Igor's Computer Blog

Copied from  Seth Godin  as I've always tried to articulate this, but was never able to so I'll copy swaths of his post: I can run a comfortable 6 miles per hour, but I can also run 10 miles an hour at full speed.  But, turns out I can only run 10 miles an hour for 5 minutes, while I can run 6 miles per hour for hours. Ten miles an hour is maximum speed, but it isn't optimum. Systems have an optimum level of performance. It's the output that permits the elements (including the humans) to do their best work, to persist at it, to avoid disasters, bad decisions and burnout. One definition of maximization is: A short-term output level of high stress, where parts degrade but short-term performance is high. Capitalism sometimes seeks competitive maximization instead. Who cares if you burn out, I'll just replace the part... That's not a good way to treat people we care about, or systems that we rely on. As a valuable contributor seeking to build a career,...

If you're interested in learning more about How Igor ticks,  Emotional Intelligence and Strategy, check out my alpha "blog" @ idvorkin.github.io It's currently very rough but has a few interesting properties: From a content perspective, it's focused on less technical topics - book reviews, strategy, emotional intelligence, and my own self discovery. From a technical perspective, it's a jekyll static  markdown blog, something I've always wanted to try because I can use powerful editing tools, keep the content under source control , and never need to worry about being at the mercy of my service provider.

TL;DR: Principles are unchangeable objective truths, values  are your subjective prioritization.  The better you can align your values and actions with principles, the easier your life will be.  Differentiating principles and values sounds pedantic, but it's important to differentiate the concepts. You choose your values, but your values have no impact on principles. Conversely, principles, can have a huge impact on your ability to live life according to your values.   When your values and principles are out of alignment, you're bound for some suffering. Stephen Covey differentiating principles and values: Principles apply at all time in all places. They surface in the form of values, ideas, norms, and teachings that uplift, ennoble, fulfill, empower, and inspire people. The lesson of history is that to the degree people and civilizations have operated in harmony with correct principles, they have prospered. Correct principles are like compasses: they are alway...

It's important to uncover "how you want to live your life", and to review it frequently.  Much of how I want to live my life is based on the 7 habits of highly effective people, and I've created a handy infographic to help inspire, remind, and encourage me. ps. If you're curious how often I review this infographic, I'll tell you a story. Turns out I drew this infographic in December 2013 while on vacation, and promptly forgot about it.  A few days ago, I was rummaging through an old sketch book, found the infographic and decided it was perfect.  To avoid forgetting it again, I'm adding it to my blog, and  am setting a weekly reminder to review it :)

TLDR:  When you're disheartened, do something that you can control and succeed at. Succeeding recharges your motivation and lets you take another run at your most important problems. Staying motivated is easy when you're having wins, or executing again a plan you believe will succeed.   Unfortunately, there will be long stretches where you won't have wins, and the longer it has been since a win, the farther you will be from believing your plan will succeed. When it's been too long since I've had a win, my motivation will tank, and I'll find you stop doing much of anything. For me to get back on track, I need to start working on things I can control and succeed at.   Often that means working on things that are less important then the things that have me disheartened. Except that's a fallacy.  See, the thing that's most important when I'm disheartened is finding my mojo. So, when you're disheartened, do something that you can control and su...

Writing breaks down into 4 distinct phases:  brainstorming, organization, writing and editing. To  reinforce the distinctness of these  phases, think of writing as four distinct jobs:  Madman, Architect, Carpenter and Judge.   Maximize your efficiency by doing each job, distinctly, deliberately and serially. Each  job has a specific goal,  and  that goal should be your  sole focus during while doing that job.  Do not do the next job, and do not go back to previous jobs.  To reinforce the distinctness of each job, consider using a different tool, and physical reminders of each job. As madman, your job is brainstorming.  Take your brain's musings and get them down on paper. Maximize creativity, find as many interesting ideas as possible. As madman don't waste time "arguing" or "revising" what you're spitting out.  Personally, I use pen and paper when  I'm the mad man to prevent  myself from revising, editing, o...

