Jekyll2022-03-27T17:36:46+00:00https://guyandtheworld.com//feed.xmlsubversion tutorialsthe pyramid of freedom2022-03-25T00:00:00+00:002022-03-25T00:00:00+00:00https://guyandtheworld.com//posts/pyramid-of-freedom<p>First of all, I got to start by saying that edibles are awesome, and that is proof that there is indeed hope for humanity! If I were a billionaire with malicious intent, I'd just mass-produce psychedelics and mix it with the water supply of a city and then play utopian content on TV. We're living at a time of great decentralization. The decentralization of technology as well as the decentralization of wealth. Wealth to free yourself from any money problems that is at our doorstep if you can devote a couple of years to work on it. The keyword is "devote" because it is not going to be easy.</p>
<p>What is this pyramid? This pyramid is how I look at my finances. Gone are the days when you slave away at your work for 20 years just to barely have money for other big things but in that 20 years, you'd be having back problems from your posture being bad from all these years of slaving away. Google's L5 engineers and above gets paid $353,000. L8 engineers get paid over a million dollars! But of course, this is in the Bay area but the point I'm trying to make is COVID created opportunities that decentralized money. Web3 engineers, where people perceive you as an anime character are so in demand that they get paid over $300,000. This is definitely my skewed view as an engineer but I'm sure if I keep digging similar patterns will start materializing in all domains if not on the scale of tech. It's not being written about because it's evolving and changing too quick, people are scrambling, and there are no maps. You need to get in and ask around the dark corners of the internet. You might find a sage there to guide you to the gold.</p>
<p>We all want to fuck around and do things that are absurd. Spend your time reading about occultism or trying out different varieties of chai, or consuming psychedelics but if you start fucking around now, you will not have the cash to pay the medical bills from a broken back, take care of your mental health after your psychedelic experiments go wrong, or to look after your parents during their fragile age if you're very middle-class like me. You also would be without influence in a world that's driven by influence unless you plan on being ascetic and abstaining from the pleasures of the world. Even worse, you get married, settle down and takes 2 weeks off the entire year for yourself?!?! Then it's over for you. No, thank you. I'll skip this and do the hard work.</p>
<p>Today, this is not limited to the west, it's available for everyone, in every corner of the world. The only two questions you need to ask yourself is 1) Do you have the grit and perseverance to execute on it? 2) Are you patient and ready to be uncomfortable? Because you're making your own map now. That's the only way. You're going to wear the hat of an explorer. There will be dragons you encounter that no one warned you about. You might be the one to mark it for others who might follow your path.</p>
<p>This is the pyramid.</p>
<p><img src="https://i.imgur.com/7Rbnuk2.png" alt="" /></p>
<p>First of all, I drew and coloured that pyramid myself. Look how beautiful it is. I've chosen the colours based on earth, trees and the sky. Wow, I'm just like Leonardo Di Caprio, the infamous painter. This is how we can dissect each part of the pyramid.</p>
<h3 id="short-term-salary">Short-term Salary</h3>
<p>This is the salary you use to buy groceries, pay your rent, pay for your internet and electronics. It makes sure that you're in a space where you're not starving. People around you are not starving. This is the "day job". Now comes the tricky part. You need to build on top of this. How are you taking your salary? Can you free up the majority of your time so you can work and learn things on your side? The best option is if you have a remote job and you work 6 hours a day. Awesome, no more commute! Can you save that energetic 6 hours of your day to work on things that are in the realm of interest but have the chance of multiplying your wealth? As time goes on, can you build up the value to free up most of your time? If this step is done right and with a bit of luck, you could even skip the next part and go straight to the top of the pyramid.</p>
<p>Even if you come from a wealthy family, it is highly recommended you take a salary. Those who control the inflow of money essentially control you and your actions. You're skilled enough to earn money to temporarily sustain yourself. The only problem is that with this method, you pretty much have to work your entire life to get by, to make ends meet.</p>
<p>That's why we invest in learning in the free time that you freed up for yourself by using your ingenuity. Learn what needs to be learned to work on the second option on the pyramid.</p>
<h3 id="long-term-freedom">Long-term Freedom</h3>
<p>I've listed the things on the pyramid. Imagine you come from old money. Then you're absolutely wasting time reading this. If you're not, you're good. Long-term freedom means with the amount of wealth you amassed, you never have to work another day of your life. It's essentially secured. You don't have to worry about your medical bills, or your dependent's medical bills if they get sick. You pretty much secured all your time for yourself and it doesn't belong to anyone.</p>
<p>Your wealth is your wealth. Hope it's all diversified if fiat does indeed go down as the crypto-bros says. You can travel with this money if you want. You can fuck around with this money if you want, and it won't run out. Hopefully, you're earning good interest in it too.</p>
<p>Congratulations, you're free from the bounds of capitalism.</p>
<h3 id="your-legacy">Your Legacy</h3>
<p>Now, this is what you really want to do. This is the thing you dreamed of when you were a young child or a grown child. The thing that keeps you at night. Sometimes you need to think about what you really want to do if you're not working, or building. Meditate? Just paint? Build cathedrals? Heck, build companies, even? Be a mad scientist? Watch movies all day? Heck, I don't know, there is so much interesting stuff out there to do, find what works for you, make your own map for yourself.</p>
<p>The thing is that most people cannot get to this point but they linger in the games within the base of the pyramid. You spend your whole life working a job. You spend your whole life gaming capitalism. Like hungry ghosts that lost their paths somewhere along the way.</p>
<p>It's a pyramid at a glance but it's really a maze. Once you beat one part of the maze, there's another one. Easy to get lost. You might even decide that you don't wanna go to the other end and you're good with setting within a part of the maze, and that's okay too.</p>
<p>Well, it's a hard journey and I'm only on the first step. I hope that I do not get stuck in the games down under.</p>
<p>There really is no failure in exploration. Your failure would really be a map to where there was a dragon for people who come after you so they can avoid the dragon. If you strike rich, it could be the map to salvation for someone else. Isn't it all win-win? We've barely scratched the surface with this thing called the internet. It is a noble path if you even set out on the journey. Salvation lies within and within it.</p>
<p>If you're interested in learning more about freeing yourself, the two resources I'd recommend are <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/368593.The_4_Hour_Workweek">The Four-Hour Work Week</a> and <a href="https://ranprieur.com/essays/dropout.html">How to Drop Out</a>.</p>
<p>a. s.</p>First of all, I got to start by saying that edibles are awesome, and that is proof that there is indeed hope for humanity! If I were a billionaire with malicious intent, I'd just mass-produce psychedelics and mix it with the water supply of a city and then play utopian content on TV. We're living at a time of great decentralization. The decentralization of technology as well as the decentralization of wealth. Wealth to free yourself from any money problems that is at our doorstep if you can devote a couple of years to work on it. The keyword is "devote" because it is not going to be easy.unleashing latent potential - a photo essay2022-02-15T00:00:00+00:002022-02-15T00:00:00+00:00https://guyandtheworld.com//posts/latent-potential<p>This is going to be a small photo essay of the insights I had while biking through the Himalayas. Before we get to the pictures, my "winter of study" has been an extreme success. I'm even considering the possibility that I should spend spring the same way, by just studying. Maybe I should do it this whole year. Maybe my whole life should be spent this way. Okay, let's not get carried away. How can I say that it was a success? Because my dreams have been getting more and more vivid as the days go by. Every day, after I finish working on my projects I religiously look forward to going to sleep. It's like going to the movies and it's quite exciting. There were times when I couldn't dream for months on end. Those were dark times in retrospect. In a way, having more dreams is kind of a signal that I'm kind of in harmony with the thing inside and outside which is nice.</p>
<p>Some days the dreams are so vivid that I need to wake up and text a friend to make sure I'm still not dreaming. Recently I had a dream that I was locked up in a prison, and this prison was near a dam that was about to break. Anyway, I scheme and make a daring escape from this prison and get on a train to leave it. Now, what does this signify? Some would say that the dam on the verge of collapse signifies globalization and the overloaded system, and me escaping the dam signifies that I'm running away from the great collapse. The truth is that I don't really wanna run away. When everything collapses, I want to be in the centre of it looking around and basking in the glory of it and I really won't be holding on. So this dream was a sign that I have a helluva more work to do to not run away.</p>
<p>Now coming to the essay, how did I come up with it? I drive for 20 minutes thinking about things. When some key insight hits, I stop the bike and note it down. My friends reached back 30 minutes before I reached! So here it goes.</p>
<p><br /><br /></p>
<p><img src="https://i.imgur.com/usPPyvZ.jpg" alt="" /></p>
<p><strong>Things built from places of spiritual scarcity most often turn out to be twisted and do not last long.</strong> That's why a lot of modern technology is so good at amplifying insecurities and not so good at amplifying the positive attributes. That's also the reason we need an "AI ethics" team to overlook the people building AI. Who would overlook the "AI ethics" teams? We're building a house of cards. How can we build anything that lasts and enrich lives if we don't trust ourselves?</p>
<p><br /><br /></p>
<p><img src="https://i.imgur.com/imA3cxk.jpg" alt="" /></p>
<p><strong>There's no rush to build.</strong> It's okay if things take decades to build and good things take patience. There is no point in pushing yourself to get something done and if you do most often it's because external forces are meddling in issues that you should solve yourself. Every time I work on my technical projects, I tell myself this so that my insecurities may not seep in to ruin art. I have all the time in the world. Do not look at the journey of others and impose artificial restrictions on your own life. That's a dick-measuring contest and dick-measuring contest are for suckers. The systems we have now, at least in technology, has only been around for 20 years. It's not even sure if these are going to be there in another 20. Stop holding on and when in doubt, remember the Lindy effect.</p>
<p><br /><br /></p>
<p><img src="https://i.imgur.com/S60GTpj.jpg" alt="" /></p>
<p><strong>To flourish in this century, you only need to focus on three things - competency, credibility and network.</strong> It's not that difficult. Be extremely competent in one or multiple trades. Build credibility in that trade by building things and proving that you're competent and most importantly cultivating genuine relationships with people who are on the same journey as yourself. Each relationship is unique, put effort into growing the ones your heart says is right without expecting anything back.</p>
<p><br /><br /></p>
<p><img src="https://i.imgur.com/wpvJmmx.jpg" alt="" /></p>
<p><strong>Money is a tool as well as a monster that grows in size as your wealth grows.</strong> You need to master yourself before you can master how to control money. Even the best and the brightest gets corrupted by it. Make sure your internal housekeeping is done and is correct before you start playing with the monster. It's a good servant but a vicious master. The bigger the monster gets, the more competent you need to be as a rider, otherwise, you become an agent to the money monster.</p>
<p><br /><br /></p>
<p><img src="https://i.imgur.com/1LUzksd.jpeg" alt="" /></p>
<p><strong>Also, stay in touch with art, have a harmonious relationship with people of other genders that goes beyond romance, and break the link between money and your hobbies.</strong> They know things you don't. They see things that you don't. If every one of your activities is directly or indirectly tied to making more money, the money monster has you on a leash. The world is bigger than that. The thing the above three has in common is that in one way or the other it aids you to break out of the money-mind. As an engineer, under the pretence of going after excellence, I'm prone to mindlessly building instead of focusing on beauty. Truth is the only thing I need to focus on is beauty and excellence will follow suit.</p>
<p><br /><br /></p>
<p><img src="https://i.imgur.com/gIZBf8s.jpeg" alt="" /></p>
<p><strong>Treat your personal philosophy as a being that is alive.</strong> Inspired by what @algekalipso said about political theory having immense power. Imagine if your personal philosophy came alive as a being with immense power and strength. How would it interact with the world around it? Would it leave or trail of destruction or would it enrich everything it touches? Even worse, what if this being is not of your creation? What if someone else transferred it to you? Maybe as a part of your indoctrination, your mother, or your father, or the state implanted this thing in you. Then the first step is to understand that you're the agent and to understand the nature of this being so you can step away.</p>
<p><br /><br /></p>
<p><img src="https://i.imgur.com/p7NPJV3.jpeg" alt="" /></p>
<p><strong>And coming to my final point. My only goal is to get as close to my true nature as I can.</strong> I'm an agent of an unknown force, for now. I seek to understand this force and through dissecting it to understand myself. I can't do it alone so I seek the people, experiences, information and places that help me do it. Just doing that, just finding out your nature would be a life well-lived. To live as yourself and not as an agent to an unknown power of unknown origins. I've only set out on this journey. I wrote this as a way to remind myself what the journey is about. I hope you find something useful in this.</p>
<p><br /><br /></p>
<p><img src="https://i.imgur.com/5npEuqA.jpeg" alt="" /></p>
<p>Fin.</p>
<p>a. s.</p>This is going to be a small photo essay of the insights I had while biking through the Himalayas. Before we get to the pictures, my "winter of study" has been an extreme success. I'm even considering the possibility that I should spend spring the same way, by just studying. Maybe I should do it this whole year. Maybe my whole life should be spent this way. Okay, let's not get carried away. How can I say that it was a success? Because my dreams have been getting more and more vivid as the days go by. Every day, after I finish working on my projects I religiously look forward to going to sleep. It's like going to the movies and it's quite exciting. There were times when I couldn't dream for months on end. Those were dark times in retrospect. In a way, having more dreams is kind of a signal that I'm kind of in harmony with the thing inside and outside which is nice.how to defeat monsters with mountain power2022-01-30T00:00:00+00:002022-01-30T00:00:00+00:00https://guyandtheworld.com//posts/mountains-and-monsters<h2 id="power">power</h2>
<p>If you think of "power" what are the feelings that come to your mind? If it was something negative, congratulations, you're normal. If it was something positive, congratulations, you're a psychopath. Okay, I'm kidding about the latter part, really. I like to start my essay with jabs.</p>
<p>The point I was trying to make was that we have a pretty shitty relationship with power as a species. How many people can you think of who has a good grip on power? We either renounce power completely or get corrupted by it. This has only been accelerated in the modern age just like a lot of things in this decade. It seems like we only have choices that are a dichotomy - renounce power or get corrupted by it. Just like how the right and the left have become more polarized. Where is the nuance and how do we find a middle-ground?</p>
<p>In a world dominated by dichotomies, it's hard to find nuance, it's hard to find balance, but we must do it if our goal is to attain nobility.</p>
<p>Recently I've developed an interest in shadow-work and the Jungian shadow. The repressed part of the human psyche. The monster that has a hidden say in what we do and what we say without us knowing it. If you aren't a full-time lurker inside TPoT, this is how <a href="https://buddhism-for-vampires.com/">Buddhism for Vampires</a> describes the human shadow.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Jungians speak of “the shadow.” Anger, lust, and creativity, when exiled, fester and mutate in the dark. They grow hideous, resentful, and plot revenge. When emotional stress weakens the wall between “self” and “shadow,” they erupt and wreak havoc. Because the visible or “light” self chose not to see them, it gets no warning and has no knowledge of how to cope. Rejection may seem like the least dangerous strategy for coping with monstrosity, but when it fails, it does so catastrophically. And even when it succeeds, it has a high price in wasted energy and lost power.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>How do we defeat these power-hungry monsters within? Linking this quote from an essay called <a href="https://buddhism-for-vampires.com/hunting-the-shadow">Hunting the Shadow</a></p>
<blockquote>
