2026
My Notes live in Markdown. My Code lives in GitHub. It was only a matter of time.
All my notes live in Markdown. Everything I ship lives in GitHub. So why was I still flipping to Terminal every time I finished editing a note? I got tired of it. So I fixed it.
Updates to Mandrill App (already)
Version 2.0 replaces the tabbed interface with a brand-new left navigation, adds a full keyboard shortcut system, and makes font & theme customization faster than ever.
Introducing Mandrill
You shouldn’t need a code editor just to read a README. Mandrill renders Markdown files beautifully on macOS offline, instantly, and without asking for an account.
A Quiet Moment at Sensoji
Sometimes, the most powerful way to experience a place is to look up. At Sensoji, above the crowds and noise, timeless design and quiet beauty come into focus.
Understanding Inter-Arrival Time - The Hidden Performance Metric
Inter-Arrival Time is simply the time gap between receiving consecutive chunks of data.
Peek into your favorite AI Chatbot’s User Experience
Armed with nothing but Chrome’s DevTools, you can now peek behind the curtain of your favorite AI Cahtbot and see exactly what’s happening.
2025
A Plan Is Not a Strategy
A comprehensive plan—with goals, initiatives, and budgets–is comforting. But starting with a plan is a terrible way to make strategy. Roger Martin, former dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto.
Skyscraper Symphony – A Sunset Panorama of Midtown Manhattan
A breathtaking panoramic view of Midtown Manhattan at sunset — from the iconic Empire State Building to the modern marvels of Hudson Yards, this photo captures the quiet majesty of New York City’s skyline in a rare moment of stillness.
Princeton University
Wandering through the timeless beauty of Princeton University, where every corner whispers stories of tradition, knowledge, and inspiration. From historic halls to serene gardens, each snapshot captures the spirit of one of America’s most iconic campuses.
2024
Effectively monitoring HTTP/2 Applications
HTTP/2’s primary performance advantage lies in its multiplexing feature, where multiple streams are handled simultaneously over a single TCP connection. Inefficient multiplexing can lead to inefficiencies. It’s important to use the right tools and strategy for HTTP/2 applications.
O11y - Data is the Key to Understanding Application Behavior
Monitoring solutions typically involve the collection of logs, traces, and metrics that assist organizations in comprehending the behavior of their applications. These tools process vast quantities of data to provide valuable insights. Traditionally, monitoring was conducted in silos, necessitating separate tools for monitoring various aspects, such as applications, networks, security, and more.
2023
Decentralize your Backlog
Ideas are cheap. They come up all the time and end up in the backlog. Remember, really important ideas almost always come back.
Growing your online presence
If you have a blog, website, trying to sell online or have a small business - basically if you have an onine presence - a website; do not underestimate the power of Google search. Today, when you have to look for a service, a place to eat or literally anything - you go search on Google or Google maps.
Understanding the Social app space
Ben Thompson on Stratechery [
Reading while being away
I have been away for a few weeks, traveling and attending conferences. While the conferences have been giving me an insight into the amazing things organizations are building (very heavily focused on AI/ML), I have been reading some fascinating articles during my down time. [
Coming Soon: New Update to LearnTheFlags
LearnTheFlag has been doing well and I have been enjoying using it with my son to teach him about the different countries in the world. The latest addition of the Map view and including the Wiki link has been great.
Evolving LearnTheFlags app
Even before I launched the app, it was evident from the TestFlight results that it was important to show the countries on a map.
Speed matters
Speed matters! Not just in Formula 1 but also in your product execution.
LearnTheFlags is Live!
We are live and you’re officially invited to see what’s new. Download on the App Store today.
I got the mail a while back and I’m beyond excited!! Give it a try and on to Version 2.
Getting ready with my first (ever) App!
I have been testing my app for the last few days with friends & family and as of last night I have submitted my app to the AppStore 🤞🏽
Building an app to learn SwiftUI
Later, someone recommended me the 100 day challenge by @twostraws (Paul Hudson) on Hacking with Swift.
Building and growing along with your product
To scale as a product manager means relinquishing control. When you grow, your product grows, your organization grows.
Handy Linux Debugging Tools
Linux has a treasure trove of utilities that allows you to keep tabs on whats hitting your performance. More on bash later where you can almost automate and create workflows.
