Rahul gives unsolicited advice

There's a lot to unpack in the title. Let's start with FOSS United . FOSS United is an Indian non-profit "dedicated to the cause of building Free and Open Source (FOSS) projects and communities in India". As part of building FOSS communities in India, they host a monthly meetup in Bengaluru  which I started attending in December 2022. In the January 2023 meetup, I gave a talk on the Digital Personal Data Protection Bill 2022 . For the February 2023 meetup, I proposed a talk on Scientific computing because everyone I met in the Dec 2022 and Jan 2023 meetups didn't know what a "Scientific Software Developer" does. The proposal was rejected but the organizers reached out to me and asked me if I was interested in being part of a panel discussion on "The State of FOSS" in India. I enthusiastically agreed, the panel had an internal meeting to prep for the discussion and the moderator came up with a set of questions. The panel discussion happened thi...

There has been a lot of interest in audio books but I had never listened to one. Not until Saturday that is. I needed to drive to and from Banglore this weekend and it takes 4+ hours each way, not taking into account potential traffic within the city itself. Usually, i'm on the phone or i'm listening to podcasts. But, given the bet I have with Preeti this month, I thought listening to audio books would be a better use of my time. So I went through the entire catalogue of ebooks available on the Library app and picked five, four of which I ended up actually listening to. The first was The Twits by Roald Dahl , narrated by Richard Ayoade , who you might know from the IT Crowd. It was short and hilarious. Richard Ayoade does an amazing job with the narration. I was smiling practically the entire time I was listening to the audio book. It was roughly an hour long so not a big audio book. In a few years time, when my son starts reading books, I'm definitely buying all of Roald D...

Arun talked about how he found the Radical Candor talk ( see the previous blogpost ) very useful and how he had his first short radical candor talk with a junior at his work place. He mentioned that he found it useful to understand the other persons perspective and he mentioned how the other person pointed out things that could have helped them. I then asked Arun if he could improve the onboarding document that their company has for new employees based on their discussion. When a discussion has meaningful outcomes, especially outcomes that can be applied to an entire group of people, it's a good idea to document them instead of letting the information sit in peoples' heads. He then mentioned that he found the Randall Koutnik talk ( see the previous blogpost ), specifically that it helped him understand how to break down work before delegating it and how he could take the capabilities of a younger employee into consideration when breaking down the work for them. If you haven...

Open Circuits by Eric Schlaepfer, Windell H. Oskay I think I heard about Open Circuits on Hacker News three or four months back. I found it very interesting and I eventually gifted it to my sister-in-law and her husband, both of who are electronics engineers and run a small hardware consulting firm. Their first reaction was that they wished they had this book when they were younger. I read this book early this week while I visited them and I felt the same. The book is more of a coffee table book in my opinion with large pictures of the inside of various electrical and electronic components with brief explanation on the components themselves. This would have been a great book to start exploring the field of electronics as a young kid, potentially leading to a ton of questions on the various components in the book. One constant question I had throughout the entire book was regarding the manufacturing process of these intricate electronic components. This is high on my list of books that...

I had my second mentoring session with Arun yesterday. We first talked about People Management and how to have potentially awkward conversations with co-workers on topics ranging from company culture to internal mentoring and work expectations. I pointed Arun to No Rules Rules , especially the parts of the book that talk about company culture and how it is important for everyone to feel like they are working with the best people. I feel incredibly lucky working at Enthought because I'm surrounded by people smarter than me every single day and I learn a ton from them. I discussed this book with my co-workers at our internal reading group and found it to be very stimulating. This felt especially important given that Arun is working at a very small startup and it isn't inconceivable that he will see the company grow 10x. When it comes to awkward conversations around internal mentoring, I pointed him to Radical Candor , another book that I had discussed with my co-workers at our i...