Issue #8: 10 Reads, A Handcrafted Weekly Newsletter for Humans

Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth. — Marcus Aurelius

1. Introvert or Extrovert? Here’s How to Boost Your Productivity: 10 mins read. I consider myself an introvert and I have no issues accepting that. I agree with post’s author that few people are pure introverts or extroverts. It could depend on the situation or people we hang out with. For me the best part of the post was productivity tips for introverts. Interesting I also came with the same conclusions as shared in this post for boosting my productivity. The four productivity tips for introverts — 1) Control your environment 2) Focus on one-on-one interactions 3) Slow down 4) Prepare for meetings.
2. Survivorship Bias And Startup Hype: 5 mins read. Luck plays a significant role in business success. Not just in the mere fact of success, but in the magnitude of any given company’s triumphs. We tend to overlook this reality because of a mental distortion called survivorship bias. It is a common cognitive failure, and a dangerous one because it obscures the distastefully harsh nature of the world.
3. Don’t Eat Before Reading This: 20 mins read.  Anthony Bourdain shares some trade secrets of chef industry. He writes Being a chef is a lot like being an air-traffic controller: you are constantly dealing with the threat of disaster. You’ve got to be Mom and Dad, drill sergeant, detective, psychiatrist, and priest to a crew of opportunistic, mercenary hooligans, whom you must protect from the nefarious and often foolish strategies of owners. Year after year, cooks contend with bouncing paychecks, irate purveyors, desperate owners looking for the masterstroke that will cure their restaurant’s ills: Live Cabaret! Free Shrimp! New Orleans Brunch!
4. The Bullshit-Job Boom: 15 mins read. We all have seen people bullshitting around and reaching the top and then building a senior team with all bullshitters together. This happens in most organization. I love the definition of bullshit job. Author writes a form of paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence even though, as part of the conditions of employment, the employee feels obliged to pretend that this is not the case.
5. Becoming a dramatically better programmer : 15 mins read. It is always beneficial for me to read posts like these. They either teach me a new way to look at how I can become better programmer or they assure me if I am doing something right. I also realized most of the suggestions mentioned in the post and trying to follow them. The post is divided into two parts — 1) Learning skills directly 2) Learning meta-skills. The first part Learning skills directly talks about importance of building new skills that complement your existing skillset and learning things that you think you don’t completely understand. The second part learning meta-skills is about deliberate practice, identifying common mistakes, and deep work.
6. Pain Plus Reflection Equals Progress : 10 mins read. Author writes, The easy path means being the same person you were yesterday. It’s easy and comfortable to convince yourself that the world should work differently than it does, that you have nothing to learn from the pain. The harder path is to embrace the pain and ask yourself what you could have done differently or better or what your blind spot was. It’s harder because you stop living in the bubble of your own creation and start living in reality.
7. Seven Reasons Why RightSizing AWS EBS Capacity Is Hard : 10 mins read. Right-sizing EBS volumes can provide a handsome return on investment. The reason is simple: AWS charges for provisioned capacity, not consumed capacity, and almost all AWS customers over-provision their EBS volumes. In our experience, the average amount of unused storage is about 75%. That’s a lot of empty storage that AWS customers are paying for!
8. CPU utilisation is wrong : 5 mins video. This is a 5 mins video by Netflix’s Brendan Gregg on why %CPU is not the right way to measure performance.
9. Go code refactoring : the 23x performance hunt: 15 mins read. These days I am also working on a piece of code where I am trying to do performance optimisation. This blog give me some ideas to explore. A good post at the right time for me.
10. Building A Pub/Sub Service In-House Using Node.js And Redis: 20 mins read. The primary reasons for building an in-house Pub/Sub system are 1) Reliability 2) High Performance 3) Cost effectiveness.