How a glitchy controller started a trend
I see my son capturing videos, and now wants to have an Instagram/YouTube account for his Fortnite adventures.
Forming Self-Organizing teams
Give your self-organizing team they autonomy they need and control the chaos.
Banana UX for Product Managers
Having worked as a UX designer, this is possibly one of the best way to explain User Experience Design to anyone, let alone product managers.
How Apple has so far avoided layoff: Lean Hiring, No Free Lunches
These numbers are simply staggering.
Writing effective One Pagers
You know your one-pager is working when it sparks a conversation and interaction within the team. These conversation help create shared understanding around values, outcomes, impact, opportunity, viability and risk.
A thread by Nikita Bier on Product Management & Entrepreneurship
A thread by Nikita Bier :
Focus on the One Thing!
Today, instead of making a long list of tasks, I simply look at my agenda and identify what’s the one thing that I do today will have the highest impact.
What happens when a CPU starts?
Came across this fascinating text file today https://lateblt.tripod.com/bit68.txt. Reminded me of my Computer Architecture class in college.
Why employee churn is lethal to Software
Even as a product manager when I pick up a software to further build it out, certain features need context becasue outright they just feel weird. Only after talking to first generation product manager, it becomes clear why a feature was built the way it is.
Measuring HTTP Performance
In order to effectively measure HTTP based application performance, it is important to understand what happens when you type a URL in a browser and hit enter.
Study suggests hardware buttons are quicker & safer compared to touchscreens
Hardware works. Hardware is also expensive! Software is simply flexible compared to hardware
Reading list for the new year
The 10 biggest scientific breakthroughs of 2022
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2022
Reading List for the Holidays
0 P-22: Rest in Peace
Product Management Gyan: Market Segmentation
At a startup or when finding new TAM’s in an organizaiton, as a Product Mangaer you find yourself at the helm of building a new product. One of the very first step is doing Market Segmentation
Are you also Closed Captioning?
I highly recommend to get a good quality sound bar. Make sure your sound bar has atleast 3 channels, so that the center (dedicated) channel will give you the dialogue and the remaining background sounds are channled through the other speakers.
Apple Pushing to Launch Search Engine to Rival Google
For Apple to work on a search engine akin Google means that the opportunity is much larger than $15 Billion.
The Backbone Controller
I have tried multiple controllers for the iPhone for myself and my son and the Backbone controller by far has been one of the best. If you are in the market for one, give Backbone a try.
ChatGPT: A new toy!
AI is real (or has been real for a while) and you are only going to see it grow from here on. There will be years before this will be far from perfect but thats the nature of AI/ML. It takes time to get better.
What is Apple’s App Store’s future plans?
According to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, Apple now has to deal with the Digital Markets Act, that was recently passed by the European Parliament. And this would mean Apple will require major changes to Apple’s business beginning in 2024.
Spider-man: Across the Spider-Verse; CAN’T WAIT!
I absolutely loved the graphics when the first Spider-Verse came out. The second one looks even more aweosme. Really looking forwad to this one.
Morocco! What a team! 🇲🇦⚽️
Morocco’s history-making run saw them become the first African nation to reach the semi-finals and now the
Tesla releases holiday update with Apple Music, Mahjong, and more
Hallelujah! Now I know what was that call all about between Elon Musk and Tim Cook.
Apple’s Ad Service - lets look at tracking
I have already said, that the services pie is gong to grow a lot bigger for Apple and advertisement is going to be one of the major drivers for this.
Spent quality time on Twitter this week
I spent some quality time on twitter this week. I closed my NetNewWire App and had my twitter feed up all week.
Some mindful reading this week
For me, typing is thinking.
FTX
Two really great articles that tell you what exactly went down at FTX. Fascinating read!
Feds likely to challenge Microsoft’s $69 billion Activision takeover
Josh Sisco for Politico:
Amazon Alexa is a “colossal failure,” on pace to lose $10 billion this year
Yes, Apple HomePods are expensive. Well, hardware is expensive and you can’t sell devices at a loss for a decade. Let that sink in.
Fastly Subdomain Takeover $2000
Today, I am going to share how I found Fastly subdomain takeover vulnerability and earn my first four digits bounty. Let’s get started.
Inside Matter!