<p>We can embrace our monstrosity while cultivating our human nobility. We can allow each to transform the other, so we become cheerful, kind, useful monsters who are also overpowering, unpredictable, and dangerous heroes.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Power is a complex topic but it's imperative for survival, to move forward, to not get stuck in the same muck. We need to understand it and put it to good use. It's through harnessing the power that we get the agency to change something that's bothering us, to fix things that are broken. If we're not aware of how power works, well, things will get quite… complicated, to say the least. When you leave your apartment in the morning and you see your neighbour, you have the choice to greet them or to not greet them. That's power. You making art, that's power. You journaling your thoughts, that too is power. So how do we harness this complex… thing? Power is a double-edged sword, most people who are in "positions of power" are overgrown children who get hijacked by this force. By using an analogy from the Lord of The Rings - how do you become a good ring-bearer? We need to train. We need to put in the work. If power is a double-edged sword, we need to become master swordsmen.</p>
<p><img src="https://i.imgur.com/pppmIo0.png" alt="Gustaf Tenggren, Cadmus And The Dragon (1923)" /></p>
<p>Most of the time, it's our shadow selves, the monsters within that have access to the sword of power. We use the sword of power without being aware of who we are. That results in mayhem. It makes us an agent of destruction, it manipulates us and after it's done with us, there's nothing left of the human that was there was before, no personal agency left to salvage something, anything. Corrupt, morbid power stems from the ego. This shadow is transferred to us even before we could understand the nature of this world. How do we get a leash over this ego? How do we understand these monsters within and get them to cooperate with us? There are a ton of ways to do it and I'm going to describe one that seems to work for me.</p>
<h2 id="mountains">mountains</h2>
<p>One funky question I ask the elders is - "Why was the Buddha enlightened in the mountains and not in the plains?". It's a pretty stupid question if you think twice about it, so don't think twice about it. There is one more related question to which the answer is the same "Why would any community move and settle in the mountains where the winters are harsh and the resources are low?". The abstract answer is that mountains are a region of sheer, raw, unpredictable power. Not just spiritual, metaphysical powers, but physical power. Mountains are forged when insanely big tectonic plates smash against each other and buckle up like the hood of a car in a head-on collision. Raw universal power. Now compare this power with the morbid power that stems from your ego. It is no match.</p>
<p>So the answer to the second question is that people move here because even though life is tough, the power of the mountains protects them from invaders. Life is relatively peaceful. The only uncertainty comes in the form of harsh mountain weather, that's tolerable with some evolutionary tricks, really. Even though life is a tiny bit hard, you can be sure that some power-hungry monsters don't come up and seize all that you've built. In short the mountains transfer a bit of vitality onto you. Like Peter Thiel says, competition is for losers.</p>
<p>This is why plains are tricky because since it's so easy that you have conquests all the time. It's quite hard for power-hungry monsters to cross mountain ranges of power. It acts as a natural force field that repulses and keeps away morbid power. You can also use this natural force to cleanse your body of morbid power. There are potentially unlimited uses and literally no downsides! Well maybe the only "downside" if you want to call it that is that you need to make a sacrifice to get this "upside" in return. I'm of the personal opinion that politicians and people in power should be made to live at an altitude of 15,000 feet or higher for at least a year to inculcate some nobility.</p>
<p>People think you encounter monsters when you move up but actually, you move up to escape them. The only monsters you encounter are within, which can be defeated. Stay long enough with intend you might even become a Shaman. For natural beasts like bears you know is dangerous, humans are unpredictable and each human is a unique monster. The devil you know versus the devil you don’t.</p>
<p><img src="https://i.imgur.com/8t0topK.png" alt="" /></p>
<p>If morbid egotistical power corrupts you, what is the alternative? How do you wield any power? I'm still figuring this out, but from my limited run-ins with beings of power, the answer is that you need to transform yourself into a vessel. A vessel that you fill with borrowed power. A power that you cannot cling onto but you become a medium to deploy it if the need arises, and only if the need arises. In a way, you need to renounce power, to gain power.</p>
<p>You need to be a bit zen to make the trip across these sheer mountains. You need to be a bit zen to stay in these mountains. The human power, the morbid, corrupt version that's responsible for a good amount of suffering for the world is really not THAT powerful against these natural forces. Once you let go, once you renounce the morbid power, you become free. You cannot cross the mountains without the aid of the mountains, without filling your vessel with borrowed power. The aid comes in the form of borrowed power. You cannot make the crossing if the mountain doesn't aid you with food, shelter, water and desirable conditions. In short, to become a master who can wield power, you need to let go. So the secret is to learn how to harness this, and how to harness yourself, and that's going to take a long, long time, maybe even decades.</p>
<p>I often ask myself why do a disproportionate amount of yogis find enlightenment in the mountains. Because mountains are the ultimate places of power. Physical power as well as spiritual power. Reading through Sasha Chapin's <a href="https://sashachapin.substack.com/p/how-i-attained-persistent-self-love">Deep Okayness</a>, I found a passage that deeply resonated with what I went through last year during one of my experiments with psychedelics.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I looked upon the howling hole in the middle of me. I allowed it to exist, which is to say, I felt the bright, loud pain of permitting it to be known. I let it melt through the ice I’d tried to surround it with. There was a moment when I was sure my life was ending. And then, instantly, the hole closed. And some <em>force</em> came out of it; it expelled an iridescent wave that washed over me, composed of raw clarity, simplicity, relief. I felt myself becoming untangled, purified by this force.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This for me was my greatest achievement of 2021. To get to a point where the biggest answer was revealed, a large portion of my shadow was freed. I've just started this journey, and I've got a long way to go. Free your shadow through whatever means necessary, freedom awaits.</p>
<h2 id="uhmmmm">uhmmmm….?</h2>
<p>If you aren't confused with what I just wrote, you read this essay wrong. Because I'm quite confused after writing it. Certain things cannot be put into words, only felt. Words are limiting. The concept of power and mountains are extremely close to me. I like to study both to tune my intuition of it. I've had run-ins with corrupt power, morbid power. I've also had run-ins with enlightened power and power that has a real chance of impacting the world in ways where this could become a paradise. To bring in paradise, individuals need to learn how to wield power in a healthy way. Become a bit zen, a bit more human, get a bit more agency over what you do every day.</p>
<p><img src="https://i.imgur.com/YR7keo0.png" alt="Angela Eastman - The Braiding the Knoll, 2016" /></p>
<p>By renouncing power, I'm not telling you to renounce society completely. I'm saying learn how to leash the ego and all the symptoms of it. I stay here because the moment I wake up, I wake up to the sight of true power, true magnificence. When you wake up to this, you're reminded of what you are. It's like a microdose of ego-death, and this one's free! You wake up, you're facing absolute truth. You renounce morbid power and use the natural power that's transferred to you. If you use it right, you move closer to mastery.</p>
<p>Defeat the monster, and watch true adventure and magic come back. Look to the east.</p>
<p>a. s.</p>poweryour mind as landscapes2021-12-01T00:00:00+00:002021-12-01T00:00:00+00:00https://guyandtheworld.com//posts/your-mind-as-landscapes<p>This whole week I've been generally going for lindy walks every evening near the paddy fields. It's quite a shame that Paul Skallas got banned for plagiarising but plagiarism is quite <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect">Lindy</a>. During one of these walks, I stumbled upon the thought of your mind being the reflection of a landscape. At least having some properties of it. Let me explain. For the first 18 years of my life, wherever I lived, there was a huge paddy field nearby. That's normal when you're from Kerala. I spent a good chunk of my daytime in paddies. Either playing or exploring or walking. It's only when I graduated high school and left home to study engineering that I left the familiar landscape for the city.</p>
<p><img src="https://i.imgur.com/KYOkhnp.png" alt="" /></p>
<p>I can't help but think that this exposure to large swathes of paddy fields should've left some residue in the way my neurons in my brain are arranged. Let me take my favourite example. Imagine you use social media in an unhinged way without self-control. Doesn't that directly influence your attention span and affect your focus? So this makes me think why can't your mind reflect the landscape that you grew up in for 18 years? Can your neurons be wired in a way to reflect the quirks of these landscapes? I like to believe that it can be in a subtle way.</p>
<p>Imagine your mind to reflect some features of the landscape you grew up in. What would your mind look like then? I like to think that my mind is predominantly a paddy field. A lot of open fields. No coherence or structure. No connected walkways. You gotta stumble a bit to get any answers or to get to a destination. I don't know how to get from A to B, you just wing it by using your spatial senses. It's not a library. That makes me ask if you're a librarian for 20 years, are the organisation of your thoughts going to reflect a big library with a ton of bookshelves?</p>
<p>Anyway, every evening when I go walking, I stumble a bit because the paths aren't continuous, get dirt on my feet, stop to observe something that moved or a peculiar sound I haven't heard before. Most of the time when I walk, I also get some ideas about my work that I didn't get before, so it's fun.</p>
<p>Now imagine you grew up in a city. Would your mind reflect the rigidity and structure of that city? There is a popular statement that I heard while travelling that people from Delhi are rude. I don't necessarily agree with this because I think generalizing 30 million people under one umbrella term is ignorant. I liked Delhi, and instead of generalising a whole city of Delhi as "rude", which seemed quite short-sighted to me, I would like to use the term "aggressive" or "competitive". I'd say a good subset of people there are aggressive. It could've been a multitude of reasons. It was a cultural melting pot, anyway. What is it about Delhi that makes culture naturally select for the trait of "aggressiveness" to survive? Of course, the same logic can be applied to computers too. Does prolonged stay in the digital realm make the nature of your mind look like a digital circuit? If a city could make you "aggressive" can't growing up in a forest make your mind lush and green? Are the folks who grew up around forests more dreamy? I like to think they are.</p>
<p>If the places you stay at could influence the structure of your mind, wouldn't you rather be around the greatest maker of all time? Nature? That also makes me think - how easy it would be for a person to get stuck and attached to this landscape. If you think your mind reflects the nature and rigidity of a city and you don't like that, I think you can be proactive and change it by changing your immediate surrounding. If you've been contemplating going on that trip, this is the sign you've been waiting for. Book that ticket.</p>
<p>If my mind possesses only the properties of paddy fields, that seems quite limiting because there are a variety of landscapes out there to integrate within our minds. That's also one of the reasons conventional travelling doesn't interest me. I don't want to visit a place to stay there for a week and meet tourists and do touristy things. If I go to a place it's so that I can soak in the diversity of the land and the people into my brain and enrich the world inside. That's also one of the reasons I made a subtle promise to myself to introduce a new terrain into the real-estate of my mind - mountains.</p>
<p><img src="https://i.imgur.com/8deAb1F.png" alt="" /></p>
<p>What is the direct opposite of a plain, meandering, pleasant to walk, abundant of life-giving paddy fields? A harsh, tough, cold, terrain of the mountains that's hard to survive in. In a way, lingering too long in a paddy field could also be detrimental for you. It makes you weak, too much abundance would make you comfortable. It does come with the added benefit of giving you that creativity boost though. Mountains are different. It trains your spirits to be tough. I'm not sacrificing the paddies for the mountains. I'm integrating both on the inside. Expanding my mind by introducing another terrain adjacent to the paddy where I can train my mind to be persistent, tough, face adversity, push through the cold so that I don't get too comfortable.</p>
<p>a. s.</p>This whole week I've been generally going for lindy walks every evening near the paddy fields. It's quite a shame that Paul Skallas got banned for plagiarising but plagiarism is quite Lindy. During one of these walks, I stumbled upon the thought of your mind being the reflection of a landscape. At least having some properties of it. Let me explain. For the first 18 years of my life, wherever I lived, there was a huge paddy field nearby. That's normal when you're from Kerala. I spent a good chunk of my daytime in paddies. Either playing or exploring or walking. It's only when I graduated high school and left home to study engineering that I left the familiar landscape for the city.creation, consumption and reflection2021-11-21T00:00:00+00:002021-11-21T00:00:00+00:00https://guyandtheworld.com//posts/reflection-and-legacy<p>Hello there, winter is setting in, I hope it's treating you well. This too shall gently pass. What do I know about winter, there's no winter where I'm from, but you know what the greats say - it's when you're in a room, and you're freezing your balls off, and you're miserable, it's then that the best creative works come to you. Well, at least that's how I rationalize anything miserable that happens to me - "this will pay off big-time, man"!</p>
<p>Well, today I'd like to do some word vomit here about something that has been brooding in my mind. I write. Like I write a ton, but I don't generally release it anywhere over the fear of losing my job. Maybe I should release it and lose my job, it could be an interesting experience. But for this particular essay, I had this intense push from from the little voice inside that said "you need to let other people read this". I don't know why.</p>
<p>What is this about? Well, you probably have a gist after reading the title. It's about two things. The first is my thoughts on creation, consumption and reflection. And the second is what you uncover after you embrace and balance all the three. Imagine these three things to be a knob on a radio. Instead of a radio, we have a human. Some people have the consumption knob on the maximum and the other knobs turned low - it could be consumption of content, videos, long-form articles, books. Some people have the creation knob while ignoring the other two - these are workaholics. The modern world doesn't want us to turn up the reflection knob. It's bad for business. I know I barely did it. I was too busy consuming and creating. If you miss the last part, the former two lacks meaning.</p>
<p>The second thing I wanted to address was my delusions about me feeling there's something wrong and missing with the world around me. Maybe it's just the kali-yuga? When you step foot outside you can feel deep inside that things are not what it's supposed to be. That something is wrong somewhere. That there's some disconnect between what we are inside and how the system is on the outside. Well, I'm not a "dystopia guy". I love the world and the people in it. I'm close friends with some larger than life people and I love every second of it. I believe we'll fix all our wrongs and build a better world but that comes after we realize what's missing from it. We need to understand the nature of it before we fix it.</p>
<p>Well, I can't put a label on it but it's just a feeling in me. I've personally tried to ignore this feeling of "something missing" for a while, I've tried to cover it up by consumption. Distractions like work, content, people, alcohol and parties. All these helped me not look in that direction. I don't know if I'm alone in feeling this and the constant dreadful feeling that you might be running away from it and coping instead of pursuing the truth.</p>
<p>See, if you're expecting me to tell you what's missing from the world in this essay, then you can stop reading now. I can't. I don't even have the slightest clue. I just have the feeling that something is missing. What I wanted to share was the strategy that kind of feels like would let me uncover what's missing. Maybe in 10 years? 20? How did I come across this strategy? Well, let's just say it has to do a lot with meeting a sage, an Italian in the metaverse, a rude bald guy and Buddhism. Well, the strategy is basically how I tuned the three knobs. These three operational modes of human beings - creation, consumption and reflection when they are not in balance. If it's not balanced, we stop seeing the world for what it is. Truths that are hidden in plain sight. Why is it not balanced by default? I suspect a lot of it has to do with the fact that the world is optimized around money, rather than personal well-being. If it was personal well-being and fulfilment, we'd have these answers and we would've integrated them into our lives. It's not a tough answer too. The ancients had it and embodied it. How do you uncover that secret and apply it to the mess that is modern life?</p>
