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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 frozen frames. Architecture components - better handling of the lifecycle, Room (ORM for Sqlite), live data observers. The API looks clunky though. Performance 50% 1-star reviews mention stability & bugs. 60% 5-star reviews mention speed, design, or reliability. Apps with > 5% crash rate have 30% higher uninstall rate. Emerging Markets > 100M users came online in 2016. 1B 2G devices expected in 2020. 50% of India is on 2G 33% users run out of storage in India every day. Data is expensive - it costs ~$2 to download a 40MB free app in India 53% users abandon websites if it takes more than 3 seconds to load Action items ...

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 Nexus 4 Nexus 5 Nexus 6 Nexus 5X & Nexus 6P Pixel & Pixel XL While iPhone is recognized as a global name while erstwhile Nexus and now, Pixel has almost no branding outside of the Android fanboys. ...

Cities have been central to the human civilization. Their dense population provides a platform for the serendipitous interactions and cross-pollination of ideas from different domains, their abandoned portions provide cost-effective real estate to struggling artists and entrepreneurs, their riches provides jobs, sometimes, side-jobs for the innovators to experiment. No wonder innovation in a city grows super-linearly (~(size)4/3) with its size. But the Internet was supposed to destroy all advantages a city has over the rural areas. The Internet was supposed to convert all of us into a global community. It did. But the cities have emerged even stronger, everywhere. One way to rationalize this is to realize that the Internet provided a platform to the cities a rent seeking ability which was extremely limited in the pre-Internet era. When a family in Kansas books an Airbnb in Thailand using Mastercard credit card, books the flight with Expedia, and uses an Uber in Thailand then these intermediaries take a cut. Similarly, when a person in Nebraska buys West Texas Intermediate from New York stock exchange, then New York stock exchange takes a cut. Now, what happens when these companies take these cuts? A big chunk of that is used for salaries, expenses, or charity donations which are usually highly localized activities and benefit the cities where these companies are headquartered. Most of these rent-seeking activities were either non-existent or of limited leverage in the pre-Internet era. ...

Detroit used to symbolize the prowess of American manufacturing. Foreign delegates would drive or fly to Detroit to see this iconic city. San Francisco Bay Area (Silicon Valley) was once called the Detroit of the west, and at that time, it meant admiration. The city has a tumultuous racial history. It’s the only city in the US to be taken over by the Federal army thrice to control riots. Before my visit, I had read the book " Detroit: An American Autopsy", it’s a bit long but gives a thorough understanding of this once iconic city. ...

The book is rated as the best business book by both Bill Gates and Warren Buffett.

The way the human brain learns is different from how it remembers. Good practitioners know how to remember. Good teachers know how to make others learn.

We made this trip over three days in December; even then, Death Valley National Park was warm during the day and cold at night. Therefore, I would warn against going there in summer, where it could be unbearably hot. Day 1 We entered from the west side and started our trip with Darwin Falls. The falls are not massive, but given that the desert surrounds them, it is a site worth visiting. We only did the first falls, and those will four-wheel drive can drive 2 miles to the second falls. ...

Our brain loves distractions, and multitasking 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 much larger than the bandwidth of our ears. When we are watching something, it utilizes more bandwidth and hence occupies more of our attention span. Also, given the way our eyes work, we can focus more on the exciting aspect of the visual feed. Compared to that, audio underutilizes our brain’s bandwidth. Further, the unidimensional flow of audio data at a linear speed does not mimic our ability to process it. Contrast forced direct listening with how non-linearly humans read. ...

The book presents a robust theoretical framework around how good ideas emerged in human history and debunking myths associated with the same. The underlying theme of the book is how coral reefs, big cities, and the worldwide web provide the right platform for innovation. The right platform for innovation provides liquid networks that encourage rapid information sharing, serendipitous encounters, the formation of slow hunches, the exploration of the adjacent possible, and the exaptation of existing solutions for solving seemingly unrelated problems.

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 base) better. The right way to compare them is to compare the unreliability and conclude that the first system fails in 10% of the cases while the second fails only in 1%, making it 10X more error-prone than the second. The reliability comparison is a vanity matrix while the unreliability comparison not only demonstrates the user perception (“The user saw ten crashes in past one hour” vs “The user saw one crash in past one hour”) drastically but also shows the effort that goes into making the system more reliable. ...