Category: inspiration
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Thank you fellow Americans for giving me hope for our country.
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Leave things better than you found it. Do no harm. Persistence. About
Tosh Hall
Global CCOClose Bio
Tosh oversees the creative product for all our offices, including work for AB InBev, Dunkin’ Brands, Target and UNICEF.
His work’s been recognized at Cannes and by D&AD, The One Show, Clios, New York Festivals, Tokyo TDC, Graphis, Communication Arts, Print and AIGA—and featured in Forbes, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. After receiving his BA in economics and journalism from UNC Chapel Hill, he worked for Revlon and Landor Associates.
Tosh teaches at the School of Visual Arts and lectures worldwide. He was recently named one of the 50 ‘Most Creative People‘ by AdAge.
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I am often inspired by creative types. I heard about Jessica Hische when she was interviewed on Design Matters podcast. I found her
- Lynda.com show “The Creative Spark: Title Case, Typographic Artisans”
- I’m inspired by their workspace and how they customized their tables to fit their tools
- Her beautiful homepage http://jessicahische.is/
- Her 2 books “Tomorrow I’ll be Kind” and “Tomorrow I’ll be brave”
Follow up
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jessica_Hische and her work on “Don’t Fear the Internet” and Skillshare courses.
case, Typographic Artisans” -
How Payal Kadakia Danced Her Way to a $600 Million Start-Up https://nyti.ms/2KCHzQH
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Spoiler Alert, the answer is No.
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Getting There
The Merced Branch of the San Francisco Public Library system is 1/2 block from the 28, K buses. Right acrossed from the Stonestown mall. There is plenty of street parking with 2 car parking for 10 minutes.
What is different?
One standout of this library is the central garden space with maple trees and 5 benches. On this sunny Saturday, taking a book outside to read without checking out the book is a great way to spend 2-3 hours browsing and reading books. There is 1 aisle worth of Chinese fiction and non-frictions books.
Interior
There is a nice fireplace with 6 comfy leather seats. A lot of 4 top tables spread a crossed the library. It’s a single floor library with almost 1/3 of the space devoted to childrens area and a small teen section.
Noise
A lot of kids, so expect noise around level 5 out of 10.
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In 2019, I wanted try something a bit different than 2018.
In 2018, I didn’t buy anything that was not a consumable.
In 2019, I wanted to be less extreme and only buy non consumables once every quarter.
In Q1 2019 – I have bought 2 pairs of shoes and that is it.
Something else I am changing, is to not spend money I don’t have. Going to all cash or ATM card. Hopefully this drives the right spending habits since I will both valued more what I paid for in cash and I don’t feel overwhelmed by a large Visa bill at the end of the month. -
The goal of this proposal is to define how we build a culture of career growth for our technical staff in any individual contributor level.
During the career of a software engineers, several key factors contributes to their career growth
- Innate skills and self motivation
- The type of projects they are exposed to and have access to contribute to.
- Their immediate supervisor and manager
- Their immediate team members
- Senior staff in their immediate team
- Senior staff outside of their immediate team
- Senior management in their direct chain of command
- Senior management outside of their direct chain of command
To be continued in part 2 https://tonytam.org/2019/04/08/proposal-for-tech-mentorship-v2/
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(The art piece is done by a SF local artist of migrant workers working in California central valley)
Yesterday, my direct report, a principal software engineer who is an expert in our C++ code base presented to over 150 engineers on a piece of code walk through of a “Life of a single data event as it is indexed and searched”. This is a very detailed, meticulous piece of work over the span of 3 months. 3 practice runs (with me, my team of 3 engineers and with 6 beta students). 5 interactions of content to clarify the content and presentation. 1 trial post production video editing.
After the 1 hour and 30 minutes of video content, we are doing one more round of post production editing to get better audio, camera and webcast material spliced together.All this work is in preparation for
- Presenting this material to every newly hired engineer to Splunk
- Have existing engineers watch it before they join the Splunk C++ team
- As a template for how to build deeper content
All this work might go under appreciated if we also don’t invest in
- Finding a good baseline measurement before the training
- Measuring again after the training
- Taking feedback to collect what other pieces of content to create
It is a lot of work to prepare, but hopefully worth the effort
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James Clear’s book Atomic Habits – During the early phases of forming a good habit (going to the gym, eating healthier, saving for retirement) there is no immediate reward. However with bad habits (eating ice cream, watching Netlifx, scrolling through Instagram), we get immediate reward.
Unfortunately humans are flawed, we tend to avoid things that give us pain and do more of what feels good as a default. In his book, he recommends building in a reward in order to trick the brain to do more of what is good for us. For example, getting a massage after a workout. Setting aside a fund to Travel to Europe, when we skip going to the restaurant.
Atomic Habits is one of the most easy to read and actionable book I have encountered. Each chapter is 10 pages, at the end there are bullet items to summarize the book.
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Today, I picked up a strawberry muffin and coffee from Bello Coffee and Tea in Glen Park. When I first saw the total bill was $5, I was taken aback. $2.5 for a coffee and $2.5 for a muffin. Was it ringed up incorrectly? It was so much lower than I would expect.
My usual coffee places are $4.5 for coffee, $4 to 6 for pastries.
Then I pay more attention to the owners/workers at the cafe. They were a middle aged Chinese couple. Or I am guessing. I wonder if the ownership had changed?
My best guess is that they are going for a volume business and they are still figuring out the right pricing model.
Or, I am just too used to fancy coffee places and charge a lot more because they pay a living wage to their workers?
My morning started with a surprise.
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I also deleted Facebook, stop using any apps that are personalized infinite scroll apps, but did not add tracker blocker. It is interesting to see this person actually bought less online as a result of not getting personalized ads.
I Deleted Facebook Last Year. Here’s What Changed (and What Didn’t). https://nyti.ms/2YdvvKk
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How do you know when a training is effective? NPS score is a measure of whether the participants would high recommend someone else to take the training. But I wanted to switch up the metrics to measure outcome and confidence.
At work, we are delivering a deep dive training to engineers to teach them about how Splunk works behind the hood.
Instead of measuring their NPS score about the training, I decided to measure the outcome instead.
First we take a baseline with the following question before the training and we’ll ask again after the training to gauge whether there is any difference in outcome.
How confident are you in your ability to make changes to the Splunk C++ code base?
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My full time job is to work on engineering productivity.
Often folks ask me what I do every day / every week?
I often tell them what I’m working on this quarter.
Quarterly Focus
Well, the first quarter in 2019, my focus is on creating coding labs and content for new engineers that join Splunk so they understand what tools are available for them that is uniquely only available at Splunk.
Training New Hires
Every week, I will meet with all newly hired engineers for 2 hours and show them the tools available to them. Every 2 weeks, we will meet for 6 hours and they will do the coding labs we have created for them. I will likely talk with them for 30 minutes about the products at the company, the community, my own story at Splunk and what makes for an effective and impactful engineer. What is the culture in the engineering organization?
Tech Talks
On an ongoing basis, I will solicit internal and external folks who have worked on interesting problems to present during our weekly tech talks. The purpose is to share the work so other might learn and make use of the work themselves. Or the talks are to inspire them to think bigger and beyond their daily work.
Listening
Anther part of my work is just listening to engineers and they may reach out to me to help them get their work done. This could be a wide range of topics. It could range from just looking for the name of someone who could answer a technical problem. It could be just brain storming with me about a problem they have in finding a solution to replicate a problem with a particular mobile app. It could be helping them finding a solution when they feel overwhelmed with too many meetings.
