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Book Summaries Book Summary: One up on Wall Street by Peter Lynch Book summary: Sick Societies: Challenging the Myth of Primitive Harmony by Robert B. Edgerton Book Summary: Safe Haven by Mark Spitznagel Notable quotes from "How to Live" by Derek Sivers Book Summary: What I learned losing a millio dollars by Jim Paul Book Summary: Thinking In Bets by Annie Duke Book Summary: The half-life of Facts by Samuel Arbesman Book Summary: The New Confessions of an Economic Hit Man by John Perkins Book Summary: The Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick Book Summary: Staff Engineer by Will Larson Book Summary: Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America's Social Justice Scam by Vivek Ramaswamy Selected quotes from "How I Invest My Money" by Joshua Brown and Brian Portnoy Book Summary: One Man's View of the World by Lee Kuan Yew Book summary of Sum: Forty Tales From The Afterlives by David Eagleman Book summary - Magicians of the God by Graham Hancock The Bed of Procrustes by Nassim Nicholas Taleb Book Summary: A philosophy of software design by John K Ousterhout Book Summary: Red Notice by Bill Browder Book summary: The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel Book summary: Antifragile by Nassim Nicolas Taleb Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport Book Summary - Everybody Lies Book Summary: The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicolas Taleb Book Summary: How not to die by Dr. Michael Greger Book summary: Why Nations Fail Book summary: Made to Stick by Chip Heath and Dan Heath Book summary: Skin in the game by Nassim Nicolas Taleb Book summary: How not to be wrong by Jordan Ellenberg Book summary: The subtle art of not giving a f*ck by Mark Manson Book summary: Fooled by Randomness by Nassim Nicholas Taleb Book Summary: Sapiens: A brief history of Humankind Book summary: Brandwashed by Martin Lindstorm Book summary: "Business Adventures" by John Brooks Book summary: "Where good ideas come from" by Steven Johnson Book summary: What got you here won't get you there by Marshall Goldsmith Book Summary: Hard Things about Hard Things by Ben Horowitz Book summary: The Lean Startup by Eric Ries Book summary: Remote - office not required Book summary: Great By Choice by Jim Collins Book Summary: The Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham Book summary: The science of happily ever after by T Y Tashiro Book summary: Bogleheads guide to investing Book Summary: "Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion" by Robert B. Cialdini Book Summary: Think like a freak by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner Book summary: The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch Book summary: Only The Paranoid Survives by Andrew Grove Book Summary: So good they can't ignore you (why skills trump passion in the quest for work you love) by Cal Newport Book Summary: The Innovator's Dilemma (when new technologies cause great firms to fail) by Clayton Christensen Book Summary: The Education of Millionaires by Michael Ellsberg Book summary: How to create a mind by Ray Kurzweil Book Summary: How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big by Scott Adams (creator of Dilbert comics) Book Summary: Art of War by Sun Tzu (Samuel B. Griffith's translation) Book Summary: The score takes care of itself (my philosophy of leadership) Book Summary: Man's search for meaning Book Summary: Winners Take All (The 9 fundamental rules of high tech strategy) Book Summary: The Power of Less by Leo Babuta Book Summary: The Start-Up of You Book Summary: Breakout Nations by Ruchir Sharma Book Review: The Tangled web Book Review: Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson Book Summary: In the Plex by Steven Levy Book Summary: Imagining India by Nandan Nilekani Book summary: India Unbound by Gurcharan Das Summary: "Difficulty of being good: Subtle art of Dharma"

Tech Thoughts Minimize Javascript in your codebase In defense of ad-supported products The Indian startup bubble is insane Migrating from WordPress to Hugo LLMs: great for business but bad business When to commit Generated code to version control Abstractions should be deep not wide Some data on podcasting API services should always have usage Limits Timing Real vs Theoretical Engineering Productivity Play-to-earn games Too much documentation is harmful Engineering stack Engineering Guardrails VCs are anti-personas for a B2C startup Bad and good ways to test code The different layers of a web applications The biggest impact of ChatGPT Social media and burglar bars 5 reasons package.json doesn't scale Why I prefer Obsidian for taking notes Low code Don't buy Google FI SIM with a phone Fundraising rounds then and now React Native Indeterminate Progress bar is an inferior UX design The two-step approach to big code modifications Dealing with phone numbers in contact book Programmable Money and value capture Angel investing for Software Engineers A short guide for MBAs looking for a job in the tech world Cryptocurrency trading This website was