Candost's Blog

Candost's Blog

Candost

I used to think that reading would make me wise. One day, ten pages before finishing a book, I realized that I had read that same book before. At that point, my perspective on reading and, therefore, my life had changed. Now, I don’t care how many books I read; I take many notes, connect dots, and share what I’ve found on my blog and newsletter. I’m interested in many things at the same time (I’m a multipotentialite). On this blog, you’ll find me talking to about multiple aspects of life like leadership, software engineering, philosophy, psychology, software architecture & design, urban & industrial design, exercising, finance, Formula1 Racing, eating healthy, and many more. I’m a software engineering manager; that’s my current job. At home, I’m a writer and an avid reader. I rarely watch TV, movies or TV series. I don’t have any social media account (except Mastodon where I have automated posting of my new articles). Hence, I often miss the popular culture references in conversations. That’s alright. I don’t have FOMO; I embrace JOMO. I rarely read fictional books.

Latest Posts

In a dinner with a colleague, we talked about psychology in leadership. They were going to therapy and told me the impact of group therapy (I never had one): you see yourself through the eyes and stories of others. When you listen to...
When Patrick Rothfuss wrote about Auri, he didn't tell a story. He defined a person. Auri is still a mystery and will always be. She figured things out in her world away from everyone, and she often understood how things should be....
Every time I see an engineer gets headroom to make some improvements in the system, I get worried. Even though they can turn complex tasks into complicated ones and solve them, they often struggle with freedom. Even though they know...
Task Relevant Maturity is a concept that helps the leader to understand how much they should monitor their subordinate and guide them. "How often you monitor should not be based on what you believe your subordinate can do in general, but...
In 2014, Douglas Stone & Sheila Heen, from the Harvard Negotiation Project and the authors of Difficult Conversations, came together and published a book called Thanks for The Feedback. In 309 pages, they talked about how to receive...
This article is part of my notes from Chapter 9 of Designing Data-Intensive Applications by Martin Kleppmann. You can read other chapter notes as well. Chapter 1: Reliability, Scalability, and Maintainability in Distributed Applications...
Resilience comes with recovery, not endurance. You won't build resilience when you push for one more time if you're already exhausted. Your productivity will be depleted. Resilience comes from recharge and recovery. Professional athletes...
"Bet on things that won't change rather than predicting how things will change." — Jason Cohen Many experts fail to predict the future because many things change constantly. However, there are a few things that never change, and we know...
When I look back at the topics I covered in Mektup, I wrote about energy and time management, habits, multitasking, mentoring, remote work, process thinking, and many more. If I take one step back, a challenge becomes visible: I'm in the...
The questions that we need to answer after inspectional reading shows how much we need to get to know or understand the book. I say get to know because some books cannot be understood in the first reading and demand analytical reading....
We were having dinner with a friend, and in the middle of it, he said, “Candost, why are you so silent?” I was confused because we were in the middle of a conversation, and I was actively participating. When he clarified that he meant...
When we come across information, we mistakenly think we have learned something new. However, we just learned that that specific piece of information exists. We didn't learn what that information tells us. To understand the information,...
On January 23rd, 2023, I started an experiment and stopped all my social media usage. I didn’t read anything on Twitter, Mastodon, and LinkedIn. I occasionally checked my automated article sharing to see if they had been posted...
I started Mektup on Substack. Right after the first issue, I migrated to ConvertKit, where I hosted Mektup for 36 issues, and then moved it to Ghost, where I hosted my blog to merge everything into one place. Ghost was a great host...
Recently, I read Tuckman Was Wrong by Doc Norton. It's an old piece (yes, 2017 is old now). The article talks about how teams don't go from one stage to another in the order Tuckman defined: forming, storming, norming, and performing....
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