Systemic Solutions
When I listen to an engineer on a specific problem, I often would try to help them solve the initial problem. Make sure they are unblocked. Then my real job kicks it and I need to figure out whether this is a more systemic problem. I would reach out to other engineers and other engineering managers and figure out who else has the same question or problem. Or I would write a document so that others could benefit in the future. I could also create a backlog EPIC so the team of 3 engineers might brainstorm with me on a more longer term and thorough solution.
Non Technical
Still to be written, Saturday badminton awaits
Mentoring
Still to be written, Saturday badminton awaits
Engineering
Still to be written, Saturday badminton awaits
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I was fortunate to attend a talk by BD Wong in San Francisco and the playwright Lauren Yee promoting her play “Great Leap Forward”.
BD Wong is an openly gay Asian man. He talked about how as an adult, he finally announcing to the world about being gay and being very proud to be gay and proud to be Asian.
I was moved to tears after hearing him say he was proud to be Asian.
At the age of 48, I am proud to be many things. I’m proud to be a father, proud to be a software engineer, proud to be a mentor, proud to be a husband, proud to be a mentor.
But.. I don’t think I’ve been proud of my heritage as an Asian.
I am not proud of my accent. I’m not proud of the odd Chinese customs, I make fun of them. I’m not very proud of the small frame of Asian men. I’m not proud that Asian men seem to be lower social status that Asian women seem to want to marry up to Caucasian men.
Work to be done yet
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Mr. Mossberg, a veteran of The Wall Street Journal, The Verge and Recode, said on Monday he would be deactivating his Facebook account, along with the Facebook-owned Messenger and Instagram apps.
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Recently I have been running dry on my personal motivation on important projects such as transcribing Impactful Engineer.
I have not been able to diagnose what the root cause is. Some possible reasons could be
- Transcription is not what motivates me and hence I’m putting it off
- The overall project and goals is not current aligned with my current mindset
- I am juggling too many things in my life
- Other stress that is de-motivating my focus with Impactful Engineer
- Most likely: I have limited motivation and just need a reboot
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An effective engineering team is highly collaborative, focused on delivering high quality code with velocity. The team sets the standard for other teams to follow in how they design software, write and test their software and ultimately delivering business value to the customer. The team functions as a coherent group, helping each other succeed, having a sense of ownership for the product and code. They actively take ownership of the product backlog, pays down tech debt and communicate outwards to their stakeholders.
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If you are a leader and/or a manager of people, go read You Can’t Be a Great Manager If You’re Not a Good Coach – HBR.org
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This week I practiced what Lyn Campbell recommended during our interview on Impactful Engineer (read here). I asked for feedback from someone I work with. I asked her how she thinks I can improve in meetings.
She generously took the time to give me the following feedback
- During one of our meetings about a previous mentorship program, she said that even though what I suggested was correct, I was too directive and came off as telling what was wrong and what I thought need to be fixed for a mentoring program. Even though my feedback was correct, but because I was very harsh in my delivery, my intention of helping the program may have put the people in a defense mode. Instead I should be much softer in how I phrase my suggestions and perhaps start the sentence with “What if we.. What do you think if we did ..”
It was difficult to listen to harsh feedback, but it was so right on. It’s consistent feedback that I got from my lovely wife about how I am also with my personal relationships.
After this feedback from work, I realize I have obvious behavior changes I need to make. I also wanted to point out that it was hard to hear this type of feedback, but it’s also much needed advice for both at work and in my personal life.
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This YouTube video really cracked me up. An immigrant kid from Hong Kong, born in Shanghai, immigrated to L.A, went to UC San Diego, majored in economics, told his parents he would rather disappoint them for a few years than disappoint himself for life, did standup, drove for Uber, auditioned 100+ times for small parts until he got a permanent spot on Silicon Valley.
Book: How to American: An Immigrant’s Guide to Disappointing Your Parents (Jimmy O. Yang from Silicon Valley)
- “When you pursue a dream, that’s how you become homeless.”
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So Far
I’ve deleted all my infinite scrolling apps (FB, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter). I’ve stopped reading online news and only read a printed Sunday paper. I’ve paid for products to remove ads (Cruncy Roll, YouTube, Pandora).
Call To Action To Take Back Attention & Time
Today, I listened to the founder of Center For Humane Technology, Tristan Harris, talk being intentional about how we should guard our attention and time from social media apps. He has went to school with the founders of Instagram and he talked about how Instagram’s founder were masters of stealing attention by designing the user interface in ways to hack our brains to come back over and over again to the Instagram app.
After thinking about it a little bit, I thought about buying a flip phone to be used on weekends in addition to my Android Nexus 6P. However, instead of buying another gadget, which will break my vow to not buy anything for one year unless it’s perishable or a book, I’ve decided to do the following life hack on my Android phone.
Creating Clean Workplaces For Every Context
On Android, you can create multiple users who get a completely clean Android home screen with the clean version Android. From that clean slate, I can install apps that allow me to single task. This similar to how you can create new users on your laptop.
Podcast & Deep Thought Context
In this Context I have only
- Pandora – Tuned to Piano Dreams radio for me to concentrate
- BeyondPod – Listen to podcasts, with zero interruptions and incentive to browser or read email
- Google Maps – I could be driving and listening to the Podcast
- Chariot – I may need to look up my ride to work
- Brave Browser – To replace Chrome, by removing ads from Chrom
Nothing from
Gmail, work email, Slack or SMSis interrupting my flow.My activities
- Reading
- Listening to podcasts
- Driving
- Reading a book and do not want interruptions
Physically In The Office Working Context
In this Context I have only
- Microsoft Outlook – work email
- Slack – work chat
- SMS – for my boss to text me for urgent issues
- Okta verify – to get into the work VPN
My activities
- During work hours on weekdays 8 to 5pm
Nothing from
Gmail, YouTube, any personal appsinterrupting my flow.Learning Context
In this Context I have only
- Coursera
- EdX
- TED
- Udemy
- Kindle
My activities
- Learning from video training
All notifications turned off. No email, nothing.
Personal Context
This is the messiest one with everything else. Personal Gmail, Wechat, banking apps, commuting apps and personal Slack channels. This is only the first week that I’m trying this so I could possibly create more contexts as they make themselves known to me.
Why?
These contexts make my intentions known and clear to my brain. Each context is meant to signal that what my primary purpose is. The completely controlled context is forcing me to single task, finish that portion and then move to the next context intentionally.
The contexts are discrete from each other. An example is that there is no multi-tasking when I’m listening to a podcast, I cannot email at the same time. As I physically switch from one context to the others, my brain also switches contexts and get ready for the next focus area. Making the context switching harder and longer will hopefully signal and train my brain to focus on a single task at hand.
What is your hack to take back attention and time?
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Who Is On Your Team?
Taking a journey alone is not only difficult, lonely but also not sustainable. Starting with simple personal goals such as exercising. If I am only accountable to myself, I can skip a day, skip a week, skip a month, I only have to answer to my nagging self. If I have a team of friends who are waiting for me every day, every week, then meeting them to start exercising is what I look forward to and exercising is just part of what we do together. For example, I started https://sfbadminton and built up a network of people who love badminton and are competitive players. There are 80 people who are part of the SF Badminton social group. Having a team/group is why for 18 months I have been playing badminton consistently every week twice to three times.
Alone – So Easy To Give Up
For 19 weeks, I write an email newsletter that I sent out to 500 engineers every Friday sharing tips that I think they will find useful. I don’t have a team, it’s just me. I have made it happen every Friday, but it’s a difficult task to keep on going. I’m able to keep pushing because I know at the end, if I can keep this pace up for 3 years, my Friday Tips will be a habit and will be a great forum for a team I can bring around the weekly habit.
