Good Photography and Others

 

Had An Amazing Twinfest 2022 in Phoenix Arizona

I had a great company offsite #twinfest2020 in Phoenix, Arizona last week where I met face-to-face our colleagues, coaches, leaders - many of whom for the first time after I joined Twin Health 7 months back. This was really a moment to connect and validate our shared purpose of #reversediabetes and chronic diseases. I drove from Sam francisco Bay Area last Monday and now on my way back home. Looking forward to next year’s twin fest! My favorites from this #twinfest was fireside chat with Kevin Johnson, karaoke, what's coming in future...

Bought 21 books from Audible as there is a special sale going on

 

কাঠগড়ায় সুমিত

Ashik's Daily Routine

 

SeeTune's Roadmap

 

I was Featured Today in Twin Health LinkedIn Page

 It's been 3 months I joined #twinhealth and enjoying my work here. I was featured today in our Twin Health LinkedIn page.

Ashik Uzzaman we are so happy to have you as both a people and engineering leader. Among his many contributions; Ashik organized and leads a Leadership Guild where Twins are welcome to join and benefit from collaborative professional development.

 

Got My Tesla Model S 2022

Finally I received delivery of Tesla Model S yesterday. I have been anticipating this for the last five months. When I closed my house purchase during Christmas last year, I pre-ordered this car immediately after that on 28th December. Due to the high demand of electric vehicles and particularly of Tesla, it's uncertain how long it may take for you to get your car. I got a chance all on a sudden in February 2022 to take the delivery. However, that was just a few days before I went to visit Bangladesh and so asked for a late time to take the delivery. Since then I came back from Bangladesh in March, I have been counting days for this. The wait is over now.

It started with the fact that I noticed visiting our new house (that time we didn't know we could buy this house or not) we had a Tesla wall charger hanging near the garage which was from the seller. So instead of the house, I started researching on Tesla EVs. While initially I was looking for Model 3, I changed my mind during a conversation with Shusmita (my wife). I am glad I did because Model S is a sports style luxurious sedan with ample space in it. I also found that middle of 2021, Tesla made a major interior redesign of Model S and Model X. I never drove a Tesla except a test drive of a model 3, but the driving experience of Model S is simply out of the world! Apart from Tesla's usual strength of glass roof, central screen that controls the car, silent but powerful driving - I was also looking forward to the yoke steering wheel and the ludicrous/cheetah mode in Model S. I am driving it for just over a day now but it already exceeded all my expectations. I will need some time to get adjusted with it, but am looking forward to long drives in it in the coming months. I was not nearly any close to this excited when I bought my house. In fact the only thing that came a distant second is 10 years back when I bought my first kindle.

The whole purchase experience is also interesting. I didn't go to show room before deciding to buy, didn't test drive until 3 months after giving the pre-order - that too there was no Model S to test drive. So I went with Wali bhai and did a test drive of Model 3 which is a relatively cheaper sedan and also smaller in size. During these months, I followed just some workflow in the tesla iphone app and one long thread of SMS message in my mobile with customer service representative. Minimal human contact all along. I paid some extra money for the blue exterior and cream interior. I found Tesla Financing gave me a better rate than Bank of America to finance the car after I put out some down payment. The people who delivered the car yesterday, couldn't help me to get in the car as it was locked. So I called Tesla Customer Service. Apparently, I had to accept the delivery of the car in my iphone app, pair the phone and then could unlock the car.

Twin Health US Engineering Social Event

We had a nice social event for US Engineering event yesterday in our Mountain View head quarter of Twin Health followed by a hiking in Rancho San Antonio Open Space Preserve which is within 10 miles of our office.

I was part of team dragon; we were 3rd out of 5 teams while fullstackers won.

First we started with a hybrid team game organized by Weve, virtual team event. We got divided into 5 different groups - fullstackers, teamslow, one team, samuel and dragon. Talia, the event organizer, skillfully made us hunt treasures, count objects, identify differences from similar images, make rainbows etc. It was fun!

This was followed by a light refreshment that our CTO Terry Poon arranged for us. While having refreshment, I had a game of chess with my colleague John Ngoi that had a good audience.

I was white and I won the game against John that started with King's Gambit opening.

Then 14 of us drive to Rancho San Antonio and did a group hiking that took a little more than 2 hours. As I am getting older, and recently diagnosed as pre-diabetic, I could feel that I don't have anywhere close to the energy I had when I did summit of yosemite half dome 13 years back. On the other hand, some of my colleagues found it pretty smooth.

Attended the talk of Jordan B Peterson in The Masonic, San Francisco

I and Shusmita attended the talk of Dr Jordan B Peterson in San Francisco April 20th. He is one of the most renowned speakers in contemporary times. I have read his books 12 rules for life and beyond order with much interest. There is hardly anyone as eloquent as him in speech. I attended another time few years back and that was more interesting as he talked about some of his thoughts related to his book 12 Rules for Life. This time it was mostly a Q&A session where questions were coming from audience via sli.do.

Guest Speaker at WeWorking Engineering Meetup

Today I attended monthly internal engineering meetup of WeWork as a guest speaker. I was invited by long time industry peer NHM Tanveer Hossain Khan. I spoke about Engineering Teams & Individuals in relation to organizational health and team structure to an audience of 90+ software engineers. It was a good experience to be there virtually. Thanks to Perry Tiu, the engineering manager, who coordinated the session skillfully.

