Adrien’s Lifestream

Buying a house has some benefits: you get the peace of mind that you don't depend on anyone and you can stay here for as long as you want, as long as you make the mortgage payments. You secure a spot to your assigned school which looks great on paper. You build equity in the house. You've seen everything about what life has to offer already, so it's time to make your adult routine permanent for the next 30 years because what else could ever happen?

Then you discover that owning the house means that you're responsible for every single thing in it. What a great way to waste time, and life as a result. Here is how to get your freedom back.

Hire a gardener. Seriously, no kid grew up thinking that maintaining a perfect lawn was a good purpose in life. Sure your dad spent time doing it, but did he choose to? Even if you mow your lawn on a regular schedule, is that going to improve your mowing skill each time so that you become more efficient, and your lawn is more beautiful each time? Also a good way to not buy a mower and avoid falling into the trap of maintaining it.

When you receive your property tax bill, pay it within 5 minutes. The faster you're done the faster you'll have forgotten about it. Yes, it's probably a large amount, you might be looking at every line and think "Is this a fair way of allocating my tax dollars". Then you remember that the local government bureaucracy couldn't care less about you.

When something breaks around the house and you're thinking about fixing it, don't do it. I mean if you have the knowledge, or you enjoy fixing things then go for it. For the rest of us who would rather spend time reading a book, have quality time with family, or ride your bike for 5 hours, you can outsource it. It will be well worth it. Don't you dare to go to Home Depot, it's a trap. Try calling the previous owner of the house and see how soon she can fix it.

Hire a dog walker. One good idea of getting a dog might be to avoid having kids. It looks simpler on the surface and it has less responsibility over time. Also in American culture, the dog is a requirement to homeownership, which means that many people previously renting an apartment got a dog as part of buying the house. But spend every day picking up your dog's poop several times a day and you'll realize that it's not much different than changing a child's diapers. Except the child ends up not needing diapers! Also if your life is scripted around the schedule of your dog, like you wouldn't think about happy hour after work because you need to commute home and be there for the dog, then you're not living your life.

Pay for a faster commute option if you increased your commute when becoming a homeowner. You have more options than you think. You're not stuck in the infinite subway script.

Never look at the value estimate of your house on Redfin. The only thing it does is to reinforce the perception that your house is worth something, even though it's the most unproductive asset. Even if you like the idea of cashing out on your house equity, we're talking about getting rid of the roof over your head, also known as one of the most basic human needs. Instead, do look at Craigslist for potential places to rent in neighborhoods that you like. You might discover that you get better value and more peace of mind when renting.

There you have it. Get your time back and start having the house work for you, not the other way around. 

Riding bikes is priceless. It gives the freedom to move your body at 20 mph for several hours with very little energy. Then the game of racing bikes happened where people wanted to see who's fastest.

The power of road bicycle racing is that it's a very simple game: the person who gets across the finish line first wins. Now there are many variables: who is there, the bike, the wind, who will crash, who will flat, when are attacks going down. And that's what makes it an art. You come to the race being very prepared with impeccable fitness and technique. While at the same time the whole thing is unpredictable.

You actually have skin in the game. Every one of your actions will make or break the outcome of the race, for you or your teammates. All those hours training hard start to materialize. There is no place to hide during a race. Go for the win and you get extra skin: the winner jersey. Eat the pavement and you'll lose skin. Sure you might be exercising today to "stay in shape". Try racing and a whole other purpose takes over: keep skin on.

People say they get high during a race, I certainly do. There is something special when taking a corner at 25 mph while being inches away from each other. The adrenaline rush is there and it can be quite addicting.

Just try it.

You’ve heard this before. The team has been working on this service and a couple months later traffic is picking up. Pretty awesome you think, customers are loving this feature! Hold on, now you hear finance people screaming at the Amazon bill. The application is considerably resource intensive. You got two options: 1) find the bottleneck and optimize, 2) limit cost of running the service. Let’s focus on the latter.

Welcome to Amazon Auto Scaling. If the fundamental premise of the cloud is “use only the resources you need for as long as you need”, then add “dynamic scaling based on traffic”.  Bottom line: you save money when traffic is low. Enterprise SaaS is a great use case since customers are using your product during typical business hours, resulting in very low traffic at night. So what does it take to make the switch?

Stateless VS stateful application

Ideally you want to be dealing with a stateless application, where terminating one node won’t produce side effects on user experience. Typical stateless apps include frontend web servers or any app that doesn’t rely on keeping session state in memory.

Unfortunately not all software is created equal. Our use case is a video recorder for web based meetings. While the presenter is discussing slides, the recorder is watching the presentation unfolding real time.
Try to terminate one instance with active sessions and you’re impacting user experience. But there is a solution to which we’ll come back shortly.

Prerequisites

One thing with dynamically terminating instances is that you can’t rely on SSH access any longer:

• Logs need to be forwarded to a remote host using Elasticsearch, Splunk or similar.
• Provisioning an instance is done in an automated fashion. We use Chef and Terraform.
• Not directly related to Auto Scaling here but proper deployment tooling is also a requirement. We use Jenkins pipelines and Chef.

Architecting the app around Auto Scaling

Our video recorder app went through a few changes. First you need to expose a health check endpoint that returns HTTP 200 if the app is in a good state. Amazon is continuously polling it and will replace unhealthy instances.

Then you need the app to properly report your chosen autoscaling metric to CloudWatch. For instance our metric is “number of running jobs”. A java thread can handle the task or even a cron job.

One more thing about stateful applications: we want to make sure we don’t disrupt running jobs during a scale down event. Amazon conveniently provides Lifecycle Hooks which allows to perform a custom action before terminating the instance. For instance: a decrease in traffic triggers a scale down event. The oldest instance (by creation time) is picked and moves to Termination:Wait state. Amazon sends a notification using SNS to check if the instance is ready to be terminated. The instance gets the notification and will give the green light for termination if there is no job running, otherwise it’ll respond with a heartbeat to keep waiting until all jobs are done. Which means your app needs to have a thread listening to SNS notifications.
Interestingly lifecycle hooks cannot be set up on Amazon web console, you'll have to use the CLI.

Amazon SDKs make it pretty straightforward to implement the above two items.

Read more »

In no particular order: 

Learning Android

Very practical guide to dive into the workings of a microblogging app.

Making Things Happen

Priorities get things done. Plus Scott is such a great writer.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

The real purpose of scientific method is to make sure Nature hasn’t misled you into thinking you know something that you actually don’t.

Ignore Everybody

If you have the creative bug, it isn’t ever going to go away. You should just get used to the idea of dealing with it.

The Miracle of Mindfullness

Every day we are engaged in a miracle which we don't even recognize: a blue sky, white clouds, green leaves, the black, curious eyes of a child-our own two eyes. All is a miracle.

The Creative Habit

Best book on creativity I have read. Dive into your creative DNA and get to work.

What Technology Wants

Kevin's point is that innovations tend to grow organically no matter what. When someone invents something new on the planet, he will be part of this group of people who worked on the exact same thing. The concept of ownership for innovation is becoming increasingly harder to pinpoint. As technology matures its own needs are growing and need to be satisfied. The computing infrastructure that runs Google needs a ton of energy before it can even return a single search result. Important book.

Free Ride

I was hoping to learn about ideas that combine the culture business with Internet/piracy. I did not. That's just a rant.

10 Days to Faster Reading

Reading faster is seriously underrated. Why not dedicate some time to the most important skill ever? Every student should read this.

Business Model Generation

If you don't know where to start with business plans, this is a great reference. That will get you going with coming up with models and ideation. Great pairing with Steve Blank's Lean Launchpad class.

Delivering Happiness

Investing in company culture does scale your business. Tony researched the science of happiness and turned out to combine his findings with running a business. It works.

The Referral Engine

The fact that the author is good at referrals got this book in my hands. But the editing is so poor. Skip this one!

The Flinch

A necessary reminder to get you standing up against the lizard brain. Doing the uncomfortable is key.

The Invention of Air

This book is about the fascinating biography of Joseph Priestley combined with the case on how ideas spread and evolve. Plus Steven is super thoughtful.

The Google Resume

People at the top share many similarities on their resume.

The Design of Everyday Things

Read it and start looking weird at poorly designed door handles.

Moonwalking with Einstein

The art of remembering things has everything to do with physical spaces.

The Art of War

A classic, but what else? Still wondering.

The Happiness Hypothesis

Very interesting book on the science of happiness. What are the tangible factors that make up how happy you are?

Our Posthuman Future

Important topic but poor editing.

The Dip

If you're not going to be number one you might as well quit now. A little book with big impact.

The Big Short

I got the audio book.

The 4 Essentials of Entrepreneurial Thinking

This book is good at explaining the thinking part. Don't forget the doing.

The Shallows

Another important book about the interruption economy.

Getting to Yes

Go find out your BATNA before your next negotiation.

