Uttam Kini's Blog

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  • Price as a proxy for quality

    In 2019, I moved into a new home. After furnishing it, I wanted to buy a TV. I researched online and came to the conclusion that all TV panels are more or less the same and one should buy the cheapest TV possible. So I bought a 55 inch VU for ₹35000 and felt proud… Read more

  • On standups

    Standups have almost become muscle memory on teams. We do them everyday but don’t question why. Standups ensure that individuals and the team are moving in the right direction. They also ensure individuals’ accountability to the team. Without them it is easy for people to go into rabbit holes or procrastinate. Read more

  • How podcasts have changed my life

    In the December of 2020, my wife and I found ourselves in the middle of the lockdown with a newborn. I started running and exercising to feel normal. Podcasts are how I entertained myself when I ran alone on the roads with a mask on. The starting point for me was this episode of the… Read more

  • The scarcity mindset

    I have noticed a peculiar practice among the older generation of my family. They hate “wasting food”. They will overeat even if it isn’t in their best interests. Most have metabolic disorders and eating more is bad for them. This doesn’t apply just to food. They also hate giving stuff away even if they will… Read more

  • On busywork

    The 70 hour work week meme is quite popular on social media these days. It took me 15 years of experience to debunk the myth that I have to work 40 hours a week to be actually “productive”.In the early part of my career, it was simpler. As a software engineer someone told what to… Read more

  • Developer productivity

    Thanks to the popularity of generative AI, there has been an explosion of AI based coding assistants.Then there is the recent McKinsey report on measuring developer productivity. Management has again fallen back into the trap of measuring dev outputs (rather than outcomes). They feel that somehow, if they can improve dev productivity numbers using coding… Read more

  • Now I am reading books more than ever

    It’s been three months now and I have read more books than what I did in the last one year before that . There are a couple of reasons why 1. I bought a kindle paperwhite three months ago 2. I challenged my philosophy of reading one book at a time I have been reading… Read more

  • Pair Programming on a Mac

    I have been pair programming for more than four years. One of the most basic things that you need to do is to find a way to share your screen, keyboard and mouse. The easiest to setup is with two people working on a laptop. It is also the most uncomfortable because you end up… Read more

  • Build Automation on Windows

    I have heard  people complain that it is hard to automate almost anything on Windows/.Net. It is one of the few things that even I agreed with, until I tried to do it a couple of days ago. To do it you may have to  not do everything that Microsoft tells you to and not… Read more

  • Sharing code and why git submodules is a bad idea.

    Recently at a client, we had to build restful services that talk to each other. We had a choreographed set of services, which meant that any service could talk to another service. The problem we had was, we were constantly refactoring the messages that were used by the services to talk to one another. We… Read more