Tag: blogging

Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams, Book Review

~ Veselin ~ 13 Comments

Sarah Wynn-Williams wrote a memoir about her times as a very ambitious young executive, working on international policies at Facebook. She was close to but not close with Mark Zuckerberg, Joel Kaplan, Sheryl Sandberg, and Elliot Schrage.

First half of the book describes her work. It was what I hoped to read when I took that book. It describes hard-working people, self-absorbed, ambitious, awkward, making honest mistakes, stupid mistakes, moving on, forgiving. Lots of internal politics, relationships, some favoritism and harassment. I managed to extract a positive idea out of it and wrote a post- Think Wrong, Move Fast and Break Things. I wish the book stopped there and the shocking airplane bed was the last chapter.

The second half is like swimming in a pool full of excrements with an occasional crocodile. All of the mentioned names lose their souls in the pursuit of goals, which seems to be humanly random and randomly human but completely unacceptable. One wants to promote a book probably filled with lies. Another wants to sleep with everyone from the opposite gender using his authority as a leverage. A third wants to be the emperor of Rome but realizes he’s already surpassed that. And all of them show the empathy of a hungry crocodile. But that’s only the beginning of the dreaded second part.

Then Sarah Wynn-Williams goes into details about election meddling, promoting violence and confrontation as an engagement tool, helping the far-right politicians and dictators around the globe because that would allow a better growth for the company, and even accuses Facebook for treason with their activities in China. She describes individual poops from the poop pool.

I knew Facebook is used that way – every time I watch more than 10 Facebook shorts, one will be by a pro-Russian troll account and maybe 3-4 will use other people’s content. They don’t hesitate to block my posts when I link to this blog but have never positively responded to a hate speech report or removed a fraudulent advertisement that I reported to my memories. Their moderation for Bulgaria has always been oddly biased in favor of anti-democratic forces. But the events from the book describe that in a world-level scale, engineered to be that way for money and power.

I don’t know if the book is true. I found Sarah Wynn-Williams’s Senate hearing, trying to get an impression. I can’t quite relate to any of these people, the author, the interviewers but it matches my expectations. It’s a cautionary tale about why the free, independent, and decentralized web is important, why and how the walled gardens are harming our society, and why kids should not be allowed to use social media.

I’m on Facebook, my friends are there. What do I do?

Double-Decker Bus in Sofia

~ Veselin ~ 4 Comments

The legend said there’s a double-decker line in Sofia. Even though it stops right next to my neighborhood, I saw it for the first time yesterday – two years after its launch in 2023. I was so surprised to spot it that I hopped on without even checking where it goes. It was cool, I felt like a tourist.

Turns out, it’s just one bus that runs back and forth between Orlov Most and Vrana Palace, and only on Saturdays and Sundays. Park Vrana looks amazing – I really need to visit it sometime. Feels like it would make for a great photo post. Last time we were there, our youngest was still a baby, and I didn’t blog as much.

The ticket price is the same as the regular public transport – tap your card on entry and it will charge you 80 eurocents / 1.60 BGN.

The line is X50 and runs once per hour. The schedule is available on Google Maps.

Think Wrong, Move Fast and Break Things

~ Veselin ~ 6 Comments

I’m currently reading Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams. I’m less than halfway through, but it already feels like this book deserves more than one post. So far, it doesn’t paint Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg as supervillains, and I’m getting a glimpse into Facebook’s early culture.

One of the big ideas from Facebook’s early years was Move Fast and Break Things. This mantra has been both confirmed working and disproved many times – often by engineers like me, who’ve lived through its successes and catastrophic failures. .

Moving Fast and Breaking Things Works

It works because the software industry can be like a gator-infested pool. When a new idea drops like a piece of meat in the pool, everyone jumps on it. The biggest reward goes to the fastest gator that ships first and markets well. There’s often no time to make things well.

Facebook won the social network race in large parts of the world. Twitter and a few others got the leftovers. But this principle applies beyond tech giants – down to much smaller scales. It’s a form of the Pareto principle: 80% of the outcomes stem from 20% of the causes. If you can roughly identify the 20% and validate an idea quickly, you’ve already won even if it doesn’t work. You saved the effort for something that may work.

On an individual level, it also feels like it works. You get a task, you ship something quickly – it shows up in your weekly update, your team’s update, maybe even the leadership sees it. You’re productive, visible, and valuable.

But It Also Doesn’t Work

Once an idea is validated, it gains users, traction, and revenue. A bug that shows up once in 1000 runs might never happen with 10 users/day. Once you have a million users, it happens 1000 times a day. Also, one broken user profile may be easily fixable but a million? Not so much.

Zuckerberg himself cited this kind of thinking when Facebook moved away from the motto around 2014. You can’t keep patching the same issues over and over at scale. Stability becomes a requirement.