compromised Closeum - closed-source in disguise Startup founders: How not to write an email The "key" problem in cryptocurrency Server vs mobile development: Where the code runs matter Google I/O 2018: Android Notes Google I/O 2017: Android Notes Apple vs Google: Naming of flagship Android vs iPhone Consumer Internet: why audio can't be as big as text, photos, and videos 90% vs 99% When aggregation works and when it doesn't The Android-Chrome merger saga Startup valuations Voice Interfaces: The Missing User Interaction Element File size should always be of "long" type Google I/O 2016: Android notes Standardization When marketplaces work and when they don't Thoughts on Tizen "Material design" and Google's strategy Thoughts on Bitcoin (part 2) Internet activists, the advent of snap judgement and Internet's permanence Thoughts on fixing tech recruiting Why Nokia's (rumored) Android phone is doomed Three reasons why Intel might lose server market even faster than consumer Random Thoughts: Android launchers (home screens) Thoughts on Bitcoin The Missing Linux Laptop Vivek Wadhwa: "The next Trillion Dollar Opportunities" Towards a broken future of Internet A fundamental problem with Aakash (Indian Government tablet initiative) Random thoughts: goals and company types in tech world EA Sports vs Zynga : the battle for games in smartphone era FOSS (Free and Open Source Code) Licensing FAQ Cablegate and the aftermath: a few observations Nokia and the smartphone era How Indian Government deals with Technology The decline of Microsoft and Intel in Internet-centric Smartphone-supplemented era BlackBerry Controversy in India

#tech-thoughts Minimize Javascript in your codebase Nov 23, 2024 Javascript isn’t a language. It is just a specification. Well, that’s true for many other languages like Python and Java. However, most languages have just one de facto implementation. For... #tech-thoughts In defense of ad-supported products Nov 09, 2024 There are two major ways to make money on consumer Internet - subscription or ads. Also, unlike enterprise-world, usage-based subscription is hard and confusing for consumers. So, we end up with 10$ a... #tech-thoughts The Indian startup bubble is insane Oct 12, 2024 Bengaluru-based Postman, a API management product, has raised a total of $433 million valuing it at ~$5.6B. Its revenue was $171M in 2023. As a comparison, Rubrik with ~$850M ARR is valued at $6B or ... #tech-thoughts Migrating from WordPress to Hugo Sep 02, 2024 For more than 10 years, this website has been running on WordPress. Over time I come to dislike it for multiple reasons.... #tech-thoughts LLMs: great for business but bad business Jul 05, 2024 The true value proposition of LLMs lies in their ability to convert unstructured data from sources like websites and documents into structured information with reasonably high accuracy. Yet, the real... #programming #tech-thoughts When to commit Generated code to version control Jun 02, 2024 Generated code, ideally, should not be committed to version control. Committing generated code can sometimes speed up testing and code generation but it is a design smell. It is better to cache genera... #tech-thoughts Abstractions should be deep not wide Mar 23, 2024 Let’s say you are building a git analytics product. Your product supports GitHub and GitLab for now. It might support more products in the future. 90% of the codebase that supports GitHub and Gi... #tech-thoughts Some data on podcasting Mar 16, 2024 A few years back, I scraped data on podcasters from iTunes. The data was a bit underwhelming and made me realize that podcasters can’t be a potential market. It is a bit dated but I believe is s... #tech-thoughts API services should always have usage Limits Feb 11, 2024 Every public-facing API service should have API usage limits. If this seems overkill then ask yourself if would it be OK if a single IP sends a million requests a second. This does not apply just to p... #tech-thoughts Timing Nov 18, 2023 Two cryptocurrency exchanges came out early on from Y Combinator. One is 2012. One in 2013. One returned 1500X to early investors. The other one ceased to exist after 2 years. What happened? ... #tech-thoughts Real vs Theoretical Engineering Productivity Sep 16, 2023 Some engineering productivity is real. Some are theoretical.... #tech-thoughts Play-to-earn games Jul 24, 2023 With Axie Infinity, there is a sudden rise of play-to-earn games. At least the way I see is that the core idea is that financial benefits of in-game purchases accrue to the network instead of just the... #tech-thoughts Too much documentation is harmful Jul 01, 2023 As code changes, documentation becomes stale over time. This happens at big companies. This happens at small companies. Unlike code, documentation is not compiled or tested. The code is executed. If t... #tech-thoughts Engineering stack Jun 03, 2023 Most startups think of the engineering stack as if it is a single cohesive thing. However, I believe that there are three different engineering stacks that are loosely coupled to each other.... #tech-thoughts Engineering Guardrails