Team – So Easy And Fun
I am part of team of 5 people to find interesting topics for the company to hear about and we run a weekly tech talk series. We do logistics coordination for the speaker, we help the speaker to get setup, we run the Slack channel for questions during the speaker session and then we follow up afterwards with recording for people who couldn’t join. We provide a great service for all of our engineers as well as give the speaker a great experience. Doing this project is super easy because I have teammates I can lean on. We take our different roles in order to make this series of tech talks useful. I look forward every Monday to work with my team. None of us have to worry about going on vacation and the tech talks will get dropped.
Who Is On Your Team?
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Seth Godin writes with the smallest number of words to convey the clearest of messages. Here he explains GDPR and the market’s dilemma
“Talk to people who want to be talked to.
Market to people who want to be marketed to.
Because anticipated, personal and relevant messages will always outperform spam.
And spam is in the eye of the recipient.
In two simple words: Ask First.”
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The myth of ‘good timing’ from Seth Godin
http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2018/04/the-moment-of-maximum-leverage.html
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In June, the two engineers will formally accept a Turing Award, the computer science equivalent of the Nobel Prize, in recognition of their work. Hennessy later became president of Stanford University and is now the chair of Alphabet; Patterson is a professor emeritus at U.C. Berkeley and a distinguished engineer at Google
Listen to the podcast: John Hennessy and Dave Patterson, winners of the Turing Award 2018
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Recently I’m experimenting with starting up bookclubs at work in order to meet new people and helping to instill the habit of book reading into my own life.
Here is what I’m doing
- Create a #bookclub channel on Slack
- Create a document with a list of books that anyone can propose
- Once there are 5 people who sign up to read a book, a pop-up bookclub is created
- Another channel on Slack #bookclub-[name of book] is created
- The group of 5 or more people who want to read that book are added to the Slack channel #bookclub-[name of book]
- Then a leader for that new bookclub schedules 5 Friday’s to read the book
- A new person is designated to lead the discussion for 1/5th of the book everyweek so that there is active participation.
- Each week the bookclub reads 1/5th of the book and discuss for an hour
Our first book is “That’s what she said” by Joanne Lipman where the author invites men and women to learn about the perspectives from each gender in order to understand each other more.
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Give this a read, virtues of print news instead of online and breaking news.
https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/03/07/technology/two-months-news-newspapers.html?
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I’m celebrating a milestone for a personal 10 year project and I’m seeking your time and attention.
Impactful Engineer shares the stories and journeys of women and men who are making significant impact in the software industry. The purpose of Impactful Engineer is to inspire young software engineers to see that are many paths they can take to move forward in their careers and grow their impact wherever they work
As I promise to my readers, I embargoed interviews until the first woman engineer interview is done.
The finished version is now published and I can’t wait to share it with my supporters and core audience (young engineers looking to grow and esp. women)
When you have 24 minutes to spare, please read the interview with Lyn Campbell who is a corporate VP, and she graduated an English major. I am looking for feedback on how I can make the site and interviews better.
Here is our first interview with Lyn Campbell, Corporate VP, Global Operations at Proofpoint
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There is a Chinese proverb 難得糊塗 that my dad put up on the wall of our home which he wrote the calligraphy with Chinese ink and paper. Every day at home, I would see it. When I was younger, my dad was very angry and frustrated with life. And I like to be believe that he stared it at everyday asking himself to change, to ignore things that are not important, to live life a little more carefree.
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My daughter loves watching anime (Haikyuu, Yuri on Ice), she adores owning physical books, she loves drawing anime characters. She is sometimes quiet about other things, but never about these unmistakable passions in her life.
She is unwavering, unapologetic and ever in love with these passions in her life.
It is infectious, because of her, I am loving physical books again.
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I loved this book (Tell Me More, by Kelly Corrigan). Once started, I couldn’t put it down. It is a book about the author’s journey to learn to do and say the hardest things in life. To learn to listen to her daughter and her dying father. I will just quote from her website instead.
In “I Don’t Know,” Corrigan wrestles to make peace with uncertainty, whether it’s over invitations that never came or a friend’s agonizing infertility. In “No,” she admires her mother’s ability to set boundaries and her impressive willingness to be unpopular. In “Tell Me More,” a facialist named Tish teaches her something important about listening. And in “I Was Wrong,” she comes clean about her disastrous role in a family fight—and explains why saying sorry may not be enough. With refreshing candor, a deep well of empathy, and her signature desire to understand “the thing behind the thing,” Corrigan swings between meditations on life with a preoccupied husband and two mercurial teenage daughters to profound observations on love and loss.
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This podcast episode from one of My ‘Virtual Brain Trust’, Seth Godin, has given me a framework to talk about how I’ve structured my life around longer term vision leading to the right short term actions.
Seth Godin’s Akimbo Podcast
Finite and Infinite Games
The idea is that there are finite games and infinite games. Finite games is liken to short term thinking and infinite games are very long term vision.
Give it a listen: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/akimbo/e/53873622?autoplay=true
- You only need to listen to the 26 minute mark.
Show notes https://www.akimbo.me/blog/episode-7-game-theory-and-the-infinite-game
Also related Simon Sinek: The Finite and Infinite Games of Leadership: tech talk at Google
The original book Finite and Infinite Games by James Carse
Tony’s Infinite Games
For example, some of my long term visions (Infinite Games) are
- Playing badminton until I am 80 years old
- Having a trusting, open, loving relationship with my daugther
- Helping my daughter have meaningful work for the next 40 years of her life
- Having zero regrets if I were to die in the next 2 hours
These long term visions drives me towards the right short term behaviors
- I do not compete in a lot of badminton tournaments and I don’t train super hard to avoid injuries
- I talk to my daughter about my own parenting choices, I model behaviors that I want her to do
- I do not push her to top name colleges just because they are top ranked. I do not push her to majors that is not right for her. I recommend to her to not chase to enter an elite college just because it’s hard to get into. She does not need to play the finite game of college admissions.
- I imagine what I would regret on my death bed, or at my parent’s death bed. If there is something I think I will regret not doing, I make myself do it asap. I tell my family that at this very moment in time, I do not have any regrets if I die. My wife tells me that she believes I have done everything I want to do.
My own interpretations
- Finite games have definite beginning and end. They usually have teammates and opponents. There are rules that are known and some are unknown. Most importantly there is a scarce resource that is coveted. There usually are winners and by definition losers. Some finite games are entrance to coveted colleges like Harvard, the Stanley Cup, getting the next promotion at work.
- Infinite games are those where there are no rules. Players who play at infinite games are playing for the long game. They don’t focus on opponents because they themselves are their opponents. They choose not to play the short game or finite games. They create a category. For example, instead of playing the game of the $10,000 computer, IBM made the $1,000 PC for every home. Apple put a supercomputer in the pocket of everyone that knows your location and is always connected. Podcast creator for Overcast put out the app for free to create a bigger pie in the Podcast marketplace.
- For young people: When we focus on the infinite game, we plan 30 years ahead. If we put our horizon 30 years, is the entrance to Harvard that important? Should we instead find the college that best suit what we want to be doing for work for 30 years? Is making a lot of money really what we want to be our vision for our life for 30 years?