To be successful, you must communicate your ideas. The heart of communication is a story which must be written. Emma Coats wrote stories for Pixar, and tweeted a series of “story basics”. Most of these are applicable to communicating, and I’m posting them here to remind myself how to communicate better. What do you want to say? Why must you tell THIS story? What’s the belief burning within you that your story feeds off of? That’s the heart of it. Come up with your ending before you figure out your middle. Seriously. Endings are hard, get yours working up front. What’s the essence of your story? Most economical telling of it? If you know that, you can build out from there. How you want to say it? You gotta keep in mind what’s interesting to you as an audience, not what’s fun to do as a writer. They can be v. different. Discount the 1st thing that comes to mind. And the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th – get the obvious out of the way. Surprise yourself. Simplify. Focus. Combine chara...

Ira Glass describes the problem of sucking  with the eloquence of the master story teller that he is. Jeff Atwood  has the solution: 1) Embrace the suck - you'll keep sucking until you don't. 2) Do it in public - that way you can get feedback and learn how to suck less faster 3) Pick stuff that matters - the more important it is, the more motivation you have, and feedback you'll get.

A week ago, I was at a gala, and I ate a few chocolate truffles because they made me happy. I suspect it was wonderful, but honestly I don't remember if that was the case. Even worse, as I try to button up my pants and the pants are too tight, I'm feeling quite unhappy about eating the truffles. In the above paragraph there were three "I"'s or "selves" being referenced. The present experiencing self, the future remembering self, and the future experiencing self. To concisely refer to these three selves we'll call them the experiencing self, the remembering self, and the future self. As you think of three different selves there are two big questions. First, when you thinking about the costs and benefits of an action, think through the cost and benefits for the different selves. Second, decide which of the three selves you want to optimize for.  With luck your present self enjoys this post, your future self remembers enjoying the post, and ...

This post targets currently employed developers who want to switch jobs.   Job hunts are stressful, and my goal for my job hunts is getting the job I want without getting too stressed.  My job hunting stresses come from: lack of confidence, being rushed, not having options, disappointing others and the pressure from my current job responsibilities. By expecting and mitigating each of these stressors I greatly reduce the stress during my job hunt. Below are my stressors and mitigations: • Lack of confidence ○ Study for technical interviews - Study Cracking the Coding Interview  and system design questions . Expect to spend 4-8 hours a week for 4 to 8 weeks.  The longer it's been since you've interviewed last, the longer this will take. ○  Prepare for behavioral questions - Think through your previous projects for situations that demonstrate leadership, confidence, team building and be prepared to discuss them. ○ Do mock interviews - ask your fri...

When I have time to read, I want to read the best book I can. When I hear about a book I want to read, I either add it to the list of books I want to read, or I start reading the book immediately.   If I add the book to my  "to read" list, I'm almost certain I'll never read the book.  On the other hand, If I start reading the book right away, I'm almost certain the book is worse than books I've already added to my "to read" list. So, I'm going to try to build the discipline to only read the best book on my "to read" list, instead of reading the last good book mentioned to me.   I suspect this technique will be hard,  but reading the best books might be worth it.  If this works, I'll try to apply the same technique to other aspects of my life like movies, toys I want to watch, and people I want to have lunch with.

Stewardship delegation is a form of delegation where the responsibility for the delegated task is transferred to the delegatee.  Stewardship delegation requires upfront effort, but the long term effectiveness it creates is second to none, so I recommend learning and applying it. To establish stewardship delegation you must convey five concepts to your delegatee.  The desired results, the operating parameters, the available resources, the measurement system and the consequences of their stewardship.  I strongly recommend the delegator spend significant time ensuring the delegatee  understands these five concepts. Most of my failures to delegate are caused by the delegatee not understanding the concepts.  Having the delegatee involved in defining the concepts, especially the accountability model and the consequences helps build their buy in and tests the delegatee's understanding. The desired results is the outcome the delegator wishes to achieve.  Des...

A key scale out skill is delegation. Effective delegation refers to a small negative impact to the delegator resulting in a large positive impact via the effort of the delegatee.   Maximum delegation efficiency occurs in stewardship delegation. Stewardship delegation empowers the delegatee to be responsible for the delegated task, and takes an initially large investment from the delegator. However, once the stewardship delegation relationship has been established, minimal effort is required by the delegator to maintain the impact of the delegatee. A delegation relationship can be modelled as a teeter totter with the delegator on the left and the delegatee on the right.   The effectiveness of the delegation can be thought of as the pivot location. To increase the effectiveness of the delegation, the pivot must be moved to the left which allows small effort by the delegator to enable large impact via the delegatee. The pivot location and its movement is a function of delegat...