May 07, 2023 Guardrails are meant to protect us from tripping over. The same can be said about engineering guardrails.... #tech-thoughts VCs are anti-personas for a B2C startup Apr 16, 2023 The early adopters of Instagram were not VCs.... #tech-thoughts Bad and good ways to test code Feb 18, 2023 Writing tests at an early-stage startup is always heatedly debated. If a function has one call, adding a unit test doubles the number of calls, this not only doubles the current work but even slows do... #tech-thoughts The different layers of a web applications Feb 05, 2023 There are three mandatory layers of any non-trivial user-facing web application. Storage, compute and view. The view is the front-end website and the mobile app(s). The storage is the database layer l... #tech-thoughts The biggest impact of ChatGPT Feb 01, 2023 In the decade of the 2010s, after Facebook became mainstream, social became a building block for websites. A lot of websites added a concept of user profiles consisting of a name, a display picture, a... #tech-thoughts Social media and burglar bars Nov 30, 2022 Houses in many major cities in Latin America have burglar bars. So, is in India. Very few cities in the US have burglar bars.... #tech-thoughts 5 reasons package.json doesn't scale Aug 14, 2022 package.json is the standard package configuration management file used in the Javascript world. To call it terrible is an understatement. Here’s why.... #tech-thoughts Why I prefer Obsidian for taking notes Jul 16, 2022 I started using Google Notebook around 2008. Once I received a notice that it will shut down, I switched to Evernote around 2012. Unlike Google, note-taking is the central business of Evernote, I thou... #tech-thoughts Low code Mar 12, 2022 I’m a big of serverless. In fact, in 2021, I believe that it should be the default choice and one should have a strong reason to deploy their own servers.... #tech-thoughts Don't buy Google FI SIM with a phone Feb 13, 2022 There are several nightmare stories on the Internet regarding Google’s poor handling of payment issues related to Google Fi service. Most problems arise because people buy a phone along with Goo... #tech-thoughts Fundraising rounds then and now Dec 11, 2021 Then Seed/Angel Series-A Series-B Series-C IPO Now ... #programming #tech-thoughts React Native Mar 06, 2021 There are tons of hyped-up claims surrounding React Native that are worth addressing. The reasons why companies run for React Native are usually, We already use Javascript for the website and now, we ... #tech-thoughts Indeterminate Progress bar is an inferior UX design Nov 05, 2020 60 milliseconds is when we notice something isn’t immediate. Any user interaction, that involves sending data over the network or doing heavy computation on it, usually takes way longer than 60 ... #programming #tech-thoughts The two-step approach to big code modifications Aug 01, 2020 We all have to make significant code changes from time to time. Most of these code changes are large. Consider the scenario that you merged one such significant change, and then other team members mad... #tech-thoughts Dealing with phone numbers in contact book Jul 10, 2020 If you are building an app that uses the user’s contact book then their certain gotchas to avoid. Telephone country codes are prefix-free If a country has a country code “+91”, then ... #tech-thoughts Programmable Money and value capture Oct 12, 2019 Money serves three purpose - unit of accounting, a medium of exchange, and a store of value. Cryptocurrencies have been compared to Programmable Money. Anything programmable requires an experimentatio... #tech-thoughts Angel investing for Software Engineers Aug 03, 2019 Software Engineers peak early in their career and especially in places in the San Francisco Bay area, New York, and Seattle attain accredited investor status early on in their career. Hearing stories ... #tech-thoughts A short guide for MBAs looking for a job in the tech world Jul 03, 2019 Why Tech In the past decade, interest among MBA grads towards tech companies has drastically gone up. If you are one of those, take a pause and ask yourself “why”. Of course, there are ups... #tech-thoughts Cryptocurrency trading Jun 01, 2019 Background There are three major types of financial exchanges Stocks and bonds Commodity exchange Foreign exchange (Forex) ... #tech-thoughts This website was compromised May 01, 2019 For 6-months, this website was compromised. I am not sure what exactly happened, but it was most likely password-reuse, which lend itself to this problem. The problem became apparent when I first noti... #tech-thoughts Closeum - closed-source in disguise Mar 01, 2019 Earlier, the Software world was rigidly divided between closed and open-source software. Microsoft Windows is closed-source, GNU/Linux is open-source. Microsoft Office and Lotus Notes are closed-sourc... #tech-thoughts Startup founders: How not to write an email Jul 22, 2018 Consider this email, And now consider this one, Hi Ashish, You signed up for the Orchard beta not too long ago, and we’re excited to finally send you an invite! ( Just