jjude

Having read hundreds of books over 25 years, here’s what I think about business books:

- To understand some domain you need knowledge + insights + discernment. Books give you knowledge. Only when you apply you will get discernment. When you apply you will get specific questions which then triggers seeking more knowledge.

- Every book is a map. It leaves out a lot so readers can understand the domain. If your interest align with that map, you'll find the book useful. Otherwise it turns out to be a fluff

- Most books could be a tweet (directive). Once you understand something, it could be expressed as a directive. Until then, you need stories, explanations, and nuance.

- Jesus' command: love God and love others is a short directive of Ten commandments, which in themselves are condensed directives of the Bible. When we hear only the directive, we lose the context and we misunderstand. That's where stories come into play. Tim Ferriss' "4 hour week" makes sense when you read all the stories (playbooks, delegations etc). You leave all of that out, "4 hour week" is a (misunderstood) crap.

- Don't read recently published books. wait at least until 5 years. Let it be looked at it from all angles. Then read it.

- If you want to learn emerging topic (like GenAI), don't read books. Join communities and learn from them. Like Perplexity community for GenAI.

- Read practicing philosophers. When you want to learn swimming, learn from swimmers turned coach, not someone who stood by poolside and watched 10000 swimmers (like Jim Collins did)

- Read annual letters to shareholders (by Warren Buffett, Jeff Bezos, Biglari ...). They have more signal than noise.

I started writing a reply and it became lot bigger than I intended. So I blogged here: https://www.jjude.com/read-biz-books/

This is what then PM Nawaz Sharif said about Kargil war:

> After the war, Nawaz Sharif, Prime Minister of Pakistan during the Kargil conflict, claimed that he was unaware of the plans, and that he first learned about the situation when he received an urgent phone call from Atal Bihari Vajpayee, his counterpart in India. Sharif attributed the plan to Musharraf and "just two or three of his cronies", a view shared by some Pakistani writers who have stated that only four generals, including Musharraf, knew of the plan.

Possible he was lying. But this is an accepted view even in the Pakistan.

> Pakistan is not economically strong enough to participate in a war,

Pakistan has nothing to lose. So there are lots of incentives for Pakistan army to go rogue.

Pope John Paul II was also extremely popular across the world.

There are two parts in this comment - poor country ; plagued by graft & bureaucracy

Latest Indus valley report[1] states that about 1Bn people (India3) are in economic condition equal to sub-saharan countries condition. In that sense large part of the country is still poor.

In response to minister Piyush Goel's rant in the latest startup event, a startup founder posted this on reddit which details how the country is plagued by graft & bureaucracy [2] . This is just one rant. Twitter is flooded with actual experience of many.

[1]: https://blume.vc/reports/indus-valley-annual-report-2024 [2]: https://www.reddit.com/r/StartUpIndia/comments/1js2y1s/piyus...

I too liked windsurf better than cursor until ...

I asked it to refactor an authenticatedfetch block of code. It went on a loop exhausting 15 credits (https://bsky.app/profile/jjude.com/post/3ljuhrxs3442k).

Which local model would you recommend that comes close to cursor in response quality? I have tried deepseek, mistral, and few others. None comes close to quality of cursor. I keep coming back to it.

I feel your loss. My mother passed away a year ago. As a first son, I was close to her. As Denzel Washington said, "A Mother is a Son’s first true love". As a 50 year old, I thought I would be able to handle it well. But I didn't.

Here are somethings I learned:

- to mourn well, mourn deeply and privately: I deleted all social media apps. I cried. I spent time alone thinking of all the times that I spent with her. I eulogized, I wrote about her. I did everything to mourn deeply. That could be done only in private. I don't think you can mourn in public.

- follow tradition to mourn: I have been an anti-tradition person all along. But I found out tradition is useful to mourn. Every culture has traditions for mourning - in our case, going to grave, going to church, 3rd day mass etc.

- find your ways to express your grief. Some write, some sing, some sit amidst nature....

- it will never be over: a year has gone and there are days I wake up in the middle of the night thinking of everything she did for me and the moments we spent together.

I wish you well.

If it helps: I wrote about my learning here: https://www.jjude.com/lessons-from-mourning/

I created a new category "/cpn/" (stands for commonlog) and posting links with my understanding. You can see them here: https://www.jjude.com/cpn/

In fact, I also posted about Simon's post: https://www.jjude.com/cpn/informal-guidelines-for-running-a-...

As he says, having a link blog is a "low stakes, high value" activity. More people should carry it out.

I collected some of the best essays I read: https://www.jjude.com/best-essays/

I also listed the blogs and newsletters I visit often (OPML available): https://www.jjude.com/consume-list/

I have been using Coolify and happy with it.

