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This is a special milestone: 700th post, after 14 years of blogging here. 700 posts is a lot of blogging. But that comes down to 50 posts per year, which is one post a week, totally doable, right? If I can get another 14 years of blogging at this rate, I will get to 1400. That is more than the EWD documents in terms of the sheer number of posts, not that I am comparing my posts with EWD documents. (BTW, of course I had a blog post about the EWDs. )  I hope I can go for many more years, because I do enjoy this. Writing in the open and getting occassional feedback is nice. But I don't do it for the feedback. I wrote about "Why I blog" recently , so I am not going to rehash that topic. Instead a good use of this post may be to serve as an index to other posts in this blog. I noticed I keep referring people to my previous posts where I covered a question before. 700 posts is a lot of posts, so maybe an index at this snapshot can help people get more out of this blog. Let...

MongoDB has a nice leadership development program internally. They suggested that filling/sharing this questionnaire would be useful to get you acquainted with the people you work with daily. I am not super into being in-touch with your feelings stuff, so I thought I probably won't do this. But then, the questions were interesting, and I jot down my answers to them quickly. I don't think this took me more than 5 minutes or so, and I felt good after having answered the questions. Maybe this gave me a little bit of self-acceptance, and being kind to my innate nature rather than judging it all the time. The questionnaire description was spot on: "Increase awareness of your own preferences by answering the questions below." Here are my answers to these questions. What would your answers be? I think it is good practice to do this exercise once in a while to know yourself a bit better. What are you AMAZING at? Where do you want to improve? I am good at research. I enjoy bei...

My blog has been going for 14 years now, and has just passed 4 million pageviews. Yay! I remember the 1 million pageviews moment in 2017 ! The main reason I was able to persist for so long is because I blog for selfish reasons. Let me try to unpack why I blog, and why I keep blogging. I write for myself The audience I have in mind is myself. I blog to clarify my understanding and thinking about a topic.  Reading a research/technical paper is already time consuming. I can't do it in less than 4 hours. Period. I love learning. And I am fortunate that I get to read research papers as part of my work. I double-dip on this effort to blog about them, to improve my understanding of these papers. Writing a blog post is the final step in my pipeline for reading a paper. I think my blog reviews of papers hits a good niche. Research papers are written for the wrong audience (or rather maybe the right audience but for the wrong reason): they are written to please 3 specific expert reviewers ...

It had been 3 years since I had to setup a new laptop. Past Murat had left me helpful instructions , but I got a bad surprise while configuring my Emacs setup. My beloved starter-kits, which worked smoothly under Emacs 27, stopped working under Emacs 29. I tried to fix the errors, but this proved futile due to my limited elisp/emacs skills.  I explored alternative starter-kits to configure Emacs. Doom emerged as the dominant choice, but it appeared large, bloated, and complex for my liking. I tried a couple small starter kits, but I faced other problems and was unable to integrate my customizations and get to a reasonable setup.  I am an Emacs user for 25 years, and I know a thing or two, but it seems everyone's now an Emacs pro. I don't get how people are able to accept and work with those complicated config files/directories. I started to speculate. Maybe the ordinary users left, leaving behind the proficient Emacs enthusiasts, who kept writing more and more intricate conf...

My cat is a great communicator. Today, just before noon, he meowed in front of my room. When I opened the door, he walked down the stairs till halfway, stopped, looked back at me, made eye contact, and meowed again. When I started following him, he passed the living room, stopped, looked back at me, meowed again, and waited for me to catch up. He then led me to the kitchen next to his feeder, and made me feed him. Many technical people forget this first rule of communication. Make sure your correspondent is following you. Make sure you connect with them strongly. My cat, Pasha, first made sure he connected with me and then communicated with me in a deep/visceral manner. He did this even without needing to use words.   How do you achieve this?  The first step is to take this as the objective. By dumping out one paragraph of content per minute to the other side, you don't achieve communication. You should stop, check the other side, confirm they are with you, before you carry o...

The most powerful person in the world is the storyteller. The storyteller sets the vision, values and agenda of an entire generation that is to come. -- Steve Jobs This book is by  Matthew Dicks , 48-time Moth StorySLAM winner and 6-time GrandSLAM champion. The book gives great tips about crafting stories. Earlier I had covered " Made to stick " and " Talk like TED "  on presenting and story telling. This book is at a different level than those. I strongly recommend you to read this book. It is entertaining as much as it is informative. This is like a short-story format version of the Hollywood movie-script format storytelling, which I covered briefly with " Nobody wants to read your shit ". Both books have the same message really: "You must streamline your message (staying on theme), and make its expression fun (organizing around an interesting concept)." My highlights from the book No one ever made a decision because of a number. They need a st...

Like many of you I watched The Queen's Gambit and loved it. The settings of scenery and decors in 1960s were mesmerizing.   And like many of you, this rekindled the interest for chess in me. Growing up, I didn't play chess much, but my younger brother got into it as a middle school student. He bought books detailing chess games and studied them. He got a city-wide championship and such. I didn't get much into it, because I guess I didn't think of it as a serious enterprise and didn't want to expend too much energy into it.  I had this Android chess app on my phone, and I started playing with that instead of my downtime Sudoku playing . In this chess app, it is very easy to undo moves, and try other moves. I play against the machine, and yes undoing is cheating, but I use it a lot to explore different scenarios at critical points in the game. I have been very surprised about how much this accelerated my chess learning. I was able to make progress through several har...

