stick - Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die
Here are my notes from Made to Stick - Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die: Bits Have you ever noticed that our friends’ friends have much more interesting...
🎲 Slice 'n' Dice
Some tips on making steady progress towards your goals: Slice and Dice Want to do 100 push-ups? Set a goal of 50 first. If that's too difficult, aim for 20!...
📚 Book Notes: Hooked - How to Build Habit-Forming Products
Here are my notes from Hooked - How to Build Habit-Forming Products: 79 percent of smartphone owners check their device within 15 minutes of waking up every...
🥳 Advice to Younger Me
This is me trying to summarize my 25 years of learnings, most of which I learnt the hard way. Things I wish I knew sooner Set goals that scare you. Seek...
📚 Book Notes: Factfulness - Ten Reasons We're Wrong About The World and Why Things Are Better Than You Think
Here are my notes from Factfulness - Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About The World and Why Things Are Better Than You Think: Bits Over the past twenty years, the...
⚔️ A Personal Assistant to Maximize your Productivity
I have been playing around with task management apps for some time now. I needed a reliable system that would prioritize the important things and allow me to...
📚 Book Notes: The Design of Everyday Things
Here are my notes from The Design of Everyday Things: The best products do not always succeed. Brilliant new technologies might take decades to become...
💭 How accurately can you remember distant memories?
When you remember a past event, you are actually remembering the last time you remembered it. ^ This is very true except for (rare) people with photographic...
📚 Book Notes: Sapiens - A Brief History of Humankind
Sapiens is a book that can overload you with lots of relevant information in a very short amount of time. It makes you self-aware, if that makes sense. I...
✍️ Write tests. Not too many. Mostly integration.
This is an impromptu post, as I got one-upped by the lack of proper testing yesterday. “If you don’t have tests, how do you know your code is doing the right...