When we think of future, mostly we think in a deterministic one single point in the future. I would like to think of future as "possible states" rather than just a single point.

This helps me prepare for different scenarios and then build on top of whatever opportunity comes along.

I got reminded of it when I read "target states" and so thought will share it.

I wrote about how I think about the future here: https://jjude.com/shape-the-future/

1. Know your customer (geography, industry etc; their revenue segment; CTO or CMO or CEO etc). Selling to a CMO of an e-com making $100mio in Europe is different from selling to a CTO of startup in healthcare in Canada. When they finished talking to you on the first call, they should feel this guy told me more than I knew in my business; he was able to articulate what I was thinking. If you leave them with that thought, most probably they will come back to you to sign on the dotted line.

2. Speak in conferences that interests your customers. If you are a techie, default attraction is to speak in tech conferences. Unless you are selling to CTOs or VP(Engineering), none of your customers come there. You shouldn't just participate in these conferences where your customer's come. You should be a speaker. Speakers have a certain authority and your customers will crowd to that awesome speaker of the conference. It might only generate lead, but it will be a strong, qualified lead. From sales point of view, these conferences will give a pretty good idea of what matters to your customers.

3. Find the decision maker as quickly as possible and speak to them rather than wasting time with gate-keepers who can say no but not yes. Decision maker is the one who writes the cheque or the sponsor of the project or who can say yes as well as no. Decision maker need not be a CEO all the time.

4. Roleplay sales calls. Record these roleplays and keep improving your tone, words, tempo everything. You should be able to establish quickly why you, why now, and why at the price point you mention.

5. In every step of the journey, they should see value in interacting with you. As often as the prospect says, "of all the agencies I'm talking to, you folks come with depth and present with structure", it is better for you. Even if they don't close because of price, they will come back to you.

6. Make them smile during the sales call. There are many ways to do it. They will forget what you told them, but they will never forget how you made them feel. If you make them feel good, they will come back. At the least, they will refer you to others.

7. As a techie, you might have dealt with logic and deterministic outcomes. Sales is emotional and probabilistic. Get used to it. It is not easy.

Finally, good luck.

(P.S: If interested you can read what I wrote about: Mastering sales as a CTO: https://jjude.com/cto-sales/; it is not as agency owner, but I get on sales calls for an IT services company. So probably we are closer in that sense).

In times of widespread attacks, it would be better to list out actions that affected parties can take. Here is what I found:

- remove it fully (as per original author). It is no more needed - use alternate cdns (from fastly or cloudflare)

Also as a good practice, use SRI (though it wouldn’t have helped in this attack)

I posted a note here: https://cpn.jjude.com/@jjude/statuses/01J195H28FZWJTN7EKT9JW...

Please add any actions that devs and non-devs can take to mitigate this attack.

I too use go + fiber + htmx.

> mini framework for adding some structure to the templates

Would be good to read little more about this mini-framework

> Rust has primarily been used for rewriting existing stuff. Go has been used to produce new things.

Interesting observation. Coming to think of it, it might be true.

I am doing similar thing (for fun) using deno. I posted the entire code on Twitter: https://twitter.com/jjude/status/1757604342310310285

(Code is derived from another open source repository: https://github.com/franekmagiera/just-tell-me/)

P.S: I am just surprised how much our coding infra has evolved. I still remember typing 120 lines of code from Charles Petzold book just to pop up a hello world dialog box. Today in less than 30 lines of code, I can fetch Youtube captions and summarise it.

Thank you for recommending this book. Started to read, seems like very different from other productivity books and useful.

I am reminded of this intro by Marc Andreessen for Breaking Smart[1]: > A great deal of product development is based on the assumption that products must adapt to unchanging human needs or risk being rejected. Yet, time and again, people adapt in unpredictable ways to get the most out of new tech. Creative people tinker to figure out the most interesting applications, others build on those, and entire industries are reshaped.

There will high group of people who will tinker and adapt to the way the gpts work and make the best of it - creating new apps, industries, and so on. This has been the case all through the tech cycles.

We will change ourselves to the new tech and we won't even realize we changed.

I am re-reading Breaking Smart book in the context of chatgpt and I'm getting way more insights than I read the first time.

[1]: https://breakingsmart.com/en/season-1/introduction-by-marc-a...

Two years back I started a podcast[0]. By all "viral" metrics pov, it is a failure - didn't get thousands of downloads, no first page hits etc. But I became a better conversationalist.

Now whenever I interview people in my professional life (I'm a CTO and have to interview people for top level positions), they routinely tell me, they had their best interview. For long, I couldn't trace it back to the podcast. After many people compliment me, I asked one what made it a better interview. He said, you let me explain my project and you listened. That is when it clicked. Those are the skills I learned as a podcast host.

I paused the podcast last year, because I got covid and for other personal reasons. With this feedback, I'm going to restart the podcast.