Inside of Apple Watch vs. Pixel Watch pic.twitter.com/AQjo6OPeGz — Joseph Cohen (@josephcohen) November 3, 2022
Apple is building an Ad (Services) Empire
The highlight for me during the entire earnings call was that Services now account for 33% of Apple’s gross profit and the fastest-growing segment in FY22 - up 14% YoY.
User Experience (UX) Metrics for Product Managers using RUM
RUM has been around ever since I started my first job (well over 20 years I recon) and the issue I fell is that people still don’t realize how best to utilize RUM.
The new iCloud experience is here (Public Beta)
It’s fast and looks great! Needs more widgets :)
Moonwalkers: New options for the commuter
Moonwalkers are show attachments with motorized wheels - like Heelys that you see kids wearing around. But these are for adults and according to the company behind moonwalkers - they boast that it can increase the wearer’s walking speeds by 250%. I have lived in Princeton and worked in New York City for over a decade and something like this would be a game changer. They are compact and can be simply worn on your shoes without having to handle other heavy gear and bother fellow commuters.
They attach to a wide variety of shoes using adjustable straps and magnetic buckles - so need to change what you wear. The devices continuously communicate with each other and monitor the user’s gait to adjust speed. They can switch between Shift and Lock modes with a simple foot movement. A video from the Moonwalkers’ Kickstarter project is available in the article.
GitHub hits $1 Billion ARR
Elon Musk’s open letter to Advertisers
Dear Twitter Advertisers pic.twitter.com/GMwHmInPAS — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 27, 2022
Apple (still) exploring iPads with larger screens
In my humble opinion, merging the two platforms would simply be a disaster. There is continuity now between your Mac and iPad; and it works amazingly well! That’s blurry enough for me.
Obviously we’ll have to comply…
Apple’s Craig Federighi and Greg Joswiak (@gregjoz) join @JoannaStern at #WSJTechLive to discuss products, privacy and power at the tech giant https://t.co/fNo2JGwMB4https://t.co/aGrTlZrUo4 — The Wall Street Journal (@WSJ) October 26, 2022
Absolutely love these one off data correlations
Cricket is a religion in India. And when Virat (King) Kohli was batting the way he was after a couple of years; everyone stopped and watched.
New Products from Apple
iPad
Merck pays Moderna $250m for personalized cancer vaccine
Good to see Apple folks at Formula 1’s Austin Grand Prix
It was hard to miss watching Tim Cook wave the checkered flag at the Austin Grand Prix. Also present was Apple’s exec Eddie Cue Which would have prompted that Formula 1 is coming to AppleTV. Unfortunately, ESPN renewed its contract to air Formula 1 through 2025 this weekend.
Gas app was able to cut Redis Engine CPU utilization by 80%
Today we cut our Redis Engine CPU Utilization by 80% and survived to live (and grow) another day!
We were CPU constrained & maxed out scaling limits for our ElastiCache cluster. We had 2 hours to reduce utilization before our next traffic surge or we were toast.
What did we do? pic.twitter.com/e4PPn59PqQ — Dave Schatz (@daveschatz) October 21, 2022
Apple increases its subscription prices
The 20 Fastest Growing Jobs in the Next Decade
Jenna Ross writing for Visual Capitalist:
The tile and the choice of visualization caught my eye. The visualization especially does a great job as it very clearly tells me what will matter in the future and what is becoming obsolete.
How to learn modern Rust
Came across this gem of a repo on Github today - How to learn modern Rust. This repo has some great collection for you to get started on rust to implementing some complex projects. What a great repo.
DacheQL
DacheQL is a lightweight caching tool for GraphQL.
Now Even Science Grants Must Bow to ‘Equity and Inclusion’
Apple is now gonna be a Bank
Meta’s VR announcement at Connect 2022
Lipstick on a pig by Nick Heer:
Google says Matter is still set to fix the biggest smart home frustrations
Jennifer Pattinson Tuohy writing for The Verge:
Carbon, a new programming language from Google, aims to be C++ successor
Existing modern languages already provide an excellent developer experience: Go, Swift, Kotlin, Rust, and many more. Developers that can use one of these existing languages should. Unfortunately, the designs of these languages present significant barriers to adoption and migration from C++. These barriers range from changes in the idiomatic design of software to performance overhead.
Bun
Kind of excited about this project and its prospects:
Apple Apps enterprise ready?
