With my Queue Tsaheylu'ed onto all-knowing Tree,
I am chatting with it bit by bit,
slurping the knowledge drip by drip,
filling and bulking my tiny brain,
with what it could consume sans going insane.
Tsaheylu’ed onto all-knowing Tree
Fold your folios
Fold your folios
Pack your flip flops
Bag your baggies.
Sun is shining
Water is warming up
Sand is summoning.
Time to charge
Time to wander
Time to go.
The Extraordinary power of leader humility (Book Notes)
Book Title: "The Extraordinary power of leader humility"
Author: Marilyn Gist, PhD
+Author: Alan Mulally(Former CEO of Ford Motor Company and Boeing commercial airplanes) with a foreword and guest chapter.
Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc. (BK)
Edition: First edition.
***
'Book Notes': aren’t book reviews, summaries, or recommendations. They’re closer to a "reading diary": one's personal experience of what a book stirs up in them as they move through it. Book Notes' sometimes include a few favorite lines or small extracts - not to “capture the book,” but to capture the moment. Occasionally, a passage lights something up inside the reader that’s unrelated (or only loosely related) to the book’s main subject. These notes also attempt to put that spark into words.
***
The font size is not small, decent and good for faster read and reading in non-cozy settings like travelling.
***
With change in technology the expectations and core qualities of a successful leader are changing. This book focuses on how 'Humility' is now one of these core qualities - from something of a guarded embarrassing or detested character, this 'Humility' is now much needed ingredient of a successful leader. In other words, as per author Humility is now a strength no longer a weakness.
***
Leadership is an Alchemy. It is neither science nor art, but sometimes neither and again sometimes it is
...I crossed the bridge
I crossed the bridge,
Running from East to West,
Daring fog, rain, wind,
Trying hard to be visible -
among zooming invisibles.
Finally - sitting in hall,
drenched with light all over,
Waking and Feeding the core,
After a long eons of break.
Sweet surprising every minute -
The core being core and not rocky.
Three Sprints per Period: The NOS Model (Normal | Overhead | Stretch)
Modern engineering work rarely fits neatly into a single, fixed sprint plan. As teams grow and systems move closer to GA, unpredictability becomes the norm rather than the exception. The NOS model is a simple structural change that acknowledges this reality - without adding process overhead.
NOS = Normal | Overhead | Stretch
Background
Today, each team typically creates one sprint per period (usually bi-weekly), for example:
CrewName 10/15–10/28
In practice, this model breaks down in several ways.
Key Challenges
1. Unavoidable Overhead
New work routinely appears mid-sprint - urgent customer issues, Customer alarms, SME consultations, release - driven priorities. Continuous re-prioritization is unavoidable, especially during GA phases. A rigid 15-day commitment does not reflect how work actually happens.
2. No Clear Space for Stretch Goals
We lack a clean mechanism to track opportunistic or “nice-to-have” work that teams can take on when capacity opens up.
3. Label Fatigue
Using Jira labels to distinguish planned, unplanned, and stretch work has proven cumbersome and inconsistent. Labels add cognitive overhead without solving the underlying issue.
4. Unreliable Metrics
When priorities shift mid-sprint, sprint metrics lose meaning. Planned vs. completed work, planning accuracy, and predictability all become noisy, limiting our ability to learn and improve.
Proposal: The NOS Sprint Model
For every sprint period, instead of creating one sprint , create three parallel sprints :
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I am moving half asleep
I am moving half asleep,
yet I go where I got-to.
Like my dad's ox cart pulling,
sleeping rider home.
I am half awake,
Yet I try to stay burning.
Like my Mom's wood-stove -
covered with its own thick ash.
My own WordPress theme
I always want to build my own Wordpress theme, just because I could. Also, I am not happy with what's available out there, they are good enough but not something perfectly matching what I want for my blog.
Even though, I said "just because I could" - in practice, I could never find time to do it from scratch, at least not in this decade.
I am glad, I could finally do it using chatGPT and Cursor. I called it "kichava" theme. As of today this blog is running on this new theme I was able to pull together in couple of hours.
Update : Then I spent couple of days of midnight oil to get it ready for submission to Wordpress.org themes. Still waiting for review. Biggest challenge is to display excerpts with formatting kept as is. As multiple line poems being concatenation into single line is very injustice to the spirit of poem. Then there is this checklist from Wordpress I have to go over and validate multiple times. But now the theme looks much better. I want to add more block features in next version or incorporate any feedback I may receive.
Going on-call first time?
Prepare well in advance
Alright,
If we want to claim we are ready - we need lot of preparation, mock runs! That's what you should do before going oncall.
- Read your team's runbooks and ensure you try them out, don't simply read like a news paper. If runbook says - search logs - you should actually search logs. If runbooks says run this command - you should actually run that command on a test system. This is important, make sure you have access to a dev/test environment where you can try these without fear of destroying everything.
- Remember, once you are on-call ; You will be bombarded with issues and very little time to act. The more you prepare the more independently you can handle issues.
Shadow!
You don't need to shadow 24/7 but if you know current on-call is good at their job try to shadow them in zoom meetings while they are actually troubleshooting, mitigating issues. I personally learned a lot in this way. Don't ever miss a chance to participate in major incidents where a lot of folks will be pulled in and live troubleshooting will happen. That's great learning opportunity. Make time and keep shadowing.
Be Curious
- Be curious - if you don't know something ask around.
- Be curious
Idea to improve recommendations – multi personalities
Here is an idea to further improve recommendations for movies, products, services, places etc..
So far, we are treating each individual as always same - and trying to recommend either with collaboration filtering or content filtering - It goes only so far.
For "n" number of reasons, individual is not always behaving in same way. Some of them are hard to gauge but other are easy to get based on several signals. Some of the examples -
* What one likes in morning is not same as the one in evening.
* What one likes in spring is not same as the one in summer.
* What one likes in home is not same as the one in work.
* What one likes in regular is not same as the one in vacation.
* What one likes with alone is not same as the one with family.
* What one watches on mobile is not same as the one in TV.
You get the idea.
Stop treating individual as some unbroken piece of rock. Treat each individual with some degree of multiple personalities and apply clustering to each persona.