If he writes her a few sonnets, he loves her. If he writes her 300 sonnets, he loves sonnets

if you want to size up a distributor, a quick way is one truck or trailer is equivalent to a million in revenue

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Brain Drain

I have had the chance to renege my Indian passport on a number of occasions, the earliest when I resided in Singapore, and then in Hong Kong. Lion City was an easy decision, they require mandatory conscription and even though they hold a strong passport, I am not willing to serve any country besides my own. While I hold a permanent residency in HK, replacing it with my motherland also doesn’t solve my main concerns, notably having access to purchase land under my own name.

Some of the more novel ideas I’ve been working on for the past few years require me to own farmland in India and without the status I am left to rely on others for help.

I’ve bifurcated my projects into a few overarching categories:

Food Security

Growing world population threatens future food and feed security as natural resources are currently being over exploited. FAO estimates that commercial feed production needs to increase by 70% in the next 30 years to meet the growing demand for protein. This increase of demand has forced the price of fishmeal to increase in land sustainable innovations are critical to combat this issue. Insect feed farms have risen up to combat this issue and has made them extremely attractive for various livestock production systems.

Producing insect proteins as an alternative to the fish and soybean meal that currently dominates the market can be made at roughly 60-70% of production costs. Fishmeal production as feed is currently unsustainable and has lead to the collapse of many fisheries and now is being considered too expensive to use in most farm animal diets.

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TechCrunch | Fortune Term Sheet | Fashion Network

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Creating a life that reflects your values and satisfies your soul is a rare achievement. In a culture that relentlessly promotes avarice and excess as the good life, a person happy doing his own work is usually considered an eccentric, if not a subversive. Ambition is only understood if it's to rise to the top of some imaginary ladder of success. Someone who takes an undemanding job because it affords him the time to pursue other interests and activities is considered a flake. A person who abandons a career in order to stay home and raise children is considered not to be living up to his potential-as if a job title and salary are the sole measure of human worth.

You’ll be told in a hundred ways, some subtle and some not, to keep climbing, and never be satisfied with where you are, who you are, and what you're doing. There are a million ways to sell yourself out, and I guarantee you'll hear about them.

To invent your own life's meaning is not easy, but it's still allowed, and I think you'll be happier for the trouble.

Happy Thursday.

For the visually inclined:

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On the bright side, this does mean I’ll have a chance to revive my blog (or at least for the next fortnight). Life came in the way and I’m ready to, once again, push out of my half-baked thoughts.

Along with my full-time job and consulting work, I’m hoping to put aside some time to add some more writing here. Calvin & Hobbes will make a comeback. Consulting stories are already in the pipeline. I’ll have time to tackle my end of the year financial review.

Along with my writing resurgence, the next book on my list is The Sleepwalkers by Cristopher Clark, which was recommended to me by my Third Reich Munich Tour Guide. I’m looking forward to spending the next six months breaking down this book. It’s going to be a good two weeks.

I just met Fernando. So happy to meet him.

I'll speak from my heart. There are people that I love. You are one of them. I love you.

My friend from Barcelona showed my writing to a lot of his friends. They said that I write as good as Julio Cortazar. Who is my favorite writer.

It doesn’t sound like a lot but for me — the validation was important. In America no one understands me.

All I want to feel is understood. Anyway, none of this matters in the end —what I wonder is this:

Are you okay?Feeling better?Please let me know.

You — more than anyone else — are my partner in crime. I forget fast what it feels like to be physically near you. You exude a warmth, a love that no one else gives me. You give me love power confidence. You are magic. You are passion and love trapped in a small minuscule vial and you let me take sips of the vial every time I feel low or lost. I owe you my beauty. And my only beauty is my writing. So I owe you my writing. I owe you words. I will make you immortal.

Fernando said the same thing.

He said

           keep writing about me, I want to be immortal

I’m just warm and fuzzy. It’s good to be understood.

Fred Brooks, in The Mythical Man-Month, quite eloquently put into words what I love about coding.

1. The sheer joy of making things. Programming is fundamentally about creating solutions to problems. At the end of the day, you have created something that didn’t exist that morning, and that is in and of itself satisfying.

2. The pleasure of making things that are useful to other people. One of the most satisfying aspects of the job as a programmer is seeing code you wrote deployed in a live system and used by actual people, especially if it improves their lives in some way.

3. The fascination of fashioning complex puzzle-like objects of interlocking moving parts, and watching them work in subtle cycles, playing out the consequences of principles built in from the beginning. Very well put. Not only do programs have complex structure and dependencies, but there is also the dynamics of the interaction between the parts as the program executes. The ultimate puzzle indeed!

4. The joy of always learning, which springs from the nonrepeating nature of the task. While constructing the program you constantly expand your understanding of both the problem and the solution. In addition, there is almost no limit to what you can learn to improve your craft – languages, algorithms, methodology, tools, frameworks.

5. The delight of working in such a tractable medium. The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from the air, creating by exertion of the imagination. Easily my favorite on the list — insightful and wonderfully formulated. And he goes on to note that

“yet the program construct, unlike the poet’s words, is real in the sense that it moves and works, producing visible outputs separate from the construct itself.”

To these five excellent points from Fred Brooks I would add:

6. The expressiveness of code. It sounds counter-intuitive, given the strict specification of a programming language, and the relatively few constructs it contains (compared to a natural language like English), but there is almost an infinite number of ways to write a program to solve a given (non-trivial) problem. First and foremost, you as a coder name classes, methods, and variables. But you also decide the algorithm, the partitioning of the logic, and finally the layout. All these factors combine to give the programmer great freedom in expressing the solution in code.

