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Happy Saturday!

Welcome to the thirteenth edition of this newsletter - here’s what I wrote this week on the blog and the absolute best of what I read on the internet. 

Hope you are all doing well. As the lockdown continues to relax in Bangalore, I am beginning to feel a little more comfortable with stepping out. Just had my first dinner outside after 7 months and not sure if it was the hygiene theater or what, but did not feel as tense as I thought I would be. Still following social distancing rigorously and wearing a mask at all times - so hopefully nothing goes wrong.

From the blog

This week I published my review and highlights of the first section of Simon Wardley’s book on Wardley mapping. Simon developed and used Wardley maps as a CEO, but even as a novice I’m finding this technique very instructive in determining what software systems my team has and what we need to build. The technique has a wide following now and the book (or other resources on the mapping technique) are an absolute must read for anyone who needs to make a decision about getting something done.  Article Link

From the great interweb

1. Kishore Gopalakrishnan walks us through the origin, design principles and architecture of Apache Pinot - a real time distributed OLAP database originally created a LinkedIn.
2. Chris Ball has a great article about GitTorrent - a completely distributed Git hosting system to break the near monopoly (as a system - not just a business) of Github.
3. Preetam Nath has some good advice on why everyone should write. Tl;dr - writing is not about writing, it is about clear thinking.
4. I wrote a review of The Great Mental Models (Vol. 1) by Shane Parrish some time ago. This book only covers the general thinking concepts, but here’s a list of all mental models Shane considers fundamental and that will be covered in the other volumes of the book series. Enjoy the rabbit hole :)

That's it for this week folks. Happy weekend!

-Kislay