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Short random thoughts

I am unable to think about topics to write about. It is not writer block but rather a result of sleep debt from last week. I can’t wait for the weekend to sleep well.

I am recently debating universal basic income with friends. I am a believer it doesn’t make sense and will just lead to higher inflation. My friends believe it works and if there are the right mechanisms, there should be competition between businesses to attract customers money, leading to cheaper prices. I was also surprised it was going to happen in the US in the 70s but they didn’t proceed with the idea. Happy to discuss any thoughts you have.

I am still on twitter and LinkedIn break. I won’t open any of them till the end of the month. I am having withdrawal effects, but I am holding tight.

I want to make my writing habit consistent in timing. I want to start my day writing something. The problem is being a night owl makes me always wake up late for work. And I can’t force myself to wake up earlier for the sake of writing.

I am currently spreading my vocal advocacy for night owls and how the modern work schedule doesn’t fit them. I discovered many people don’t know it is mainly genetic, and they can’t do much about it. It now makes other owls feel less guilty about themselves when I tell them about the genetic fact. I am feeling like Rick when he said “I am a pickle”. I keep telling people “I am an owl“. #teamOwls

I am also thinking about detachment. I noticed I am becoming defensive in some meetings recently. This stems from being with the same team for almost a year, and taking pride in the work we do. There is a fine line between defending the work being done and thinking of what needs to be improved. The problem is after a while we become part of the system. We let the waves move us in their direction. We should keep an open mind, and instead of going with the flow or resisting, we should surf to rise high above those challenges and arrive safely to our goals.

I have two long form posts that I never finished. One is about stakeholder management. I recently wrote a paper on how we manage stakeholders in our department that went viral inside the company. It is too specific that makes it useless to be published publicly as is. I have a draft for the public one, but it needs half a day to finish. The second post is about writing the developers newsletter inside the company. I took this task from a colleague that went on parental leave, and I didn’t imagine I would enjoy it that much (it is ironic the extrovert, talkative, vocal guy didn’t think he would enjoy writing a monthly newsletter to 200+ teams). I experimented some ideas, and wanted to share this experience. I hope I will get to publishing both of them.

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Assessing London

I came back yesterday from the UK. I visited London, Edinburgh, and spent one night in Glasgow. 

I totally enjoyed the trip. Being in a place where everyone speaks English makes a big difference. Also the British are more smiley, chatty, and socially aware than the vibe I am getting in Berlin.

Maybe the socially aware point is a bit vague. It is hard to explain but for me it is being aware of the surrounding and proactively managing the situation. I normally observe this feeling in how/when people offer their help with something.

On the flip side the three cities I visited are far behind in infrastructure compared to Berlin. London public transit system is not accessible. Buses are small, allowing them to take maximum one wheelchair at a time. In Berlin buses are bigger, can take two, sometimes three wheelchairs at the same time.

London tube is much worse. The default is non-accessible stops. In a big city like London, it makes things much harder for people like myself.

I imagine the accessible housing situation is equally bad. Most of the city is old. Berlin is still being built which creates more accessible housing opportunities for people such as myself.

I still loved it, but not sure if I would want to live there. I normally look for three factors when assessing a new city.

1) Career Opportunities

I believe London wins on that one. The big 5 have development offices there. There are more startup deals and funding than any other European city.

2) People accessibility

London wins because of the language. I do understand the arguments of people being easy on the outside and hard on the inside. But I still think if one understands the language, it becomes a question of the effort you put into blending with the people around you.

3) Accessibility

Berlin wins by big margin. And it is getting even better over time.

I am not thinking of moving, but for me this was a good eye opener into the London situation and what are the options if I decided to move out of Berlin.

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Accessible British Bathrooms

One thing I don’t understand about accessible bathrooms in the UK is their insistence on having a tiny sink, and placing it too close to the toilet. I can’t think of a reason for such a bad design and it is totally unusable.

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Yak Shaving

I was in a planning meeting few weeks ago and one of my colleagues said something wasn’t done because the team was “Yak Shaving”. We didn’t understand so we googled it during the meeting and this is what we found

Yak shaving is programming lingo for the seemingly endless series of small tasks that have to be completed before the next step in a project can move forward.

Then he said I have a very good video that explains what it is. We also played it in the meeting.

https://youtu.be/AbSehcT19u0

This was funny.

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Short random thoughts

I don’t have time to write much but I want to keep up with the habit. So here is a short random thoughts post.

These days I am thinking about London and comparing it a lot to Berlin. It is really good to be in a place that speaks English but the public transit system sucks in terms of wheelchair accessibility.

I am thinking about self censorship. I delete many thoughts after writing them. I don’t know how much self censorship is good or bad but I think I am doing more censorship than necessary.

I am reflecting on my decision to delete Facebook in 2015. Before Trump became a president, and before GDPR. It is one of the best decisions I made but I didn’t think enough of its impact. This needs another post.

I might elaborate more on those points later. I might not. But right now, those are my random thoughts.

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Hello London

I am in London for a short visit. It is my first time.

It feels good to be in a place where English is the default.

I always say I am operating at 50% of my social capacity in Germany because of the language.

It feels different when you understand what’s happening around you. The signs, the announcements, and the side talks.

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Unique Pageviews

I don’t check this blog’s analytics often. I do it every few months. I was curious to know which posts/pages are read the most this year. This is the data since 1st of January until today.

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Scalability of ethics

I was watching Peter Thiel interview with Dave Rubin. Part of the interview was Thiel talking about seasteading, a libertarian Utopia he wants to build in the middle of the sea.

The first thing that came to mind upon hearing this was Talib’s “ethics don’t scale” argument from Skin in the Game.

There is also

A libertarian Utopia can not scale, or it will turn into a dictatorship or something else.

That’s one of the reasons I don’t understand humanists that keep saying we are all one. No we are not. We are different. There are infinite factors that determine our position in society and our life path. We can’t control for most of those factors. We live with other human beings. They have different desires and incentives. They have different genes. Their ethics are different. They act differently.

The only way we can all be one is in a dystopian world. A world in which we are all trapped together having to abide by rules dictating we all should behave in a certain way. In such a world I will probably be unconscious. This makes life meaningless. And I don’t want to live a meaningless life. Sorry, we are not one.

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Quality through quantity

A friend was telling me I am writing a lot recently. I told him I try to do it daily. Then he went into the whole discussion of quantity vs quality.

Writing is a muscle. You need to train it to get better at it. It is also a habit, you need to form it. 

By doing it often you get to a point where you can write high quality pieces easily. You achieve quality through quantity.