I had recently listened to Chuck Palahniuk in Tim Ferris's podcast. I got hooked immediately by Palahniuk's views on minimalism in writing . The man is right. The novelist has no business telling how the characters feel and how you should feel.  Literary minimalism is characterized by an economy with words and a focus on surface description. Minimalist writers eschew adverbs and prefer allowing context to dictate meaning. Readers are expected to take an active role in creating the story, to "choose sides" based on oblique hints and innuendo, rather than react to directions from the writer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimalism#Literary_minimalism It was clear that Palahniuk had thought a lot about how to choose words and how to give a rhythm to the story. So to learn more of his craft, I picked up his new book on writing: Consider This: Moments In My Writing Life After Which Everything Was Different. I loved it. I recommend it if you care about improving how you co...

This book from 2007 was an easy and fun book to read. The book gives tactics for making ideas/concept stick in peoples minds. This is not just useful for marketing purposes, but also for teaching, presenting, and research exposition. The book gives the following formula for stickiness: tell Simple, Unexpected, Concrete, Credible, and Emotional Stories. SUCCESS! Acronyms help for stickiness. Notice how close the advice in the "Talk like TED" book mirrors the advice here. For me this is what stuck from the book. (Note that this follows the SUCCESS formula.) Nora Ephron is a screenwriter whose scripts for Silkwood, When Harry Met Sally, and Sleepless in Seattle have all been nominated for Academy Awards. Ephron started her career as a journalist for the New York Post and Esquire. She became a journalist because of her high school journalism teacher.  Ephron still remembers the first day of her journalism class. Although the students had no journalism experience, th...

This is a very bold and *valuable* talk: The craft of writing effectively . It introduces a no-bullshit approach to academic publishing that will change/upgrade your perspective to writing. This talk may offend you, you may want to reject these ideas initially, but you will eventually realize that this is the reality we live in and you must come to terms with it. Since you are a researcher, and deal with complicated topics, you need to use your writing for thinking. Writing and thinking feed off of each other, and you need to write to help your thinking. But ultimately writing is not about you or your thinking, it is about the *reader*. After your initial drafts are done, you should reframe your writing to be reader-centric . The reader doesn't care about your work, he cares about what useful things he can learn from it. ( In marketing, they have a good saying about this: The customer doesn't want a power drill, he wants a hole in the wall to hang a photo. ) Provide val...

On New Year's morning, I watched the above lecture by Patrick Winston, the late MIT professor, on "How To Speak". (Patrick Winston passed away in July 2019. May he rest in peace.)   I had previously covered the Winston star idea by him ; this talk provides a more general and comprehensive treatment on how to speak and present. Patrick's talk contained several new gems for me. And I thought I already know a lot about presenting. Start with an empowerment promise. Nobody cares about your talk, they care about what useful things they can learn from your talk. So make this about the audience, look at this from their perspective, and start by telling them what useful thing they will get out of this talk. Differentiate between presentations that aim to expose (a job talk or a conference talk) versus that aim to inform (a lecture). For an exposition talk, you need to get across your message in the first five minutes. You should explain the problem you solve and...

This book, by Safi Bahcall , is about how to nurture radical breakthroughs in science and technology. The book draws inspiration from the innovations Vannevar Bush made possible Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD), created in 1941, and the innovations Theodore N. Vail enabled at Bell. OSRD's portfolio of accomplishments is impressive indeed. The war against Nazis is won through superiority in the field of science . The bombers' microwave radar cut through darkness and fog to detect German U-Boats, and rendered them ineffective in a matter of weeks. The book compiles insights from the organizational principles Bush and Vail employed as Bush-Vail rules. The main concept here is of a dynamic equilibrium, where the organization maintains well-separated and equally strong loonshot and franchise groups (phase separation) continuously exchanging projects and ideas in both directions. Summary of the The Bush-Vail rules 1. Separate the phases separate you...

This book is by Austin Kleon, 2012. I had also wrote about his other book "Show Your Work! 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered."  Here are the 10 things nobody told you about being creative: Steal like an artist. Don’t wait until you know who you are to get started. Write the book you want to read. Use your hands. Side projects and hobbies are important. The secret: do good work and share it with people. Geography is no longer our master. Be nice. (The world is a small town.) Be boring. (It’s the only way to get work done.) Creativity is subtraction. Kleon gave a short TEDX talk about the idea behind this book. The title is an homage to a quote attributed to Picasso: “ Good artists  borrow,  great artists  steal.” Picasso also said: "Art is theft." It’s not  just  where you take things from, it's where you take them to. Here are some parts I highlighted under Section 1: "steal like an artist." Every artist gets asked...

This book is by Ed Catmull, cofounder of Pixar, with Amy Wallace, 2014. The book is about the cultivation and management of creativity: If Pixar is ever successful, will we do something stupid, too? Can paying careful attention to the missteps of others help us be more alert to our own? Or is there something about becoming a leader that makes you blind to the things that threaten the well-being of your enterprise?  I would devote myself to learning how to build not just a successful company but a sustainable creative culture. As I turned my attention from solving technical problems to engaging with the philosophy of sound management, I was excited once again. While reading the book, I was impressed by how many questions Ed kept asking. I thought I was asking a lot of questions , but Ed is really really into asking questions and using them to achieve focus. Here are some parts I highlighted from the book. From childhood to PhD Growing up in the 1950s, I had yearned to be ...