mariedavid

Yes, I didn't expect so many answers !! I have a whole page of reading recommendations now. Just have to choose where to start.

Thanks for all your recomendations, especially the BBC documentary. I'm really interested in Gödel and Cantor.

I'll add this one to my list, thanks !

I loved this book when I read it indeed. Really comprehensive and smart.

Thanks, I had read some Feyerabend essays a few years ago. This is indeed instead thought provoking.

Thanks, I'll add the John Stillwell book to my reading list. And thanks for the idea of watching the newer "Cosmos" series. I'm always looking for ideas for shows to watch with my son!

Thanks, I have heard a lot about Bill Bryson but never took the time to read it. I will start with this one.

I went back to college and started a bachelor in philosophy in a specific cursus tailored for people with a full time job. Met plenty of fantastic people with various backgrounds.

Business & work : Deep Work - Cal Newport, Anti fragile - Nassim Taleb CNV : Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life. Marshall Rosenberg "spiritual" or wisdom related : Tao Te King, Marcus Aurelius, the Gospel, Meditation on the Tarot classics : Plato, Homer, and Peloponese's war by Thucydides. And I couldn't explain why but I re-read Into thin air by Krakauer every year.

Hello I am myself learning React right now. I love this website : https://daveceddia.com/ He provides a free 5-day intro course which is well-paced and gives you already plenty to start with. Then he offers a full fledged paying course which I have not tried yet, but I will most likely do. I love the approach : rather fast-paced, hands on, with a lot of exercices, which makes the knowledge sticks.

I faced the same question and ended joining a climate-tech company (www.carbometrix.com). There are plenty of tech jobs in the climate tech, you can read Climate Tech VC newsletter - they have a good job board. DM me if you want to discuss the subject.

"How do they deal with vulnerability, or being wrong, or someone else being wrong?" this is indeed an excellent question. I had so many difficulties in the past with engineers who where "never wrong". Thanks very useful advices.

I deleted the app on my Iphone. I don't regret at all. My mind seems clearer, not swamped into unnecessary content curated by the algorithms. I loved Instagram because I love painting, and photography, and visual arts in general but these past years it has become terrible with all the videos, and advertisement. And to answer your second question, when I feel mentally exhausted I try to do something physical like going out for a short walk. Seek boredom is an excellent advice !

this is excellent advice ! it sounds much better indeed to have the candidate working on concrete problems we are trying to solve. Thanks

Thanks very useful !

At work : to manage the onboarding of newcomers, to organize our weekly strategic meeting (we have a page where we share our subjects and reflexions), to organize the engineering wiki and more generally the knowledge of the team on various subjects. Notion is good for managing knowledge in a team, I am less convinced but using it as a tool for project management / kanban. At home : I open a new Notion page by topic (like : Python tips, books to read, notes from a book, ideas on a specific problem I'm dealing with) and once in while I supress non useful pages or regroup them in a master page. For the todo I alternate between Notion and pen and paper. I don't know why I am better at managing my time and priorities when I write then down.

I started Zettelkasten a few months ago as I had the idea to write more, think more, and create a blog. But the system crumbled -by lack of time- as I finally ended working full time as a start-up founder... My insight is that Zettelkasten are a fantastic tool if you have a writing purpose in mind or at least some topics on which you want to store some knowledge and reflect actively. Otherwise, you will end up piling up loosely related ideas without knowing what is relevant for you. I loved the system because it helps you to read in a more focused way. Actually, it allows you to think while you read (instead of ingesting passively knowledge). But it remains a time-consuming and intensive system to maintain. You have to commit to it. Anyway, even if I quit, I kept the Zettelkasten I wrote and intend to return to it if my lifestyle changes in the future. I loved the experience.

I've been struggling with this same question the past two years by scaling up a machine learning team (our job was to design and put into production various machine learning-based products for the company). When the team was small, there was no way we could create a product team (no enough product managers or machine learning engineers). So we started with skills. But it came with its lot of inconvenience: hard to align people across the various roadmap. Some teams were swamped and had a hard time prioritizing. Beside, teams by skills tend not to understand their constraints and way of working (thing product manager vs developer culture clash). Honestly, I feel that the product organization is the more efficient one in delivery and team alignment. But this requires vast resources if you manage a lot of different products (this was our case). And in the end, you can end up with doing some things twice or not investing enough in the common assets/architecture (my team was in charge of managing our data platform as well, so we had to think long-term and global at the same time). I quit my job by if I were still here, I would definitively cut back on the number of projects and rearrange the team by products.

thanks ;-) it seems hard indeed to find the right level of information to put in each entry(fact vs thinking) and not to overstore information

Deep Work, by Cal Newport : to focus on what matters. The talent code, by Danie Coyle : to understand the value of deliberate practice. Brain at work, astonishingly useful mixing practical neuroscience and concrete situations. Getting things Done : to adopt a good time management system (you can tweak the method). Good luck !

I confirm. All Cal Newport's writing (book+blog) really help to understand how our attention is hijacked, and concentrate and make time for what really matters. As far as I'm concerned I suppressed all distracting apps on my smartphone, I quit social media, keeping only my LinkedIn account for my job, and I curate carefully my digital intake.

reading Why we sleep, by Matthew Walker. After reading this book I decided to put sleep quality above everything and it helped me take the adequate measures. What worked for me was : lowering my caffeine intake (no more than 2 coffee), no caffeine in the afternoon, no screen in the evening, no work 2 or 3 hours prior to go to bed, increasing exercise and sunlight exposition in the day. Oh and good earplugs !

Tara Brach - Radical Acceptance was a game changer. Otherwise : trying to focus on having enough sleep (i.e. staying away from screen at night + enough exercise). Trying to put things into perspective (curiously reading history books helped me). Better organization of my time to be more focused on what really matter (check out Cal Newport books and newsletter). Hope this helps !

For the team I used to manage, I told them that I was not going control the hours they put in as long as the job was done, and the emergencies were handled. Turned out that I had to restrict them to work for too long and I constantly had to remind them to take breaks and to turn off slack on evenings. For myself (I used to be a manager) I concentrated on having my most strategic tasks done. Meetings were shorter, and I could skip the less interesting ones by turning on mute and doing something else instead, so all in all WFH resulted in less working hours. However the full remote set up turned out to be exhausting : due to the loss of physical interactions, I spent a lot of time solving conflicts and misunderstandings in my team that would have been easily sorted out by seing each other. My advice for you would be not to concentrate on the number of hours you put in, but rather on the fact that your job is done (in a 4-hours-workweek style). If it results in less hours worked, then enjoy it !

1. stop the noise. I deleted my twitter, facebook and instagram account and my mind is much clearer. 2. spot people who are independent thinkers and read as much as you can from them (my favorite one being Nicholas Nassim Taleb, Charlie Munger and Paul Graham). 3. read books (instead of reading online) and chose timeless, influential books. Quality over quantity. 4. take notes when you write