Decade In Review (2010 – 2019)

Every year, I write a Happy New Year blog post to recap my previous year. I’ve been doing this every year since the past 10 years. It sort of became a tradition. Now that we’ve entered a new decade, I thought it’d be fun to start writing a blog post to recap my previous decade. This will be my first Decade In Review blog post.

My life completely changed in the past decade. I experienced a lot of ups and downs (I lost my Mom 💔). I learned a lot of valuable life lessons. All the difficulties I faced made me a stronger person. It has been a humbling experience. I feel very fortunate and am grateful for that.

Highlights 🎉

👨‍🎓Graduated with a Master’s Degree in Computer Science
👨‍💻Became a professional Software Engineer
🤵 💍 👰Got married

Influences & Inspirations 🙏

Here’s a list of people who’ve influenced or inspired me to be a better version of me in the past decade –

Interesting Trends 📈

🏃‍♂️Increased emphasis on health and fitness
👨‍💻Transitioned into the role of a Senior Software Engineer
📚Picked up the habit of reading books
📝Blogged consistently every year for over 10 years
💻Created and contributed to open source software

Honorable Mentions 🎯

(this weirdly makes me sound like WatchMojo)

📱Bought my first smartphone
💻Bought my first pro laptop
🚗Bought my first car
🧳Traveled to a new country

Individual Years 📆

Only the past decade –

Then -> Now 👻

Here’s to taking it as it comes in the next decade, cheers! 🍻

It Doesn’t Have To Be Crazy At Work

I like David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH) and Jason Fried’s style of writing. It’s very casual and often times funny. I’ve enjoyed reading Getting Real and Rework. I never felt motivated enough to read their other book, Remote.

Getting Real changed the way I think about projects and even my side projects. It didn’t have a similar impact on me as Getting Real had, but, it’s still a good book. All of these books tend to follow a similar narrative, busting the myths of common work practices.

DHH and Jason recently published their new book called It Doesn’t Have To Be Crazy At Work. I immediately pre-ordered the book. I got really excited once I received the book and started reading it.

Here are my takeaways from the book:

Sustained exhaustion is not a badge of honor
Being comfortable in your zone is essential to being calm
JOMO (Joy of Missing Out)
An hour can be spent with one focused 60 min block or fractured into multiple blocks of 15 min or so on. Achieve for the 60 min block
If you want your employees to take a vacation, take one yourself. If you don’t want your employees to come in when they’re sick, stay home when you’re sick. This will help the employees to not feel guilty for doing so
Trust Battery
Sleep is very important
Balance your Work and Personal time
No fakecations (fake vacations). Go off the grid when on a vacation
Deadlines are fixed. Not the scope
Give enough time for an idea to settle in. No knee-jerk reactions
“Disagree and commit” can be a thing. Letting the team know you disagree and you are still committing to the idea/project is always better than not letting the team know
Spend the first week or two of the project to clarify unknowns and validate assumptions
Doing nothing should always be an option in a project
Embrace calm

Now, obviously, I didn’t want to steal the essence of the book and so, I am purposefully vague in the above points.

The book is pretty good. Reading through the first few chapters might feel like the book is challenging reality. But, later on, the authors talk about the problems in the current work environments and offer solutions to avoid/fix those problems.

My rating of the book: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ (out of 5)

If you’re interested in following the books I read, here’s my goodreads profile.

Comparison is the death of joy
Mark Twain

Review: Internet Explorer 8

Now that the latest version of one of the most bashed-up (Yet, the most popular) Microsoft products is out, the bashers can’t wait to get their hands on this new baby. But believe me, I tested it and I can confidently say that they will have a tough time bashing up IE8. Coming to the review, Microsoft seems to have developed IE8 as an answer to all those web developers who hate IE for its noncompliance towards the W3C standards. Now let me start off with the some of the most important features that are “visible” to the average user.

Feature 1: The Speed Microsoft has drastically increased the speed of IE8 since its previous version 7. If you have used IE7, you will definitely notice a drastic change in the speed of IE8. This is probably the first thing that an average user would notice apart from the interface. The rendering times of some heavy sites like Wikipedia, Orkut, Microsoft etc seems to have reduced. IE8 seems to be in a fair contention with Opera 9, Firefox 3 and Chrome 2 in case of Speed.

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