From an individual contributor point of view, it looks that profitable ideas attract many layers of heavily invested people – technical, marketing, finance, data, legal, executive, investors. And when something breaks, you’re not just dealing with bugs. You’re affecting dashboards, KPIs, morale, and your own job security. Blame becomes easier to assign. 10 of these people will know how things work and won’t blame you but the eleventh may have a bad day and push the button.

How to make a difference?

In early-stage product development or during moments of intense change, moving fast and breaking things can be the right move. But in mature projects, where uptime matters and stakeholders are many, the priority shifts. It’s more about stability, reliability, and trust.

Ultimately, Mark Zuckerberg hung that motto on Facebook’s wall – and eventually took it down. He may put it back up if he recognizes a need for it. Recognizing the moment is a key part of leadership.

Cursed by Alex Kosh, Book Review

~ Veselin ~ 5 Comments

I was the first person to read, rate, and review this book on Goodreads. Goodreads, this has to be a major achievement, I demand a badge or a cookie!

The book was originally published in Russian and later translated into Bulgarian for the free online library Chitanka, with the author’s permission. Since its release in 2023, only one person has reviewed it on Goodreads.

The story follows Roman who resurrected into a world with ghosts, mediums, and magic. He was much older in his previous life but now finds himself in his teenage years. He forms relationships with dead people and animals. This 3rd part of the story will make him face Sadako Yamamura but without the videotape hack. Sadako is terrifying.

The story is good and I enjoyed it. The only thing I didn’t like was the description of various government authority figures as billionaires who live in incredible luxury and show complete disregard of human life.

Combating Anxiety with the Five Whys

~ Veselin ~ 24 Comments

Wars, inflation, health, aging, deadlines, death, AI, work woes – the adult life has no shortage of triggers for anxiety. These worries appear to stick around for a long time with sudden spikes that make them worse. Yet, anxiety rarely feels useful – we are not changing the course of history by worrying about it. How can we tone it down without solving world’s hunger?

I’ve tried a variety of tactics and each has its own place. I never miss the chance to include the subject of thinking errors. They are a major source of anxiety and self-fulfilling prophecies. However, today I’d like to share about the Five Whys, a method of using your non-intuitive slow thinking. The whole reason why I wrote my previous long post about intuition was so I can write this one without explaining what’s a slow brain and why intuition can work against us.

What Are the Five Whys?

When faced with a problem, you ask “why?” at least five times, using the answer from the previous question as the basis for the next. Originally developed by Toyota as a problem-solving tool in manufacturing, it seems to work well for self-discovery. It forces us to goo several layers deeper than the shallow obvious reason for a problem. Here’s a current made-up example.

  1. “I’m worried that the USA import tariffs may trigger a global crisis” – “Why does that bother you?”
  2. “I’m worried it might affect my job” – “Okay, it may or may not, Why does that bother you?”
  3. “I’m worried I may lose income” – “This doesn’t sound great but still, why are you worried about it?“
  4. “Because I may be unable to provide and my family may suffer” – “Family is there for good and bad. Why does a loss of income, even for a longer term, worry you?”
  5. “Because I tie my self-worth to how others (or family) perceives me”

And we find something deeper than just “Oh no, Trump”. We’ve reached a core fear that’s fueling the anxiety.

The Core Fears

Asking the five whys for fears appears to bring us down to the same one or two true fears and these seem to be similar for most people. For example (absolutely not a complete or scientific list):

  • Fear of failure
  • Fear of judgment
  • Fear of rejection
  • Fear of being alone
  • Fear of being a burden

The process of tying one or more of these (or a similar core fear) to some uncertainty-inducing current event can make us panic essentially for nothing. No, Trump won’t make your significant other stop loving you, neither can a potential risk coming to life take away your past experiences. Other things can do that, like being mean, or not listening, but not Trump.

Have I recently shared that we should always be kind? The past acts of kindness, for example, cannot be taken away if you get run over by a car, get sick, encounter dangerous people, communists, experience inflation, or a are attacked by a foreign army.

Why it helps

Anxiety thrives in ambiguity.

Bringing light to the true fears can take away some of their power. The news will never stop blasting the horrors of the day and they will always be awful because this is what makes us watch news. But our deepest fears can be nearly constant for decades, like old friends we don’t really like or want. Nothing is ever going to be perfect.

Brene Brown wrote a book called “The Gifts of Imperfection” where she describes the loss of self, direction, purpose, meaning, safety, certainty, and future. She asks us to seek for our internal self-worth. We are worthy and should accept that, should find reasons for it, and should also not undermine it too much. There is always a need to improve but never a need to be perfect, risk-free, or error-free.

I summarized that book in 2019 with the following text:

If you’re a mess and vulnerable, you are not alone. We are all together in this.

So, to tie it all together, The Five Whys is a method to get anxiety to a point where the level is within Brene Brown’s “This is fine”.