RRR Movie - Veema's Roar Back to Royal Bengal Tiger

I watched the movie RRR with my friend Abul Nuruzzaman in Cinemark of Milpitas, the first Indian movie to cross 1000 crore rupees revenue in box office world wide. We watched the hindi version of this although the Telegu original production is running in Telegu, Tamil and Hindi versions simultaneously in the theatres. The 2 heroes of the movie Raama and Bheema are loosely inspired from Ramayana's Rama and Mahabharata's 2nd brother of the Pancha Pandavas, Bheema. If you have watched the movie RRR, my question to you is - who is more favorite to you? Sitarama Raju or Komaram Bheem? You can easily imagine it's the later for me.

I am particularly fascinated by Bheema's roar against the Royal Bengal Tiger! The raw emotion of fearlessness is mind blowing. I can compare 2 other scenes from the past that can resonate with this. One is the roar back of Kong in 2021 film Godzilla vs Kong. The other is the 2012 film The Avenger's where Dr Bruce Banner turned into Incredible Hulk answering Captain America that - "That's my secret Captain. I am always Angry!"

My Journey with Marqeta Ends… For Now…

 3 years back I joined Marqeta from Roku as an Engineering Manager lacking any Fintech / Payments experience. At that time Marqeta was as a Series D startup with less than 250 employees valued at 450 million dollar. Today is my last day at Marqeta as I am joining Twin Health, a Health Tech startup, next week. I am grateful for the excellent journey together I have been through. We went for a few more fundraising events and went public in June 2021. This made it possible for me to buy a house in Fremont last Christmas.

CEO Jason Gardner has built an excellent company through his leadership, compassion and leveraging his professional network. I was hired by Manish Pandit who was the Senior Director of Engineering, and Director of Recruiting Ali Algarmi who also hired me from Salesforce to TubeMogul in 2015. After few months, Manish left for Facebook and I started reporting to the new VP of Engineering Abhay Kumar. When Abhay left end of the year, I have been reporting to Brad Taylor who joined as Senior Director of Engineering the same month I joined. I always had a good manager luck, and I learnt different things from each of them. With time my scope of work got larger and larger, I moved into mid level management from line level management by starting to manage other managers and principal engineers, being responsible for a relatively large org. I got some very good engineers, leaders, partners, stakeholders around me and I hired some brilliant engineers. Together we did some cool work that I will remain proud of for years to come. I always looked for optimizing globally instead of locally and that strategy worked well for me here.

I am leaving some excellent people here, some amazing memories, some hard earned lessons. I have seen Marqeta grow from small to a medium sized company (800+) and I am confident that it’s just a matter of time when under the new leadership Jason has setup – Randy Kern, Vidya Peters, Suni Lobo – Marqeta will become a 10000+ people company. Wish you all the best my fellow Marqetans as I watch you thrive from the sideline!

I have created a Marqeta Alumni Group in LinkedIn named Ex Marqetans and already see 40 members joined there. Regarding my next step, stay tuned as I come back with my understanding of what Twin Health is up to.

The Almanack of Naval Ravikant: A Guide to Wealth and Happiness

Last week I finished an excellent compilation of bit size wisdoms The Almanack of Naval Ravikant: A Guide to Wealth and Happiness by Eric Jorgenson. This book is based on Naval's famous tweetstorms on various topics of wealth, money, life, philosophy, technology, startups, angel investments, silicon valley and so on. This is book has contents from many episodes of the Apple Podcast Naval which I started listening to as soon as I finished the book.  

I first heard about Naval Ravikant from my a Roku colleague a few years back and since then started following him in seminars, twitter and so on. He is the founder of angellist, epinion and investors of 200+ companies including some of the best that came out IPO. In this book the editor / author compiles his conversations around wealth and what it means to our lives. I highly recommend everyone reading it irrespective of your occupation. Here are some of the quotes from the book -

• The more desire I have for something to work out a certain way, the less likely I am to see the truth.
• Escape competition through authenticity.
• If you have nothing in your life, but you have at least one person that loves you unconditionally, it’ll do wonders for your self-esteem.
• Specific knowledge is found much more by pursuing your innate talents, your genuine curiosity, and your passion. It’s not by going to school for whatever is the hottest job; it’s not by going into whatever field investors say is the hottest.
• Tension is who you think you should be. Relaxation is who you are.
• A happy person isn’t someone who’s happy all the time. It’s someone who effortlessly interprets events in such a way that they don’t lose their innate peace.
• The closer you want to get to me, the better your values have to be.
• Earn with your mind, not your time.
• The hardest thing is not doing what you want—it’s knowing what you want.
• Play iterated games. All the returns in life, whether in wealth, relationships, or knowledge, come from compound interest.
• Study microeconomics, game theory, psychology, persuasion, ethics, mathematics, and computers.
• Memory and identity are burdens from the past preventing us from living freely in the present.
• The three big ones in life are wealth, health, and happiness. We pursue them in that order, but their importance is reverse.
• I would combine radical honesty with an old rule Warren Buffett has, which is praise specifically, criticize generally.
• Intentions don’t matter. Actions do. That’s why being ethical is hard.
• My definition of wisdom is knowing the long-term consequences of your actions.