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At age 39, painter John Baldessari took his entire life's work of landscape paintings and lit it ablaze.

This is part one of the Crossover Project. Part two is here and part three is here. I sat in front of Mat, idly chatting about tech and cuisine. Before now, I had known him mostly for his cooking pictures on Twitter, the kind that made me envious of suburbanites and their 75,000 BTU woks. But now he was the test subject for my new project, to see if it was going to be fruitful or a waste of time.

The smartest people in the world use mental models to make intelligent decisions, avoid stupidity, and increase productivity. Let's take a look at how ...

Video games are taking over the world and it's time for Design to take them seriously.

We hold phones from the future, running software designed a decade ago.

Half-a-billion people stored files on Dropbox. Well, sort of. Really, the files were in Amazon’s cloud. Until Dropbox built its own. And threw the switch.

Something beyond rising energy and labor costs is leading to sticker shock on once-cheap urban amenities.

Amazon wants to be a marketplace for India’s 40-plus streaming platforms, with the impending launch of Prime Video Channels in the country.

Data is the new oil, we are told. Every country needs a data strategy, and all of us should own our data, and be paid for it. But really, there is no such thing as data, it’s not yours, and it’s not worth anything.

Recently I was sitting outside at a restaurant and my ears perked up when the gentleman at the table behind me started talking about entrepreneurs with his guest. When pressed by his companion as t…

When interest rates rise, keeping EMIs constant may be more trouble than it’s worth Read this edition online Monday, 20 June 2022 A weekly newsletter about how finance is getting supercharged by tech in India, and how you can make money work for you.

My own content creation philosophy, explored through my own personal story with React

This newsletter was originally published on Substack and archived here for posterity.

After leaving Google, many engineers miss the developer tools. Here's one ex-Googler's guide to navigating the dev tools landscape outside of Google, finding the ones that fill the gaps you're feeling, and introducing these to your new team.

India’s first open source unicorn, Hasura has shattered the notion that proprietary solutions are the sole path to building a $1Bn business

Separate the “job to be done” from the the job you think you want

Don’t build the startup ship of Theseus.

How to prioritize at work early in your career.

You can have generalist knowledge or a generalist skill set — not both.

I think I am at least somewhat more productive than average, and people sometimes ask me for productivity tips.  So I decided to just write them all down in one place. Compound growth gets...

People using interrogative self-talk seem to perform better than those who use declarative self-talk. That’s the Willpower Paradox.

We constantly make decisions that will affect our lives in the future. That future can be one hour from now (what’s for lunch?) or one year from now (should I hire an assistant?). Unfortunately, the brain has a hard time imagining what our future selves will need. Instead, it takes mental shortcuts and makes choices ... Read More

“I would do much better!” you think, watching someone give a presentation about a topic you are familiar with. “I don’t feel like smoking at all, I’ll definitely be able to quit tomorrow,” you say with a relaxed tone, right after smoking a cigarette. These are illustrations of the empathy gap: our tendency to underestimate ... Read More

The problem with emotional reasoning is that it can lead to worsening feelings of anxiety, fear or worry in situations that are already stressful.

Psychological reactance is a reflex reaction to being told what to do, or feeling that your freedom is under threat. It can occur in personal, professional or social settings when you feel that you need to regain a sense of control over your autonomy.

Apophenia is the tendency to detect patterns that do not exist. Also known as patternicity, apophenia occurs when we try to make predictions, or seek answers, based on unrelated events.