Designer, turned product manager writing about modern software.
Sometimes, forgetting is good for your memory. If you are forgetting the concepts at a 'spaced interval' in a conscious way, you might actually make your memory more concrete. This could be best illustrated by the repetition curve graph below: Our memory is prone to logarithmic decays as...
We lack frequent usage of the 'future past tense' in modern discourse. When I was recently writing some new year resolutions, I noticed the use of 'I can', and 'I will', and found myself questioning the format, especially when I see that I'...
Writing for yourself on your personal website is the purest form of self-expression on the internet. It avoids any trappings from the algorithmic maze. And there are no digital echo chambers. It's just you and your ideas in your own cozy little garden. We're witnessing the...
Let's say you have to make slides for tomorrow's big meeting. Your boss wants five strategy points on one slide. You know that's too much to be put on one slide, but it's being insisted. "This gives a complete picture of...
Imagine having an idea in the shower and testing it before breakfast. That's our reality now. AI lets you prototype at the speed of thought. I use Claude Projects and Cursor to build what I call disposable apps - quick prototypes that prove a point. The magic? No...
Let's take a clear pond flourishing with various aquatic plants — water lilies, duckweeds, water milfoils, you name it. The variety of these plants provide a delicate balance, feeding the pond with nutrients, and this very natural filtration system. The algae still tries to outcompete the aquatic plants, but...
As a disclaimer, I would like to mention that I have a very shabby process of getting things done. There could be a golden standard out there worth emulating; but nevertheless, this (rather easy) system works for me, and I continue to follow this— 1. Most of the work in...
Writing is thinking. My blog has had a median of 0 visitors per day for almost two years (nowadays, it's only a marginal improvement). And I don't care. As Alexey Guzey points out, perhaps the best indicator of your online writing having benefits is when you...
The story behind shape rotators, wordcels and journey-shifters.
The top 1% smart thinkers I've observed have all been very clear thinkers. They could elucidate complex thoughts as they understanding the basics, at a very fundamental level. Sure, you could memorize all kinds of complicated concepts and stitch them together, but you will only get so far....
We have more books on birds written by ornithologists than books on birds written by birds, and books on ornithologists written by birds. Taleb eloquently describes this as the key problem of knowledge, or in other words as epistemic arrogance. Strong corollary can be drawn with various disciplines, including entrepreneurship....
Leonardo da Vinci's masterpiece, the Mona Lisa achieved through the painstaking application of countless gossamer-thin layers of oil paint over the course of many years, many months. The sfumato technique which Da Vinci popularised, involved applying more than 40 layers of paint, each only 10 to 50 micrometers...
What differentiates a good essay and a bad essay? With a great essay, you can see the larger tree that connects all those branches, leaves, and twigs together into a single unit of a 'tree'. A bad essay is where you only see the random assortment of leaves...
Strongly recommend everyone to keep private notes about people. These could even be some random jotted keywords: "served in the navy", "capuccino lover", "biker", "loves going on long walks", and so on. When private notes accumulate over time in the form of...
Imagine you're building a house. You could break down the act of building into various steps: first comes the foundation, then the framing, then the roofing, and the plumbing, and the wiring, and so on. Or you could try to do it all at once, ordering a jumble...
In the world of nutrition research, contradictory findings are as common as fad diets. One day, a study proclaims the benefits of a low-carb diet for weight loss. The next, another study champions a plant-based diet for overall health. This constant flip-flopping of dietary advice leaves most of us feeling...
Zettels are the best way to connect and preserve ideas. I've tried various tools and systems for online writing, but nothing beats the power of Zettels. What are they, really? They come from the Zettelkasten method, developed by Niklas Luhmann, a German sociologist who was incredibly prolific. He...
Showing proof-of-work as a designer is quite simple. You made an app, you communicated the output product and exhibit how the product evolved over time ranging from the paper napkin sketch, low fidelity, high fidelity prototypes and finally a fully fledged product. The iterations need not just be tangible, but...
I've been hiring people (and conducting more thorough reference checks) more recently now, and I've learned something important: most reference checks are useless. They're like those mandatory training videos you have to watch at big companies. Everyone goes through the motions, but nobody really...
In the book Inspired, Marty Cagan talks about dividing one's day-to-day tasks into three major buckets: people, process and product. I'd experimented with categorising my tasks into similar such buckets based on the framework by Shreyas Doshi: To make this possible within my workflow, I started...
Home cooked apps using Rails, React, v0.dev and shadcn/ui
Not starting with a blank slate has been a great productivity boost in my writing. I wrote 50K words in 2024. And I can safely say that these 50K words have been written in a well thought manner, instead of an AI generated word salad. All this, because I'...
As a Rails enthusiast, I've always wanted a better deployment solution to house my hobby projects. It was not that there was no good solution available: We have AWS, Heroku, Hatchbox, Fly, Render.io and various other such PaaS alternatives. All these PaaS providers were ultimately wrappers sitting...
I decided to revive a long-lost interest and try my hand at cartooning. But it was an unlikely dream, given my complete lack of artistic talent and the rarity of success stories in that business. So I decided to try something called affirmations, which I will describe in more detail...
While designing health campaigns for Noora Health's work in Indonesia and Bangladesh, I was overseeing the health communications strategy for pregnant and newly-delivered mothers. There were messages in a specific format that needed to be rewritten in a more easy to digest Whatsapp format appealing to the people...
This is a list inspired by Kepano in his blog: 1. What would you do if you had 6 months to live? 2. What would you do if you had a billion dollars? 3. What advice would you give yourself 10 years ago? 4. What do you hope will be...
Brad Adkins, a fellow Indiehacker wears the same Mornino wool t-shirt every day. He has three pairs of shorts, one pair of sandals, and one pair of shoes. Other than that, it's just a jacket and some workout gear. He doesn't like wasting energy thinking about...