Notes from 11/5–25/5

4 min readMay 25, 2020

The new term begins. This set of notes span between a holiday week and the first week of SUTD term 8.

COVID-19

Blockchain

Ethereum

An Annotated Version of Vitalik Buterin’s Ethereum Roadmap

It’ sincredible what’s being done here and I’m glad all this hype is over. But gosh this is an incredibly technical topic. There’s so much to learn from how this came about.

Sharding centralizes Ethereum by selling you Scaling-In disguised as Scaling-Out

Absolutely brilliantly written. It doesn’t simply gloss over the challenges and it talks quite simply about the challenge at hand.

Why You Should Learn to Build Blockchain Apps

Supposedly, lots of growth.

Data

Development

Using Python and Robinhood to Build a Long Call Trading Bot

Good for reference

Product

14 must-have documentations for building scalable products painlessly

Brand foundation (Brand guideline + Brand information)
User persona (toC and toB, breaking into toB-buyer and toB-user)
Industry knowledge & Glossary
Design system
Mock up
Company roadmap
Product backlog
Interactive prototype
Business requirements
Functional requirements
Cloud infrastructure documentation
Micro-services architecture
API documentation
Data library

Strategic clairvoyance: how to predict your product strategy’s success

Planning for product-market fit before launch

Best Competitive Analysis For Product Managers and Tech Startups

Every 6 months

Eigenquestions: The Art of Framing Problems

“Eigenquestion” is a made-up-word that borrows from the linear algebra concept of eigenvectors (mathematically: represents the “most discriminating vector in a multidimensional space”). I have a mathematics background so this term felt like a natural choice to me, but rest assured, it’s just a borrowed name and remembering/understanding the math is unimportant to understanding the concept.

Basecamp’s Shape Up: how different is it really from Scrum?

Shaping. Senior team members, who ultimately will not execute the project, define the problem and solution with the right amount of detail. Shaping needs to happen at the appropriate level of abstraction: concrete enough, so the team knows what to do, but not so prescriptive that it restricts the team from figuring out interesting details themselves. It is a delicate balancing act.
Betting. Shaped projects are pitched to the management team with some senior members present, and together they decide which projects to green light, and which to drop. Shaped projects that don’t make the cut are not systematically stored.
Building. The team delivers the shaped project with all necessary skills present in the team and have full responsibility for scope in a cycle of six weeks. At the end of the six weeks, either the project is finished or the project is killed. Extensions can happen but are extremely rare and discouraged.

The things I don’t like:

Shaping is done by senior members outside of the team, possibly introducing waste and inefficient hand-overs.
Teams get assigned to the work. I believe stable teams perform better than short-lived, temporary teams.
How do you ensure teams have knowledge of the technical component they will be working on? Or is this taken into account when assigning team members?
Totally unclear how Shape Up will work with bigger teams or scale with many teams. My initial impression is that it does not seem extremely scalable.
No moment of reflection built-in where people can chime in to improve the process. This is a missed opportunity.
Shape Up does not cover validation of what you’ve delivered, just discovery and delivery.
The voice of people who will perform the work in the betting process seems small, apart from key senior people. It would be nice to include the team more in the decisions on what will be worked on, so there is more buy-in.

Productivity

Have budgets for your life

Budget your time, attention

The root of time wasting activities is bad habits. They might look harmless at the beginning. A minute social media break from work seems to be a reasonable thing to do until it becomes a repeated behavior that distract your concentration.