The Illusion of Control
The illusion of control is a susceptibility to exaggerate one’s ability to control outcomes. In one sense, maintaining this illusion is necessary for one’s emotional well-being. If we allowed ourselves the truest reckoning of how little our efforts matter in shaping the important outcomes in our lives – how...
This explains everything — the CAP theorem
Several years ago, Edge.org posed the question “What is your favorite deep, elegant, or beautiful explanation?”. The book “This explains everything” compiled 150 answers from renowned authors and thinkers in physics, biology, economics, and computer science. This essay is in the same vein. Accurate, ubiquitously available facts in a...
How do you ask for water?
Clear communication is a prerequisite for collaboration. A lack of clear communication is, perhaps inarguably, the biggest impediment to forming and sustaining effective teams. Communication is what the listener perceives, not what the speaker utters. However, this does not mean that “it’s all up to the listener”. The attempt...
The “Policeman” — by Anis Siddiqui
In 1989, my late father, Anis Siddiqui, wrote this article for a magazine at the behest of a literary and personal friend of his. I’m reproducing it here with minimal editing: the only changes are replacing single-quotes with double quotes and adding “sic” to a place where I believe...
Decolonizing my language
One way to define personal growth is “a regular unlearning of entrenched falsehoods in favor of newly discovered realities”. For too long I have blithely used language that was built up in a culture of racial and other forms of discrimination. I intend to deconstruct it, destruct the flawed...
Why I disapprove of terms like “Code Monkey”
Originally written in 2015 in a private correspondence. In our line of work, we have a wide array of tasks that require some degree of specialization. Keeping Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment builds green, monitoring the complexity of code, observing the trends on the Kanban wall, guarding against too many meetings,...
Secrets
Yesterday, I made a mistake that’s unfixable. I committed a database password to a public code repository. Granted, it was a password to a local database — one that can only run on “localhost” (i.e. the computer you’re working on). And it was for a small project that my...
The benefits of allyship
Why should a cis-gendered man advocate for the rights of women and LGBTQ+ people? “Be warned that if you wish, as I do, to build a society in which individuals cooperate generously and unselfishly towards a common good, you can expect little help from biological nature. Let us try...
Conference report: FOSDEM 2020
On the first two days of February, I attended and presented at the 20th edition of FOSDEM – the annual Free and Opensource Developers’ European Meeting in Brussels, Belgium. Background FOSDEM bills itself as the best Opensource conference in Europe. It has always been held in Brussels and, to my knowledge,...
Conference report: DeliveryConf
On January 21st and 22nd, I attended the inaugural DeliveryConf in Seattle Washington. Format Over the course of two days, there were four keynote sessions1, one at the beginning and the other at the end of each day. There were 9 other speaking slots (5 on Tuesday, 4 on Wednesday)....