Scaling up refers to becoming a more effective person by increasing your personal efficiency. Scaling out refers to being a more effective person by engaging others to help solve your problems.    While scaling out is initially more difficult than scaling up, it has the potential for significantly more effectiveness than scaling up, so you should spend time investing in both types of scaling. To understand the entomology of these terms lets look at the computer domain.  In the domain of computers there are two common ways to achieve more computing power or scale. Scaling up and scaling out. Scaling up refers to getting more computing hardware for a single machine.  For example,  getting more RAM, faster CPUs or even bigger disks for the same computer.     On the other hand, scaling out refers to getting more computers. Instead of making your single computer faster you break up the problem so it can be processed by multiple computers and use the m...

I love being concise -   the efficiency warms my heart.   Russian, with its single   verb question, and matching single verb response gives me a visceral pleasure. Two Russians, Sergey and Slava, wanting to grab lunch could have the  following exchange: Sergey: Eat? Slava: Eat! My love of conciseness often  has me sending short emails.  Frequently, my mails are so concise that my reader has no idea what I'm talking about. This confusion means  I need to send another mail explaining the meaning of my initial concise mail. To conclude the lengthy explanation of my concise mail, I hear the words of my wise friend -  a message isn't concise if the reader can't understand it.

TL;DR: If you ask me any of the questions below I'll say ...  Sorry, I don't answer these questions, but would you like to talk about how my answer will affect you?   Are you quitting?   Is there a re-org?   Are you having a kid?    Is Igor getting fired? It's common for a questioner to  pose a question requiring a yes/no answer, with an intent to trap the respondent into disclosing information.  For example, assume Quincy wants to know if Rachel is pregnant, and Rachel is, but doesn't want to disclose that information yet. There are three possible behaviors for Rachel,  lie, disclose or abstain. Lie:   Quincy: Are you having a kid?   Rachel: No   2 weeks pass   Rachel: I feel awful for lying but I'm having a kid Disclose:   Quincy: Are you having a kid?   Rachel: Please don't tell anyone, no one should know, but yes. Abstain:    Quincy: Are you having a kid?    Rachel: ...

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It's very easy to get worked up about fools. I've both been worked up, and had co-workers on the ledge of irrationality, with a fool as the cause. In my experience most folks classified as fools simply have different priorities and aren't fools - but  that's immaterial for this post.  When dealing with fools, remember to answer the following: 1) Who is the bigger fool - the fool, or the one being controlled by the fool? 2) What is a fool but a wise man's teacher?

If you haven't read  Getting to Yes ,  I highly recommend it, it had a drastic positive effect on my negotiation skills. For me, the key point of Getting To Yes is to focus on outcomes not positions.  Outcomes are what we want to accomplish, for example  "getting something to eat".   Positions are a single concrete instantiation of that outcome, for example "getting a cheeseburger at Burger King".   A problem with humans is we often get very attached to achieving our position, even though there are several positions that can achieve our outcome, many of which will make other people happy.    When we get in a fight with someone it's usually because we have incompatible positions, not incompatible outcomes.  If we can  refocus our interaction onto achieving outcomes,  we can usually find a position that can make everyone happy.  A few days after reading Getting To Yes, I was at the cafeteria and had an excellent oppor...

( This post is not designed to be belittling, instead it's designed to be root cause analysis.) When Zach, my two year old, figures something out he screams out barely intelligible words and repeats them until I can figure out what he is saying and repeat it back to him.  The more non-obvious Zach's discovery the more insistent Zach will be that I understand his unintelligible statement. For example, the other day Zach and I were outside and Zach started screaming buddaf -  I was baffled! Zach was very insistent so I started looking around and sure enough I found a picture of a butterfly painted on a bus stop. I screamed butterfly, and Zach became ecstatic and we were able to move on to another topic. By contrast if I can't figure out what Zach is saying he gets sad, and acts rejected. This morning at breakfast Zach wanted something and I couldn't figure out what it was.  For 3 minutes Zach kept repeating masfd (which I still can't figure out) with vigour and ...