Notes from 18/3–24/3/19

8 min readMar 24, 2019

My Salary Progression in Tech

Big jump from being a developer to a solutions architect — and as a solutions architect you don’t even code? Most interesting

CODERS’ PRIMAL URGE TO KILL INEFFICIENCY — EVERYWHERE

There’s one obvious reason, of course: They do it because of the dictates of the market. Capitalism handsomely rewards anyone who can improve a process and squeeze some margin out. But with software, there’s something else going on too. For coders, efficiency is more than just a tool for business. It’s an existential state, an emotional driver.

YES GROUP US ALL AS “CODERS” AND HOW WE HATE INEFFICIENCY AND TRY TO OPTIMISE EVERYTHING.

Have you considered it was because people like to optimise and be precise hence they tackle some of the most complex systems man has ever created?

The Essential Questions That Have Powered This Top Silicon Valley Manager’s Career

Managers shouldn’t dole out advice or “save the day.” Instead, empower your report to find the answer herself. She has more context than you on the problems, so she’s in the best position to uncover the solution. Let her lead the 1:1 while you listen and probe.

Also be comfortable with awkwardness as that means the conversation is touching points that are important/need to be discussed.

Giving feedback knocks down two of the biggest barriers preventing your reports from doing great work — unclear expectations and inadequate skills — so that they know exactly where to aim and how to hit the target.

Truth.

Ultimately, a group of people working in unison is a wonderful thing to behold. Done well, it ceases to be about you or me, one individual or another. Instead, you feel the energy of dozens or hundreds or even thousands of hearts and minds directed toward a shared purpose, guided by shared values.

And such a rare sight.

This Is How Normal Life Feels as a Psychopath

feel+psychopath = skeptical this article is accurate

Basically the first sentence covered the entire content of this article. That “Everyday, nonviolent psychopaths say they’re nothing like the psychopath we see on our movie screens”. But that’s pretty obvious no?

It’s Not Enough to Be Right — You Also Have to Be Kind

Reason is easy. Being clever is easy. Humiliating someone in the wrong is easy too. But putting yourself in their shoes, kindly nudging them to where they need to be, understanding that they have emotional and irrational beliefs just like you have emotional and irrational beliefs — that’s all much harder. So is not writing off other people. So is spending time working on the plank in your own eye than the splinter in theirs. We know we wouldn’t respond to someone talking to us that way, but we seem to think it’s okay to do it to other people.

To me, simply put, it’s that if you truly care about a person, your objective is not to point out his mistake but to help them get better. Usually that involves kindness. Sometimes it involves harshness. It depends on what the person best responds to.

How to Build the Ultimate Onboarding Checklist (Hint: It’s Not Just a Checklist)

Before Day One

Assemble their cross-functional onboarding team and introduce their point person or “buddy”
Make sure you and the new hire’s supervisor are aligned on role, goals, and responsibilities
Get all the legal forms and documents filled out
Prepare employee’s workstation
Give access to any tools, devices, doors, etc. they will need
Create accounts for them on any software they’ll need to do their job
Send any manifestos, handbooks, or articles you usually have new hires read
Prepare benefits package including a summary of FAQs
Provide a copy of the job description with responsibilities

On Day One

Make sure your team knows they’re arriving and have the hiring manager ready to greet them
Formally welcome them to the team and make introductions
Take a tour of the office
Start their training material workflow
Have them scheduled to meet with management to revisit expectations
Review company culture
Make sure they meet their point person, in person

During the First Week

Get them going on their first real work project
Go over expectations for the following month
Schedule at least one touch point to collect feedback and answer questions
Encourage them to communicate with their point person

During the First Month

Have several touch points with you, management, and their point person already planned
Explain long-term, high-level company goals so they are aligned on direction and culture
Provide reading material for personal growth
Set up a few small events to encourage them to socially interact with the team
Ask for feedback on your onboarding checklist

After Three Months

Schedule an informal performance review
Review past and future assignments to ensure alignment
Review former performance goals and set new expectations
Give and ask for feedback again
Check employee progress on training
Discuss end of probationary period and expectations afterward
Check in on how they’re feeling about company culture and how they fit into it

After Six Months

Conduct a six-month performance review
Review employee goals and progress so far
Set goals and objectives for the next six months
Check that employee has received all necessary training
Open the door for honest feedback
Make sure they still feel a strong cultural connection

After One Year

Conduct a yearly performance review
Recognize their first year at the company and review how they met expectations
Discuss goals, projects, and plans for the upcoming year
Discuss compensation and raise policies
Ask for — and listen to — feedback on your onboarding checklist and company culture
Congrats, you made it to the year-one milestone! Look forward to the next awesome year of working together.

