Have you been in a situation where you feel so overwhelmed with work that your daily learning and book reading time has to take a backseat? That was basically me. The last 3 months had been a mad rush starting out a new company.

Kinobi has launched!

We are here to provide career centre services to the 200 million students in the region of South East Asia to plug the gap between education and the working world reality.

In this post today, it also serves as a reminder to learn despite the pressure to deliver at work. Learning is a consistent process in which you have to stay committed to follow through. You have to stay discipline not for others sake but primarily for your own sake. No one will look after your own wellbeing as much as you would for yourself. See that as a form of self care and the future you will thank you dearly for it. Lets dive right in!

Entire CS curriculum in youtube videos

Information are at your disposal. Now how much do you want it?

If it matters after today, don’t talk about it in chatroom

Chatroom helps with quick replies, low-stakes status update, emergency situation updates and for fun and engaging interactions (especially with remote workers)

But when you need a discussion that matters beyond today, don’t do it in a chat room. That is not the tool for the job.

Generally consider tools which will help to segregate your information based on their information. Tools for documentation helps with the following

• Encourage longer form responses with articulated thought processes instead of quick one liner replies.
• Shows you list of notes with title for maximum skim-ability
• Helps to keep your points organised

You can check out [this article}(https://critter.blog/2020/10/05/guerrilla-productivity-tactics/) for productive tips

Learning x by doing Y

Whatever you want to try coding, you can explore them here with youtube videos to walk you through.

Pavement bookworm

When reading becomes a habit, that habit can radically turn your life around. You will put your reality into a accurate worldview in which you are more prepared for the adversities before you. You could slow your pace to make sense of the simple joys around you. Reading can help you see danger in seemingly-harmless substance such as drugs or even social media and its implications on your perspective.

Whatsapp without a number

With delta chat, you rely only on the email server for the delta chats to construct your chats and render your email threads like a regular chat. Decentralised, no reliance on phone numbers.

Patterns of distributed system

Pattern structure allows us to focus on specific problem, explaining why a particular solution is needed. Solution description provides the code structure to show the actual solution, but generic enough to address alternatives. Pattern techniques allow us to link patterns together to build a complete system.

Brain fog

• Give up the clutter. Make sure your current space is clear of clutter.
• Multitasking doesnt work
  Task switching has severe cost. There are much time taken away from doing productive work to unload and reloading the hippocampus/short term memory.

Narrow down to 3-to-1 method where your entire day is focused on the 3 most important tasks and give one task your undivided attention for an extended period of time.

woice.me

Interesting concept to integrate remote work with a personalised experience with voice only and concept of rooms to enter.

Operating an airport in antarctica

Small but functional. Super interesting but one wonders why would anyone want to work such a job. Interesting thought.

Shipping data products fast

1. Utilize design sprints

These spints are used to undrstand your business use-cases. Ask the following questions

What is the problem we’re trying to solve? Why are we solving this problem? Asking questions empowers you to find a problem worth tackling, identify the right technical solution and ultimately drive impact.

Then choose a small team to decide on the business problem to solve. RACI it. Assign the person Responsible, Accountable, Consultant, who to be kept informed of the sprint.

Time box your sprints.

At the end of these sprints, you have your business problem identified, team set up, dates blocked off, concerns addressed.

1. For data products, utilize your spreadsheets

For data related products, use spreadsheets for the following use-cases

• Cleaning data by hand rapidly
• Displaying graphs
• computing basic ranking indices
• formatting output data

You want to ship fast, you need to iterate on your prototypes quickly. Good products are iterated multiple times.

How to calculate your magic number for product iteration.

3. Keep focus on whatever meets the min requirement.

Keep an 80-20 focus on the decisions you have to make. Focus on building models that solve problems and can be shipped quickly.

4. Talk to your users

Shipping fast also means shipping the right product. Take the time out to talk to users, before, during, and after every build iterations. Shadowing them or even doing the tasks yourself is a great return in investment to know their pain points and challenges.

Gathering feedback is an art. Generally there are 2 quick tips to do that

• Ask specific questions.
  Don’t ask if they have any feedback. Ask “How do you feel about the dashboard’s loading speed?”. “Are you able to locate the insight you need from this dashboard to report on the top of the funnel performance?”

• Select a diverse group of users for feedback.
  Its better to ask 3 people each from different teams using the product than to ask 5 people from one team.

The click menu

Interesting article on the confusion with hover menus. Should the parent menu be clickable when it has a hoverable sub-menu?

This article gives a good insight into that

Click click click

A super interesting website that hooks you to stay on with little to no content.

Hackers day

Interesting reminder that anything you put on the web is prone to be hacked and thus have to stay safe and vigilant. Security is never a given so you have to be intentional to patch your OS and continuously put yourself updated with security updates. Keep yourself updated with security terms as well! Here’s one for you to learn: watering-hole attacks

You can check out what is the watering holes attack here. There are also other attacks such as phishing and spear-phishing attacks as well.

How morning brew went from colleget newsletter to 75 million in 5 years

Its first target audience was the college students.

How to improve README docs?

Think from the users, what does a random user visiting your repo wants to know?

1. What problem does the software solve, and roughly how?
2. How does your solution look like? Are there any visual components or an interface for human consumption?
3. Are there any alternatives which is a better fit besides your product?
4. What platform does your solution work on? What are the pre-requisites to make it work?
5. Any remarks that may prevent me from using the software you have?
6. Any other links to documentation which may be of help.

TLDR;

One parting comment for the readers, do not stop learning regardless of your schedule. Even one page of a 700pager book is still progress. You want to be continuously moving forward before you start to feel stuck. Find joy in learning new things everyday and you will find a new sense of joy in the mundane (: