📚 Art of Finishing, Developing Domain Expertise, OAuth from First Principles, Scammy Text Messages, New Ideas on Dating

Practical Engineering, Shark Attack to Paralympic Silver Medals & more

Sep 16, 2024

Hello, this is post #176.

Welcome to the folks who joined me through Manav’s shoutout on LinkedIn. I admire your curiosity!

And, thanks a lot Manav.

As I was writing an attribution for today’s post, I realized that most of today’s finds are primarily from two sources. It was not by design, it happened. And, I don’t feel happy about it. I am going to be conscious about avoiding it going forward.

This week has been hectic both at work and on the personal front. We're about to begin a 6-month home interior project, and the past two weeks have been filled with designer meetings, site visits, and endless Pinterest browsing. It has definitely cut into my ‘wandering time,’ and my unread and to-read lists are at an all-time high. I’m planning to restore some balance this week, hoping it will bring back a sense of peace and comfort.

If you enjoy Stay Curious, please share it with your network! LinkedIn posts like Manav's work wonders and help reach more curious minds.

And now, let’s have a quick look at what interesting things await you today.

Are you excited? I loved all these and so they found a place here. Let’s not wait and get started.

🎖️ The Art of Finishing

There’s a certain comfort in the realm of infinite possibility. When a project is ongoing, it can be anything. It’s Schrödinger’s project — simultaneously perfect and flawed until you actually finish it and put it out into the world. The moment you declare a project “done,” you open it up to criticism, both external and internal. What if it’s not good enough? What if I missed something crucial?
[...]
An unfinished project is full of intoxicating potential. It could be the next big thing, a revolutionary idea, or your magnum opus. This potential often feels more exciting than the reality of a finished product. There’s also comfort in the familiar territory of an ongoing project.

These words from Tomas Stropus’s “The art of finishing” spoke to me. I’ve a junkyard of unfinished projects - startup ids, essays, photobooks and more. These things excited me once. They were the most important thing for me, at that moment. But today, they are waiting for my attention.

If you’re like me, then Stropus’s post will do good to help you understand why we end up in this situation. He explains the benefits of finishing projects and why we should do something about our ‘unfinished’ projects.

The costs of never finishing extend far beyond just missed opportunities. While starting projects might expose you to new technologies or concepts, it’s in the act of finishing — of solving those last, trickiest problems — where real skill growth often occurs. Each unfinished project can chip away at your confidence. Over time, you might start to doubt your ability to complete anything substantial, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy of incompletion.

Give it a read, to help you diagnose your situation better. This should help you. He has some suggestions, as well in case you want some starting point to make some changes.

(via Readwise)

🎯 Developing Domain Expertise

Will Larson talks about some ways of developing domain expertise, specially when you enter a new field. He covers the usual suspects - understanding product analytics, shadowing customer support, talking to customers, and talking with your internal experts. These and some more ideas for getting your hands dirty can provide you a good starting point.

He has shared examples from companies like Uber, Stripe, Intercom, Felt and Carta (his current employer). These can give you some ideas about how to do it in your world.

A few recommendations that stand out for me (highlights mine)

Directly use or integrate with the product. Try to find ways that more closely different customer cohorts rather than just what you find most common. For example, if you only used Uber in San Francisco in 2014, you had a radically misguided intuition about how well Uber worked.
Make an executive offsite ritual around using the product. Follow Intercom’s approach to routinely integrate the core parts of your product from scratch, experiencing the challenges of your new users over and over to ensure they don’t degrade.

Both recommendations go a level deeper than we usually operate. A lot of us use the product, but in a fixed context and we don’t change it much with time. This makes our learning myopic and not relevant in many cases. We should add more variety & depth to get a more realistic hands-on experience.

🫶 New Ideas on Dating

Online dating is a fascinating business to learn about. It serves an innate human need that got amplified over the last few years. There is a stigma attached to it in many cultures & geographies. It suffers from all the challenges that a marketplace business suffers and more. Trust & safety issues keep popping up in new forms. There is a plethora of offline & informal solutions that existed in the past and continue to evolve to challenge the online business. Our dating taste and needs are evolving fast and one size fits all solution may not work for long. There is no winning monetization model. I can go on and on.

And that’s why I am excited to learn more about this category. Here’re a couple of things I picked up in the last couple of weeks on this theme.

Gen Z singles are hot for hobbies: How GenZ are choosing hobby clubs and IRL meetups over speed dating events to find their next date. How is Eventbrite becoming a competition to Tinder?
I remember hearing this ‘insight’ in a recent discussion around ‘doing things’ and ‘third place’ theme. Now, I have one more validation point. I am bullish on the need for social experiences and expect them to be a big niche business in making. This is one of my unfinished projects (in case you are interested to know more, DM me).
Bazaar and chat: Why dating & matrimony apps don't work? From an Indian startup’s blog. They have outlined the problem statements fairly well. From skewed gender participation and what’s leading to bad experiences for one and all.