<h3 id="consumption">Consumption</h3>
<p>It's tiring, man. Mindless consumption tires you and makes you a zombie. What is the first thing that you do when you wake up? I'll tell you what I used to do. I turn off the alarm and turn on the internet on the phone. This starts a chain reaction of events. With that one small move, I've set the course for the entire day. When I turn on the data, I get notifications from social media. When I get notifications, I either get sucked into Instagram or WhatsApp. This happens before you even get out of your bed. Imagine doing this day after day for years. Then the next 30 minutes you're caught in this never-ending loop of mindless distraction and consumption. This according to me is the worst kind of consumption because it's out of your control. It's in the control of the big-tech co that just hijacked your mind through clever machine learning. It's like cigarettes in the 50s. They thought this shit was healthy. We don't have regulations for machine learning, yet.</p>
<p>These apps that you go to, don't have you as their interest in their mind. It's all about them and making money but they'd like to make you think that they think and care about you. How many times have you ignored the total time spent on Instagram because you'd feel guilty after looking at it?</p>
<p><img src="https://i.imgur.com/XBTNEso.jpeg" alt="Instagram Time" /></p>
<p>You go into these apps and look at the shiny colours of personal messages, story replies, likes and boom - dopamine hit. Addiction. First thing in the morning. Then you scroll down, start watching reels. If you're on WhatsApp, you catch up on the group messages and somewhere along the line you realize "fuck, I have responsibilities in the real world, I need to get my ass up". You take this tiny silicon piece of glowing shit into the loo and your eyes are on this. Your eyes are not observing the surroundings. You're not a spatial being anymore.</p>
<p>Well, the person I just described was me maybe like a couple of months ago till I made a deliberate decision to not do it. Nah. I'm not going to let Zuckerberg hijack my mind. Last week I only spent 10 minutes on Instagram, yay to me. Technology is a double-edged sword. You can build a billion-dollar business from a remote rural village in a third world country and the same technology can make your brain go to a pulp if you're not careful enough. You need to take agency and get the upper hand. I can't completely cut Instagram off because I have friends and I like memes. My Instagram explore is still the funniest place because it knows my taste (cough greentexts, cough). Also nurturing human relationships in the second year of the plague is one of the ways we have to bring light to our worlds so I stick to using Instagram web every other day and I don't have the app on the phone. Life is good.</p>
<p>Well, my point is that I consume too much, I think we all do in one way or the other. We don't need to watch 2 hours of reels. Imagine what you could do if you take that time back? Well in short after five months of travelling I did take that time back I feel spectacular. I put this extra two hours into reading. The list was long, and boy am I glad. Taking back control and getting in touch with the self was the first step to uncovering the "something missing". It's not just instagram. I started regulating the amount of long-form essay consumption, Reddit, Youtube, Spotify. What is the point of any content if you can't extract value out of it and apply it to your life? If it's for entertainment - do you feel refreshed after you consume it? Do you feel refreshed after scrolling Instagram? No. So I started sticking to books.</p>
<h3 id="creation">Creation</h3>
<p>A great man I know once told me "Aim for the impossible, not for the possible-but-hard. Most things that excite people are possible but hard." and just after that I was like "Fuck yeah, I'm going to find the impossible so I can achieve it". In my mind, this is more of a feeling than a thought, I feel that on my path to find the impossible, I'll also uncover the "something missing" that we addressed in the first part of this essay. It feels to me like it's the same journey. In this journey, like any journey, you get one lesson, but it's the only lesson that you will ever need. It could even be the same thing - the "something missing" could be the impossible dream that I don't yet have or it's tied in some way.</p>
<p><img src="https://i.imgur.com/xJ89B5u.jpg" alt="The scroll of truth" /></p>
<p>Creation is important and it's creativity that fuels creation. If you're overwhelmed by consumption, how will you find the time to create? Imagine a beautiful building, and what comes into your mind? Maybe the Taj Mahal or the Colosseum but it's never the Burj Khalifa. The world needs creativity more than ever and we need to create beautiful things. It's embedded in us even though the modern world tries to distract us from true creation and more into the "manufacturing" kind of capitalistic creation. It needs to be cultivated because it's an integral part of who we are as human beings. It could be you cooking your breakfast and deciding to go a bit off-recipe by mixing that ingredient you never used (don't know if this is real, I don't really cook). It could be you putting on your clothes in the morning and this feeling of trying something new and a bit different comes in and you decide to do it. For me, it lies in computers. I like to code and make things. Participate in digital culture. Write. Make things online. Lose money with crypto.</p>
<p>I ask myself where does this feeling, this drive to do something new, this thing called creativity come from? Hang with me here because I'm aware I might lose readers here. I think that it comes from a "higher plane". A place beyond rationality and the material world. This place could be deep within our minds. Heck, we know more about the universe than how our mind works. I think psychedelics are something that gives us a peek into that plane if you use it recreationally. A lot of people abuse it. So we've established that creativity comes from a place called the "higher plane". This place is a place of abundance. It's beyond what me or you or what Elon Musk has done. You can tap into it if your spirits are good, a lot of people have tapped into it and created wonders in our history. You just need to be in touch with yourself. You can increase the amount you get from this place with practice but you can never have the whole.</p>
<p>So we've established that the "higher plane" is where creativity comes from. If there's a place, and then there's a way to get there, right? Yes. I like to use the analogy of a bridge. You use this bridge to get there, take things and bring them into the real world. That beautiful piece of code you wrote. The poem that accidentally materialized on paper. The paragraph that just flowed. The tune that you started humming. The new pattern that you discovered when drawing. You need to constantly use the bridge otherwise it degrades and rots away. You need to maintain it. I'll tell you, it's hard work. Imagine for a moment you don't do it. This bridge will rust and get destroyed. Of course, psychedelics are short-cut but abusing psychedelics means you get stuck in the higher plane, even jump off from the bridge, and that's not what you want. The best balance is when you take creativity from the higher plane and exercise it in real-life. Build things of meaning. Enrich the life of the people around you.</p>
<p>Look around you. Look at the number of people who had that bridge destroyed because they neglected it or got too busy with other things. You neglect it and you forget it exists. It's a delicate thing that needs to be nurtured and when you see the people who stopped using it, you can feel it. I think that my resolve is much stronger to protect the bridge I have with my life. The bridge can be built back if you lose it, of course. It just takes effort. It's easier when you're young. Harder when you're older and rigidity seeps into your personality.</p>
<p>You can lose this bridge. You forget to use and exercise it because you're busy participating in other people's rigid systems. It could be you going for masters and losing the best years of your creative young life trying to make it in a foreign system hence neglecting the self. It could be because you lose yourself in a shitty job and you forget how to use this bridge. It could be that you get into a toxic relationship that doesn't let your mind wander where it wants to go because your mind has been hijacked by negativity. One thing I'm confident about is the fact that I will protect this bridge with my life. Everything else is secondary. Everything.</p>
<p>Maybe I'll link this part from Joe Rogan and Chuck Palahniuk's interview</p>
<p><em>Chuck: "You gotta sacrifice something’s to get a greater understanding of what it is. In almost all cultures it's believed that we're born with a genie, demon, guardian angel or a spirit. It's a spirit that has a destiny for us. If we sacrifice time and effort into developing this gift. The spirit will remain with us and keep us safe for our entire life. If we don't accept our gifts and if we don't live into our destiny and then the spirit becomes malevolent. It becomes something that haunts us and destroys us, destroys our entire household. The ancient Greeks called it the Lemur. It's about sacrificing or dedicating, devoting a certain amount of time and energy to fulfil that destiny. At some age you realize you gotta sacrifice your life for something, I decided to sacrifice it for writing."</em></p>
<p><em>Joe: So do you feel like you're in service of this gift?</em></p>
<p><em>Chuck: Always. It's not a negative thing. It is complete dedication.</em></p>
<p>For me it's technology. Because it's something I'm good at. What are you sacrificing your life for?</p>
<p><img src="https://i.imgur.com/OQBHASg.png" alt="" /></p>
<h3 id="reflection">Reflection</h3>
<p>Now we come to one that we do the least. Reflection. I'm not saying don't consume. I'm saying consume in moderation because the system is built in such a way that they don't want you to think and reflect. Every day I wake up, I go to the loo without my phone and I set there like a miserable fuck alone with my thoughts. I started meditating for 30 minutes and the first five minutes, it's excruciatingly painful. I go for a 30-minute walk without my phone and it just feels weird at the start. But once you get through that pain threshold, things start taking beauty of their own. You read the ingredients of the shampoo. Oh, there are 4 different kinds of birds that sing in the morning? There are three types of plants that sting you.</p>
<p>People see this long-haired weird guy go into the bushes (That's how I get to the paddy fields a bit far away from where I'm staying now) so that I can have acres just to myself with nature. Just me, nature, and good old thoughts. I told the people that I'm going to have a smoke. It's easier than saying I'm going to "reflect on the nature of reality".</p>
<p>Recently it was raining and I was fearing that I was losing myself in "creation", I was spending 10 hours a day programming and I COULDN'T miss my walk. I decided to go barefoot in the rain to feel the ground to be more grounded. After that particular incident, the people stopped saying hi whenever I walk by. Maybe it's better this way?</p>
<p><img src="https://i.imgur.com/52w4yC4.jpg" alt="" /></p>
<p>When was the last time you got bored? Like genuinely bored? And you thought of something interesting to do and you did it? I can remember instances as a child when I came up with some crazy ideas because I was bored. Once I took a big teddy bear and threw it into the well to see if it floats. It did. FOR SCIENCE! This was the primary reason I got my ass whooped by my dad as a child. It was also how I discovered that electric cars run on motors and that magnets are these sticky things that only stick to certain materials without glue before I knew what magnets were.</p>
<p>It's through reflection that I decided that I wanted to pursue the impossible. Comfort can be a prison. It's also through reflection that I decided I want to flow like water while having the conviction of a stone. How do you adapt to the new world while you ignore conventions but have enough conviction to not lose yourself in the chaos and new order? It's hard to walk the line. How do you participate in crypto and degeneracy while maintaining enough sanity to know that "yo, this seems like a scam and I shouldn't put my money and time into it".</p>
<p>When you just consume and create and you forget to reflect you lose agency over your life. Your life becomes a series of reactions to the events that happen to you. Your life is out of your control. You're emotional to the things on your feed, to the things that your peers do, to what your parents tell you. Do you want to be an animal without agency over its life that merely reacts to things? The Buddhists call it the <a href="http://tibetanbuddhistencyclopedia.com/en/index.php?title=Animal_realm">animal realm</a> or were it the <a href="http://tibetanbuddhistencyclopedia.com/en/index.php?title=Hungry_ghost">hungry ghost realm</a>? I'm not sure. As you can see I haven't been taking my Buddhist lessons seriously. You're not machines built for consumption. Your potential is unlimited. You have infinite paths to take and you're going to go for the most common ones?</p>
<p>It's important to reflect on your day. What are the things and moments you cherish, that you're truly grateful about? What are the relationships that make your life feel meaningful? How do you convey to those people that their mere existence is a reason for you to be happy that there are things out there that are pure, and full of beauty? There are things to do that are meaningful and can improve the life of your fellow humans. Gestures of kindness. In a way, I feel that everything in this silicon piece of glowing shit that we call phones feels like it's designed to not look at this fact and rejoice! Look at all we have and we've done. Food at the tip of our fingertips with a click! Poverty is at an all-time low. People aren't commodities. Relationships aren't follow requests. Things can be built that genuinely subverts outdated systems. Look at bitcoin.</p>
<p>I know that this essay was all over the place. There was a start but no end. More questions than answers. Well, if I find the answers, I will be letting you know. This is less of an essay and more like a declaration of a quest. A quest that I'm ready to sacrifice my life to. It's like the moment when Frodo left the Shire to destroy the ring of power.</p>
<p><em>“It's like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger they were. And sometimes you didn't want to know the end. Because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened? But in the end, it’s only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer. Those were the stories that stayed with you. That meant something, even if you were too small to understand why. But I think, Mr. Frodo, I do understand. I know now. Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back, only they didn’t. They kept going, because they were holding on to something. That there is some good in this world, and it's worth fighting for.”</em></p>
<p><em>- The Two Towers</em></p>
<p>I'm declaring that I'm leaving on a quest, there is no turning back now. The road is long and I should leave soon.</p>
<p>Maybe the next time you go to the loo, remember to forget your phone?</p>
<p>I will see you soon.</p>
<p>a. s.</p>Hello there, winter is setting in, I hope it's treating you well. This too shall gently pass. What do I know about winter, there's no winter where I'm from, but you know what the greats say - it's when you're in a room, and you're freezing your balls off, and you're miserable, it's then that the best creative works come to you. Well, at least that's how I rationalize anything miserable that happens to me - "this will pay off big-time, man"!the four horsemen of the indian tech-ecosystem2021-09-11T00:00:00+00:002021-09-11T00:00:00+00:00https://guyandtheworld.com//posts/four-horsemen<h1 id="intro">Intro</h1>
<p>I went for a walk today, well more specifically, I went for a Lindy Walk. It was quite nice, there was a drizzle, I got to wear my favourite windbreaker, in Delhi. This was the first time the weather was even moderately suitable for that after my last stint in the mountains.</p>
<p>While walking, I was thinking about India and how far the tech ecosystem here has progressed. Last five years all these food delivery apps, taxi services, and entertainment apps became a priority in our life. Guess a good amount of that has to do with the fact that Jio made data dirt cheap.</p>
<p>Innovation on this scale brings massive change. Massive change is catalyzed because a ton of people participate in a movement. That made me think. The dynamics of human nature stays the same no matter how innovative the technology is. Think nuclear bombs. We're way too immature as a species to have access to that force of nature. Monkeys playing with Pandora's box.</p>
<p>Whenever there's a large group of people, in this case, the Indian tech eco-system, you can see patterns of human nature. Some people have common traits and it could be because of the school they attended, or the philosophy of the company, or where they went to university.</p>
<p>Reflecting on my experience of being in the tech industry for five years, I thought it'd be a great thought experiment to maybe group people I've encountered who showed similar traits and what we could learn from them.</p>
<h3 id="prescribed-over-achievers">Prescribed Over-Achievers</h3>
<p>The above-average 8.0 CGPA+ college graduate who gets into a big corporate company and the achievement is wildly celebrated by their university, peers, and family. And why shouldn't they? Their parents and grandparents probably had to face one or the other means of poverty or hardship in a third-world country and this is an achievement to celebrate. This gives them very high status within the community and they're highly desirable in the traditional matrimonial setting.</p>
