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A sample of LinkedIn requests I receive these days. Hi Ashish, I’m the CEO of [redacted]. [redacted]. I’m looking for financial partners and would like to connect to see if we’re a fit. Hi Ashish, I’m the CEO of [redacted]. [redacted]. I’m looking for financial partners and would love to connect! - M Hey Ashish, I’m the CEO of [redacted] - [redacted]. I’m looking for introductions to financial partners and would like to connect to see if we’re a fit. - S Hi Ashish, I’m the CEO of [redacted]. [redacted]. I’m looking for introductions to financial partners and would love to connect! - K

Cancun, or, more precisely, Cancún, is a coastal tourist city on the Caribbean (eastern) side of Mexico. There are two significant areas, Punta Cancun (tip of Cancun), also known as the Hotel Zone and Playa Del Carmen. We chose to stay in Punta Cancun. The Hotel Zone is walkable and you don’t need to rent a car if you are staying there. Buses are always available to go to other parts of Cancun though you rarely will. ...

The book takes a data-driven approach to analyze the world.

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 made a few more changes on top. Then a major bug is detected. You desperately make the fix. It makes it in. You declare a victory, and a few hours later, your colleague notices another bug/crash/performance regression. Your commit cannot be reverted. It isn’t just about you. Many others have built on top of the change you made—the code sloths along in this broken state for a few days before you eventually fix it. Everyone has faced this issue at some point or the other.

After renting a moped in Thailand, I stopped at a small shop to ask for a petrol pump/gas station. Instead, the shop owner handed me a bottle of gasoline for purchase. “Must be a peaceful country where they can sell gasoline in bottles.”, I said to myself, “In most parts of the world, people would use this as a petrol bomb during violent protests and riots.”

We decided to do a packaged tour of Kerala, India. The tour included round-trip flights from Delhi to Kochi, a taxi for the full journey, and all the hotel stays. Day 1 - Kochi to Munnar While going from Kochi to Munnar, a three-hour drive, we first stopped at Valara falls and then saw the Ayurvedic (herbal) medicinal and spice production at Greenland Spice Garden . Day 2 - Munnar We checked out the Mattupetty Dam and the nearby market. From there, we headed to Echo Point . While returning, we stopped at the Cowboy Adventure Park . I would highly recommend this park; your driver won’t probably want to take you here since the price is too low to give him a kickback. We had to skip Eravikulam national park since we spent too much time (~3 hours) at the Cowboy Adventure Park. Then, we headed back to Munnar and checked out the Tata Tea Museum. There isn’t much to see at the museum. In the evening, we ended up for a massage at an Ayurvedic Massage Centre . The center appears rustic, but the experience was excellent. ...

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 no other country will get a country code like “+912” or “+913”. This scheme ensures that numbers are inherently unambiguous. Telephone numbers can have multiple representations Since most people don’t dial internationally, telecom systems implicitly assume a domestic call. So, someone dialing 612-555-1234 in the US is dialing “+1-612-555-1234”, while the same person in India is dialing “+91-612-555-1234”. Since international dialing would be more infrequent, telecoms require unique prefix numbers like “00” to distinguish whether someone is 612-555-1234 in their country or 0061-255-51234 in Austria. In some states, even the domestic area code is not explicitly required. So, a user might have stored “555-1234” as the phone number to which telecoms will implicitly prefix the user’s area code. And if the user wants to dial beyond their area, the telecom operator would require an additional “0” prefix to mark that it is an STD call . This localization has a massive implication regarding processing cleaning and normalizing phone numbers retrieved from the user’s contact book. Both country code and area code don’t contain “0”, and usually, that’s superfluous. So, while telecoms might be OK with calling or sending SMS to “0-612-555-1234”, they will treat a number like “91-0-612-555-1234” as incorrect. ...

Cusco or Cuszo, an Andean city in South America, was the seat of the Inca empire and is home to the world-famous Machu Picchu. I would recommend staying near the city center of Plaza De Armas (“Parade Square”). Most tourist activities are in and around the area. Day 1 Start your journey with a walking tour. I did it with Inkan Milky Way . It would give you a good idea of the UNESCO heritage site around the central square (Plaza de Armas). If you are coming from the lower altitudes, then acclimatize yourself by taking rest, drinking a lot of water, and chewing coca leaves. ...

To use monorepo or not is an eternal debate. Each has its pros and cons. Let’s say you decide to go with monorepo, one major issue you will face over time is slow testing. Imagine a monorepo, consisting of an Android app, an iOS app, some backend code, some web frontend code. On only very few occasions will someone modify more than one of those simultaneously. Further, most of these projects confined to their directories would be using different build systems as well, for example, gradle for Android, yarn/npm for Javascript, go/rust/java/npm for the backend. The total build time and test time will only grow over time. It annoys developers making small modifications to their part of the codebase. And it slows down the development velocity drastically.

The book posits a unique viewpoint to understand randomness and unpredictability in the world around us. Rather than trying to predict the improbable black swans, it focuses more on how not to be adversely impacted by them.