Figuring out how to juggle life, work & your own personal growth
In the month of Feburary, I found myself in an interesting position. Swarm with the post-covid setup, businesses has started to fall back on physical meetings to establish trust and relationship building. While that has been good, there are more effort required to get businesses going.
Despite that, you want to ensure you are still on a steep learning curve to push yourself to the next level in your own personal development. Before you can get started on your development, you want to know which areas you wish to focus on.
Area of focus has been neglected and its time to make some adjustments to steer us back on course. In this article, we will be breaking down the learning into general learning, technical learning, ideally business learnings as well.
General
Understand what your investors may need. You want to set them to help you succeed. While not everyone is in solely for the mission, they want to know how they can support you and thereupon not lose their own investments.
These open source applications are really good quality. Its not just open source and so poor quality that its not even usable. On the contrary, they are really good as a base.
The challenge is how you can work ontop of the existing code base. how can you extend the functionalities on a code base quality you may not be convinced of.
From a technical angle, do not mistake good UI with good code.
Interesting fun facts that comes along with timing.
Quite an interesting idea to replicate
Too good they cant lay you off
Interesting way to cement your position in a company. While this could be true, i wonder how a company’s culture, goal structure, and feedback system can avoid this problem. While its good for you as an individual, I could see how decisions that are good for you but poor for the company may be made.
80% less podcast created in 2022 than 2020
The wave has passed. People have been stepping out of their doors. The way to establish themselves has converged back to the physical space.
You can randomize the streets you wish to visit. Interesting concept
Children do this and subconsciously adults do too. We create a narrative in our head, and we love the way it makes us feel. It makes us feel less helpless, more secure, more convinced that the responsibilities do not lie in our hands
Interesting way to describe the issue with a bloated Website. With the power of javascript, there lies the abuse. Not utilized sparingly, it can add in unnecessary bloat.
Tracking, visualising and exporting hours tracked
Interesting how you have a tool just for time tracking. Is it that challenging? Rather, why would an excel not be sufficient for time tracking? Or why do anyone need to track their time on projects to the minute?
Assuming its a project from fiver, they already have timers to track the hours. They have their own tooling, thus the question on the need for an independent time tracking tool.
Interesting game that lets you understand how the knight moves in cheese.
Technically you can work backwards from the spot you wish to land on. The obstacle of the queen is an interesting way of creating some level of difficulty.
More control over my employment status
Don’t call yourself a Programmer
Engineers create business value, not just programming software
How do people trace the motion of the finger?
How do we track the scoring of a circle?
We can consider formula used to trace out the perfect circle. the further you are from the perfect circle, we can then measure the distance of every point from that line.
PM intern being a product owner
Topics for more meaningful Arguments in Family Meeting
4 Things I knew before starting my Mental Health Startup
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Need more capital for a product Company - More than $200k USD
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Investors won’t be impressed by the product in the early days
Finding PMF will be a challenge and you need to be patient with that
- Product will not sell itself, invest in PR & Marketing.
Being in places founder gather can help position you among operators. You want to gather feedback as early as possible and typically you find founders more willing to share feedback. Not from a point of expertise but a point of genuine support. They were once in your position: Pre product Market Fit, and wished some others were able to provide that same feedback.
- Fundraising is a full time responsibility.
Fundraising is about narratives & relationships.
The market lives in inflated truth, anyone who tells the truth about their projects will not look ambitious & convincing enough.
Filled with Knowledge, Starved of Wisdom
Motivating your managers can be challenging
External Motivator: Supporting/Coaching/Public Recognition of work
External Detractor: high difficulty at work/discouragement from leaders
Internal Motivator: Drive to improve/confidence in solution/skillfulness/passion
Internal Detractor: Anxiety/ Low confidence in ability
Technical
Interesting if we could have our systems in a VR. Figuring out how career preparation could be more immersive than just a static website.
Getting your work automated is one of the best feelings. Hard to request, but easy to experience its value.
The nature of work may not be as straight forward with clear feedback loop from any frameworks.
For example, in nodejs, when you make an error, the compiler directs you to the file & line. You solve it and move forward. In Devops, when a setup does not work, it just fails.
Writing documentation for Software Architecture
Challenging the notion that code tells the story, and thus no need for documentation. This is true at the application layer. Not entirely true when it is at the architecture level
git-sim
The visualization with animation can help in a teaching setup.
This can be useful to understand the hidden implications of any git command
Not as easy as it looks but something that is technically within reach. Needs more exploration to understand the cost required.
Setting unit tests as a way to document your progress and what you have yet to complete
If your company encounters a security issue, be the one to talk about it. If you are not talking about it, then someone else will. Especially if you are a big big company.
Unauthorised access, that means your audit logs needs to flag out for high security level work and needs to alert out quick immediate actions
List of Security Technology Tools
Surprising things CSS can animate
Understand Interpolation. When the browser animates a CSS value, it creates a sequence of intermediate values over the course of the animation.
.boo-move {
animation: move 6s ease-in-out infinite alternate;
}
@keyframes move {
from {
z-index: 1;
/_ transform here to appear further away /
}
to {
z-index: 6;
/ transform here to appear closer _/
}
}
@keyframes swing-backwards {
0% {
z-index: 2;
/* `transform` here to overlap inwards and appear closer */
}
50% {
/_ transform here to swing outwards /
}
100% {
z-index: 1;
/ transform here to appear further away _/
}
}
.widget-wrapper {
counter-reset: sum;
}
.digit-4 { --increment: 8; }
.digit-3 { --increment: 4; }
.digit-2 { --increment: 2; }
.digit-1 { --increment: 1; }
.digit::before {
content: ‘0’;
animation: flip-digit step-end infinite;
animation-duration: calc(var(–increment) * 2s);
}
@keyframes flip-digit {
50% {
content: ‘1’;
counter-increment: sum var(–increment);
}
}
You can animate digit flips without javascript
.decimal-output::before {
content: counter(sum);
}
Things learnt from Software Engineer of 20 years
- Software engineers should write regularly
- keep your processes as lean as possible
- Software engineers, like humans, need to feel ownership
thats why devops is popular - gives you the ability to own the process from start till end, and can be directly responsible for delivering value.
- Always strive to build smaller systems
Don’t get pushed by budgets or PR to build big systems; especially if 50% simpler/smaller systems can do just the same job or eventually a much simpler job (less maintenance with a smaller system).
Find out what you need to build, allocate a budget for it. If you have spare budgets, use it for R&D or better customer discoveries. You want to put your product consistently infront of end-users and get real genuine feedback from them.
If you are building an internal system, get the internal stakeholder’s feedback. Don’t build without feedback, kidding yourself that you are a great builder. You are only a great builder when the product has stood the test of stress & feedback.
- Software is a means to an end
The primary job of any software engineer is to deliver value. If value is what you want to focus on, sometimes, the best tool for the job is not software at all.
- The best software engineers think like designers
You understand the end user, you plan your product around your end user. It may be an API, great engineers will consider who will be using it, why it will be used, how it will be used, and what is important to these users. Keeping the user’s needs in mind is the heart of a good user experience.
Break out of the typical UX mentally - frontend with nice visuals. User by definition is a person/subject utilizing a service/product. From this perspective, there are users of backend services, there are users of APIs. And you want to give these users a good UX. Stripe does a good job with this.
Challenging Algorithm Questions
TLDR;
For the month of Feburary,
it has been a good reflection on what are the most important aspects of work. As a founder, put time to work on your business, not in your business. Your circle needs to enlarge every single day, you cannot afford to lose focus on what is truly the most important.