- For parents: If we extend our horizon out 30 years for our children. In our daily interaction, what is really important? Is putting away dishes 100% of the time really important? Or is giving her a hug every single day and telling her you think her art is really good and she should continue? For the long term, is it better for her to get perfect homework and grades or for her for fail a few times and for her to seek out help from friends and teachers so that she learns how to recover from failure?
- For yourself: At work, if you extend out 30 years. In your current job, is it better for get the next promotion by stepping over your co-workers. Is it better to be focusing inwards on the next reward or making all your teammates better? Is it better for be known for someone who people love to work with again in the future. So that in 15 years, when you reach out to your network, people will be your promoter behind your back. And they gladly accept any request for help from you?
From Simon Sinek:
- Infinite game players focus on vision, something that is always going to be out of reach.
- Finite game players work at the tactical level
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Welcome To My Introvert World
I used to be ashamed to be an introvert. I thought I was weird for not enjoying cocktail parties. Everyone else seem to be having a grand old time, small talking about the weather, what they did for a living, leaving a conversation after 5 minutes so they can mingle some more while always holding a drink in their hands.
I hated parties, when I had to go one, I would stay for a bit, hangout for an hour or so, trying to enjoy myself, but I just couldn’t understand what I was missing? Why go to parties to hang out in a circle with people they already knew? Or why talk about very shallow subjects that was not interesting at all. They might meet a stranger and talk but conversations were not meaningful and no real long lasting connections made. It feels like party goers have an agreement that if one person was pleasant, the other would play along and wait for the party to end.
Whenever I would meet someone a party and make a connection where we talk about deeper subjects, I would talk for hours and share honest thoughts, I tend to enjoy myself. But it is rare that a stranger would hang out with me for that long.
Accept and Embrace
Everything changed after I heard the TED talk from Susan Cain on the Power Of Introverts. With 20 minutes of my time watching the TED talk, this completely changed how I valued my introversion and how I embraced my daughter’s introversion. I no longer apologize to my daughter’s teachers that she doesn’t raise her hands in class. If she has something meaningful to say, she will say it. Give her a bit of time for her to form her thoughts and she will give you a thoughtful answer.
Now I am proud to be an introvert. I decline parties that I don’t enjoy unless my wife think it’s important. When I’m there, I am content to just enjoy myself, without needing to talk. I listen, I observe, I am content with my introversion self.
After accepting that there is nothing wrong with being an introvert, I’ve started to embrace attributes of extroverts to add to my arsenal. Some examples are:
- I’ve built a group of 90+ badminton players at https://sfbadminton.org, talking to players I’ve never met. Welcoming travelers who just want to play with my group for a few days.
- I’ve created the Impactful Engineer website to interview people I have known as well as engineers I have never met.
- I’ve written a public blog at https://tonytam.org since 2005 with 600+ blog posts
Are You An Introvert, Extrovert or Ambivert?
Take the test https://www.quietrev.com/the-introvert-test/
Quiet Revolution WebSite
If you wanted a bit more information, subscribe to Susan Cain’s website at Quiet Revolution https://www.quietrev.com/ and her resources for introverts
Interviews With Susan Cain
Read her interviews at https://www.quietrev.com/media/
Quiet: The Power of Introverts
If you want to go deeper, read her book
“Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking“
An Introvert Trying Out Extroversion
(This photo is my brother in law and I playing tennis with 2 women we just met in Lake Tahoe) 
10 of us from the sfbadminton.org group played at Stanford, go Cal! -
Thank you Justin Baldoni, because of your speech I *know* I need to dedicate 10 years of my life to mentoring women engineers!
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Learn something, learn anything.
Learn a new sport, learn to be better at a sport you are good at.
Learn a new skill, learn to use part of your brain you seldom use.
Learn to be empathetic, learn to listen to others.
Learn how to love yourself more than you do at this moment.
Learn about how someone else thinks, ask questions about them.
Learn Or Languish.
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I Have A Point .. Bare With Me :D
There are great companies in the eyes of the public. These could be
- Fortune’s 100 best places to work
- US Stock Market top 10 companies by market cap
- Companies with most number of eye balls
- <insert> however you want to define great companies
Now let’s say your company is a ‘great’ company. Then by the transitive property in math
- If a = b and b = c, then a = c
- If you (a) = company (b), company (b) = great (c), then you (a) = great (c)?
That was weird, do you (a) = company (b)?
Let’s break this down
If you are the founder, do you = company?
- If you are a founder of 1 employee, then yes!
- If you are a founder of > 1 employee, then no because there are others who contributed to the company.
If you are on the board of directors and by definition usually not an employee, then you ≠ company.
If you are an employee, and not the founder of one person then you as a single entity does not encompass the entire company. So you ≠ company so you ≠ great just because company = great.
Now, let’s assume you = great, company = great and you ≠ company, then you = great not because of the company and also company = great not just because of you.
What Is The Point?
My point is, just because a company you work for is a great company in the public’s eye, don’t get it in your head that by definition you are a great person. You still have to work hard and do good to be deserving of greatness.
For the people on the outside looking at great companies, the people who work there are not all great people. So no need to be envious. Just be a great human wherever you are!
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Presentations!!
I don’t like giving presentations, even though my job and my passion with Impactful Engineer requires me to.
Why Don’t I like Presentations?
- I don’t like my voice in front of a big audience
- I don’t speak clearly enough and I sometimes mumble
- I don’t enunciate words clearly (I learned English when I was 15, but that is not an excuse). I just never spent the time to learn English properly
- I feel like a fraud (mostly when I don’t prepare)
- I like to procrastinate ^^^^
Why Should I Do Presentations
- My job as the head of Engineering Productivity requires me to speak and reach out to a lot of developers, engineering leadership, new hires
- I love my job ^^^
- I write a website Impactful Engineer https://impactfulengineer.org where I interview software engineering leaders. If I wanted to spread the word, which I do, I need to present to people to encourage them to read and learn.
What I Could Do
- I could join toastmasters
- I could sign up for 1:1 training (many resources out there)
- I could just make myself to continue to do it poorly, which I do now
What I Am Hacking To Do
- I prepare and do mock presentations by myself
- I accept invitations when my manager do pre-presentation sessions
- I record myself doing the mock presentations with video as well as audio transcription service Trint which really shows me how poorly or well I’m pronouncing words!!! I love love this hack!
Next Steps
- While I hack with fixing my pronunciation, I will join toastmaster to fix the fear of speaking in front of an audience.
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Imagine this
… Someone invites you to a 1/2 hour meeting on a topic you are familiar with and an agenda that is clear
…… You spend 2 hours researching, writing down your thoughts ahead of time with 3 possible solutions and with pros and cons
……. You go into the meeting, you ask the person whether your ideas made sense and during the meeting you present your findings, discuss, debate and collaborate.
…….. What do you think the person who called the meeting will think of you? Will they be your promoter or detractor?
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Here are my current tools to getting things done in 2018. I optimize for capturing 100% of my brain on paper or electronic. I do not optimize for having only a single place for a task or idea.
Things that are time sensitive or urgent
- I use Google Reminders with time due dates
- I also block out chunks of time on my calendar to work on the item.
- I write this on a 3×5 index card
- I write it in my bullet journal
Longer term goals and important things like health, family, money, personal
- These are important, not urgent. I use Trello as a planning tool and kanban board to jot down all my ideas. Everything that is important to me in my life is on Trello. I have over 50 kanban boards. This includes food menus, life goals with my wife, how I want to raise my child, what my commitment is to my parents, my life goal to be a teacher of computer science, my reading list.. everything!