Apple announced new features for their messaging platform. While all of us can enjoy editing and unending the messages and complain that Twitter can’t get a simple editing feature; there is something else that no one has mentioned yet.
Even Apple Mail now boasts about Unsend Mail, Schedule Mail and a better search.
IconFactory’s WorldWideWeb
I absolutely love IconFactory’s apps. I use at least 2 or 3 of them on almost a daily basis. Iconfactory’s developer Craig Hockenberry announced a new app recently and it home for me.
gqt
Off late I have been dealing with API at work and home, REST and GraphQL. Came across this fantastic utility today - gqt. It’s a simple GraphQL client, but runs in the terminal. Using this in Visual Studio Code’s Terminal is so helpful when you don’t have to switch windows while working.
Markdoc
Came across Markdoc today, made by Stripe.
Drama at Twitter continues… 🍿
Well, everyone wants to make sure they get a fair deal: Elon Musk says Twitter deal on hold pending details on fake accounts; shares sink 9%.
mitmproxy2swagger
Came across an interesting library (or tool) - mitmproxy2swagger that reverse-engineers REST API just by running the web app and sniffing traffic in the background. Once you are done, the tool allows you to download a yaml file. Open up the file in Swagger and voilà! Beautifully formatted API endpoint. Can be useful to document API for your application.
Moving away from 1Password
I have been using 1Password for a very long time. However, for the past year or more, I have come to rely on Safari (on macOS, iOS and iPadOS) to suggest me strong passwords, storing them for me and ultimately, me making a manual copy/paste to 1Password.
Kadri Kambala
The slush track comes down to a stand still, with no wind you can see the reflection in the water. The adrenalin is running high and with a crack of the whip the the silence and stillness brakes into chaos.
One of the best CLI utility I have used in a while
Having worked on Linux early in my career, it is hard to get away from the cli. I continue using cli as much as I can and am constantly on the look out of tools that can make my life easier.
Microplastics are confirmed in human blood for the first time
Brad Bergan for Interesting Engineering:
Go 1.18 released with Generics support
Go 1.18 isn now generally available. This release supports generics which a lot of us have been waiting for. This is still the very first version to support generics and I believe this feature will gain more support and updates in the upcoming features.
Star”bucks”!!!
With the earnings season in full swing, this tweet just blew my mind:
The New York Times buys Wordle
Emotional Intelligence - An example
Justin Bariso writing for Inc. on explaining emotional intelligence when reporters asked Tom Brady if he was going to retire after the Bucs lost to Rams last weekend:
The 5G Airline Controversy: What is it about?
5G versus the airlines is potentially a real issue, rather than a bogus threat. But it’s likely that the parties involved will work out adjustments soon. Which is a good thing.
Scaling with Process vs. People
Marty Cagan writing for SVPG on scaling your product with people instead of processes:
What’s in a Good Error Message?
Good error messages are important. When things go wrong, these error messages are the only communication channel between your software and customer. A good error message will allow your customer to recover well or submit a support ticket - and thats $ we are talking about.
Makar Sankranthi!
Down south, in a small village near Hasan in Karnataka, IN the celebration is a tad different. Here the farmers along with their bulls jump over burning fire to ensure the evil spirits stay away from their fields and help get a good crop yield.
2021
The secret of the macOS Monterey network quality tool
Dan Petrov found a cool new utility:
Killing a feature is also important
When it comes to adding a feature to your product, there are countless ways of doing this - and we still mess it up. However, when it comes to killing a feature there isn’t much out there.
Learning golang - my journey
As a product manager by trade, I don’t need sit and learn programming languages as I’m not expected to site down and write code. But the engineering in me wants to keep building.
Product vs Feature teams
The lack of giving up control and delegating to your product team is probably the biggest reason I see very few product empowered teams.
Tight & Loose Cultures and its impact
You have to listen to the podcast to understand why a country or its culture is shaped the way it is. It’s not just entire countries, but even states within the US have tight or loose culture.
Applying a ‘Time-To-Market’ KPI in product
It is very common to get into the phase of doing more before releasing to the market. The TTM metric forces you to be frugal about your MVP.
Your Product is already obsolete - How to Survive
All startups go through three distinct phases – birth, growth, and survival. You start by making the product work, then you have to grow the product, and then, crucially, you have to focus on survival – on keeping it relevant.