<p>They also adopt the company's philosophy without questioning its integrity. Usually, they do not have any original ideas on how how to innovate in their career because they never had to. Their route was pre-programmed for them by society through various cultural mechanisms. The most ideal option is to either go for higher studies in a first world country because that's where most of their peers are going. Civil service exams are also a very popular option.</p>
<h3 id="restaurant-orbiters">Restaurant Orbiters</h3>
<p>Back when I was interning in a start-up in Bangalore, I was a part of this group, and I had fun. Even though the internship came with status, it was boring. Most of the time I was working on side-projects or complex things for the sake of feeling smart. It didn't have much meaning. I looked forward to eating meals with my mates. I made some great friends with who I'm still in touch now. You never see us, or them alone, ever. It's surreal. Mostly seen around the areas of hotels and cafes around lunchtime.</p>
<p>Wears a neatly ironed shirt and pants if corporate. Thankfully I didn't have to do this because it was a start-up. It makes sense. If they're in an office, and within a team, it makes sense to eat together than to eat alone. Nowadays, I eat alone most of the time with a YouTube video playing in the background or reading a newsletter on Crypto because both my teams are remote and I'm travelling around. Sounds more fun than how I consume my meals. One month is quite small to make friends in a coworking space you go two days a week.</p>
<p>They also seem to carry tags around their neck, some even decide to be rebellious and keeps the tag in their pockets.</p>
<h3 id="the-corporate-dropout">The Corporate Dropout</h3>
<p>The one risk they took in their life that paid off was them quitting corporate for start-ups, but then it deterred them from taking any other risks due to the fear of losing status. The initial system that they were in, corrupted their world-view so much that it's not salvageable anymore. It moulded their philosophy in such a way that they were wired to not work on things deep in the trenches.</p>
<p>When the Indian start-up ecosystem was in its infancy, there was a lack of role models in the space. They were the first adopters of these mass communication media and hence garnered a following. They're not good at anything except leveraging mass communication with manufactured takes that are self-censored to a large extent due to the fear of being criticised.</p>
<p>They will block you at the first attempt at calling them out. Always signalling that they're trying to work on high-status things, but lacks the vision or the actual grind that's necessary to make it, but makes a living out of preaching about them. Mostly rants about whatever technology is in the mainstream and moves on when the next set of shiny toys comes along. Doesn't seem to commit to any mission. How to spot them? Go to the front page of Tech Crunch and look for hot terms. Eg. NFT, Solana. Then see who's reiterating the same without having skin in the game.</p>
<p>A good litmus test to filter the good ones from the bad is to maybe ask have they shipped anything useful, code or no-code? Are they creating value outside of social media? Are they coming up with thought-provoking insights and creative ideas about the things that they are talking about? Are they reiterating things by rephrasing popular narratives to garner sentiment?</p>
<h3 id="the-settled-remote-worker">The Settled Remote Worker</h3>
<p>They've made it. They don't even have to leave their hometowns now. This is the end of the line. Finds excitement in the next tech stack that drops. Forgets to exercise and basks in the comfort of his homemade food. The best-case scenario is that they'll contribute big tech money to the local economy, but the worst-case scenario is that they'll inherit the habit of saving all the money from our previous generation while becoming the black holes of our economy.</p>
<p>It's a great option though. They can exert influence in their hometowns and be a role-models for the kids growing up in small-towns. I was one of those kids and I sure would've loved to have a role model like this. Their lungs will be safe from the smoggy air of the cities. I would like to exercise this option in the future. Maybe after I'm 30 and after having amassed enough wealth from tech, I'll set some kind of establishment in my hometown where I can meditate and work taking in the wonderful views of the Western Ghats. I and my cousin have a ritual where we go out walking out in the paddy fields at least one time a year and exchange the plans we have once we make it big. One of them is setting up a traditional resort with a high-speed fibre connection to chill during the monsoons and the winter months. Summers will be better spent in Dharamshala.</p>
<p><img src="https://i.pinimg.com/originals/04/f1/f8/04f1f8a5818c1972be9e36017e4f8fdb.jpg" alt="Traditional Kerala Architecture" /></p>
<p>Look at how beautiful this is compared to what's being adopted today. The ancient architecture was built with taste, intuition and utility. I've been in these houses and during summers, they provide natural ventilation and cooling.</p>
<p><img src="https://i.pinimg.com/originals/74/a9/10/74a9107b187254b74b4d3fe4e775909d.jpg" alt="Indoor" /></p>
<p>The courtyard provided you with natural lighting and, and during rains, it was absolutely beautiful.</p>
<p>Modern architecture has iatrogenic effects. They do more harm than good. They're blant, do not have natural cooling, so you naturally need to set up an air-conditioner to provide the cooling. Now, these suckers need electricity that you get by burning coal further contributing to an already degrading planet.</p>
<h3 id="wrapping-up">Wrapping Up</h3>
<p>I think one major player that I didn't talk about was The Tech Chai Walas. Mostly because they're tech-adjacent rather than tech. The saviours for all of us in the industry. They're there to reenergize us, the tech bros when they're exhausted from sitting in their air-conditioned cubicles for 10 hours a day.</p>
<p>Always happy to provide you with chai and cigarettes. People always seem to enjoy spending time around this establishment than their temperature-controlled, motivation posters filled offices. Surprisingly, the heat never seems to bother them at all and somehow they feel freer than the rest of us. God bless them.</p>Introgrowing your professional network in the year of the plague2021-08-20T00:00:00+00:002021-08-20T00:00:00+00:00https://guyandtheworld.com//posts/networking-during-covid<h1 id="intro">Intro</h1>
<p>I've been meaning to write this article for over a year now, around the same time COVID came in and we all got locked down and took to our dungeons on Discord. It really doesn't seem so long ago. Around this time, my start-up shut down and it drove me down this tunnel of self-reflection regarding what I was going to do next. It was time to reach out to some folks, old friends from the internet, maybe even meet some new ones who could give me creative ideas about where the world was going, so I could figure out where to put my effort in for the next five years to build a legacy.</p>
<p>That got me into thinking, pre-COVID if someone said "networking event", what comes into your mind? Large hotel halls, with yellow lighting, filled with food that barely has any taste, but it's better than your university dorm food, so you devour it. You can hear a person giving a talk in the background from a niche company that you do not give a shit about, while the impostor syndrome hits you, and you ask yourself "why the fuck am I here?".</p>
<p>Company stalls filled with reluctant employees who rather be in their cubicle than talking with randos just like you, tired of answering the same questions again, and again. There isn't a hint of happiness or delight in their face while they're talking to you because you're there to waste their time, and you both know it. People walking around to amass the maximum number of t-shirts and swags (this was me, it was a way for me to gain favours from dorm friends with my t-shirt supply). Kids piling around that programmer dude who wears a Google t-shirt in the hope of getting an epiphany to get an internship with Google. Random strangers who start shallow conversations with you with the hopes that you'd put them in touch with your HR.</p>
<p>I'm pretty sure there were better networking events that I was not invited for. People like me would've ruined it, for sure and they knew it. I generally hated events like these because they felt superficial but I've been to more than one of these due to circumstances. Not all of them were bad though, I got to meet some really cool people from these events, I'm still in touch with them after many many years.</p>
<p>That got me thinking. I had a strong network even before COVID, and it was not because of in-person networking events. Out of the five internships, one job, two start-ups that I did, all of them were due to opportunities I got from the internet. Asking myself how I did that turned out to be a really interesting mental exercise. I think some people would find the answers useful since the 'rona got rid of networking events and we're left to leverage the internet for answers.</p>
<p>The key gist is that - I was not trying to network. I was trying to create value through projects and coding, or just trying to make friends online. The latter two was infinitely more effective than the former one. If you're stuck at home, looking to build your "professional network" during COVID, I hope the following might give you some pointers. On top of my personal anecdotes, I managed to curate some other tactics from other folks from the kinder parts of the internet.</p>
<h1 id="why-network">Why Network?</h1>
<p>What are the ways in which you can build a network and build genuine relationships with people in tech online that hopefully lead to a job, a remote job, or being part of an exciting community online? And also, why is it that when you ask someone what you're supposed to do after learning to code, the conventional wisdom is always "network"?</p>
<p>Networking is important because organisations and companies that do great things are made up of people. Whatever programming language or framework you're proficient in, the path to being part of a great company or a project means working and collaborating with people. People come first, everything else comes later.</p>
<p>That doesn't mean you're supposed to use and manipulate other people to meet your needs or to break into companies that you like. It means that you're being genuinely useful so that others are willing to work with you and are willing to invest in you let it be through hiring you, giving you access to capital or more resources. Getting skills is the first part, and then comes networking. Remember the order.</p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">The most effective networking strategy I’ve found has nothing to do with conferences, cocktail hours, cold emails, or any of the common ideas you hear.<br /><br />1) Do interesting things.<br />2) Share them publicly.<br /><br />Like-minded people will come to you.</p>— James Clear (@JamesClear) <a href="https://twitter.com/JamesClear/status/1123684508535066625?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">May 1, 2019</a></blockquote>
<script async="" src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Stop networking, start making friends.</p>— Sahil (@shl) <a href="https://twitter.com/shl/status/1154763552562933761?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">July 26, 2019</a></blockquote>
<script async="" src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
<p>Now that we understand our motivation to do it, and considering that we're here after completing the Open-Source challenge, we need to figure out how to leverage our learning from the Open-Source challenge and use it to build a network.</p>
<p>Additionally, since COVID drove everyone home, now things are more democratized but the ways to the network have changed. Let's look at a few examples of how this can be achieved.</p>
<h2 id="ways-to-network-online">Ways To Network Online</h2>
<h3 id="1-write-about-your-work">1. Write About Your Work</h3>
<p>You contributed to Open-Source. Now imagine the project that you contributed to is in the AI or the Crypto domain. You write about your experience of contributing and how your work was useful for the project.</p>
<p>Then you find the for-profit companies in the same domain, working on the same problem through LinkedIn, AngelList or Crunchbase. Then find out who the Engineering Managers and Developers are and forward this article over to them and tell them that you're looking for opportunities.</p>
<p>The caveat is that for this strategy to be the most effective, the contribution to the Open-Source project needs to be significant. Now that you fixed a bug, and know your way around how to make a bigger contribution, this should be a cake-walk for you!</p>
<p>Let's follow this process by looking at a real-life example. You contribute to an Open-Source project called <a href="https://github.com/bentoml/BentoML">BentoML</a> which tackles the problem of "Model Serving Made Easy". There is a lot of private companies that do the same. A Google search gave me</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://neptune.ai/">neptune.ai</a></li>
<li><a href="https://dataloop.ai/">dataloop.ai</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.cortex.dev/">cortex.dev</a></li>
<li>deepdetect</li>
</ul>
<p>These are all companies that you can apply for with the domain knowledge you gained through contribution. You can find the details about the company through LinkedIn!</p>
<h3 id="2-leverage-communities---discord--reddit">2. Leverage Communities - Discord & Reddit</h3>
<p>Everyone has their own very unique interests. People participate and indulge in their interests through online forums and chats. One strategy that I found out for getting knowledge on specific domains or projects is just to be active in their communities and understand how it works.</p>
<p>I've outlined how to find out communities and projects that you like in detail in this article <a href="https://guyandtheworld.com/posts/reddit-strategy">here</a>.</p>
<p>Where else are you gonna find the most active communities on the internet other than in Reddit, Slack and Discord? Since we're exploring options in the context of Open-Source, there are two cool subreddits where you can hang out, interact with folks and increase your chances of getting lucky. <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/opensource/">r/opensource</a> and <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/coolgithubprojects/">r/coolgithubprojects</a>. You can read through the posts and visit the subreddits daily and see if you find something that interests you. You can also find the associated discord channels the same way.</p>
<p>What do you do after finding an interesting project or a discussion? Participate. Just leaving a genuine comment after going through the post and the project or appreciating the work they did is quite enough to help kick-start a friendship. Or if you're looking for anything particular just make a post outlining what you're looking for after going through the rules of the subreddit. Reddit and Discord both allow you to reach out to these folks online using the chat and the DM feature. Use it. Be curious about the project, ask questions, and don't be shy! Get involved in the project and it could bud into a genuine opportunity.</p>
<p>To cite practical examples that worked for me, I'll attach two separate anecdotes. The job I got after my graduation was due to me being active on Reddit and looking for portfolio projects to build. I saw a post on <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/datascience/">r/datascience</a> where a user shared their project and findings and I genuinely found the project interesting. Since I was looking for interesting projects to solve I commented</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Great read! Are there any similar experiments you'd suggest? I'm getting started and this sounds like a very interesting project to do as a starter.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>and I got a reply</p>
<blockquote>
<p>You can replicate mine fairly easily with use of the amazon and ebay APIs. A couple other ideas off the top of my head: Do the same thing for walmart and/or aliexpress. Scrape data on how many items are <em>sold</em>. It would be interesting to see how many of these drop shipped items are selling and how often. Scrape articles posted on Hacker News for the busiest times on HN, I thought it would be cool to figure out what the busies/slowest times are for new posts, and when your the most likely to get on the front page.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>We collaborated, built two projects together so that it could enhance my portfolio, and he could get more traffic to his website. After that, we became friends! Fast forward some time, when I was looking for a job, I pinged him and he hired me without even an interview!</p>
<p>The second instance is how I found a Data Science project, which eventually turned into a Start-up. My motivation was to build a start-up while specialising and gaining skills in Data Science. So what did I do? I went over to r/datascience (again) and I made a post saying I was looking for interesting projects to work on. My post got removed and I almost got banned for spamming. but before I got banned, a couple of folks commented on this post showing interest.</p>
<p>One of the people who reached out was very enthusiastic, had a lot of great ideas for projects, had a great portfolio and industry knowledge and at that point. This was our initial idea, and boy was it exciting!</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Essentially I want to scrape news websites probably in African and Asian countries, get the stories, look for anything to do with certain topics, translate them and do entire extraction - names, roles, organisations etc and then flag them for certain use cases. Like I said things like wildlife trade but also money laundering all the way to terrorist financing. Basically, once you have a core platform to do this you can then filter on any specific case. Let's stick with wildlife for now.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>We built this project, turned it into a start-up, unfortunately, it didn't succeed as a start-up but it was an amazing experience that leads to another host of opportunities, nonetheless.</p>
<p>These same techniques could be employed for finding great open-source projects, finding niche job opportunities and increasing your network! Just think about what subreddits and communities would benefit you the most and reach out to the relevant people.</p>