- I also use a physical notebook and I follow the bullet journal system. I implement a few of customized differences (which I’ll write about later)
Really long term and very important things
- I create a public WordPress blog so that I externalize my work and hold myself accountable
- I create a private WordPress blog for very private journals so I can see a time view of my thinking. This is for myself to read in 5, 10, 20 years.
For Work projects that I collaborate with someone at work
- I create a public page with tasks and I share that with my co-workers and we jointly collaborate
For private notes from 1:1
- I create a simple text file and upload to our corporate box folder and keep them private
For incoming emails that I need to take action on
- I create a set of folders for important people and prefix them from 0 to 9, follow by their names.
- I flag emails that I need to send follow ups
For meetings and action items
- I usually send the agreed upon actions items
- Or I create a ticket in our bug tracking system
- Or I create a document, whatever is appropriate
Multi-tasking
- I try to not multi-task, and instead create multiple timers (5mins, 10 mins, 15 minutes) that are task specific (Teeth cleaning 15m, news reading 5 minutes, work on my website 15 minutes, email cleaning 5 minutes)
Emails
- My goal is to respond to every email, or unsubscribe to spam emails. The goal is to drive the Inbox to zero, while never achieving it.
Browser
- I use the Taco Chrome extension to bring in Trello, gmail that I have starred so that I see a background of my daughter, with the list of things to do and one to three most important things to focus on.
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a good overview of some of the use cases of blockchain Technology
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Mission
The mission of Impactful Engineer is to empower software engineers to build a meaningful and impactful lifelong career through interviews with leaders in the industry.
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Hedonic Treadmill
I’ve noticed that when I received really good news such as a pay raise, a promotion, really great results from a test (in college). My happiness level rises up for a very short time (less than 1 hour), then my emotion tapers off back to what it was before.
So let’s say my happiness level is usually at 5, on a scale of 1 to 10. After I get a promotion, I may get to level 9 of happiness for a very short period time. I would tell my love ones all about it. Then after 2 hours, my happiness drops back to a 5 or 6. And after 1 day, the promotion that I have been working towards for the last 3 years is a distant memory.
This could be the way my brain is wired. I tend to dwell on the negative, or what I could be doing better. But I recently learned that this is part of hedonic treadmill which “is the observed tendency of humans to quickly return to a relatively stable level of happiness despite major positive or negative events or life changes.”
Why Celebrate?
The reason to stop and celebrate is to build gratefulness into big wins, build up long lasting positive energy towards the next milestone or the next big promotion and most importantly, to be kind and loving to yourself.
Most people, including myself, beat ourselves up too much and not reward ourselves enough. We as parents take care of our children. As partners, we try to take care of our spouses. As children, we try to take care of our parents. And whatever energy we have, we lastly take care of ourselves.
For those of you who love to look forward and always looking to accomplish the next big promotion, my advice to celebrate is a great way to build in positive reinforcement in your own brain so that you will have the energy to tackle the next milestone which usually is twice as hard as your previous milestone. You need every bit of energy you can get.
Example
I try to remind myself to ride the high of the good news for at least a week. This works very well and helps me to be grateful for the good news and builds up my resilience for the bad news when it comes.
Here are some examples of how I practice this.
Raises
If I get a raise or bonus, I will celebrate 7 different ways over 7 days.
- Day 0: Of course I will set aside most of the bonus money in savings like any good husband and father.
- Day 1: I will share part of that bonus money with my daughter, a small but meaningful to her.
- Day 2: I set aside $200 for a new racket for badminton so that I will have a semi-permanent object that I use weekly to remind myself of my raise.
- Day 3: I will schedule a celebratory dinner with my entire family and tell them I’m treating them for dinner because of the bonus.
- Day 4: I may treat my wife and I to a massage
- Day 5: I will schedule a trip to a place with my wife that is my first choice, instead of having to think about someone else all the time. This is the time to celebrate this for myself!
- Day 6: I will do something simple, like going to my favorite donut shop or Thai restaurant and just eat the dish I love the most
- Day 7: I have a separate bank account for me to buy badminton gear, badminton membership and birdies. I would just deposit $200 in that account for future reward.
Other Milestones To Celebrate
You can use the 7 ways, 7 days to celebrate these other milestones
- Celebrate your birthday over 7 days for a birthweek!
- Celebrate your promotions, bonus and raises
- Celebrate a new job
Sharing With Others
With my daughter, my wife and people I mentor, I try to share this philosophy with them. For them to be kind to themselves and celebrate the big milestones.
You will find me asking them how they feel after a big accomplishment, reminding them for the next 7 days that they should celebrate even if it’s something small.
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How to collaborate with remote workers who are in another office or working from home.
https://blog.trello.com/6-mistakes-when-you-work-in-office-but-have-remote-team-members
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Facebook Doesn’t Like What It Sees When It Looks in the Mirror https://nyti.ms/2FLVBei
Turns out, an enlightened, socially engaged Facebook has a similar outlook as the amoral, audience-seeking Facebook. Each sees connecting online as key to the good life.
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Very inspiring from Edmond Lau of The Effective Engineer
http://www.effectiveengineer.com/blog/the-most-intense-year-of-growth
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Someone I admire said “Nothing Good Comes Easy”. Apparently that is not a new saying.
Anything worthwhile takes hard work. Ask any athlete who is on top of their game how much training and preparation they have to do to get ready.
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“We kept saying this was not a one-off. This was a toolbox anyone can use,” Ms. DiResta said. “We told the tech companies that they had created a mass way to reach Americans.”
She Warned of ‘Peer-to-Peer Misinformation.’ Congress Listened. https://nyti.ms/2jkZH6e
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Well, I have some time on my hands so I decided to create a sleeve for my badminton birdie tubes. Right now it’s paper, but I am hoping to print them on elastic fabric so they can be reused.
2nd iteration with color!
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The psychologist Angela Duckworth argues that a person’s level of stick-to-itiveness is directly related to their level of success. No big surprise there. But grit, she says, isn’t something you’re born with — it can be learned. Here’s how.
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Duration: 44:54, Played: 42:27
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Published: 5/4/16 8:00:00 PM
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Episode Download Link (31 MB): http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/freakonomicsradio/~5/4m9s3K43a7c/freakonomics_podcast050416.mp3
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Show Notes: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/freakonomicsradio/~3/_YfbD8S-zhg/
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Episode Feed: Freakonomics Radio – http://feeds.feedburner.com/freakonomicsradio
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Linux Mag asked Bill Joy (creator of VI): “So you didn’t really write vi in one weekend like everybody says?”
No. It took a long time. It was really hard to do because you’ve got to remember that I was trying to make it usable over a 300 baud modem. That’s also the reason you have all these funny commands. It just barely worked to use a screen editor over a modem. It was just barely fast enough. A 1200 baud modem was an upgrade. 1200 baud now is pretty slow.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/09/11/bill_joys_greatest_gift/
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Ferry Building -
On Oct 5th, my co-worker Ollie R. and I were chatting during breakfast and he was showing me his Android Wear watch. When he told me that developing for wearable devices is pretty new and something worth getting into, I went to Amazon the next day and bought a refurbished 2014 Moto 360 for $112
I asked my 14 year old daughter @cate_no_kate to do the box opening, sync the watch to my Android Note 4 to give her a simple box opening joy as well to see how easy it would be setup. After about 30 minutes the Moto 360 was on and connected.
The next few days, I played with the watch. It was nice, but I was itching do some development on it and launch an app on the Google Play store. I am a GTD nut. I use Trello, Google Keep, Evernote but I often overbook my TODO lists so I decided to build an app called ‘Just 3’ which just let’s you deal with 3 tasks a day.