to jog your memory, Orchar... #tech-thoughts The "key" problem in cryptocurrency Jul 02, 2018 All cryptocurrencies are eventually tied to a “private” key. You lose this key, and the funds are gone, forever. Millions worth of bitcoins have disappeared from the circulation due to los... #tech-thoughts Server vs mobile development: Where the code runs matter May 21, 2018 When the code runs on your servers, you have much more control over the “context” in which it runs. On the mobile devices, the device OS and the user control the context. This difference l... #tech-thoughts Google I/O 2018: Android Notes May 14, 2018 Highlights All android support library code is moving to the androidx namespace. No more android.support.v4 or android. support.v7 namespaces. Android app bundle to split the app into downloadable mod... #tech-thoughts Google I/O 2017: Android Notes May 22, 2017 Infrastructure - Architecture & Performance Android Vitals - More visibility in Google Play dev console on battery drain, wakelocks being held for too long, ANRs, crashes, dropped frames, and froz... #tech-thoughts Apple vs Google: Naming of flagship Android vs iPhone May 21, 2017 iPhone iPhone iPhone 3G -> iPhone 3GS iPhone 4 -> iPhone 4S iPhone 5 -> iPhone 5S iPhone 6 -> iPhone 6S (and plus sizes) iPhone 7 (and plus sizes) Android Nexus One Nexus S Galaxy Nexus Ne... #tech-thoughts Consumer Internet: why audio can't be as big as text, photos, and videos Feb 27, 2017 Our brain loves distractions, and multi-tasking gets bored quickly. When we read text or watch a photo, it engages us visually, a video (with audio) engages us even more. The bandwidth of eyes is muc... #tech-thoughts 90% vs 99% Jan 01, 2017 Consider two systems: the first is 90% reliable and the second is 99%. The wrong to compare them is to compare the reliability and conclude that the second one is 9% (or 10% if you take 90% as the bas... #tech-thoughts When aggregation works and when it doesn't Dec 04, 2016 All consumer internet products are either about consumption, production or both. A blog site is primarily about consumption. A photo transforming app is primarily about production. Social networks are... #tech-thoughts The Android-Chrome merger saga Aug 13, 2016 Articles with the following titles would be considered a joke “BMW is planning to merge its series i5 cars and Motorrad bikes” “P&G is planning to merge tissue paper and toilet p... #tech-thoughts Startup valuations Jun 19, 2016 In 2001, Amazon’s share price crashed from 100$ to 6$, they had to do a 15% layoff. But it was Jeff Bezos’s perseverance, tenacity and grit because of which Amazon survived. As several sta... #tech-thoughts Voice Interfaces: The Missing User Interaction Element Jun 13, 2016 Apple Siri, Google Now, Amazon Echo, and Microsoft Cortana have garnered a lot of press lately. But one thing which is still missing out is voice-native user experience. Let me illustrate that with th... #programming #tech-thoughts File size should always be of "long" type May 21, 2016 Java 1 2 3 int getTextFileSize(String fileName) { return (int) (new File(BASE_DIR, fileName).length(); // WRONG } A 32-bit signed int can deal with ~2GB worth of data. And if your code is not going t... #tech-thoughts Google I/O 2016: Android notes May 19, 2016 General Multitasking - multi-window mode and picture-in-picture mode. This includes the ability to launch window in adjacent activity, and drag and drop between activities. Notifications - Custom quic... #tech-thoughts Standardization Jan 04, 2016 Standards exist so that products from different vendors can interoperate with each other, for example, sending email from Gmail to Yahoo! mail, and use common interfaces, for example, sockets for elec... #tech-thoughts When marketplaces work and when they don't Nov 09, 2015 Thanks to Uber’s meteoric rise in valuation, several startups are trying to mimic the idea of building marketplaces with instant gratification. So much so, that there is an aptly titled poem, &q... #tech-thoughts Thoughts on Tizen Jan 24, 2015 Users won’t buy a phone till they know that their basic set of apps is available on the device. That pretty much rules out players like BlackBerry 10, Jolla, Ubuntu OS, and Firefox OS. Even Micr... #tech-thoughts "Material design" and Google's strategy Nov 12, 2014 Android Before 2008, smartphones OS market was fragmented. There were a few big names like Palm and Symbian, but most phone manufacturers were doing their custom operating systems. For example, Motoro... #tech-thoughts Thoughts on Bitcoin (part 2) Jun 04, 2014 Here is a summary of things that have happened since I wrote the previous Bitcoin blog post.... #tech-thoughts Internet activists, the advent of snap judgement and Internet's permanence Apr 29, 2014 In 2013, we saw how internet activists’ snap judgments about the interpretation (or misinterpretation?) of jokes at pycon destroyed the professional career of two individuals (Source: A Dongle J... #tech-thoughts Thoughts on fixing tech recruiting Apr 05, 2014 Enough articles have been written about engineering crunch in the valley while some