A life ordinary by Amit Sarkar - Issue #11

Hello friends,

Welcome to another edition of my newsletter.

This week was a very eventful week for me and my family. It was our anniversary and our son turned 9 months.

So we decided to make an impromptu visit to the Cotswolds over the weekend with everything booked last minute. It was an amazing road trip and the first for our family. We drove over 600 kms in 3 days and enjoyed some lovely food and some amazing views.

On the return, we stopped at Bicester Village, and one thing that struck me the most was the difference in the size of the toilets for men and women. The women's toilet was huge while the men's toilet had just 2 urinals. The fact that it was of different sizes, highlighted the fact that the world is slowly recognizing the fact that men and women have different needs and need different design planning. Kudos to the design team at Bicester village

My wife also finished a 10K run this week, after 9 months of giving birth. Hats off to her grit in completing this run. I was there with our son to cheer her up throughout the race and greeted her at the finish line. Our son was the happiest seeing his mum at the finish.

And one thing I want to learn for the future is to type faster.

šŸƒ Agile

Software development for a long time followed the waterfall model of development.

But in 2001, a group of software engineers documented a different approach to product development in the Manifesto for Agile Software Development.

It suggested the following fundamental values -

  • Individuals and interactions over processes and tools

  • Working software over comprehensive documentation

  • Customer collaboration over contract negotiation

  • Responding to change over following a plan

This method of software development has since been widely adopted and now more than 80% of organizations use Agile.

A short recap of the main methods used in Agile: Scrum, Kanban, Lean, Extreme Programming, Bimodal development, and Hybrid.

Some of the popular agile methods are mentioned below -

  1. Scrum - Release early, learn from feedback, and improve

  2. Kanban - Rapid turnaround, effective effort allocation, and transparency

  3. Lean - Eliminate waste, focus on core features, and test early

  4. Extreme Programming - Increase the quality of code, automate testing, and get constant feedback

  5. Bimodal Development - Maintain existing software, delivering innovations in parallel

  6. Hybrid - Have clear deadlines and fixed budget with iterative development and testing

ā³ Longtermism

I recently read a tweet from Elon Musk which led me to another tweet from William MacAskill which led me to the article mentioned below.

The demographers estimate that in these 200,000 years about 109 billion people have lived and died.

It is these 109 billion people we have to thank for the civilization that we live in. The languages we speak, the food we cook, the music we enjoy, the tools we use ā€“ what we know we learned from them. The houses we live in, the infrastructure we rely on, the grand achievements of architecture ā€“ much of what we see around us was built by them.

In 2022Ā 7.95 billion of usĀ are alive. Taken together with those who have died, about 117 billion humans have been born since the dawn of modern humankind.

This means that those of us who are alive now represent about 6.8% of all people who ever lived.

We are mammals. One way to think about how long we might survive is to ask how long other mammals survive. It turns out that the lifespan of a typical mammalian species is about 1 million years.Ā Letā€™s think about a future in which humanity exists for 1 million years: 200,000 years are already behind us, so there would be 800,000 years still ahead.Ā 

Letā€™s consider a scenario in which the population stabilizes at 11 billion people (based on the UN projections for the end of this century) and in which the average life length rises to 88 years.

In such a future, there would be 100 trillion people alive over the next 800,000 years.Ā 

ā€˜Longtermismā€™ is the idea that people who live in the future matter morally just as much as those of us who are alive today.Ā When we ask ourselves what we should do to make the world a better place, a longtermist does not only consider what we can do to help those around us right now, but also what we can do for those who come after us.Ā 

The recent news on climate change, global warming, Russia's war with Ukraine, China becoming aggressive over Nancy Pelosi's visit to Taiwan and many more made me realize that humanity's future lies in fragile hands. One wrong step and we are doomed.

But we also have the gift to improve our lives and make our planet better prepared for the future.

We almost always think short-term and never care about the future. We also find it difficult to grasp big numbers that make us estimate very poorly.

Thinking about the long-term future forces us to think more deeply about our impact on this world and how we can make it less damaging.

If we manage to avoid a large catastrophe, we are living at the early beginnings of human history.

Below is another video from Kurzgesagt's (German for "In a nutshellā€œ) YouTube channel on the same theme.

šŸŽ™ļø Digital legacy

Me and Rinat recently did a podcast about digital legacy and we felt it was an important topic to cover.

Most of us, when we think about our Wills, only think about physical assets. But these days we have so many virtual assets, from Facebook posts to Google Photos, from digital-only bank accounts to cryptocurrencies. What will happen to these digital assets once we die?

Thinking about your digital legacy is more vital than ever and tech companies have already started thinking about it.

Thank you so much once again for reading my newsletter this week. Please feel free toĀ Buy me a coffeeĀ if you are enjoying what I am sharing.

Until we meet again next week, please take care of each other, stay cool, drink lots of water and be kind.

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