A life ordinary by Amit Sarkar - Issue #14

August 30, 2022

Hello friends,

Welcome to another edition of my newsletter.

This week we had our son's baby reviews and it all went really well with him reaching development milestones for many things. We are so glad as first-time parents that we are doing everything we can to help him grow to his fullest potential.

I also ran the Bromley Parkrun, with my local friends this Saturday. I felt strong but was really surprised with my performance in the end. I achieved my personal best at this park with a time of 24 mins 02 secs. The weather was cool and sunny but there was no breeze.

I also finished teaching my boss's son about software testing, this week. He recently completed his GCSEs and wanted some work experience during his school holidays. So we ended up teaching him about software testing. The thing I know the most. When you teach someone something, you are actually learning twice. And that is a compelling thing. If you want to learn something start teaching. I learnt more about testing by teaching than by practising it every day. And I realized I sure do know a lot 🙂. Software testing is a way of thinking.

Rinat and I also recorded our 50th podcast episode on MFA (Multi-Factor Authentication). It is a huge milestone for us since we started recording our podcast in 2020. The recent episodes will soon be published.

🧘 7 types of rest

Are you getting your seven or eight hours of sleep a night — yet you still feel exhausted? Here’s why that could be happening, according to physician Saundra Dalton-Smith.

We go through life thinking we’ve rested because we have gotten enough sleep — but in reality we are missing out on the other types of rest we desperately need. The result is a culture of high-achieving, high-producing, chronically tired and chronically burned-out individuals. We’re suffering from a rest deficit because we don’t understand the true power of rest.

The lines from the article I have mentioned above echo a lot with me.

Whenever we think about rest, we always think about either physical rest or mental rest.

When we are resting physically, we normally lie down, take a nap or sleep.

When we relax mentally we try to keep our minds relaxed as much as possible by doing things we like.

But there are other forms of rest.

But as you can see in the image below, there is more to rest than meets the eye.

It's important in today's world where we are constantly active, mentally, physically, socially and emotionally that we need to rest properly. And resting doesn't mean sleeping always.

Simply by meditating, doing yoga or even going out for a walk we can relax ourselves.

⛰️ Flying over Mt. Everest

Chinese team 8KRAW.com and DJI climbed to the top of Mt. Everest recently and flew a DJI Mavic 3.

To give you a perspective, Mt. Everest's peak is at 8,848m. And the drone in the above video flew at 9,232m.

To fly a drone at such an extreme altitude, the drone pilot must have a lot of training and experience. The weather can change very quickly and it can get extremely cold. Also, the battery in such conditions won't last very long. High wind speeds can also make it difficult to control the drone. And most importantly, since the air is far less dense at high altitudes the drone has to work harder and harder as we increase its height.

So shooting this film is indeed quite amazing.

🖼️ Midjourney

In my newsletter issue #3, I had written about Open AI’s DALL·E 2 & Google’s Imagen. But there have been more tools, recently, that are far more accessible to the public.

I read an article on How-To Geek about an AI-based image generator tool called Midjourney and thought to try it out myself.

I gave it a shot and below are two images from the text prompts I had given.

If you do decide to generate some of your own images, then you can check them all out here, later.

The crazy thing is that instead of replacing all artists, who are not going anywhere, this new tool would create new jobs.

The funny thing is when people think about technology replacing old jobs they forget that technology does tend to create far more new ones.

🎙️ Podcast

Last week I heard an episode from the podcast Tech Lead Journal by Henry Suryawirawan. In this podcast, Henry himself was interviewed. And it was amazing to hear about his whole journey in the tech industry and how many incredible people he has interviewed. It was the 100th episode so it was a huge milestone for Henry as well.

As always, this podcast was recommended by my wife who herself is a Senior Software Developer and listens to some amazing podcasts.

In this podcast, Henry talks about the 3Cs outlined below. I feel I am trying to do the first 2Cs but not doing enough for the third C.

The first C, “consume”, is consuming knowledge. You read, you listen, you watch YouTube, for example. That will give you a lot of knowledge. But knowledge itself is not enough. It’s a potential power only. So the only way to make it a real power is that you have to translate from that knowledge to something more practical.

This is where the second C comes in. It’s called “create”. Maybe you want to create a content like a blog post, podcast. Maybe you want to teach it to some other people. Because by the time you teach a particular topic that you learn, you’re actually learning it twice. So it’s not just once that you read and you understand, but when you teach it to some other people and that people actually also understand, you learn about it twice, and even better, because now you can synthesize the learning and make sure that other people also understands.

After you do this creation, you interact with other people. That’s when the third C comes, which is “connect”. So I think it’s very important these days to build a community, to reach out to various people. Because no matter what, that will open a lot of doors for you. That kind of network means more opportunities for you, more connections, more people that you probably don’t know before, and somehow they now become your friends.

He also talks about servant leadership. Which in my understanding is to serve the needs of your team as a leader.

And the line that resonated with me the most was

No matter what you do, no matter what you have learned in the past, you’ll never be prepared. So you’re never ready.

Listening to a good podcast while driving, walking, running, gardening or shopping opens up your mind to new possibilities.

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

Until we meet again next week, please start teaching, learn more, rest well, create more and be kind to others.

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