solutions like increasing equity grants to engineers have been suggested, the bigger issue of the broken recruiting ... #tech-thoughts Why Nokia's (rumored) Android phone is doomed Feb 11, 2014 In Feb 2014, WSJ is reporting that Nokia is working on an Android phone. In Sept 2010, Anssi Vanjoki, outgoing head of Nokia’s smartphone division, likens mobile phone makers that adopt Google’s softw... #tech-thoughts Three reasons why Intel might lose server market even faster than consumer Jan 28, 2014 One of the biggest challenges to Intel’s x86 hegemony in the consumer market has been the emergence of smartphones where ARM-based processors have 90% market share. The PC market where Intel has... #tech-thoughts Random Thoughts: Android launchers (home screens) Jan 09, 2014 I have used Cover and Aviate but could not stay with either and am back to Nova (which offer static screen of apps).... #tech-thoughts Thoughts on Bitcoin Jan 07, 2014 A short summary of bitcoin Electronic money is all about ledger (transactions) which tells who sent money to whom, in standard financial system, central/federal/reserve bank (different nations have di... #tech-thoughts The Missing Linux Laptop Aug 21, 2013 For the past one month or so, I am looking around for a good personal laptop running GNU/Linux. I was looking for something similar to my current Mac Book Pro My constraints were following Intel proce... #tech-thoughts Vivek Wadhwa: "The next Trillion Dollar Opportunities" Apr 20, 2013 (Opinions expressed here are my understanding of Vivek Wadhwa’s opinion) “The next Trillion Dollar Opportunities” (in this decade) China’s manufacturing and India’s call ... #tech-thoughts Towards a broken future of Internet Dec 24, 2011 Internet, which initially started as a DARPA experiment is [still] under the indirect control of USA government through ICANN despite several objections from Europe as well as IBSA. This worked when m... #tech-thoughts A fundamental problem with Aakash (Indian Government tablet initiative) Dec 10, 2011 This blog post is not about how good or bad the product technically is or how indigenous it is; it’s about a fundamental problem with tablets. It amazes me to see that even a journalist like T. ... #tech-thoughts Random thoughts: goals and company types in tech world Aug 27, 2011 Start-up One goal May have multiple products but all products are aimed at a single goal. All teams are working towards the same goal. Diversified Multiple similar goals Have several products (or sev... #tech-thoughts EA Sports vs Zynga : the battle for games in smartphone era Mar 21, 2011 Zynga’s market valuation has surpassed EA Sports market evaluation. Even though EA Sports is trying hands in social and acquired Playfish, their main source of revenue is still video games. Thou... #tech-thoughts FOSS (Free and Open Source Code) Licensing FAQ Jan 23, 2011 There are two choices while writing on this topic. One is to write a detailed and accurate port. The other is to write a short post. I preferred the second approach and had added appropriate links to ... #tech-thoughts Cablegate and the aftermath: a few observations Dec 29, 2010 Wikileaks released a set of United States diplomatic cables on Nov 28, 2010, popularly referred to as Cablegate. Let’s consider the events which happened afterward.... #tech-thoughts Nokia and the smartphone era Dec 02, 2010 Nokia is facing some serious issues some of them are technical, but the major issue right now is how it can rebrand itself as a smartphone manufacturer (rather than just a mobile phone manufacturer).... #tech-thoughts How Indian Government deals with Technology Oct 16, 2010 This article illustrates some examples of how the Indian government deals with (Information) Technology. Some of these projects are unheard of while some generated unnecessary hype.... #tech-thoughts The decline of Microsoft and Intel in Internet-centric Smartphone-supplemented era Oct 11, 2010 An article on how the internet-centric era supplemented by smartphones is giving tough time to Intel and Microsoft and why the two giants of Desktop-centric computing era are not able to retain their ... #tech-thoughts BlackBerry Controversy in India Sep 13, 2010 Indian Govt. has asked RIM (maker of the BlackBerry smartphone) to provide access to the data going through its servers for intelligence purposes and it appears that BlackBerry has accepted the demand... ‹ › Following is a list of selected posts, all posts can be seen here. About me can be seen here. ...

I am a software engineer and an angel investor based out of the San Francisco bay area. This page is mostly a collection of curated articles that I have written and tools that I have built. More professional info is on LinkedIn. You can email me at ashishb AT ashishb.net. Blog posts & Tools Infrastructure If you are an infrastructure engineer consider my Docker 101 blog post and then read how you can deploy web services essentially with zero fixed costs. Afterward, you might like reading about the pitfalls of Docker’s scratch image. You might love or hate me for questioning the serverless functions lock-in. ...