From Hacker News:

There really is a special kind of satisfaction when you see something you wrote actually work. I remember the first time I made a sprite move around the screen with arrow keys, I probably moved that guy around for several minutes just out of pride — jack-bodine

Funny enough, Titus Barik published a paper that contributes a qualitative analysis on the sentiment of programming and play on Hacker News. The themes he found include play as artistry, catalyst, fun, playgrounds, spontaneity, tinkering, and anti-work. There is a quote that I particularly like,

“The joy of programming for programming's sake is something you do in your own time.”

Of course, I have a relevant playlist.

Captioned: I literally love programming. More than anything in this world. It epitomizes my laziness and inherent desire to change things in the world in a single digestible bite.

And two for when I am required to get in the zone.

Figma has quite possibly the worst versioning I've ever seen in a “collaborative” tool. Try it yourself — open a file (which takes an eternity if you have more than a dozen screens)1 and navigate to the history tab. You’re presented with a list of ALL the changes that have been made to the document, ab initio. And that’s where the Sequoia-invested Product Managers called it a day. One would imagine if you clicked on a certain date, you’d be able to see updates, or at the very least the delta. But no, apparently it’s super difficult to show states. As a developer, this doesn't provide nearly enough useful information immediately and only hinders the communication flow.

We have had to resort to adding comments and tagging devs near the relevant sections. The problem is no design tool has really solved this issue.

The tight feedback loop that was so carefully curated in our AGILE process is now completely blocked by a missing feature request that has a high impact at a relatively low implementation cost.

No, “naming” a version is not going to solve my pet peeve. I need actionable assistance so I don’t have to rifle through a hundred different app states and compare it with the current major version in production. Taking a screenshot and uploading it to JIRA/ Linear/ your current flavor of issue tracking software doesn't solve the problem and only moves the conversation to a different medium.

Miro does this adequately well, but it still sucks. At a glance, I'd like to see the highlighted changes, and instantly know what's changed in every iteration or design sprint.

I’m not even going to get into caching components and performance issues.

Python: hackernews-daily.py | daily-hackernews.py
CSVs: hackernews-daily.csv | daily-hackernews

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As the hours flew by and the drinks watered down, we debated passionately on the most optimal way to crack the veritable beast: a Dijkstra algorithm for romantic entanglements.

As usual, I proceeded to fire on all cylinders — presenting my argument (favorable) to the best of my inebriated ability, providing solid references (sprinkling in some of my curated bookmarked tweets), and in a drunken stupor, ending with the Chinese proverb 各花入各眼, which loosely translates to ‘different flowers match different eyes’.

Now, the conversation isn’t as important as the comment she made when she inevitably left, which is the title of this post. I paused for a brief moment, wondering if I had offended her, and flagged her down to apologize, but she laughed it off, picked up her Neverfull, and jettisoned out the nearest exit. I hastily opened my overflowing Notes app and attempted to retype the phrase she had muttered under her breath into Pinyin for later analysis.

Come morning, Pleco came to save the day.

As I continued to read, I came to a sobering realization: neither the parenthesized word (glib) nor the example had a positive tone. I’ve asked people at my office where this falls on the customer feedback scale, and they said I shouldn’t be too hopeful. Oh well.

She doesn’t need to know that I’d only just restarted my Cantonese tutoring (almost a year from this publish date), that I’d come across the relevant articles while surfing Hacker News at work, and that I’d diligently read through the comments.

The negative connotation aside, what does owning a silver tongue really mean? Connecting dots when others can’t (or find it particularly challenging to do so)? Reading between the lines? On the contrary, these qualities define who I am on a cellular level. I am proud of the fact that I am quick on my feet (while also unsuccessfully trying to achieve the more literal translation in my free time).

My “silver tongue” has helped me in a ton of hairy situations, whether that be roping in clients, gaining employment while being severely under-qualified, kicking (not knocking) on opportunity’s door, or giving advice to friends and family when I technically should be on house arrest based on the number of tales I’ve twisted. Surface-level knowledge on a lot of topics. A generalist if you will.

They’ve also been my downfall. Diplomacy is not nearly as well defined in my dictionary as some other choice words are, and that bitten my hand on more than one occasion. Sparse knowledge on many topics also means you’re full of shit when you’re talking to someone with domain expertise. I’ve also misread the room and made comments when I really should have kept my mouth shut.

Oak's words echoed... There's a time and place for everything, but not now.

I’ve realized way too early that making someone laugh is the easiest form of validation, and honestly, it doesn’t even matter if they’re laughing at you, they’ve already released (see: injected) the dopamine straight into your system, with your flashing neurons inadvertently crossing the photopollution limit, drawing disturbing comparisons to The Symphony of Lights.

It wasn’t always like this. I’ve had to battle bouts of Imposter Syndrome, and still find it hard to chat up women at bars. I’m comfortable only talking to a handful of people and I talk to them frequently. I still face these demons every single day.

I’m not trying to defend my personality, more providing context to the uninitiated. I didn’t take offense in the slightest. I just want an engaging conversation, a drink, and a laugh to drown out the pain of not being the absolute best at something :)

In hindsight, in all the confusion, I didn’t realize I was the one footing the bill. I guess my silver tongue was bested by her iron boot. I truly hope she doesn’t read my newsletter.