After tinkering with Android Studio, I had a hello world app on Day 1.
To add todo items, I had to add them as string resources in Android Studio, build and deploy it to the phone. I had to do this everyday until I figure out how I wanted to add items on the watch. This kept me developing the app every day.
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The Future of European Transit: Driverless and Utilitarian https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/28/technology/the-future-of-european-transit-driverless-and-utilitarian.html
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A contrast to what people ( myself included) Post publicly vs privately searching on Google. Just a great reminder to look at social media posts with the awareness that it is partial truth
On social media, the top descriptors to complete the phrase “My husband is …” are “the best,” “my best friend,” “amazing,” “the greatest” and “so cute.” On Google, one of the top five ways to complete that phrase is also “amazing.” So that checks out. The other four: “a jerk,” “annoying,” “gay” and “mean.”
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New York Times technology reporter Mike Isaac talks with Recode’s Kara Swisher and The Verge’s Lauren Goode about the controversies that have plagued Uber for the past two months. In a new profile of Uber CEO Travis Kalanick, Isaac reported that the company ran afoul of Apple’s rules by keeping track of the iPhones on which Uber had been deleted and re-downloaded. The trio talks about whether Uber’s culture will — or can — be reshaped at this point and why Kalanick is unlikely to lose his job, a
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Duration: 1:01h, Played: 40:28
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Published: 4/27/17 9:05:00 PM
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Episode Download Link (56 MB): http://rss.art19.com/episodes/2e450eec-e55a-4acf-9424-a9c1d05b28f3.mp3
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Episode Feed: Too Embarrassed to Ask – http://feeds.feedburner.com/Recode-TETA
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A random tile in front of a house in the Inner Sunset in San Francisco All of us have a key that enters our front door. We believe that no one else can get in without a key and we entrust this front door key only to people we absolutely trust. The security of your front door is an illusion. The door can be easily broken down. The windows are easier to enter from via a broken glass.
We should assume the same about our passwords to login to our email systems and our PIN codes to unlock our phones. The recent hacking of the DNC emails only serves to remind us that email communication is not secure. Anything written and sent via email can be hijacked in various ways.
Your email communication is not secure, understanding this is the first step. The second step is understanding why it is not secure.
- The receiver of the email can forward, save and disclose to anyone they choose
- The email service provider (Hotmail, Outlook, Gmail, Yahoo) can be hacked, or more likely hand over the email to the government.
- Careless handling of passwords by the owner of the email account, not turning on 2 factor authentication
- A phone using IMAP which downloads all of your emails and stored locally on the phone gets stolen without encryption and without a strong PIN to protect it.
- Various conviniences like cloud backup storage (I Cloud, Dropbox, Box, Google Drive) that you store email backups and password files that are unencrypted can compromise your emails
- IT departments underfunded, with not enough security measures, hosting machines that emails are downloaded for their employees also could get hacked.
- A co-worker or family members installs malware on their devices can comprise everyone
- State sponsored hacking is impossible to stop.
Just a friendly reminder to myself and others that email is not secure, did I say that already?
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Dear LinkedIn,
You are the only service out there to discover data about companies both private and public, what type of employees work there, which universities the employees graduated from and lots of other useful data about the professional lives of the workers.
LinkedIn is a fantastic service for professionals.
There have been many articles in recent years published about the lack of diversity in technology. Even the Federal regulators call on tech companies to improve diversity. (sfgate article May 18th, 2016)
Many top technology companies voluntarily publish annual reports on diversity. For example in 2016 Google has 19% women, 1% Black, 3% Hispanic in tech roles. (2016 data from Google on diversity). Pinterest (2015) has 21% women, 1% Black, 2% Hispanic in tech roles. Twitter (2015) has 13% women, 1% Black, 3% Hispanic in tech roles). Facebook (2015) has 16% women, 1% Black, 3% Hispanic.
While voluntary data from companies like Facebook, Google, Twitter is great. This data is not available from all companies and the data is not consistently published to make it easy to compare data across companies.
What if LinkedIn actually made diversity data transparent and real time to the public?
Would this encourage different long term behaviors for tech companies now that the data is no longer just voluntary?
Would this transparent diversity data lead to a much interesting interaction between job seekers and employers since this data could be extra dimension for job seekers to judge the type of companies they want to work for?
Tony T.
Readers: What do you think? Would you like to see diversity data published by LinkedIn? Share and tag on LinkedIn please.
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This is worth listening to learn about how Facebook thinks about software and expecially how they are trying to push software developer forward for the entire industry.
React and React Native are being called out as very successful open source projects from Facebook. Cassandra has also been a huge winner. The interesting take away for me is that Facebook thinks that if a project thinks about open source from the start, then the right abstraction and design will be done correctly from the start.
Give it a listen with your favorite podcast app. Subscribe to ‘Changelog’
This week we’ve got a big show with James Pearce, Head of Open Source at Facebook to talk about that very subject — open source at Facebook. We talked about his path to software development, why he’s the person to lead open source at Facebook, their view on open source, their culture of open source, how they choose what to open source, and more importantly — how they focus on, support, and nurture the community.
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I understand the free services like LinkedIn, Yahoo, Google, Facebook are supported by ads. But the ads are not well targeted or creepy and repetitive, too much in your face (2nd post on LinkedIn, every 5-7 posts on Yahoo.com) and ultimately waste a lot of my time scrolling pass them in order to see relevant content.
Today I turned on Ad Block https://getadblock.com/ which has helped me:
- Removed all the sponsored links from LinkedIn
- Remove the entire right hand side of “you may also know” to give me back more real estate on my screen
- Remove 12 ads from NYTimes.com which I pay for the subscription
I also sent a $5 payment to support the team behind Ad Block https://help.getadblock.com/support/solutions/articles/6000055836-how-can-i-support-adblock-
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Sign of the times, no more freebies. I am not sure how this will convince me to stay using Evernote or pay for it. It only makes me want to export my notes out to Google docs or One Note.
“At Evernote, we are committed not only to making you as productive as you can be, but also to running our business in as transparent a way as possible. We’re making a change to our Basic service, and it’s important that you know about it.
In the coming weeks, Evernote Basic accounts will be limited to two devices, such as a computer and phone, two computers, or a phone and a tablet. You are currently over this limit, but will have at least 30 days to adjust. Plus and Premium accounts will continue to support access from an unlimited number of devices”
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Marking my 2nd month at Splunk.
I really love the culture of being data driven at everything we do. Being here at Splunk already opened up my mind as to how I can grow and learn as an engineer because of the people and the relentless focus on execution and innovation.
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It’s not incompetence, but competence, that causes companies to be disrupted. That applies to big companies and small, as well as people too.
Or so argue Clayton Christensen and Marc Andreessen in this podcast, based on a conversation at Startup Grind (moderated by Derek Anderson) between the a16z co-founder and Harvard Business School professor Christensen — aka the “father of disruption theory” (also known to his wife as “the Jewish mother of business”).
This podcast shares everything from their views on managing innovation in companies like Apple, Google, and Twitter (including how to apply the jobs-to-be-done framework there); what the abundance of capital means for innovation; and how to truly measure success and strike work-life balance.
http://a16z.com/2016/03/03/disruption-clay-marc/
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My daughter is taking up writing and publishing her stories publicly on WattPad. Her current series is based on the seven sins and she is trying to take on seven different writing styles.