The Case for Marriage

How the Stock Market Works

Just Kids

Patti Smith's autobiography. Her music will resonate differently to you.

Startup Weekend is a learning experience about entrepreneurship. You’re building a company from scratch. I just finished my second Startup Weekend San Francisco and it was awesome.

After reading this book you will never get into something without doing your checklist first. Atul Gawande is challenging what we think of the reliability of experts with the question: what do we do when expertise is not enough?

He demonstrates how good the impact of the checklist is through carefully chosen stories. It's about surgeons, airline pilots, engineers, investors and the degree of complexity they face to do their job.

Here is my curated version of the book:

The problem of extreme complexity

« Here, then, is the fundamental puzzle of modern medical care: you have a desperately sick patient and in order to have a chance of saving him you have to get the knowledge right and then you have to make sure that the 178 daily tasks that follow are done correctly—despite some monitor's alarm going off for God knows what reason, despite the patient in the next bed crashing, despite a nurse poking his head around the curtain to ask whether someone could help “get this lady's chest open”.

There is complexity upon complexity. And even specialization has begun to seem inadequate. So what do you do?”

“There are degrees of complexity, though, and medicine and other fields like it have grown so far beyond the usual kind that avoiding daily mistakes is proving impossible even for our most superspecialized.”

The checklist

“ Substantial parts of what software designers, financial managers, fire-fighters, police officers, lawyers, and most certainly clinicians do are now too complex for them to carry out reliably from memory alone.”

The end of the master builder

“Four generations after the first aviation checklists went into use, a lesson is emerging: checklists seem able to defend anyone, even the experienced, against failure in many more tasks than we realized. They provide a kind of cognitive net. They catch mental flaws inherent in all of us—flaws of memory and attention and thoroughness.”

There is three different kinds of problems in the world: the simple, the complicated and the complex.

“Simple problems are ones like baking a cake from a mix. There is a recipe. Following the recipe brings a high likelihood of success.”

“Complicated problems are ones like sending a rocket to the moon. They can sometimes be broken down into a series of problems. But there is no straightforward recipe. Success frequently requires multiple people, often multiple teams, and specialized expertise.”

“ Complex problems are ones like raising a child. Once you learn how to send a rocket to the moon, you can repeat the process with other rockets and perfect it. But not so with raising a child. Every child is unique. Although raising one child may provide experience, it does not guarantee success with the next child.”

The checklist factory

“Good checklists are precise. They are efficient, to the point, and easy to use even in the most difficult situations. They do not try to spell out everything—a checklist cannot fly a plane. Instead, they provide reminders of only the most critical and important steps—the ones that even the highly skilled professionals using them could miss. Good checklists are, above all, practical.”

“Pilots nonetheless turn to their checklists for two reasons. First, they are trained to do so. They learn for the beginning of flight school that their memory and judgment are unreliable and that lives depend on their recognizing that fact. Second, the checklists have proved their worth—they work. Aviation checklists are by no means perfect. Some have been found confusing or unclear of flawed. Nonetheless, they have earned pilots' faith.”

The test

“In London, during a knee replacement by an orthopedic surgeon who was one of the toughest critics, the checklist brought the team to recognize, before incision and the point of no return, that the knee prosthesis on hand was the wrong size for the patient—and that the right size was not available in the hospital. The surgeon became an instant checklist proponent.”

“More than 250 staff members—surgeons, anesthesiologists, nurses, and others—filled out an anonymous survey after three months of using the checklist. […] Then we asked the staff one more question. “If you were having an operation, would you want the checklist to be used?”

A full 93 percent said yes.”

The hero in the age of checklists

“ Discipline is hard—harder than trustworthiness and skill and perhaps even than selflessness. We are by nature flawed and inconstant creatures. We can't even keep from snacking between meals. We are not built for discipline. We are built for novelty and excitement, not for careful attention to detail. Discipline is something we have to work at.”

Since then I started thinking in terms of checklists for every task I'm working on. Checklists are big deal. How did the checklist impacted your daily work?

I went through the whole piece of Peace Is Every Step. This thin book brings a lot of valuable insights from Buddhist teachings into our information-overloaded world. It's that simple and deeply refreshing.

I first met Storify Cofounder Xavier Damman at a conference in San Francisco one year ago. He was working on a product called Publitweet back then. He also built in 24 hours ListiMonkey right at the time when Twitter launched the list feature. He was very enthusiastic and ready to take the next step.

Brain Rules is one of those books that really makes you feel smarter. Who wouldn't want to know how your brain is running?