If you’re looking for more, head here for some more recent explanations.

(via Substack Reads)

🔐 OAuth from First Principles

If you’re up for some nerdy fun, let’s learn OAuth from first principles. Folks at Stack Auth have done a fantastic job making a simple yet fairly effective explainer of a complex topic.

I loved this post for a couple of reasons:

It starts from the very beginning, assuming I don’t know anything. It gradually builds up one concept at a time.
It’s taken a storytelling route to teaching. Tutorials need not be boring, I am adding this one to my list of exhibits.
It uses characters from one of my favorite sitcom - Silicon Valley. Big Head, Pied Piper, Hooli - who will not get excited about these! The genius of this approach lies in the fact that their story & challenges automatically got baked in the discussion. Their tutorial did not need to spend time & attention explaining skills & motivations of these parties.

Here’s a snapshot for you:

(via YC Newsletter)

🚮 Practical Engineering

I’m not done with my treat for the nerdy folks, yet. Practical Engineering is a youtube channel deciphering our constructed world.

It creates explainer videos about mega projects from civil engineering and public works. The howto videos are clubbed with lab models to explain the concept in a more digestible & fun way. Here’re two videos that I saw and found quite interesting.

How French drains work - no, this is not about the drainage system in Paris (I covered a bit about it in an earlier post, though). These drains are magical subsurface things that keep our dams safe.
The hidden engineering of landfills - you may have heard about them. I feel disgusted at the mere thought of visiting one. But there is a lot more to the landfills than we can imagine. This one is an eye opener. I am not sure if they are built with the same detailing everywhere, but landfills in this video are real stuff of science & practical engineering!

While you’re at it, did you know that there are ‘Dumpster Archeologists’? A self proclaimed ‘dumpster archaeologist’ tells us about what our trash says about us? He goes through trash bins from the neighborhood, picking up things that interest him (things that tell a story) and weaves these stories. Creepy stuff, but he does have some interesting stories to share!

Finally, on the topic of trash cans, you may want to check out the art of Disney’s trash cans. They pay attention to details, and make even the mundane stuff like trash can something worth looking at.

(via YC newsletter)

💬 Scammy Text Messages

"Hi David, I’m Vicky Ho. Don’t you remember me?"

I have been getting some such messages on Whatsapp. You may have received some, as well.

PJ Vogt’s post attempts to find who's behind these scammy text messages we've all been getting?

The hour-long podcast investigates how these work and their origin. The story does not end at this. The folks who send these messages have a very tragic story as well. You will have mixed emotions at the end of the show.

If you’re interested in the world of scammers, I’ve dug out a few posts from the archive:

Who scams the scammers? Meet the scambaiters (from the post #24) - It’s not so easy to get complete justice though!
How I fell for an Amazon scam call and handed over $50,000 (from the post #149) - these are highly prevalent right now. You or someone near you would have got a call like this in the last week itself!

(via Substack Reads)

🦈 Shark Attack to Paralympic Silver Medals

In May 2023, Ali Truwit somehow survived a shark attack. The shark bit off her left foot and part of her leg, and so her left leg needed to be amputated below the knee.

In Sep 2023, she won two silver medals in the Paris Paralympics in swimming events.

A lot has happened since that horrific incident. Ali’s grit and determination is unlike anything. ESPN did a long piece covering her life leading up to Paris. It’s a chilling account, and worth reading about.

Days after returning home, she called James Barone, her longtime youth swimming coach, on FaceTime. Details of the attack came spilling out of Ali. Growing up, Ali and Barone had a running joke. She was terrible at kicking her feet. "Remember all those years you were trying to get me to kick my feet when I was swimming?" she says, a wry smile on her face. "I swam 70 yards to the boat with no foot."

Her struggles did not end there, she was retraumatized in Paris. It’s unbelievable how she overcame her fears and achieved what she did there!

Two inspiring stories, it’s difficult to believe that these cover a life less than a year apart.

(via The Profile with Paulina)

✨ Everything else

Why do airplanes fly at 36000 ft? Can plane doors be opened mid-flight? Is “airplane mode” on phones real? If these questions pique your curiosity, this video - what everyone gets wrong about planes - answers them and a lot more in just 20 minutes. (via Readwise)
‘suitor saucy’, ‘casuist your’, ‘acuity russo’ - they all have one connection. Can you guess? Check out anagrams.io for more such fun. (via Recomendo)
Nobody reads ads. If you enjoy reading good copies, you will enjoy these. A lot of gems in one place! (via Sunday Snippets)