Give it a try and support her efforts in putting her writing out there :) You will have to sign up for WattPad to read the entire story, give it a read and like or comment on it :)
‘Happy birthday’ is a very dark but engaging story from the first person and present time perspective
https://www.wattpad.com/232371235-seven-happy-birthday
‘Good to be queen‘ is a 3rd person, almost fair tale like voice.
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From Edmond Lau’s The Effective Engineer blog
1. Optimize for iteration speed.
Quick iteration speed increases work motivation and excitement. Infrastructural and bureaucratic barriers to deploying code and launching features are some of the most common and frustrating reasons that engineers cite during interviews for why they’re leaving their current companies.
Read the rest of the 9 things that a team can do to build a good engineering culture: What makes a good engineering culture?
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(The photo is from a customer of my restaurant I Privé)
We all love to take advantage of user contributed reviews such as Yelp, Amazon, Airbnb. They give us another trustworthy dimension to decide whether we want to go to a particular restaurant, buy that bluetooth headphone or rent that vacation apartment.
Based on owning a restaurant with over 3,000 guests who make reservations over the last year, possibly another 9,000 guest who walk into our restaurant and also looking at the 190+ Yelp reviews I Privé have received over the last year, I have a rough guess that only 1% of people contribute to the reviews we all value so much. I have another theory that 20% of those 1% contribute 80% of the content, this has yet to be proven. I’ll have to dig more into public data available elsewhere.
Why is the percentage of content contributors to consumer so low?
- In order to contribute to something like Yelp, you have to create an account, most people do not see the value to create the account. Hence the first hurdle. This does not apply to Amazon. See #2
- If you are on Amazon and buy a item you don’t really want others to know about, you may be worry about privacy issue if you write a review, so you would not bother.
- Let’s say you buy an item like a bluetooth headset like I like did, you don’t see the value of writing a review that already has 1,900 reviews, so you also do not contribute.
- Writing a review takes time, most people don’t want to take the time, it’s that simple. It’s simply easier to consume and not write, almost like a writer’s block. Hey these other reviewer are so funny, if I wanted to be as funny as them, I have to come up with something witty. Maybe next time
- If I buy a bluetooth headset, and if I take time to write a review would it help another human being make more money to feed his family or pay his employee? I think this is what review sites needs to do better. Show consumers why a single review is helpful to the other humans receiving that review and also the humans reading the reviews. If you love a restaurant, writing a negative review will help the owners improve or a great review will boost their believe they are doing the right thing. If you write a review and 5,000 people read it, is that worth writing?
Until review sites can work on showing the value of your review, I encourage you to join the 1% and contribute a review today to your favorite restaurant, a great Airbnb, a loved gadget or a great book you bought.
(I contribute to Yelp here)
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The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), the body responsible for overseeing the internet’s technical standards, has approved HTTP 451, “an HTTP Status Code to Report Legal Obstacles”. The new status code will show viewers when a web page is being blocked for legal reasons.Source: Error 451 is the new HTTP code for online censorship (Wired UK)
“I suspect that censorious governments will disallow the use of 451, to hide what they’re doing,” Nottingham wrote, on a similar note. “We can’t stop that (of course), but if your government does that, it sends a strong message to you as a citizen about what their intent is. That’s worth knowing about, I think.”
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Source: One Founder’s Desperate Battle To Keep Workers Employed | Caroline Fairchild | LinkedIn
Stembel can’t afford to hire a number two because she is devoting a significant portion of her revenue to a cost that her competitors eschewed long ago. Namely, she employs all 48 of her workers — her bike couriers, car drivers and flower designers — either full or part time. They all sign W2s and she provides them with paid vacation and worker’s compensation. Full-time employees get health care as well.
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What I want for Christmas from LinkedIn
- Incentivize people to actually update their profiles and update with a real resume
- Either make resume (in PDF) a first class part of your LinkedIn professional profile. (do not send an update to your network, I don’t mind my boss finds an updated resume, but I don’t want this update to be broadcasted) I know people are reluctant to put their resume on LinkedIn, but why not make it acceptable that everyone should keep an updated resume online?
- Or… if this is too radical, make ‘resume’ a first class citizen in a private part of your profile so recruiters can use that PDF to get access to an up to date resume? Right now, my guess is about 75% of people’s LinkedIn profile is not up to date and needs to be updated when people actually look for a job. (I’ll take challenge from anyone that I can randomly sample 20 profiles and 15 of them are out of date compared with their resume by at least 1 to 2 years.)
- Increase signal to noise ratio by letting me remove : ‘People in your network have new connections’, ‘See anyone you know? Connect with them’, ‘is now following:’ , ‘has a work anniversary.’, ‘has an updated profile:’
- Let me privately dislike something and personalize my feed based on what I dislike.
Thank you little elves at LinkedIn :)
- Incentivize people to actually update their profiles and update with a real resume
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No only can you now use Yahoo to check emails from GMail and AOL.
The coolest feature is that Yahoo implemented a backend search that is way better than any email client could do. Check out how cool and fast the searches are.
Download here
https://overview.mail.yahoo.com/features/multiplemailboxes
Power users: try these searches
from:tony – emails sent from yahoo.com
to:tony – email sent to yahoo.com email
subject:amazon – find all email with subject amazon
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link: http://www.bitrebels.com/lifestyle/18-ways-to-be-more-positive/
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I’m proud to work for Yahoo, to be part of the dog fooding of this new app inside Yahoo. The team that worked on the new Yahoo Messenger app is awesome!
Check out the features!!
http://yahoo.tumblr.com/ and http://messenger.yahoo.com
- Animated gif search from tumblr directly from Yahoo Messenger
- unsend (is that even a word?) any message, great for me who mistypes a lot
- Buttery smooth animation, fast start time
- Invite 1000+ to a group for a group chat
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Interesting look at automation at the task level.. the mundane parts of the job can be automated, but not the entire job.
Automation Will Change Jobs More Than Kill Them http://nyti.ms/1kfj78b
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Tony Tam -
We do not pay for cable, never did and do not have a TV. We do have a movie projector and a 90″ drop down projection screen.
Looking at our digital entertainment obligations:
We get the recent DVD ‘s free from the San Francisco public library.
We pay for Comcast for 6mbps for faster internet than AT&T, this is not entertainment but a utility.
We used to pay for Pandora, ads-free but the ads are not that annoying and our family is okay now with free Pandora.
My daughter buys songs from iTunes.
We pay for Netflix for a few months and it became too hard to find movies to watch or many movies were not available, so we canceled.
We pay for Hulu Plus, letting us watch TV shows and now we pay for Hulu ads free as well because the ads take away from the experience. $11.99 / month is our monthly obligation.
Other areas we have paid, is $3.99 / movie from Amazon (iTunes is always $1 more expensive). iTunes for movie download because it is so simple for airplane rides.
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Tony Tam -
Evernote Basic subscribers can save up to five emails to their Evernote account. To continue using the feature, you must upgrade your Evernote account.
Today when I emailed a note to my notebook, I got the above paywall message.
I used to love Evernote. You can create notes very quickly, you can email notes to your notebook, every little thought or article I can save it and eventually find it via their quirky search engine.
I think the days of the free lunch is gone. Either you pay with real money or pay with your time in the form of advertising. These startups like Evernote, Dropbox thought they could get to profitability with scale, but I think they just loose more and more money with scale. Only less than 1% is willing to pay, subsidizing the rest of the 99% free loaders.
The issue with Evernote is that it has become a dumping ground for notes that I may not find again. I don’t think the value proposition is there for me to continue to pay them where I can just store my notes in Google Docs or text files saved to Box.net or Dropbox.
