(Looking at the picture below) What (the hell) is that fence doing here? It serves nothing. Let’s remove it. That’s what many people agreed on without asking a straightforward question: Why is there a fence here in the first place? What’s the rationale behind putting a fence? That fence is called Chesterton’s Fence....
When I wrote you the last time about the myth of multitasking, I talked about our attention limit having a value of only one cognitive task. Today, I want to double-click on that attention-demanding creative task and connect it to the quality of results. In Mythical Man-Month book, Brooks talks about the importance...
Many tenure engineers get frustrated with various small things if they have stayed in the same team or done the same job for a long time. They start getting annoyed by new people bringing not-so-new ideas that were already proved wrong two years ago. They had seen the projects put into the trash and, after three...
Hey friend, This Mektup is a personal one. You must have heard what happened in my home country, Turkey. Two earthquakes took the lives of thousands of people (40k+) and impacted millions. (just yesterday, two additional earthquakes took another set of lives) Although my family and friends are physically healthy,...
There are three categories or approaches to decision-making styles in the world that encapsulate all the decision-making models. Ethical Reasoning (Good-Evil/True-False/Right-Wrong) It's conceptual reasoning. We have concepts in our minds that are formed over the years and impacted by people surrounding us,...
It seems like the British had a devastating impact on Kenya. "Modernization" shows its evil face in many places. When people are forced, preached, evangelized, and convinced that their culture is not good and that they have to change, they go over dramatic problems—many of these problems last years, if not...
Sometimes, leadership introduces something and doesn't explain what they consider to be the disadvantages of the change. They often talk about the pros of a new system without mentioning the cons clearly. This situation makes it very difficult to get the buy-in from people. When executive leadership and HR introduce...
Hey friend, I wrote the following paragraph two years ago in the first Mektup. Putting myself in front of many people is one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. Even though I’m a bit of an extrovert, it still frightens and excites me every time I start a live session, send a tweet, or publish a blog post. However,...
When we receive feedback, we might consider applying it fully or declining it. It often looks like a 0 or 1 situation; take it or leave it. Even when we try to find the middle ground, it comes down to picking up what's useful in feedback (only a small part) and applying it to our lives. If we're unsure about the...
We're at the end of the first month of the new year. I thought about sharing something about feedback that helped me a lot in my conversations, especially in one-on-ones with my team members. There are three types of feedback: Appreciation, Evaluation, and Coaching (that I learned from the Thanks for the Feedback...
With the extensive usage of tools like Slack, Confluence, and Google Docs, we—especially leaders—struggle to be articulate. In school, we were all taught to start writing by forming bullet lists, building our arguments, adding more background, and finishing our text by summarizing everything. Although this strategy...
This article is part of my notes from Chapter 8 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 Chapter 2: Data Models and Query Languages Chapter 3: Data Storage and Retrieval...
