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Awais Hussain

Timeline of Everything

* 100,000 - 200,000 years ago → Homo Sapiens evolve * 50,000 years ago → Humans acquire language * 10,000 years ago → Agriculture develops * 3300 BCE → Start of the bronze age * 2600 BCE → Great Pyramid at Giza built * 1325 BCE → Death of King Tutankhamun * 1200 BCE → End of bronze age / start

Dealing with period of low focus / energy

Like, I assume, everyone else, I have days when I am more focused and motivated and other days when I am less so. What I have found helpful on the low-focus days is to work through the list of questions below. If a question triggers a response beyond a neutral

Things that would be cool to work on

A Crowdsourced Religious/Spiritual Text | A Programming Language for Argumentation | Showing Historical Timelines Side-by-Side

The Zen of Android

There are always multiple ways to do the same thing. The thing you want is deprecated. Examples only serve to make the documentation bloated. You will always forget which xml property you need. The inline error will disappear in 30 seconds, or when you rebuild, whichever is later. When in

What is Structured Conversation?

Most conversations are not consciously structured ahead of time. Rather, the shape they take emerges organically through the people who are present. A few recent experiences have led me to believe that while there is nothing wrong with these kinds of organic, unstructured conversations, there are lots of incredibly effective

My week at the Insight Meditation Society

Over the new year, I spent 9 days on a meditation retreat at the Insight Meditation Center in Barre, Massachusetts at a course run by the folks at the Insight Meditation Society (IMS).

Books I enjoyed this year

Winners Take All Anand Giridharadas I first came across Anand Giridharadas in an "Authors at Google" talk on YouTube which was part of his book tour for this book. I remember that he was pulling no punches as he critiqued the neoliberal elite in general, and the tech

My vim Based To-Do System

About a year ago, I came across this blog post by James Routley, where he explains his approach to keeping track of work-related notes. His "logbook" is a collection of Markdown files, stored in a single folder, and named according to the date they were created. This is

The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri

This article contains spoilers! This week I read Jhumpa Lahiri's "The Namesake". My favourite sections, I think, were the scenes of Ashima and Ashoke (Gogol's parents) at the beginning of the book. They are plucked from their familiar homes in East India and pulled

My First Day In Senegal

When I was in London, I tried on several occasions to write down the frustrations I had with life in the city. Each time I failed because I could not avoid, in my own mind, coming across as embittered or defective - as though I had made a mistake (or