How To Prioritize Tasks ?

Shipping products is hard. What makes it hard is that typical products involve multiple teams and multiple dependencies. Navigating these challenges is non-trivial. There are technical challenges to overcome, but those are typically not the biggest blockers. (There are enough smart people in the room to take care of that, unless its some greenfield domain like AR/VR/Self-Driving etc), Then there are the procedural challenges; what should be done when and by whom.

The Dishwasher Test for "Am I Rich ?"

Setting up a private network with Tailscale

I came across Tailscale recently. It’s a tool that lets you build a private mesh network between your devices easily. My use case was to transfer data from my laptop(macbook) to my android phone. Many times I have a pdf doc that I have on my laptop that I wish to read on the go. I usually just email it to myself and download it to my phone, but wanted to see if I can use Tailscale for it.

No one Knows Anything

It’s actually true. When an “expert” says something, we take it at face value. We never question it and keep propagating those views. Without even pausing to consider if it’s really true or not. Our emotions and biases seem to have a greater effect on if we accept that viewpoint or not. Irrespective of whether we accept the viewpoint or not, we just assume that the author knows what s/he is talking about.

Ideas

Here are a list of ideas that I think would be great to build out as standalone products. (NOTE: I have not researched if they already exist in the wild or not). At different points in time I have needed something like this, so there is definitely a need. If any entrepreneur wants to adopt these ideas and run with it, go for it ! (If you are a VC and want to fund it, ping me :) )

History

For most of us history is something that happened far back in the past, with no relevance to us now. That’s just not true. A lot of what we consider “far off in the past” is actually quite recent (in relative terms). e.g. the cold war got over just 30 years ago. 200 years ago, Napolean was still around ! The technological progress of man in the last 100 years has been more than all of the progress we have made since we walked the earth.

End to End Deployment on GCP

Table of Contents Disclaimer Introduction Assumptions Architecture Create a Project Enable APIs Create VPC Create Subnets Create Firewall Rules Create Private connection to DBs Create NAT Router Create DB Populate env vars Push container to gcr Create Instance Template Create Managed Instance Group (MIG) Create IPv4/IPv6 address Create Backend Service Setup Load Balancer Cleanup Disclaimer This tutorial is provided “as-is” without any representation or warranties, express or implied.

Risk First Assessment

We are all familiar with the usual way how software project deliverables work: requirements, design, development, testing, deployment, monitoring… However, how many times do we do a risk assessment of our projects? We always seem to focus on the steady state where most of the things work. We don’t spend as much time in thinking about failure scenarios / risks to our project. I differentiate this from say a threat analysis / matrix.

BioHacks

I recently read a book called “The Gene” (by Siddhartha Mukherjee). It gives a great introduction to the history of our understanding of the human genome. That got me curious and I started playing around with DNA Sequences (in the software world !). I wrote simple functions to do things like DNA transcription, DNA Reverse Complement etc. It is available for anyone to use at: biohacks.jimmyislive.dev/ The backend is AWS Lambda functions.

'Remember Me' using the Go gorilla framework

A ‘Remember Me’ type functionality is something that is available on most websites today. Essentially what it does is that if the checkbox is checked when logging in, the session is kept logged in for a much longer duration (say a week or month). Otherwise, when you close the browser, the session terminates and you have to log in again the next time you visit the site. In golang, it is implemented easily using the gorilla toolkit.