product

1/ The biggest hindrance in building any product is noise from outside. It is from people who are not using your product but giving advice.

2/ Losing focus comes next to noise. It is very easy to get lost for winning customer and losing a circle of competence.

3/ Quick growth which means scaling, hiring, unpackaged product development and unclear moats.

4/ Marketing which should be the word to mouth by delighting customers turns into social media ads.

Buzzwords

I have lived through a decade of tech hype. I started coding with LOGO. Much has changed since then.

Every 2-3 years I get to hear new buzzwords: virtualization, IaaS, SaaS, PaaS, Containers, federated, Docker, Bitcoin, Blockchain, serverless.

I have my friend Ashish who has been running the same business of selling aluminum sheets in these 10-15 years. He keeps saying, in the end, it about how much profit you are making from a sale.

How many of these buzzwords have returned significantly to their stakeholders is yet to be seen.

famous

Why do we have this urge from within to be famous? It can be one being an influencer, thought leader or someone with many followers. Is it about feeling good or getting out and proving our worth to the world?

The marketers are thriving on it. Making us feel vulnerable, our quest for being famous is making them rich. We buy ads on Instagram, pay media to win founder of the year award.

I have never understood why and how this all works. In the end, it is about looking ourselves in our eyes, being honest with self.

meetup

My first Linux user group meetup was in 2001/2002. It changed my life forever. It shaped my career, got me a huge network and shaped me as an individual.

I can’t imagine where I would have been in life if I had not encountered Lug/FOSS. The network, mentoring and relationship have helped me in all these years.

I attended another Linux user group meetup after a long time. There were some familiar faces whom I had met via IRC, Twitter or other Linux events.

There was a 3ed engineering student as well in the room who reminded me of myself. My first meetup, I was clueless about what these people are talking about. The difference he had was Internet availability and better Linux distribution. He mentioned why these days meetups are not needed, the Internet has it all. I so wished to tell him how these meetups were more about connecting, meeting and learning life. Linux and technology was one part of it.

ourselves

We are surrounded by people who have never done something in their life but have got a shit load of opinions. These are the so-called thought leaders, from sharing WhatsApp forwards to Facebook posts, they can be found everywhere.
These opinions and thought leaders do more harm to society than the favor. Their preaching of 10000 hours of perfection to KETO to mindfulness, ends up in creating a herd. We, humans, are so scared that we seek out for externalities for everything. From advice to the comfort we seek out instead of seeking in and self questioning.

We end up becoming followers of a mass murderer, rapists or a pedophile just because we are too scared of ourselves. We are seeking for that magic bullet in others to comfort us.

recycle

The humans came to exist centuries ago. We survived against all the odds: predators, nature. We learned from our mistakes and got better with time. We built houses, arms and formed a society.

Coming to 2019, I get a feeling that most of our current challenges have answers in the past. Our innovations are built on our past knowledge. All we need to do is to recycle. Most of our pains and miseries are no different than what our forefathers faced. Some guided us with the solution in the form of philosophy, psychology or religious text.

I find it stupid when I see the so-called thought leaders of the current generation preaching knowledge about life without giving credits to the original creators.

34

Celebrated my 34th birthday yesterday. I feel lucky to have survived so far in this journey of life. The quest for acquiring self-knowledge is still going on.

What more do I expect from this amazing life: I have great friends and family members around me, I have enough money to pay for my bills and all my body parts are working alright.

alone

Most of our life we are on ourselves. We live with our body and thoughts. We have externalities in the form of companions and society.

If we master and accept living with ourselves, in our consciousness living this life becomes very easy. It keeps us calm and going in the flow of life without any pain and worry.

It is not necessary to go by the template and appease everyone as long as you are not hurting others. It is not required to be part of this herd, you are free to have your thoughts and liberty to express it.

Rabindra Nath Tagore wrote a famous poem Ekla Chalo Re. I have added its English translation below.

If they answer not to thy call walk alone,
If they are afraid and cower mutely facing the wall,
O thou of evil luck,
open thy mind and speak out alone.

If they turn away, and desert you when crossing the wilderness,
O thou of evil luck,
trample the thorns under thy tread,
and along the blood-lined track travel alone.

If they do not hold up the light when the night is troubled with storm,
O thou of evil luck,
with the thunder flame of pain ignite thy own heart
and let it burn alone.

Bengali version of the same poem