It's amazing how much the simple act of writing down your ideas helps you think 🤯 That happened to me this week. I'm writing an article about altruism (you'll see it next week), and I
Zain Rizvi
I'm a Software Engineer who's spent over a decade building the infrastructure used by millions of devs around the world. In the past I helped build Stripe, GCP & Azure. Nowadays I build PyTorch
Dangerous Professionals: Hacking the Bureaucracy to Get Stuff Done
The Dangerous Professional finds the seams between the policies, and slips inside them to Get Stuff Done
Newsletter #2 - Senior Engineering
Last week I said that I'm taking an online writing class called Write of Passage. What made me sign up for it? Well, I read a lot. I mean a LOT. Like, the-librarian-knows-me-by-name a lot. But often the
Newsletter #1 - Interview Advice
I recently started David Perell’s course “Write of Passage” It’s an intensive 5 week class teaching how to extract all those thoughts in your head and put them down on paper. It’s a grueling pace, where you
What's it like as a Senior Engineer at Google?
When I started working at Microsoft, fresh out of college, coding was my life. Writing code was the easiest way to build any cool thing that my brain could imagine. When I thought about what I’d want to do for the rest of my life I thought that I just wanted to keep coding. I was wrong
Interview advice that got me offers from Google, Microsoft, and Stripe
“What would you say if I asked you to design me a service capable of responding to thousands of user requests every second and latency was critical?” “Umm...that you have to solve this problem at work. But you’re
Remembering what you Read: Zettelkasten vs P.A.R.A.
I spent over a year researching better ways to take notes and remember what I read. Here's what I found.
Quickly Building Products for ACTUAL Customers
This is my tweetstorm [https://twitter.com/ZainRzv/status/1248271817258622978] on key aspects to focus on when you’re building a SaaS service. It details how features that seem critical may not actually be that important. Experiment to see what
The Truth about VPC Security Controls
GCP’s VPC Service Controls [https://cloud.google.com/vpc-service-controls] protection is often described as a virtual firewall for your GCP projects. That’s a useful mental model for your company’s decision makers to think with, but the analogy
So you want to do Deep Work?
In this information era where all mechanical tasks are being automated, in order to be successful you need to be able to do what machines cannot: be creative. And creativity is something you can generate on demand through deep work, and in his book “Deep Work” Cal explains how you can achieve it.
How to setup a Free Custom Domain Email Address
I recently discovered that it’s possible to combine any domain that you own with your Gmail account and a free MailGun account to get a free custom domain email address! When you’re done following the below instructions you’
How to Create Customized Deep Learning Containers
Ever find yourself needing to install the same packages on all your deep learning notebooks? Or maybe wishing you could send your exact setup to someone else who could run your notebook? Or perhaps you’re a corporation which wants