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Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die by Chip Heath and Dan Heath One of the better communication books I read this year. At its core is the “Curse of Knowledge”: once we master something, we forget what it’s like not to know it. That blind spot makes explaining ideas clearly far harder than we realize. The authors show how effective communicators work around this curse—by opening curiosity gaps instead of dumping information all at once, and by stripping ideas down to their essence until nothing more can be removed without losing meaning. Practical, memorable, and immediately useful. ...

When I tried to add a Sonos Beam Gen 2 to my home network, which consists of a Orbi mesh with one receiver and multiple satellites, I ran into few issues. There are others who have run into similar issues trying to battle 2.4 Ghz and passwords. Sonos would not connect to my default network (5.0 Ghz) and it could only connect to a 2.4 Ghz network. So I enabled a guest network with 2.4 Ghz and the Beam connected. Once the connection was done, the app mentioned that the Beam was not configured properly. It would show the Beam in the app, but you cannot do much with it. The main problem was that my phone was on the default home network (5.0 Ghz) while the Beam was on 2.4 Ghz. ...

Imagine you are at a technical phone screen, the first step in the interview pipeline. After the initial chit chat, the interviewer presents the coding challenge which looks like this. Given n non-negative integers representing an elevation map where the width of each bar is 1, compute how much water it is able to trap after raining. One of the first things you should do in interviews is ask clarifying questions. The first question would be, are you a water management company or a software company? Once the futility has been confirmed, you will ponder about the algorithm. Should I sort? Should I use a stack? Should I use a Priority Queue? Should I jump out of the window? ...

It would be an understatement to say obstacles are all around for people who got affected by COVID-19, for businesses that got impacted, and for people who got laid off in a 3 minute Zoom call or an e-mail in the morning. What do you do when the black swan event of the century turns a normal day into a day where you wonder about how you are going to survive this crisis. ...

Every day I have an hour commute by BART – San Francisco Bay Area’s delightful transit system. When you are waiting for the train, there is a sight that will grab your attention every single day. Everyone is on the phone, mindlessly swiping gems on a game, binge-watching Netflix, and catching up with the latest on their favorite social media outlet. Caught up in their screens, it is fun to see people miss their stations. ...

If you have installed Docker for the first time, it is better to verify the install with the command docker run hello-world When you ran that command and got the error “unauthorized: incorrect username or password”, read on. Most likely you would have entered your Docker hub e-mail and password. Big mistake. The instruction says that you should login with your Docker ID. This Docker ID is not your e-mail. For that you need to login to Docker Hub with your e-mail and go to the Profile page. There you can find your Docker ID. ...

re:Invent was a huge conference with many venues and over 60,000 attendees. If you don’t plan properly, you will end up sitting in various shuttles, traveling up and down the strip. Here are some tips from my experience. Book your ticket early. The popular sessions fill up quickly and you will end up on the waiting list for most of them. When the re:Invent planner says that the next venue is 30 minutes away, trust that. I walk fast, I run. Still it is hard to get from one venue to another in time. This has nothing to do with your walking speed. The convention centers are deep inside a casino and you will spend 10 minutes, just to get to the shuttle bus. Then another 10 &#8211; 20 minutes on the shuttle and another 10 minutes for walking. So plan accordingly.  <p> If you are on the waiting list and reach late, the chances of getting in are slim. </p> Pick your badge from the airport. This is very convenient. Also you have one less thing to worry about. ...

In this podcast, Jonas Kjellberg, the co-creator of Skype, gives few tips to entrepreneurs on how to think about running a business and how to innovate. Thinking in Zeroes: One of his focus is to challenge the cost side. Running a business is costly and often in business leadership, cost reduction means laying off employees or moving business operations and development to a low-cost location. Skype was a challenge to Telcos and Jonas used this thinking to his advantage. What could he do which the telcos could not? Skype used the internet which was already paid for by the customer which brings the cost of laying out infrastructure to 0. Telcos use switches for routing. Skype used the CPU power to do the same. Again the cost is 0. They used idle computers to route the calls to reduce cost. ...

In an interview on the AI Podcast, Andrew Ng predicts that AI would be an essential part of our lives and it is going to transform the world, the way electricity did. A consequence of that is not that Skynet would activate, but many of the existing jobs would disappear. To survive, lifelong learning would become essential. Previously, we could learn something in college and ply trade based on that knowledge for decades. Now we will have to replenish that knowledge constantly. ...

In June 2017, Alex Honnold did something which no man had done before. He climbed El Capitan in Yosemite without any ropes. This free solo ascent of the 3000 ft rock formation without any fallback mechanism ranks as one of the greatest athletic feats ever. Equally interesting is the way Alex Honnold trained. He did 60 practice climbs on El Capitan. First, he rehearsed these climbs using rope. He memorized complex portions of the climb. He specifically trained on the tricky portions of the segments by going up there and with gear and practicing over and over. In the final weeks before the climb, he practiced on a smooth stretch of rock, climbing with only his feet and not using his hands. Thus what looked like a miracle was the result of a well-planned training. ...