<h3 id="3-reaching-out-to-open-source-maintainers">3. Reaching out to Open-Source Maintainers</h3>
<p>Reach out to the maintainers with your contributions and see if there is more impactful work that needs to be done is also a great strategy. This is what Sijin, one of our participants in the first cohort ended up doing.</p>
<p>He chose a project called <a href="https://github.com/SimplQ">SimpleQ</a> since it was an open-source project in the domain that he was experienced in and understood the use-case quote.</p>
<p><a href="https://github.com/SimplQ/simplQ-backend/pull/152">Use orElseGet instead of orElse in OwnerService.getOwnerOrElseCreate by sijinpavithran · Pull Request #152 · SimplQ/simplQ-backend</a></p>
<p>He chose a good first issue and contributed to the project which got merged quite fast. Then he found the maintainers of these projects on LinkedIn and reached out to them. He promptly got the opportunity to rewrite the whole backend of SimpleQ! From one line of code change to rewriting a whole package is a big, big deal.</p>
<p>In the words of Sijin</p>
<h3 id="how-to-reach-out-to-the-maintainers">How to reach out to the maintainers?</h3>
<blockquote>
<ol>
<li>Checkout the github profile of the maintainers.</li>
<li>Usually they should have website link on the left panel(under their profile pic).</li>
<li>If not check for information like their username, location & current organisation information. This may help you to directly search them over Linkedin.</li>
</ol>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<ol>
<li>Key point here is to use your judgement to get their email or Linkedin profile URL so you can get in touch and discuss more about opportunities to contribute to project.</li>
<li>Alternate option: If you already have got your PR merged. You can leave a comment in the "PR" or the "issue" you are working on showing your interest to connect.</li>
</ol>
</blockquote>
<p>As a gesture you can also follow them on Github(and give them stars, I am sure they deserve one.).</p>
<p>For e.g:
Case_1:</p>
<ul>
<li>One of the project maintainer I made contribution to had his portfolio website URL (github pages) in his Github profile section.</li>
<li>From the portfolio page I found his Full name & current Organisation. Searched him on Linkedin and send him a Connect request with a short text mentioning the project and the PR I contributed to.</li>
</ul>
<p>Case_2:</p>
<ul>
<li>Similarly the second project maintainer has a fancy username. But again his github profile README.md (i.e Overview tab) section had a link to connect redirecting to</li>
</ul>
<blockquote>
<p><a href="https://www.hiretheauthor.com/">https://www.hiretheauthor.com/</a></p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>page. On this website I found this person full name.</p>
<ul>
<li>Searched him on Linkedin and send him a Connect request with a short text mentioning the project and the PR I contributed to. Showed my interest to help out with any tasks or ideas.</li>
<li>The maintainer was happy to help and shared his idea about rewriting his backend API in a different langauage to improve performance and save cost by going serverless. Currently I am working on this task.</li>
</ul>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
</blockquote>
<h3 id="4-build-a-presence-on-twitter">4. Build a Presence on Twitter!</h3>
<blockquote>
<p>I had been on Twitter for nearly two years before I finally figured out how to use it. I could never quite understand why this platform is so great for networking and self-promotion. To my further surprise, by the time I finally figured it out, Twitter had already had an amazingly positive impact on my career.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>You can read the <a href="https://medium.com/la-vie-en-code/leveraging-twitter-to-build-your-web-development-career-e71d1802e07f">full article here</a>.</p>
<h3 id="5-what-do-reddit-and-hackernews-have-to-say">5. What Do Reddit and HackerNews Have to Say?</h3>
<p><em>As a self-taught dev, how do you network and build genuine relationships with people in tech online?</em></p>
<blockquote>
<p>Reach out to people you know in the industry and hang out with them. Getting a LinkedIn doesn't hurt. Try and join a FOSS project somewhere as it's experience and requires you to work with people in the industry. In general though same way you make friends elsewhere but you try and focus on people in the industry. Play video games and you will probably play with some devs for example. Poke around in reddit and ask people questions and go from there. You also don't need friends to get a job in the industry. Sure it helps but I would go get a job and start working with the people there and try and befriend them. Never know when one of them leaves and speaks well of you. Find out who their friends are and so on and so forth.</p>
</blockquote>
<p><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/ogcmkh/as_a_selftaught_dev_how_do_you_network_and_build/h4iasof/">Source</a></p>
<blockquote>
<p>I'm currently dealing with this as I've also started my self-studies in 7 months ago. I'm building myself towards an Android Developer position and just starting my job searching) I created a Twitter account & only follow people involved in the Android community or post relevant content that I would fine useful. Replies to them, retweets, etc. Someone was looking to start a podcast involving a technology I'm learning and I opt'd in. Nervous as heck l, but now my name was shared with his followers.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Join Slack. I found the Kotlin slack to be great for me as it's not flooded with unanswered questions like some and fits perfectly with the technology I use. People both have reached out to me + I've reached out to them with discussions, etc.</p>
<p>One even connected me with a UI/UX designer to help me with a project! I started a 100 coding challenge. Only 2 of us committed and we're nearly finished. But I've since started collaborating & working on similar projects w/ different tooling, but meetup in a video call about once a week.</p>
<p>You might not meet any "senior" developers here, but it could be a good way to build relationships over the course of a few months. I think small groups might work best for this as it could get overwhelming to see 10+large posts a day. Wouldn't really be able to keep up with everyone's progress. I joined MeetUp less than 2 weeks ago. There are a couple local coding groups in my area. I've since been on one remote call & attended the other in person last night! Seems a lot of groups have started transitioning back into physical locations while also hosting on zoom.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/learnprogramming/comments/ogw64d/as_a_selftaught_dev_how_do_you_network_and_build/h4ldsbd/">Source</a></p>
<blockquote>
<p>You have to ask yourself; what's the purpose of this network? Is it to have a group of like-minded engineers so that if you lose your job you can get first-hand referrals for a new job? Are you looking to establish yourself as a consultant? Are you looking to meet higher-level executives in hopes of becoming them one day?</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Whatever the case, if you email them with a shallow request of "looks like you're doing cool things let's get coffee", your request will probably be ignored. Everyone is busy, there's no time for random coffee with a stranger.</p>
<p>But if you can ask a very specific question regarding their work, you'll pique their interest. Offer to teach them something in return, now you're on the path to a mutually beneficial professional relationship.</p>
<p>Don't send out the same message to different people. Do the hard work; research each person's background, send an email specific to their likes/interests. Be strategic when making a request from someone and if you can offer something in return, even better.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>1) If you read or hear about someone you think are doing something great, contact them, tell them, ask them.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>2) If you see someone who is doing something amazing, go over to them, tell then how great you think it is, ask them how they do it.</p>
<p>3) If there is something you want to understand but don't, figure out who do and ask them.</p>
<p>4) Get out amongst people.</p>
<p>5) Build, create, write, launch something put it out there for the world to see.</p>
<p>In other words.</p>
<p>Just be genuinely interested in the people you interact with and you will be building the best possible network without feeling you are being insincere. It doesn't matter if it's in person, by mail, via a tweet.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I drink beers with people usually. Basically, I make a lot of high level friends / associates at every place I have worked or random meet ups and I do a lot of lunches or after work drinks to keep up with those people.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I usually spend at least one happy hour a week after work + one lunch a week with those types and then one or two lunches a week with current co workers and people closer to me that I consider super talent that I'd like to always stay in touch with.</p>
<p>I just drop random messages to folks saying "Hey it's been about year since we last chatted and it'd be awesome to learn about what you're working on and catch up in general. Do you have anytime for a lunch or pint after work in the next week or two?"</p>
<p>If you do stuff like that you'll get invited to other social gatherings and eventually you'll start meeting their friends and people they consider talented.</p>
<p>What I described above is actually work (I enjoy it though) and requires time and effort.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>You can either approach this small-scale (you want to actually know the people in your network) or large-scale (you want millions of readers/twitter followers, etc).</p>
</blockquote>
<p>For small-scale:</p>
<ul>
<li>
<p>Industry talks and conferences – it's very common for tech companies to give talks or even conferences. An information security / pentesting consultant company held an event where some of their employees presented research that they were taking to a larger conference. From their side, it was for marketing reasons, but this was kept out of their presentations completely (which focused entirely on their work). From my side, I got to spend a fun few hours being wined and dined (for free) and got to chat to some interesting people in the coffee breaks about their work. We still keep in touch. Pros: smaller groups of people who probably share interests with you (you chose the same event). Cons: It's a bit harder to find out about events like these, but definitely possible if you keep your eyes and mind open.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Reach out to people who used to be in your network – university professors, old colleagues, etc. They have surprisingly good memories, and probably won't be at all unhappy to get a quick update from you. They might even mention some opportunities ;)</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Make stuff – even if it's small, such as a blog post or a useful script, it's probably enough to get a few people to notice you, and perhaps one or two to follow you on Twitter or email you and ask you for help with debugging
For large-scale:</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Give people free stuff in return for an email address. Spam them (even if it's not a lot of emails, it's super targeted and you'll get results). Follow people on Twitter, and DM them with offers with free stuff (video, white paper, blog post). Some will react badly (like most of the HN crowd, including me) and report you as spam, block you, unfollow you. A majority of people will lap it up and your 'network' will grow exponentially. [Note: I haven't really tried this myself, but as an experiment I created a Twitter account and started tweeting cheap motivational bullshit. I gained followers pretty quickly and saw how the marketers with hundreds of thousands of readers operated as they were amongst the first to notice my bullshit account. Unfortunately what they were doing was working].</p>
</li>
</ul>
<p>In either case, remember that there are a lot of people looking to grow their networks because having a large network is beneficial, so they look for other people who can provide value and network with them. Instead of being one of these people, and focusing on what your network can do for you, rather focus on the value you can provide to others, and then give it to them. The network will flock to you.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Do you have a LinkedIn profile? Depending on your location it might be very good place to start building your network. If you do this methodically you will be ready by the end of the year. The method is simple - scroll through "people you may know" and find people who are as close to your target audience as possible (probably recruiters / headhunters, sometimes executives of small/mid enterprises who are hiring). It will probably be difficult to find first few, but more you find easier it will be to see other persons who are worth connecting with. Always craft personalized message when connecting.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Once you have enough connections (I'd say at least 500) you should start paying attention to your board - many people will post interesting positions, but there will be many other who either post positions you are not interested in or post marketing stuff you are probably not interested in either. You just mute sources you are not interested in. Also when you get contacted by somebody whose message does not fit your requirement always provide polite response (some people respond with angry words when recruiter had not taken time to read their profile and invited to the process for irrelevant position). After a month or two your board will be tuned for jobs you are interested with. Also if you casually browse through jobs advertised through LinkedIn jobs you will get recruiters attention. Good luck!</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I don’t know what field you’re in, but when I was in law school, it was SUPER common to do “informational interviews”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Step 1: Go onto LinkedIn and search for alums from the same school(s) you went to, who also work in the area/field you aspire to work in</p>
<p>Step 2: Research them thoroughly. Find out if they have previously worked or interned at an organization that you would like to work at some day</p>
<p>Step 3: Find their email address though your alumni network, through their website/profile on their company’s website, or use LinkedIn messaging to ask them for an informational interview. Something along the lines of “Hi, I’m a student at/alumnus of X school. I found you through our alumni services network. I am aspiring to work in Y field after graduation, and I would love to buy you coffee sometime and talk about what it’s like to be a Z field/job (e.g. employment lawyer, plumber, etc), and how you ended up in your current position.”</p>
<p>Step 4: Dress nicely, but not too formally. I would say business casual or dressy casual is good. Arrive 10 minute early. Have a list of questions prepared, but try to not be robotic. Ask them how they got to where they are today. Tell them about your background and ask them for any advice on improvements you can make in the future to increase your chances of getting to work in their field one day.</p>
<p>Step 5: While they are talking about themselves, keep an eye out for opportunities to meet more people. For instance, let’s say in your research, you found out that they used to work as an accountant for X Fortune 500 company. When they are talking about their career path, and they mention X, jump in (without being rude/interrupting) and mention that working at X is a dream job of yours. Ask if they can connect you with anyone who currently works there (via an introductory email).</p>
<p>Step 6: Don’t waste too much of their time. Informational interviews should last generally 15-30 minutes. After the interview, follow up with a thank you email, including thanking them for taking the time to meet with you, and thanking them for agreeing to introduce you to someone who works at X company (just to remind them to do so).</p>
<p>Step 7: For the people that you interview who you truly want to work with/for, try to keep in touch with them (but don’t be annoying or repetitive).</p>
<p>Step 8: When it comes time to look for a job, email them and say something like “I recently graduated and I am currently looking for a job. After speaking with you and hearing more about your company and position, it seems like your company’s culture would be a great fit for me. If any job openings come up, I would appreciate it if you would keep me in mind.”</p>
<p><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/IWantToLearn/comments/acp9f2/iwtl_how_to_network/ed9ydg5/">Source</a></p>
<blockquote>
<p>It's odd many people mention freelancing. That shit's pretty hard. Regarding the remote job, what do you actually want to do? Learning html, css and vanilla javascript probably won't land you a remote job unless learning JS morphs into getting good with node or one of the front end frameworks. I guess you could try the freelancer sites, but you're competing with people who will be happy making less than 50/day.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Some free advice…</p>
<p>Go to stack overflow remote jobs, angel list and other jobs that post remote opportunities. Focus on the story of the company and then the description of the job and decide if you can be passionate about one or both.</p>
<p>Start learning some of their tech stack and build a small project (doesn't have to be pretty or have a full ci/cd pipeline but it should work, be live somewhere and the code should look cleanish)</p>
<p>After that, hit linked in and try to find a recruiter for the company (if it's big enough), a senior developer or a technical lead.</p>