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Tony Tam -
The best way to tell if your speech is going to go well is to give your speech.
The best way to find out if your new product has market appeal is to try to sell it.
The best way to become a teacher is to teach.
There’s a huge need for study, refinement and revision. No question about it.
http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2015/10/first-interact.html
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Tony Tam -
It wasn’t Professor Plum in the Library with the Candlestick. So what killed Twitter?
Source: Why Twitter’s Dying (And What You Can Learn From It) — Bad Words — Medium
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From Pamela Fox of Kahn Academy
http://blog.pamelafox.org/2015/10/voice-coaching-what-i-learned.htmlI use my voice a lot. I give talks at conferences, I teach workshops for GDI, and I record videos for Khan Academy.
But I’ve never loved my voice. I grew up with British parents, so I spent my life wishing I had an accent that sounded as smart as theirs. And now that there are videos of my voice on the internet and comments underneath those videos, I know that there are a few aspects of my voice that don’t always work so well, like the clarity of my pronunciation, upspeak tendency, and verbal tics
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Tony Tam -
Platforms, distribution and audience http://ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2015/9/14/distribution-and-audience
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Tony Tam -
A sashimi plate from I Privé Even though I work in high tech, I don’t really understand business that loose money during their entire existence. How can that be a business? I invest in a restaurant that is luckily profitable after 1 year. We offer a product people value and are willing to pay for. We have investors who want to see a return on their money in a few years and not wait for a IPO or buyout opportunity that may or may not come.
I understand that initially a company have to heavily invest in order to build up the customer base, but after 3-4 years, isn’t it time to put a stake in the ground that you have to figure out a way to be profitable? Or you need to think about whether you are a business or just a gamble that someone will bail you out?
If you are loosing money after 4 years, it’s time to evaluate
1) Am I hiring too many people, expending too much capital compared with the revenue I’m bringing in?2) Is the product even worth paying for? Is my product/ services really valued by customers?
3) Is my company really going to get the economy of scale or will the cost of doing business going to overtake any savings I will gain?
4) Is the barrier to entry for my competitors strong enough to keep them away long enough in order for my growth to continue?
I don’t believe in technology companies that do not have a 4 year horizon to profitability. They are just kidding themselves and not asking the hard questions and making the hard decisions.
–
Tony Tam -
We are celebrating my mom’s 74th birthday today. She is a medical licensed pediatrician in China. When my family immigrated to the United States in 1980, her medical degree was not recognized here in the states and she lack the basic English to be medical doctor here. She took on a job as a seamstress and was paid by each piece of clothing she was able to make. Given her lack of background on the sewing machine, she did not not last very long at that job. She studied English at night and then she got a lucky break in being hired in an acupuncture office. The owner of the practice did not have a medical degree and wanted someone like my mom with Eastern medicine experience. She later received board certification in California as a licensed accupunturist and have practiced for over 30 years in San Francisco and later a 2nd location in San Jose.
In my early memory of my mom, she is often calm and very deliberate with her words. My memories of her when I was young was her taking care of my cuts and bruises, wrapping my head in medicine to treat head lice and fanning me to sleep on scorching nights in Hunan.
Later on in middle school and highschool my mom must have worried a lot about me. I was not sociable. I didn’t have many friends of the opposite sex. I had done well in school but socially awkward. The one constant I did feel from my mom was that she had unconditional love for me. Whether I went to UC Berkeley or not. Whether I had a high paying job or not. The word love was not said in our house. Hugs were not given. Later on, my mom told me that for her generation, it was very hard to say those words of affection, it was just awkward to say them.
When I was 35 years old, I learned the greatest trait my mom has shown me. One evening, I told my parents I was getting divorced. I don’t know what I expected my parents to say. But what came next from my mom gave me strength to come out of the divorce a much better person, a better father and a more empathetic son.
My mom sat down next to me and told me that it is best to let everything follow their natural path and don’t force things to happen. Her natural calm demeanor reminded me that even though the world seems to be crumpling around me, in the grand scheme of life, this too shall pass with time. She made feel that is there is nothing wrong with me.
The greatest trait I learn from my mom that day is that when someone needs you the most, the best gift you can give them is unconditional love and support. No judgement, accept the person in your life for who they are.
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Tony Tam -
After owning the I Prive restaurant for over a year and helping run the digital infrastructure as well as posting job openings on Craigslist, I have a theory that a lot of people who used to work part time at restaurants are now working as drivers for Lyft or Uber.
The hours are probably more flexible, the pay is much better and there is the freedom of choosing your hours and taking vacations whenever you want.
Restaurants have to start thinking about other incentives such as better hours, better pay, equity sharing and career growth in order to attract loyal employees.
–
Tony Tam -
I have played badminton for half my life. Four years in high school, four years for the UC Berkeley club, then I picked it up again very seriously trained and competed for 3 years and now I play for fun with my co-worker and near my house.
I love playing of course because of the game itself and also because I am really good at it. I no longer make beginner mistakes playing a competitive sport. The game itself then rises to another level, not just keeping the shuttlecock in play, but strategy comes into play. I can turn the racket certain angles to make subtle last minute adjustments. I can wait to hit the shuttlecock when I want to hit it, not because it’s just there. These are very deliberate choices I can make on the court because I am no longer chasing after my target, but I’m at the target earlier.
I played today with a team and they were not at the same skill level. So I told my partner to go easier and don’t smash and just practice our drops and high shots. It was still fun without being too lopsided.
Then we played against another team where they were good singles players, highly skilled and strong smashing. We lost the first game, and I switched tactics to attack more, do drop shots more to spread out the defense, relax my nerves and focus on defense. We readily beat this team in the second game. Physically, nothing changed but my playing improved drastically because of my mine and mental shift.
I can now relate to athletes who talk about having to work on the mental focus to get to the next level.
–
Tony Tam -
quoted from synopsis
East•Side Sushi introduces us to Juana, a working-class
Latina single mother who strives to become a sushi chef.Years of working in the food industry have made Juana’s
hands fast—very fast. She can slice and dice anything
you throw at her with great speed and precision. Forced to
give up her fruit-vending cart in order to find a more secure
job, Juana lands a position as a kitchen assistant at a local Japanese restaurant. It is there she discovers a new
friendship and a whole new world of cuisine and culture,
far-removed from everything she has ever known.While working in the restaurant’s kitchen, Juana secretly
observes the sushi chefs and eventually teaches herself to
make a multitude of sushi. Her creativity sparked, Juana’s
re-ignited passion for food drives her to want more from
her job and her life.Eventually she attempts to become a sushi chef, but is
unable to because she is the “wrong” race and gender.
Against all odds, she embarks on a journey of self-discovery, determined to not let anyone stop her from achieving
her dream–
Tony Tam -
(dinner at the restaurant that I own in Burlingame, I Privé )
/ stepping up my high horse
I would love to see this in the perfect world for a product support experience.
1) Takes me zero effort to report a problem, make this as easy as possible. Realtime chats, email.
2) I get an acknowlegement that the right person is looking at the problem. No black hole.
3) When problem is fixed, I get a bravo or at least a thank you thumbs up, or get mentioned in a ticket :)
4) I am also put on a list of power user for that product if I report and help the team narrow down problems.
This would trigger my brain to report problems as I see them. I would also spend the extra effort.
I know this could be unrealistic right now. But imagine a world where this actually happens. What a wonderful world for the product engineers as well as the users of the product.
To be known as a product that listens and repsonse to your users./ getting off my high horse
–
Tony Tam
Tony Tam 