Blockchain

CryptoKitties, Explained … Mostly

I like the way they explained it. Basically said that cryptokitties are collectibles, like beanie babies. Also this foretells a massive crash in prices then! Beanie babies aren’t worth anything now.

A universal framework for understanding incentive design in crypto and fiat systems — Part 1

Money is an agreement about energy. From a systems level perspective, money is an incentive design choice. More precisely, money is a distributed system with an embedded incentive mechanism design.

Interesting comment.

At this point, I think people are just explaining things in different contexts for different audiences. I’ve yet to find a more technical understanding of incentive design off medium. But the rest are papers that will take a while to digest.

Blockchain 2: Crypto Boogaloo

JPM Coin **EXISTS** and that’s all the article was about. Really my lesson here is about the catchy-ness of a title.

Meet RepuCoin: The Best Pupils Develop Their Academic Reputation Over Time

Using reputation as a proxy for a Proof-of-Authority type of blockchain. Reputation will decay over time. Voting on a consensus is created using a weighting of the reputation score of the miners.

Blockchain-Ethereum

A simple guide for how to write unit tests for smart contracts

Understand the busines logic
Map out your tests. fill it with //comments
Address the modifiers first then work through your require and if statements sequentially. Use OpenZeppelin’s assertRevert helper to check if your contract should revert
Function overloading and the need for low-level calls. Testing two functions with the same name but different logic
Test internal functions through either creating another contract that inherits the test contract or test the logic within the other functions in the contract that call the internal function

Cybersecurity

Introduction to Naïve Bayes in Cybersecurity

For applied ML in general

P(Sales | Phishing) = 0.429
P(Production | Phishing)=0.286
P(R&D | Phishing)=0.286

So if it’s a phishing attack, there’s a 40% chance it’s on the sales server. Can help with narrowing down the need to guess where the attack is targeted at.

Open Source

How to make an easy and valuable open source contribution with CircleCI orbs

Orbs — package manager for CircleCI config files (can use to configure AWS S3 upload without installing the AWS CLI or an AWS config file)

Example given was a slack Orb that used ‘notify’ and ‘status’.

notify allows one to craft a custom Slack notification in any job. So for a simple way is just that whenever there is an issue you will automatically get notified.

Building open source projects on CircleCI

Open Source projects get 4 build containers with no minutes cap.

Some features they mentioned: public build pages, private environment variables, decide on whether you will build on a PR etc

Open Source Doesn’t Make Money Because It Isn’t Designed To Make Money

People will pay a little for apps; not a lot, but a bit. Scaling up requires marketing and capital, which open source projects almost never have (and I doubt many open source projects would know what to do with capital if they had it).
There’s always money in ads. Sadly. This could potentially offend someone enough to actually repackage your open source software with ads removed. As a form of price discrimination (e.g., paid ad removal) I think you could avoid defection.
Fully-hosted services: Automattic’s wordpress.com is a good example here. Is Ghost doing OK? These are complete solutions: you don’t just get software, you get a website.
People will pay if you ensure they get a personalized solution. I.e., consulting. Applied to software you get consultingware. While often maligned, many real businesses are built on this. I think Drupal is in this category.
People will pay you for your dedicated and ongoing attention. In other words: a day job as an employee. It feels unfair to put this option on the list, but it’s such a natural progression from consultingware, and such a dominant pattern in open source that I think it deserves acknowledgement.
Anything paired with a physical device. People will judge the value based on the hardware and software experience together.
I’m not sure if Firefox makes money (indirectly) from ads, or as compensation for maintaining monopoly positions.

Life Optimisation

Streamline Your Workflow by Assigning Tasks to Days of the Week

The idea is pretty simple: Rather than shift your focus throughout the day, group together similar tasks so that you can streaming completing them. In Fast Company’s example, a business owner used the first two weeks of the month to meet with new clients and the last two to work with VIPs.

Yup! Done that. I try to put all my meetings on the same day. But I don’t always have control over when these meetings happen. Back in summer I would only go back to SUTD once a week to save on the travel time.

The Difference Between Knowledge and Wisdom (and Does IQ Matter?)

Wisdom can be both contextual (being a great fisherman or being a great soccer player or being a great copywriter) or it can be general (understanding and dealing with life in a healthy way as, say, a monk would be better equipped to do), and both of these kinds of wisdom can be helped with knowledge but knowledge isn’t a requirement for them to manifest if the empirical capacity of the senses in the person embodying them has been developed to a high enough level of competence, and an IQ test has nothing useful to say about that. All it does is tell you that you have the inborn capacity to accumulate and create knowledge, which is clearly important, but not important enough, because the real world goes one step beyond theory, and that is, it requires action — the ability to interact with and adapt to a changing reality, which is an entirely different ball-game

That’s it! That’s the entire article there! Wisdom is… applied knowledge to the appropriate capacity and intensity for the right problems.