<p>Send an email or linkedin message to the people (not multiple from the same company) explaining your situation. Let them know you're looking to switch to a (fill in the blank for you) role and that while you didn't see a job posted that matched your experience, you're passionate about working there because (fill in the blank). Also ask them if their company allows people to intern (even 5 hrs/week hands on will give you exposure that you might not get self learning and it's time you would have spent learning anyway), if they have advice on what you should focus your learning on or would even mentor you.</p>
<p>The reason you're doing a personal project first is so that if they use angular, you can talk in the message about how you built an app with angular that say helps your wife pull up thoughtful messages from you for the kids throughout the day since you're gone for so long.</p>
<p>Look remote jobs take persistence but they're not impossible to get. One thing I've learned is that once you get experience, things snowball with regards to getting better job offers (more money and/or perks like working remote).</p>
<p>Regarding should you pivot? I don't know. It depends on where you are and what you do to net $50/day. I'm just going to throw this out in case it helps…be careful about paying for courses that aren't on reputable sources. I've yet to see a course that will really teach you how to get a remote job as a developer for the low price of 2,500 or whatever.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/learnprogramming/comments/ev4mzx/selflearning_will_i_find_work_remotely/fftfx1f/">Source</a></p>
<blockquote>
<p>People ask for help finding a remote job a <strong>lot</strong> in this thread so instead of people asking the same question and others copying and pasting a list again, here are some of the main sites to find a remote job:</p>
</blockquote>
<p><a href="https://weworkremotely.com/">We Work Remotely</a></p>
<p><a href="https://www.flexjobs.com/">FlexJobs</a></p>
<p><a href="https://www.wfh.io/">WFH.io</a></p>
<p><a href="https://remoteok.io/">RemoteOK</a></p>
<p><a href="https://jobspresso.co/">jobspresso</a></p>
<p><a href="https://remote.co/">Remote.co</a></p>
<p><a href="https://remotive.io/">Remotive</a></p>
<p><a href="https://www.workingnomads.co/jobs">Working Nomads</a></p>
<p><a href="https://www.mikesremotelist.com/">Mike's Remote List</a></p>
<p>And <a href="https://github.com/jessicard/remote-jobs">here's a good list</a> on GitHub of companies that are remote friendly.</p>
<p>Updates: <a href="http://stackoverflow.com/jobs">Stack Overflow</a> - courtesy dexx4d, <a href="https://github.com/lukasz-madon/awesome-remote-job">A curated list of awesome remote working resources</a> - courtesy kenshinji</p>
<p><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/telecommuting/comments/662qsc/looking_for_a_remote_job_here_are_the_best_sites/">Source</a></p>
<h3 id="finishing-up">Finishing Up</h3>
<p>You're here now. You've made it. Congratulations. I agree, doing this alone is hard and intimidating, it sure was for me, and getting a job is not that easy even with these tactics. Especially when you're not really going out or if there's a lack of like-minded people who could tell you where to look and what to do.</p>
<p>If you're actually interested in the strategies listed above and would like to apply this with guidance from experienced mentors to make yourself valuable in programming and then use that to build a network, we have a community for that. It's called <a href="http://opensource.thefasttrackedprogrammer.com/landing">The Fast-Tracked Programmer</a> and we help you make code contributions to Open Source software in 30 days so that you have tangible work experience to list on your portfolio, and we help you use that experience to build up your resume and then help you network.</p>
<p>Make sure you notice the order. We only do it after we make sure you're valuable enough! The next challenge kicks off on September 6th and we only have less than 30 seats left. If you're interested in doing this, join our cool <a href="https://discord.com/invite/nfN3ABj4mR">Discord Community</a> and say hi in the #support or the #introduction channel. One of us will be with you shortly.</p>
<h3 id="useful-links">Useful Links</h3>
<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27025922">Ask HN: Who is hiring? (May 2021)</a></p>
<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26171008">Ask HN: Advice for finding an entry-level remote job?</a></p>
<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26825017">Ask HN: How can a unhireable person get a job?</a></p>
<p><a href="https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com/">Google Summer of Code</a></p>
<p><a href="https://remotive.io/remote-companies">2500+ Companies Hiring Remotely in 2021</a></p>
<p><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/digitalnomad/comments/8bkdpc/how_do_you_guys_find_quality_fully_remote_jobs/">How do you guys find quality fully remote jobs?</a></p>
<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12489896">Ask HN: General advice to grow my network</a></p>
<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27008832">Ask HN: I have no idea how to network in tech. Any tips?</a></p>
<p><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/remotejs/">remotejs: Remote jobs in Javascript</a></p>
<p><a href="https://thehiveindex.com/topics/software-development/">Software Development Communities</a></p>Introthe open-source challenge2021-07-27T00:00:00+00:002021-07-27T00:00:00+00:00https://guyandtheworld.com//posts/open-source<p>a small thread on self-learning, CBC, reallyconfused and what comes after. i tried building reallyconfused to solve the problem of self-learning. my aim with the product was that i could help someone just like me navigate the field of tech easily through curated roadmaps.</p>
<p>so what's the consensus? self-learning is… kind of a… hard problem to solve. there's no one fits all solution. people who are sufficiently motivated to learn by themselves are not an ideal paying customer because they could use the free resources on the internet to learn by themself.</p>
<p>and if i was indeed the target customer, i would've not paid for this service. i got the distribution and virality part of it right, the roadmap format was highly effective too, but i really did not figure out how to monetize it. this was what YC was concerned about too. so what now?</p>
<p>during the peak of reallyconfused's launch, @adammikulasev reached out to me through reddit "Just saw your road-map post learnprogramming… wow! I think that is really going to help some of my clients." and we proceeded to connect through linkedin.</p>
<p>after running some experiments with reallyconfused, reddit and discord, we had a successful funnel where we were able to convert a bunch of self-learners into a discord server. small win. what do we do next? how do we keep these motivated people who wanna learn engaged and provide value?</p>
<p>after talking with our users, the common theme was</p>
<ul>
<li>hard to get valid real-world work experience</li>
<li>hard to upskill from tutorial hell to real-world projects</li>
<li>hiring market is hard for new-folks without real-world experience</li>
</ul>
<p>we had a light-bulb moment "open-source is the way". it absolutely ticks all the boxes. we use open-source to give people valid work-experience, and leverage that for employment. we do it in a way genuine value is created for all the parties involved.</p>
<p>GSoC did it, and it was effective. @jjmachan comes in and validates the whole thing because because it was the same path that he's taking. only one way to test it out. dive right in!!! and @fastprogrammer was born.</p>
<p>we quickly prototyped a roadmap and set a date for our first free cohort. since all of us had considerable experience with open-source, it put us in the place where we were able to deliver value and we had a mechanism in place to do it.</p>
<p>we had the perfect distribution, a meaningful vision, a group of motivated learners and it was time to launch. we launched the open-source in 7 weeks challenge in our discord and 45 people signed-up for the challenge from our 330 people discord channel.</p>
<p>the goal was to do meaningful open-source contribution, leverage that using different ways, get acquainted with the community and do networking, and use that to get a job. the perfect path for a lost, intermediate programmer, looking to break in to tech.</p>
<p>we had to keep the incentives right because we did not wanna create more trouble for the maintainers like hacktoberfest did, and wanted to create genuine value for the open-source community.</p>
<p>we specifically focused on closing existing issues and incentivized solving meaningful bug-fixes and features. we wanted folks to stick to one project to make impact than jumping around.</p>
<p>it worked. our roadmap, with dedicated channels, stand-ups and calls were super effective. our community was active and filled with awesome people, and we were able to produce kick-ass, tangible, valuable results.</p>
<ul>
<li>closed 18 issues</li>
<li>fixed 8 bugs</li>
<li>added 10 features</li>
<li>added 3 features that are awaiting approval</li>
<li>had 27 pull requests merged</li>
<li>contributed 30 pull requests</li>
</ul>
<p>we weren't satisfied with this result. we wanted better results for our participants. we incentivized people to tackle challenging feature and added three more steps to the journey. in a world where half-assed personal projects are used to spam recruiters through linkedin, we tried to incentivize meaningful contribution.</p>
<p>we tried to get all our participants to show-case their contribution to actual, useful open-source projects and helped them polish their resume. we used our combined knowledge to curate strategies on how you could network, but without using linkedin, without pretentiousness and by showcasing actual value.</p>
<p>it was a spectacular success. JJ after contributing to BentoML, got an awesome paid internship at BentoML itself. along with that, two of our other participants got internships and jobs through this program.</p>
<p>it's one thing to have success with an open-source challenge but whole another ball-game when people get jobs through the roadmap that we designed.</p>
<p>so what worked for us?</p>
<ul>
<li>supportive community</li>
<li>tangible outcome</li>
<li>resources and the network</li>
<li>accountability</li>
<li>mission</li>
</ul>
<p>why this was a better model than reallyconfused self-learning? first and foremost, we focused on the user-journey and the community than the product. we don't even have a landing page. the people who joined us were the ones who was committed to the mission of upskilling themselves.</p>
<p>there's too many resources out there for beginners, but hardly any good ones for the people who got plateaued while learning to code. stuck on projects, or stuck taking too many courses? how do you get that valuable real-world experience that's so needed to land a job.</p>
<p>i think we managed to tackle that niche, and tackle it well. so what are we doing in the future? double down on the current model. personally, it was a great, fulfilling journey to take part in this because of the outcome, the process, and getting to work on something meaningful.</p>
<p>if you want access to our high quality resources, community, mentor resource and other fun things, join us for the next cohort. if you're interested, sign-up here https://forms.gle/jExh2CAXMJq3ys2i7
sorry, we can't afford typeform, yet.</p>
<p>we don't really have a landing page, but you can follow us at @fastprogrammer for other cool updates regarding our journey. if you want me to dig into any other aspect of this particular experience, let me know!</p>a small thread on self-learning, CBC, reallyconfused and what comes after. i tried building reallyconfused to solve the problem of self-learning. my aim with the product was that i could help someone just like me navigate the field of tech easily through curated roadmaps.how my first start-up failed spectacularly2021-06-13T00:00:00+00:002021-06-13T00:00:00+00:00https://guyandtheworld.com//posts/first-startup<h3 id="the-start">The Start</h3>
<p>After you try and fail at building a profitable start-up multiple times, at one point you'd have learned enough from the failures that there'd be no way out but to do it right. I think that quote was by Edison or something, idk. In this essay, I'll be trying to touch upon my first attempt at building a start-up, how it miserably failed at being a start-up and the lessons I learned from it. These essential lessons I learned from my first failure was pivotal for everything that comes after.</p>
<p>The first problem was the motivation with which I wanted to start my first tech start-up. I was at the end of my third year of engineering at my university, it is 2019, you don't have to wear masks or social distance. Every day you're getting drunk, coding and talking shit. Life is unironically good. I just came back from Bangalore to Kochi after my data science internship and was processing all the information from the start-up where they raised Series A. The obvious next thing to do for me was to get into start-ups because I quite honestly didn't find placements or a job challenging enough. I had a programmer ego, and I had multiple cool internships under my belt. Obviously, the next thing to do is to be worth $10 million so I can flex during the university reunions.</p>
<p>I also knew in my bones that it'd be a much more fulfilling thing to pursue next since I could find tech jobs pretty easily. The problem was that I was trying to get into deep-tech, or more specifically, I was trying to specialize in data science because I was aware that I had a lot of things left to learn if I needed to be credible on the global stage in my trade. The motivation with which I wanted to create a start-up was to upskill myself technically instead of building a product that solved a genuine problem of the user. So you can see the dilemma that I faced. I was more interested in becoming a "CTO" than taking responsibility for the users, PMF, vision and having skin in the "start-up" game because the tech was my comfort zone. The idea was that masters and PhD looked pretty drab, so if I could use my tech skills to start a B2B company that was valuable, I'd be credible on the global stage and I could work and tackle much bigger projects. This was my Plan-A.</p>
<p>I'm not an idiot, so I did plan for the possibility of my Plan-A failing. If my Plan-A failed, the Plan-B would be that I'd still have the tech skills from this venture to back my portfolio up. It's a gamble, but let's get this shit done. What would I have done differently? I should have started a Whatsapp newsletter. Just kidding. But yeah, I think if my motivations were in the right place, which was to create a start-up by bringing genuine value, that'd have yielded a better result than the strategy I took.</p>
<h3 id="the-strategy">The Strategy</h3>
<p>I wanted to build a start-up while specialising and gaining skills in Data Science. So what did I do? I went over to r/datascience and I offered my skills to the free market to see the response it yielded. The free market did respond. My post got removed and I almost got banned for spamming. I guess the free market wanted to preserve the value and integrity of the forum. One interesting thing happened though, before I got banned, a couple of folks commented on this post showing interest.</p>
<p>One of the people who reached out was very enthusiastic, had a lot of great ideas for projects, had a great portfolio and industry knowledge and at that point, I was more interested in learning things to get this project done than to make money so we decided to team up. This was our initial idea, and boy was it exciting!</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Essentially I want to scrape news websites probably in African and Asian countries, get the stories, look for anything to do with certain topics, translate them and do entire extraction - names, roles, organisations etc and then flag them for certain use cases. Like I said things like wildlife trade but also money laundering all the way to terrorist financing. Basically, once you have a core platform to do this you can then filter on any specific case. Let's stick with wildlife for now.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Now to build the MVP out, I needed a team and I got three of my friends involved to help with this. A friend who was exceptionally good at ML, a friend for the frontend, backend and to do the general stuff. So we're a team of 5 and we're to kick ass.</p>
<p>This was a period of immense excitement since we brainstormed how to achieve this, build it out and take it to the market! I mean just thinking about the possibility of someone buying this was enough to keep us going for months. We registered our company in the UK, gave ourselves labels as co-founders and other C-positions to compensate for our lack of market knowledge and to create some momentum.</p>
<p>When you consider the start-up philosophy, we did things wrong from day one. If it's a profitable start-up that we wanted to build, we should've started with doing market research, looking at the competitors and similar products in the space and strategising about how we could differentiate ourselves in this market. We didn't think about the distribution neither. Who the fuck is going to buy this? Since our incentive was to "build an interesting project with real-world implications", we built something that we thought the market wanted instead of what the market actually wanted. I think this is the most common mistake that people who come from engineering background ends up doing. We focus on the tech, and not enough on thinking about whatever the fuck we're building.</p>
<p>One of my friends did warn me in an email but we conveniently ignored that. Here's the email exchange between the both of us.</p>
<div class="highlighter-rouge"><div class="highlight"><pre class="highlight"><code>ME - It's called http://alrt.ai/ and we stumbled upon this idea last December, our landing page is trash but a new one is coming in a couple more days. It's basically a way to monitor all the news sources across the world for news that are relevant to you and identify the news that'd be most useful for your industry. The idea is to start as a custom-tailored solution for corporates where the underlying infrastructure would stay the same but depending upon the use-case we'd carefully fine-tune our ML models to provide people with a story that might be immediately important to them via alerts, that's what is going to differentiate us. But I'm convinced there are even more use-cases on the consumer side which we could sell to people on. We have a Kaggle top 20 and an industry veteran who has all the contacts on our team.
