Decentralised military units perform better than centralised ones. Decentralised businesses perform better than centralised ones. Reason is simple, decentralisation brings you closer to the context in which you are operating enabling agility and nimbleness.

• When you read a post on lessons from startup failure, to the reader, the lessons sound obvious - not from a hindsight bias perspective but in absolute terms. I believe the protagonist does not see this for two reasons.
• \1. When you are in the thick of things, you get blindsided to some obvious realities - like the fish that asks what is water.
• \2. You wilfully ignore some of these realities like a self perpetuated reality distortion field. Doing anything new, requires you to suspend a part of your rational mind as you are going against the grain. If it was that obvious, everyone would have done it.

Every rule has an exception, few have the judgement to exercise this. If you find people with this rare talent, latch on to them.

I am at that stage in life where I am skeptical than happy when someone claims their service is free.

Every time I re-read a research paper, I come away with something new.

Hypothetical question - If there is a super human who is acutely aware of persuasion techniques and own biases at a subconscious level, would that person have a dull and boring life?

Why security by obscurity is a bad idea. https://abhyrama.com/2019/07/18/security-by-obscurity/

• Gut instinct - Biases, metal models, and principles that you have not or cannot put into words.
• @harish224227 Hahah, yes.

If someone starts appearing in too many podcasts, either they are publishing a book or, they are starting their own podcast.

Side hustle to earn an active income is a big rage. Instead of side hustle, invest that time in becoming the best at what earns you bread and butter. This will more than make up for the income from side hustle.

If it happens to you, it is a tragedy; if it happens to others, it is a statistic.

Software observability is an addiction. If you have never done it before, difficult to see why people go ga ga over observability. Once you have reaped the benefit from observability, impossible to let go.

Is it possible to sell big hairy audacious goals (Elon Musk, Narendra Modi like) to the masses without being pompous, bombastic, and overt optimism?

Phrasing pithy intelligent sentences in the virtual world is easy. Doing things in the real world is hard.

• Came across the concept of Kind and Wicked learning environments thanks to @DavidEpstein’s recent podcast appearances. When you think of this, parenting is probably the wickedest of all learning environments.
• The paper on Kind and Wicked learning environments by Hograth et al is highly readable - https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/5c5d/33b858eaf38f6a14b3f042202f1f44e04326.pdf.

Central engineering teams should act as enablers for other teams building observability and productivity tools, proliferating best practises and providing guidance. In today’s world, where speed is of essence, hand off of tasks to central engineering teams does not work.

Two kinds of interviews: \1. You tailor the discussion based on someone’s previous work. \2. You have a set of expectations and you validate that completely ignoring the resume.

2 works for big corps, startups vying for talent should do 1.

Hackathons should mandate - only demos, no presentations.

The ability to truly hold conflicting ideas and do justice to them is one of the most important mental gymnastic ability one has to develop.

Twitter requires you to compress your writings and eliminate context for brevity.

Prose writing requires you to expand your writings with context to make a joyful fulfilling read.

Both are orthogonal exercises but important to become a better communicator.

You can cover up a mediocre idea/ product with a great presentation.

Be aware of this when someone presents you something.

On the flip side, develop good presentation skills.

Go introduced me to structural typing through its interface implementation which is a pretty cool concept and probably the only mainstream language to do this.