Deep work Nowadays, we are getting accustomed to working in a continuously interrupting environment. Smartphone notifications, hundreds of e-mails, open spaces, and meetings slicing our workday. We are feeling busy, and overworked, but are we more productive? If I am a salesman or project coordinator that way of…
I've spent 240 hours the past 6 months drawing, and I'm eager to go all-in. I'm planning to apply to Sheridan's animation undergrad program in February, and have been busy preparing a portfolio for it. Here's some of my recent work, and a lil music video featuring my progress over the months.
On development teams, balancing priorities while keeping focus is hard. Without an intentional approach you can quickly find your team submerged in a lot of different work, hurting progress on your most important goals. But the real world is messy. Prioritization is hard. Work comes in many shapes and sizes. Unplanned…
What happens when executives are allowed to secretly sell stock at a company that is doing poorly? And what can founders learn from this incident?
To write great policies, arm those in the future who will kill your darlings
What did whiteboards ever do to you?
There haven’t been a lot of community structures or resources for Staff+ engineers. That’s changing.
How to model work that interacts with ambiguity
Tanishq Kancharla's personal website
Focus Time Saved Me from Burnout As a staff engineer, I’m expected to write and review code, give interviews, design and review one-pagers, groom tasks, participate in meetings (standups, planning …
Work with amazing people you love collaborating with, the rest (mission, purpose, etc) falls out from that.
If you’re interested in strategy, this post will be valuable to you. It shares the the tools that I’ve found most valuable so far.
Mentor relationships can be absolutely wonderful over the arc of a career. This is a simple way to think about finding and keeping good mentors.
Most of my clients are CEOs of growing companies, most of the rest are C-level executives in similar settings, and a number of others are leaders in investment or professional services firms. In order to be effective in these roles they must be able to influence others, wield authority, and maintain status. At the…
We don’t really talk about layoffs. When you hear someone say they got laid off, it’s likely the next thing you hear from them is about the new job they’re starting. But we don’t talk about what it’s like in between those two events - which means we’re not acknowledging how traumatic it is to be laid off.
Made in Notion, the connected workspace where AI agents and teams organize docs, projects and knowledge together.
Click to read Mr. Chan's guide to substitute teaching, a Substack publication.
Lessons learned from 10 years at Google
I recently left my job at Honeycomb. They’re a fantastic company, and I think they will be wildly successful. Still, life circumstances are such that I wanted to explore an opportunity at a much larger technology organization. More on that in another post, perhaps. In this post, I want to reflect on a unique aspect of…
My fantasy for work-life integration today
Life is short • There is no speed limit • How to Be Successful • You and your research • Becoming a Magician • 95th percentile isn’t that good
This is one of my favorite stories from all of my years in applying TOC. I use it frequently in my consulting work and again it's totally tr...
I've been interviewing engineers for a while now, and it seems the more interviews I do, the more I realize how many my initial assumptions about hiring were wrong. For example, take resumes. Initially, before every interview I'd carefully review resumes. I'd look at candidate's past
Before I got into tech, I worked at a tutoring company in the Northern Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C., doing a mix of schoolwork-related tutoring and standardized test prep. From a business perspective, it made so much sense - you have kids taking standardized tests and parents who wanted their kids to do well…
Often when an organization is going through some turmoil, executives think to themselves, “Ah, I should have some one-on-ones with the team so they can hear how we’re handling this.” On the other side, I frequently hear from folks who get nervous when they get these meeting invites, “The CEO/CTO/CPO/etc just scheduled…
Even if every technology jockeying for a spot under the 'web3' banner evolves beyond proof-of-work blockchains, these systems will still not be part of the web because they designed not to be. 'web3' ain't the web, and VCs talking their own book don't get the last word, no matter how much dirty money they throw at it.
2021 was not too kind to me. I discovered that I not only have OCD but OCPD, a personality disorder. If you’ve ever had a conversation with me where I just couldn’t let something go because it was wrong or incorrect and it bothered me, now you know why. I have, for better or worse, extremely high standards for…
Code review innocently asks a staggering question: “does this code look good to you?” It’s not even clear how to start to answer this question – which makes putting off code reviews easy.