So I'll give you a few actual use-cases that we tailored this product around
Exploration of a particular news space: We call this the automatic mode. I've attached screenshots labelled "auto" for these dashboard pages, would make a bit more sense if you take a look at that. We had a few commodities based hedge funds that trade petroleum-based product show interest in this particular use-case. Suppose this hedge fund is interested in Diesel based news and wants to find events that surround diesel. So we give some keywords into the system like diesel refinery, diesel production, diesel storage, diesel capacity, diesel terminal, etc and pull all the news based on these keywords to our database and will keep monitoring the internet for this news. After pulling this news into our database, we do entity extraction and do sentiment analysis and apply our custom model scores. We render all this information into the dashboard so the user can see what Organisations, Products, and Countries are most relevant in the Diesel space. Suppose an explosion happens in South Korea in a Diesel plant, we'll have the trending entities related to the explosion on the page along with the news and if it is happening in real-time that model will alert you on what's happening. Another use-case is, if you want to see how the "Diesel" product was affected by COVID, we can automatically deploy a COVID detecting model onto the dashboard and it'd show all the entities and news that are most related to Diesel and COVID. Mind you, we can literally track anything and deploy a model for anything for eg, Technology, Medicine, Media etc.
Monitoring your Portfolio and setting up alerts if certain danger "metrics" are triggered: This mode is called the portfolio mode. I've attached the screenshots called "portfolio". This is quite straightforward. Suppose you're a Risk Manager and you have to keep an eye on the companies in your portfolio, while also making sure your clients are not involved in corruption or there's no data breach and stuff like that. You could also do due diligence and background check on your new potential clients and keep tabs on existing ones. For example, questions like were Deloitte ever involved in a data breach last year? What is the banking risk in Turkey? could be used to answer. In the portfolio-mode screenshot, at the top, the two buttons are the two custom trained models for detecting news that is related to financial crime or cybercrime for all the companies on the left. This mode helps you to monitor different companies in your portfolio for new and all the while making sure no news about a financial crime or cybercrime about your clients hit the mainstream news or go viral before you know it.
On the consumer side, we were thinking of setting up a paid research platform for casual institutional investors to research and keep track of their portfolio but it's a very competitive space. We have a few interested clients and I was thinking while we pursue that, we could see to some of the applications on the Consumer side something which would help us create some income since B2B deals do take some time hahaha...
</code></pre></div></div>
<p><img src="https://i.imgur.com/eZYWjP7.png" alt="page 1" /></p>
<p><img src="https://i.imgur.com/SWtepnq.png" alt="page 2" /></p>
<p><img src="https://i.imgur.com/Dpr5wez.png" alt="page 3" /></p>
<p><img src="https://i.imgur.com/5vICnMJ.png" alt="page 4" /></p>
<p><img src="https://i.imgur.com/gQXxIqx.png" alt="page 5" /></p>
<div class="highlighter-rouge"><div class="highlight"><pre class="highlight"><code>FRIEND - "Mind you, we can literally track anything and deploy a model for anything for eg, Technology, Medicine, Media etc." This statement creates scepticism in me. I rarely see an all in one solution that works better than a solution designed for a specific niche or use case.
For portfolio mode, how is this different than just setting up google news alerts or using a brand monitoring saas like mention.com? It doesn't have to be different. There are plenty of companies that do the exact same thing and co-exist, I'm just wondering how this might be better or different?
</code></pre></div></div>
<div class="highlighter-rouge"><div class="highlight"><pre class="highlight"><code>ME - Yes definitely, if our core service is to make sure we get all this data to the users the fastest, we're screwed because we'll be competing with the big players like Bloomberg and Reuters who do this at such a fast rate that thinking about competing them would make you go bust hahaha... We're targeting clients who do medium frequency trading, which is basically they want it fast, but not that fast and for field research. So the differentiating factor would be how accurate can we identify relevant events from the constant stream of news, how good our custom build models are for alerting our users on relevant events, and how good the exploration thing is. Show me news where "<EVENT> happened in <REGION>".
Yes, you're right about portfolio mode, I guess it's not that different from any other service out there, only our ML models would be the highlight. That's why we created the auto mode, which is more exciting.
One of the use-cases we wanted to do was for institutional investors. If they wanted to diversify their portfolio or something and wanted to find Green energy investment in Australia or something. We could literally build a custom solution in 2 days for them to accomplish this and we could sell it based on that. You'll get weekly trending companies in green energy always on your portfolio and you could monitor that region or that industry quite nicely. So more of a research-oriented thing than a super speedy delivery of news.
</code></pre></div></div>
<div class="highlighter-rouge"><div class="highlight"><pre class="highlight"><code>FRIEND - I'm a huge believer in selling something that you don't have. Can you talk to companies and tell them that you can do this, and just make a frontend product that you can show them, and get them to pay you before you build it. Tell them you will have this thing up and running in full force in three months, but if they sign up today, you'll give them 40% or something? If you have a few customers locked in, then that's super motivating.
</code></pre></div></div>
<p>Reading those emails, makes me cringe right now. Since we're a bunch of programmers, the thought of doing "business" didn't quite interest us and we just wanted to keep building. It's a bias that can end up with you building something for a hypothetical market that exists only in your head. We were quite shielded from the reality of things because the excitement within the bubble that we were living in gave us momentum.</p>
<p>All was not in vain, we gained a LOT OF SKILLS. I had to pivot from being a Data Scientist to being a Data Engineer since that's what the team required. Since we were building this thing out in Google Cloud, after some hustling and our previous experience with passing the YC Start-up School we qualified for $5000 credits on the platform to build out our infrastructure. Then I took the Cloud Engineer and Data Engineer Professional course, which had like 10 mini-courses in total and completed it. There was one point where I was obsessed with learning every. single. GCP. offering.</p>
<p>I definitely think if we were building a realistic start-up we wouldn't even have remotely tried even 10% of the tech we tried out. To give you a rough idea of our stack. We used and experimented with Postgres, MongoDB, python-Django, ReactJS, GraphQL, Neo4j, Cloud Scheduler, Cloud Functions, Airflow, Cloud Composer, Redis, Cloud Jupyter Notebooks, Cloud ML for hosting our algorithms, TensorFlow, Keras, Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana, Cloud Storage, Google-Pub-Sub, Entity Extraction, Sentiment Analysis, Pipelines for ETL, Deep Learning and a tonne of other things that I don't have the patience to list out here. If I was to tackle the problem again with my newfound wisdom, I would've just tried to prototype the whole thing in a Jupyter Notebook to see if it was possible to build and then just sell the algorithm for some money.</p>
<p>Since we had classes, we had to social engineer our way out of attending physical classes to sit and hack. I personally had to skip a lot of fun events in my final year of university to get this thing done but I have zero regrets because it was all compensated for by the things I learned. I do sometimes think I should've participated, but alas, no point in wishful thinking.</p>
<p>Then BOOM COVID struck. University got cancelled, there was a lot of uncertainty regarding where things were going and not sure about what this meant. I knew that this was going to be a long event since I read an article on the Spanish Flu, but boy, were my expectations misplaced. We had one final drink with the boys and parted our ways hoping to see each other in two weeks. Fun fact: We didn't. We didn't see each other for months and we ended up graduating on a random Tuesday after two months.</p>
<p>Enough getting emotional, it turns out that COVID was another opportunity. Because now instead of not focusing on classes, we could work full-time on this. Halfway through building our project we had a hypothesis regarding who our target market was for. This was something we were supposed to do at the start. But we deluded ourselves by thinking it was hedge-funds and investment firms. LMFAO. We convinced ourselves that they'd buy it and kept the momentum going. We got on calls with hedge-fund managers, folks from investment firms, discussed what they wanted from this MVP, 5 months into building the MVP. We were suddenly struck with the realization that Bloomberg terminal was a competitor. Surprise surprise.</p>
<p>That second epiphany was the lack of money coming in. It penetrated our bubble of delusions about the "start-up" we were building. By then, we had an MVP that we were proud of. Compared to our competitor, the BLOOMBERG TERMINAL, which literally brings in billions in revenue, our product was like a minor downgrade but hell, our UI had better colours.</p>
<h3 id="the-end">The End</h3>
<p>It was a cool MVP which I was really really proud of. You could create a "scenario" like "Risk", "Climate Change", "Green Energy" and companies and entities that you want to track and they'd scrape and gather news articles regarding that. Did you want to know cool green energy company news in Australia? Boom, you got it! We kept on adding feature after feature. Graph database to map and connect entities? You got it. Predictive algorithm to score entity relationships? You got it.</p>
<p>Ultimately it was around May that the team started losing momentum. We couldn't find a paying customer, most of our peers had got full-time job offers and some started working while we were staying with our parents and trying to get this thing to take off and bring some revenue. Ultimately the truth dawned on us that we built a product in the void and that no one wanted it. This venture was a spectacular failure.</p>
<p>Since we couldn't sell this product to hedge-funds and investment firms, I tried to find consumer applications through newsletters and other channel but by that time I was running low on energy. I just wanted to get this thing over with. It was mentally taxing to work on something which yielded no returns. As one last-ditch effort to sell the tech that we built by posting it on r/startups and we had a lot of offers for $10,000 to $20,000 to buy this thing, but I and my team-mates were so burnt out from working 10 hour days for the last 7 months without weekend breaks that we just could not see it through since we were too exhausted to fix the bugs we needed for the demo. The realization that I wouldn't be a millionaire in 2020 hit me like a brick, on my face, when I'm driving 200 KM per hour. Yeah.</p>
<p>I ended up open-sourcing all the tech I wrote and put it on my Github. The last days of the company were filled with so much despair, realisations and harsh truths that I took a couple of days off just to process it. I was feeling bad for the team since we failed, and one of my co-founder had to cancel his masters for doing this. If you built a start-up, you know how hard it is to just let go of it. It's like a baby you're raising a baby and boom, one day the doctor tells you that it's not going to survive and you sit and ponder where you went wrong and how you can salvage something out of it. It was COVID, so you couldn't go out and have a drink to talk it out neither. The existential crisis of sitting in your room at 1 AM grappling with the reality of truth is a very humbling experience. Suddenly the expectations and hopes about being a millionaire come crashing down and the delusions that you convinced yourself of is out there clear as day. You had to let go and move on. With this, there was only one thing left to do, quit.</p>
<h3 id="the-lessons">The Lessons</h3>
<p>It was not all in vain, I was able to leverage the tech skills I gained here by learning all this and get a very well paying job, 2X more than I would've gotten from sitting in placements. The seven months that I spent doing this with my team were times of immense personal growth and sacrifice. I do not think the things I learned about myself through this journey could be recaptured by anything else. These would turn out to be fundamental lessons that fuel my journey forward.</p>
<p>After this, I started freelancing for a friend's company in the US, which had a very interesting product. Since our user-facing backend was in Django with Postgres, I put out a proposal to my friend where I said "Hey, I'll solve any three issues that you give me in 10 days. You can hire me if I get it done". That gamble paid off since I knew the tech very well. Their tech stack was similar to what our start-up had and I was able to solve those three quite important issues in 7 days. I started freelancing for a comfortable $15 an hour as a normal programmer.</p>
<p>Getting a day job was kind of weird since I was working with the customer service team to bring actual value to users through my tech skill. Quite a stark contrast from where I was just a month ago being the "CTO". You didn't need fancy databases, "ML" or "ENTITY FUCKING EXTRACTION WITH ETL" to create value. A CRUD app was all that was needed to comfortably solve the user's problems and bring them genuine value and make their life better. It was a humbling experience and a philosophy I started embodying for every project that followed.</p>
<p>Eventually, I was able to convert that into a job where I could work my own hours, I negotiated a better salary and I had plenty of time to work on my side-projects. The lessons I learned there were so valuable for me that I knew I had to build a start-up, but this time I knew how to do it right. Without writing a single line of code, just by myself, and after talking to users.</p>
<p>Why am I reflecting on this after a year? I don't know. If this helps one other person make a better decision, I guess that's enough but I don't think I'm that altruistic. I could also bullshit by saying "this gives me closure", but it doesn't lmao… I'm going to be edgy now, in the words of Rustin Cohle from True Detective "You see we all got what I call a life trap, a gene deep certainty that things will be different… that you'll move to another city and meet the people that'll be the friends for the rest of your life… that you'll fall in love and be fulfilled… f<em>**ing fulfillment… and closure whatever the f</em>** those two f***in' empty jars to hold this shit storm. Nothing's ever fulfilled, not until the very end. and closure. Nothing is ever over". Ironically I too had a run-in with a pagan cult, but maybe let's save that for the next essay.</p>
<p>I guess I just wrote this for myself and if you read my last essay, the launch success, getting a YC interview call is directly correlated to the lessons that I learned here. Just focusing on creating value and being of service to others. I still have a long way to go but yeah, this shit is fulfilling af.</p>
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<center><iframe src="https://open.spotify.com/embed/track/5OLjhk2db14wAFMmWjrxGw" width="100%" height="380" frameborder="0" allowtransparency="true" allow="encrypted-media"></iframe></center>
