I decided to make a time zone converter. It had seemed like an easy project, but I was horribly mistaken
Zain Rizvi
Software Engineer with over a decade of experience. Building the infrastructure used by millions of developers around the world. I helped build GCP and Azure. Nowadays I'm building Stripe.
Newsletter #14 - Timezone madness
My aunt has a problem: she wants to join Zoom meetings, but they're all hosted in different time zones. And she can't convert them to her local time. She has to ask for help every time. Yes, there's google, but
Newsletter #13 - Develop insights by noticing connections
In school, did you hesitate to ask questions? I certainly did. It was peer pressure, raising my hand was a big no-no. I didn't want to be that kid. So I suppressed the instinct to ask. And those muscles atrophied.
Newsletter #12 - My sister got scammed. The bank helped her scammers
Hi friends, My sister just wanted to earn some money before returning to college. She found a job posting on craigslist, which she learned too late had been carefully written by scammers. Those people took advantage of her bank website's
How banks help scammers with their bad UI
My sister wanted a summer job before starting college. Instead she was scammed out of thousands
Newsletter #11 - Send a Bat Signal
At work, cutting scope is a way to potentially save weeks of effort. But where does cutting scope cross the line into cutting corners? Slava and I try to find that line in: The Nonintuitive Bits episode 25: Cutting Scope
Newsletter #10 - Why I stopped focusing on the user
Authentic networking in a covid-world. The journey beats the destination. Define your culture by asking questions
Never Focus on the User
User focused design is wasteful. Every business knows this, but they're afraid to admit it. It's is a PR friendly way to say they focus on their buyers
Newsletter #9 - How my coworker got senior leaders to consider his proposals
A couple weeks ago I suggested repeating your message twenty one times for it to sink in. That might seem excessive, but my old manager Viacheslav Kovalevskyi has used this tactic to get senior leaders at Google to consider his
Newsletter #8 - When someone said I was wrong 😬
Do you have people who disagree with you? My old coworkers from Google are happy to do it. They're great to bounce ideas off of, and last October we started a podcast where we'd discuss our different views. It's called
Newsletter #7 - Everything is an opportunity to learn
In the past few days, some of my articles have really hit a chord on reddit and hacker news. I'm stoked to see them helping people. And they've led to a lot of new faces on the newsletter this week.
Taking my own Advice
You’ve heard how the best way to learn is by teaching, right? Wrong. Try grading instead. The single biggest practice that improved my writing was reviewing other people's essays. David Perell made me do it. I took his class