New User Onboarding & Time to Value
When customers first sign up for your product, they will either get what they are looking for; or they won’t…
Avoid feature bloat and deliver your product strategy
Features too have an iceberg problem. They may seem to be small features but turn out to have huge costs. This can happen when you decide to ship a feature for a specific customer or a use case instead of shipping new products.
Measuring Feature Adoption
When it comes to SaaS Products, product managers typically have product adoption as one of their top KPIs to track; especially when launching a new product. The logic is pretty simple, improving product adoption means higher retention, lower churn and move revenue.
Product Roadmaps
Simply put, a product roadmap is a high level plan that organizations use to communicate their plans to achieve their product vision. Product vision is typically driven by the Company’s overall vision.
Measuring your WiFi Quality
I live in a townhome and this router sits on the first floor. With all of us working from home; the connection has been spotty in some of our rooms. The download speed is great when you get a good connection but the stability is worst.
User Experience (UX) Metrics for Product Managers
These tools ensure quality. This helps with SEO, accessibility and best practices and measures performance metrics. Performance metrics are important to understand how your page loads as this impacts user experience.
2020
When (& Why) to adopt Kanban
One of the biggest frustration with the scrum model is the last few days of sprint where everyone is rushing to deliver what was committed to at the beginning of sprint, cause splitting user stories or carrying them over is bad practice.
Product Metrics: How & What
Software products today are much more complex (in a nice way). Some of this complexity comes with a treasure trove of data. We then integrate with other software & SDK’s which help us understand users behavior and experience.
One more gadget: The Ember Mug 2
It keeps my coffee at my desired temperature. The battery on this lasts long enough for me to take my mug and walk around or go to a hour long meeting. Because of the ceramic coating, they do feel fragile, but I’m assuming the stainless-steel makes it durable.
iPad Pro gets a trackpad
iPad Pro was announced this week with a load of Hardware goodness. But what got the most attention was that iPad Pro now has a trackpad. Well, the Magic keyboard did (not the iPad) and the iPad OS was updated to support the trackpad.
Dropbox: Rewriting the heart of our sync engine
Once you have a successful product at your hand; things start to get complex. It’s not that the world has got complex problems; adding features and at times making this simple add complexity.
Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference 2020 kicks off in June with an all-new online format
perf top for debugging and checking if your app is hogging your CPU
You can look at performance of an application by multiple means. You can use synthetic tools like Google Puppeteer and Lighthouse to see the performance of a web application. But what about that server-side code that sits in the background to process and serve this data to your application.
Science is not easy
Hah!
It’s Roadmap season
Within the organization Roadmaps are a fearcly debated topic. It’s not the principle of a product roadmap; it’s the misunderstandings they bring.
2016
Technology is changing us (for the good I think)
Designing for mobile is different and not just with regards to the shape and size. Because mobile devices are lighter and more portable (in some cases), we find it more convenient to use them. And because we use them so often, we feel a unique, emotional connection to them.
2015
Every single Kramer entrance
Every single Kramer entrance!
Documenting UX
It does capture details; however, chances are when I see someone else’s wires, I may not like a solution. How do you support your solution?
Banner Blindness
The most prominent result from the new eyetracking studies is not actually new. We simply confirmed for the umpteenth time that banner blindness is real. Users almost never look at anything that looks like an advertisement, whether or not it’s actually an ad.
Please add “AI” to your Ads…
By now I’m immune to the ads that show up on the website and thanks to Readability, I don’t have to look at them constantly.
Graphic Recording for Documentation
So to solve that issue, what I did was come up with a story line - one liners (and explanation when I had to explain a concept) with bit sized graphics.
Outlook for iOS - job well done!
Acompli released an Outlook like app last year and Microsoft did not waste much of a time in snapping up this company. The result, Microsoft official Outlook for iOS app and in quick time.
2014
How much (Prototype) Fidelity?
Following up on my article I wrote some time back, “Wireframing is NOT Prototyping” - a common question that got asked was, well if its not prototyping, what is it and what level of fidelity one should expect?
Wireframing is not Prototyping
The last few years the wireframes have looked more and more different and detailed. Images, actual look and feel, every single mouse movement or tap or gesture and what happens next, etc. That definitely throws cheaper and faster out of the window.