<p><br /></p>The Startlaunching my product on reddit to get 1,500 sign-ups and 300,000 views2021-06-01T00:00:00+00:002021-06-01T00:00:00+00:00https://guyandtheworld.com//posts/reddit-strategy<p>In this post, I'll explain how you can come up with a start-up idea, get it validated, and have a great launch while providing value for the subreddit. I will not be discussing "how to build MVP" part because that'd be a waste of time for everybody. I've validated multiple products on Reddit and built one of them. The product I ended up building was for self-learners and I leveraged a self-learning community called r/learnprogramming. Using this strategy,</p>
<ul>
<li>I ended up garnering 300,000 views, 1500 sign-ups for the product.</li>
<li>It was largely driven by a post that got 4200 upvotes, 170 awards, 200 comments which were absolutely pivotal for getting feedback.</li>
<li>I spent $0 to do this while managing a day job.</li>
</ul>
<p>The framework that I listed down here can be used for Discord and other forums too. I'm sticking to Reddit since that's where I personally found success. Here are a few examples of the Reddit launches which benefitted the communities more than the creators and in turn found "community-idea fit".</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/learnprogramming/comments/lrcrxx/to_make_careerplanning_less_confusing_while/">ReallyConfused - r/learnprogramming</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/degoogle/comments/njatok/we_built_an_endtoend_encrypted_alternative_to/">Ente.io - r/degoogle</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/coding/comments/n7m0q2/i_can_code_well_now_what_i_made_a_list_of_curated/">tiny.school - r/coding</a></li>
</ul>
<h3 id="why-should-you-validate-on-reddit">Why Should You Validate on Reddit?</h3>
<ul>
<li>To validate that your idea solves an actual problem that the user has.</li>
<li>Your first version is probably not the best version, the community and their feedback will guide it to where it wants to go.</li>
<li>You shouldn't waste months on building something no one wants and it's good to have distribution before you have the product.</li>
<li>It would help you with SEO.</li>
</ul>
<h3 id="what-should-you-validate-on-reddit">What Should You Validate on Reddit?</h3>
<ul>
<li>A B2C product popular enough to have a subreddit. If you're building a B2B product for hedge fund managers interested in silver commodities, you'll have a much harder time doing that on Reddit.</li>
<li>Something you're sure will create value to the Subreddit you chose. If you release it without creating value, you will ruin your reputation, get banned and make it tough for the mods and ruin the community.</li>
</ul>
<p>Now since we listed down the pre-requisites, let's see how we can get this done!</p>
<h3 id="frame-the-problem-statement">Frame the Problem Statement</h3>
<p>The first part before building the MVP is to validate your idea. Most often the idea software engineers come up with is a solution. We see the end product, the website, the iOS app, the hardware. The aim is to frame the problem statement. You need to find an answer to this question - what's the difficulty the user is facing? In most cases, you'll need to optimize the solution multiple times to get to the problem statement to get to one that actually makes sense and one that the user would resonate with. Unless you're a person who's coming into the game with a problem statement, you're good to go.</p>
<p>My problem statement was this</p>
<h4 id="beginners-are-confused-regarding-career-options-while-self-learning-a-job"><em>"Beginners are confused regarding career options while self-learning a job."</em></h4>
<p>The solution was to build a platform where you could explore roadmaps on tech where it outlined how one could go from studying a particular programming language to a career in tech. I too started thinking of it from the solution instead of the problem. Before I wrote a single line of code, I was committed to talking to a hundred users to</p>
<ol>
<li>Remove any personal bias from my idea.</li>
<li>Get an email committing to use the product so that I had distribution before the product</li>
</ol>
<p>Now we have the problem statement, and we haven't written a single line of code, how do we make sure there's a market for this idea?</p>
<h3 id="find-the-community-idea-fit">Find the Community-Idea fit</h3>
<p>I think the reason Reddit works well for this is that if I received a hand-crafted personalised message from a comment I wrote on the niche topic that I'm interested in from another anonymous user, I know for a fact that this individual is reaching out to me for what I'm interested in and not because of who I am. Now we have an idea why Reddit might be good for value creation and now you know that the way you reach out to these people has to be in a way that creates value for them while also engaging them.</p>
<p>The first thing you need to do is find these communities, to do that I googled "learn programming subreddit". It returns three subreddits - r/learnprogramming, r/coding, r/programming. All three are important but r/learnprogramming had the biggest potential. Then you read the rules to get an idea of who uses this subreddit. You sort by the top (by the year) and you get a solid idea about what the community is about and what kind of posts people share there. Use your reasoning to see if the users here would resonate with the problem statement at hand.</p>
<p>For the other products I validated, I googled for "podcasters subreddit" and it returned r/podcasting and r/podcasts. The second product was a product for youtube creators so the keyword I used was "youtube creators subreddit". It returns three subreddits - r/youtubers, r/newtubers, r/partneredyoutube. All three are important but r/partneredyoutube was more of my audience but I never went about building these two products due to multiple reasons even though I got validation.</p>
<h3 id="find-the-early-evangelists-from-the-forum">Find the Early-Evangelists From the Forum</h3>
<p>While reaching out to folks, please be absolutely sure that you're not spamming these users. This is a valuable channel for reaching out to folks and we as responsible citizens of the internet need to withhold a pact for using these sustainably in a way that creates value.</p>
<p>So did you find a subreddit that you think would like your product? Great job. It might take some time to find the niche you're looking for. If you do not find the exact one, broaden your keywords. If you're looking for something like a community of cardiovascular surgeons, your idea might be too niche for Reddit but if you broaden your keywords, you get r/surgeon with 25,000 users.</p>
<p>Now, how do we find the right users to reach out to? How do we frame that message to make it so that the person you reaching out will get value out of the exchange too?</p>
<p>In this part of the step, you need to stake out the community and learn. You need to know what kind of people post on those forums, what kind of discussions takes place and who the right set of users to reach out to are. If you spam, you ruin your chances of landing an interesting conversation regarding the idea.</p>
<p>For this, I staked out the forums for a couple of weeks. I went to "new", and read the posts which people were posting. Even if you do not have a solid idea of what your problem statement is, this part helped me to resonate with the problems and polish my value proposition. In the case of my roadmap product, I saw that a good amount of questions in r/learnprogramming was "how do I get started with X, "what's the next step after learning Y", and "how do you become Z". This was a moment of epiphany as this is exactly the target market that my product was designed for.</p>
<p>Slowly but surely I started reaching out to these folks to get a better understanding of the problem that they were facing. Since I had experience with programming, I tried to answer their questions so that an exchange of value could take place. If you're willing to help out people, they would be willing to help you. Slowly I got to understand their pain points and even got some emails so that I can reach out when I finished building it. Through these conversations, I pinned down the value proposition and the problem statement.</p>
<p><strong><em>Explore, Create and Share Learning Roadmaps in Tech</em></strong></p>
<ul>
<li><em>Explore Roadmaps Made By Self-Learners</em></li>
<li><em>Build Your Own Roadmap And Pursue Long-Term Goals</em></li>
<li><em>Explore Careers Day-To-Days and Project Ideas</em></li>
</ul>
<h3 id="validate-your-idea-and-collect-email">Validate Your Idea and Collect Email.</h3>
<p>I still wasn't convinced that the users would come if I built it. Yes, I got validation for the problem statement and got a couple of emails but not enough for me to be satisfied. Would they pay if there was an option? Can I acquire users at scale? I wanted to run couple of experiments to see if it'd work.</p>
<p>First, I asked my friend who was an established data scientist to note down the resources he used to self-learn data science. Then I visualised this using Figma, which I had to learn and released it with integration to substack to collect emails. I released this PDF in a subreddit, made a medium post and it got some much-needed traction.</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/learnprogramming/comments/igzsc6/from_learning_python_to_becoming_kaggle_kernels/">Released the PDF on r/learnprogramming</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/learndatascience/comments/igzd77/from_learning_python_to_becoming_kaggle_kernels/">Released the PDF on r/learndatascience</a></li>
</ul>
<p>Second, I set up a dummy landing page using unicornplatform and shared it on Twitter and reached out to folks I was talking to already. It was a free platform, so that helped.</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://hopeful-raman-1f72d9.netlify.app/">Here's the landing page</a></li>
</ul>
<p>I did not release this landing page on the subreddit since I did not build the platform that I was promising and it was just a test to see if it could get people interested enough to give me their emails. Through these two strategies, I got 150 emails which convinced me it's time to build!</p>
<h3 id="build-the-mvp">Build the MVP</h3>
<p>I know you have been itching to build the product but I'm glad you got had the patience to read till here. Hopefully, you've gotten rid of your biases and have a solid go-to-market strategy and distribution (email list) in place that's ready to see your bomb-ass product after you finish building it.</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://reallyconfused.co/">This was the MVP</a></li>
</ul>
<p>I'm not going to explain how to build a product because I'm pretty sure there are better articles than this which outlines how to build an MVP. Make sure you keep this process to 1-3 months if you're on this full-time. I had a job so it took me a wee bit more, and I had to learn frontend and I chose Golang to build the backend which was a mistake in hindsight. I knew Python pretty well so I should've stuck to that. The learning phase probably added two to three extra months to the process.</p>
<h3 id="when-you-get-stuck-go-back-to-your-initial-users">When you Get Stuck, Go Back to Your Initial Users</h3>
<p>I suggested keeping this sprint short is because chances are you'll be hit with an existential crisis while you're building it. The longer it takes, the harder it'll be to keep up the momentum. It took me 5-6 months to ship, which could've been done faster and there were times I wanted to quit. I constantly asked myself "who'll want this?". During these tough times where you're questioning your sanity, you need to go back to your users and get more validation to get your momentum back especially if you're an indie-hacker. There were times I was like "only if I worked on a B2B product" before launch and then I'll go back and read the initial customer development I did and it'd give me a boost of energy to keep going. I think questioning your sanity is a good way to make sure that you're not building anything based on your delusions, too much of this can be detrimental.</p>
<h3 id="after-the-mvp-is-done-release-it">After the MVP is Done, Release it!</h3>
<p>The launch of a product is not the end goal. It is the iterations where you keep improving while finding sustainable distribution strategies to build a business that generates revenue. But the initial traction from your launch would introduce you to new users, problems and opportunities which would broaden your vision. Remember that launch is a one-time thing and it's not a sustainable strategy. But when you're doing the launch, it doesn't hurt to do it right!</p>
<p>Now you have your distribution channels ready i.e the subreddit where you validated your product and you're absolutely sure that it creates value for the users from our talks with users. Now prepare for your launch. I personally prefer to have a text post than a link post so that I can explain my reasoning but there are multiple ways to do it, but ideally you should just stick to a text post. Be sure to outline the problem statement, since that's what users resonate with more, the solution and your motivation for building it and the link to the product. Make sure to get feedback on your post from your associates to see if it resonates. You can use your initial set of users to guide you through this. Research on what the best time to release it would be and launch!</p>
<p>These are my successful launches</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/learnprogramming/comments/lrcrxx/to_make_careerplanning_less_confusing_while/">r/learnprogramming - To make career-planning less confusing while learning to code and I made a website with over 50 CS career roadmaps!</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/learnpython/comments/m1qeb6/i_made_a_website_with_12_career_roadmaps_you_can/">r/learnpython - I made a website with 12 career roadmaps you can pursue while learning Python.</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/InternetIsBeautiful/comments/lwxhrp/i_made_a_website_where_you_can_explore_create_and/">r/internetisbeautiful - I made a website where you can explore, create and share learning roadmaps with over 50 existing roadmaps to learn from</a></li>
</ul>
<p>It did take some time to tune my launch strategies to see what'd get me the most exposure, growth and sign-ups. I had to keep the roadmaps free to create some network effects and it worked according to plan. I had no revenue creation strategies in place since growth was what I was targeting and I quite did not expect this kind of a launch. Now I have distribution with a big email list and an easy way to run experiments to create revenue.</p>
<p>I do have regrets. I should've better engaged these visitors, and retained them but in my defence, I did not expect to get this kind of virality. During the initial launch, I should've at least converted these users to a Discord channel. Alas, I didn't. Here are some product metrics that are solely through the Reddit launch.</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://imgur.com/a/XGAsH8n">Page-views</a></li>
<li><a href="https://imgur.com/a/pkSY3Kb">Active Users</a></li>
</ul>
<h3 id="inherent-risks">Inherent Risks</h3>
<p>These are some risks with this strategy,</p>
<ul>
<li>A specific community for your needs might not exist. Your product might be too niche.</li>
<li>The mods could remove your post even if it's something that's actually useful. You should do valid research to see if there's a risk of that happening and reach out to them to get the reason.</li>
<li>You might get banned for spamming no matter how useful it is. Do not get discouraged, and keep pivoting and tuning your message to see where you're going wrong.</li>
</ul>
<p>If you have an idea of planning a launch like this for your product, shoot me an email or a DM, I would be happy to consult.</p>In this post, I'll explain how you can come up with a start-up idea, get it validated, and have a great launch while providing value for the subreddit. I will not be discussing "how to build MVP" part because that'd be a waste of time for everybody. I've validated multiple products on Reddit and built one of them. The product I ended up building was for self-learners and I leveraged a self-learning community called r/learnprogramming. Using this strategy,