Not all creative projects have to make money directly. There could be 2nd order benefits, which we may not see immediately.

[0]: https://jjude.com/podcast

> India has always been known for its notorious costs of Petroleum

Wouldn't the same factors like state tax, central tax, political interference affect battery charges too? Or none of them matter?

Can you please throw more info on what you are building? Have you written / tweeted about it anytime?

I take notes in an atomic way (other than clipping interesting articles). Because they are atomic, many of the notes are linked in one manner or the other (either via "concepts", "daily log" etc.). So whenever I revisit one of the "concepts" node, I visit these atomic notes.

Also, obsidian has a "open a random note" button. Thus I open a random note once in a while to see if I can learn (or relearn) something + to see if that note is still relevant for me.

My learning strategy involves three steps: consume, produce, and engage. Though they are self-explanatory, let me explain how I practice these.

When I decide to learn something new, I look for the best articles, books, videos on the topic. Google helps me out here. I devour them as quickly as I can.

Consuming gives you the illusion of understanding. I make those concepts my own by producing something. A blog post, a slide deck, an illustration helps me to contextualize what I learned.

Consuming and producing is like four blind men trying to grasp what an elephant is. Each has his model of the elephant, which is not a comprehensive picture. I share whatever I produced with others and seek their feedback. I triangulate my opinion. With the comments given by others, I can make a complete picture, at least closer to it.

I go deeper into this in a series of articles here: https://jjude.com/sdl/

Most write out of authority, authority in the field. I don't. I am a learner. I write for the unlearned about things in which I am unlearned myself. ― C.S. Lewis.

I write at https://www.jjude.com as a way of learning. Writing is part of thinking out loud for me. This year I'm learning about customer experience, business of technology and technology of business. I'm also planning to launch my coaching program. All of those find their place in the blog.

Just yesterday was searching on the Google Play Store if there is an Android version of Overcast. There is no decent podcast app that has this particular feature of Overcast - cutting off silence.

Nobody has mentioned beego [1]. You can write a decent web-application using core Golang language. Yet, coding large applications require many features, like session handling, db connection, and so on. Instead of composing these from independent sources, you can use Beego which comes bundled with all of these.

If you are aware of Python ecosystem Beego is like Django (though Beego doesn't have an admin module).

I have been using Beego for couple of years now for my personal projects. I'm happy with it. It has almost all the features required for a web-application framework. It has good documentation too.

Just yesterday I released a side-project sheet2buffer[2], coded in Beego as backend and React as front-end.

If you are interested, I also wrote an introductory post about Beego[3].

[1]: https://beego.me/ [2]: https://sheet2buffer.com/ [3]: https://jjude.com/beego-intro/

I equate learning any new domain as going into a zoo. You look at each animal on its own and you can learn about difference between animals. You can complete it reasonably in a weekend. But going into wild wild forest is entirely another. (If you are interested, I wrote about it here: https://jjude.com/are-you-learning-a-new-domain-visit-its-zo...)

I learned React reasonably quick. But when I started writing production application, I got into so many cases which were not covered in introductory materials. I found answers to some of these cases via google; I had to find answers to many others by trial and error.

That is why people sharing these type of patterns helps. We all become wiser before getting into wild forest.

I am like you, I want to write in markdown, store in plain text & organized in folders. I started with nvAlt. It is great but it doesn't support folders. So I jumped to iAWriter on Mac & iPhone. I have about 1500 files spread across different folders. I have been using this setup for about 8 months now. It seems to work pretty good.

I studied in Tamil medium. When I entered college, I could not speak a sentence in English. Here are the things that helped me.

1. Read Bible cover to cover many time with a Tamil Bible side-by-side. I didn't understand many of the words / phrases. Still I kept reading as long as I understood the meaning.

2. In college we met every evening for prayer. I started sharing messages for few minutes. I made lot (a lot) of mistakes, but my friends helped me improve. Lot of folks made fun of me, but I still kept going because two of close friends kept encouraging me.

3. Watched Friends series with sub-titles. I didn't understand many of the dialogues because I lacked context. Still I would memorize sentences and repeat to myself.

4. Started writing a blog[]. The one I have currently is 2nd or 3rd one. In the first blog, I wrote primarily about what I knew well - SQL, Vantive etc. So the content was there, I had to only find ways to express it. Even now, I write about what I know or what I learn, so that makes it easier to blog.

: https://jjude.com

5. When I read articles or books, I note down the sentences or phrases I like. I store them in Evernote and re-visit them often. I try to use them in some daily usage.

Next month I will deliver a keynote speech in Azure global bootcamp in my city (Chandigarh). From not able to speak a sentence in English to this, has been a long journey of frustration, encouragement, and satisfaction.

Good luck.