TTT 29: Strangers Love Me š
Smedium Bets For Corporate Wins š²
Hi Team,
ą®®ą®¾ą®²ąÆ ą®µą®£ą®ąÆą®ą®®ąÆ (maalai vaNakkam), Buenas Noches, and Good Evening from Oaxaca, Mexico.
Iāll be sharing a thing I did, a tweet I loved, and a thought I had.
A Thing š²
Last week, I shared my frustration around my scope exceeding my authority.
Combining that with my firm belief that the only feelings that linger are the ones that we repress or ignore, I brought it up with my manager in our 1-on-1.
He 100% understood where I was coming from.Ā
A younger me might have kept that close to the chest. But now I am acutely aware that I donāt come with an expiration date, so I donāt know when I will pass. So why am I waiting to be truthful with others?
He suggested IĀ āscope downā the roadmap to our division and pitch it directly to the platform team.
He said heād use his authority as the Chief Architect of HealthTech to get it done at our division level instead of one level higher as we originally planned.
He told me that the right level of scope to operate at is the one where the humans move the quickest. Even though the strategy will benefit all app devs at the company, thereās no use bringing people along who drag their feet. That one level higher management might have a ālonger termā strategy in mind to address the problem.
The risk of a ālonger termā strategy, something greater than a year, is what will they have to show for this yearās performance review?
I prefer to take a Smedium Bets approach to work. Whatever I am working on better resolve < 6 months. It ensures I get a win before upper management can be cycled out.
Thatās why I was so pressed to deliver the HIPAA compliant cloud platform in 5 months.
Small wins snowball into bigger wins.
āLonger termā strategies get gutted as soon as new management is cycled in. Iāve seen this happen more than once. But past performance does not indicate future results.
I just love to pattern match.
A Tweet
I hadnāt heard of the SAGA pattern until 2020.
At my job, we were unwinding a monolithic application into microservices. With this came the redrawing of domain boundaries. And many questions about how to decompose transactions.
I had many architects peers at the time hand waving through, āShould we use the SAGA pattern?ā, but provided little specifics.
Recently I came across Bilgin lbryhamsās twitter account and realized he covers in detail the hard parts of designing distributed systems - such as distributed transactions.
Itās much more constructive for me to learn from people who did it than people who read a high level blog post and hand wave about it.
So give him a follow if you want to level up in the hard parts of designing distributed systems.
A Thought
āI woke up in a sweat at 2am and checked your locationāĀ
Thatās what my cousin, Venky, texted me Thursday morning. On Wednesday afternoon, I was on my way to try Tacos Cabritos when I got hungry. There was a dude selling tacos de canasta, so I figured Iād have an appetizer.
I got my tacos and sat down on the edge of a large pot.
I saw a woman next to me doing the same and I smiled and said, āBuen ideaā. She smiled back and responded in an American accent, āWould it be easier if we spoke English?ā We chatted for a while and she invited me to a bike ride later.
Her name was Isabel. She took my phone number and said sheād call after work.
I assumed that meant 5 oāclock. No call. 6 oāclock. Nothing. 7 oāclock. Nothing.
I figured she didnāt mean what she said. As a solo traveler, you meet a wide range of people. And in my experience, many are more words than actions.
Finally at 7:30pm I get a call from an unknown Mexico number.
Itās her. She said to meet her where we got tacos and sheād have a bike for me at 8:15pm. I quickly changed and left my place.
When I got there, she and her husband were on roller blades standing next to a bike. He adjusted the seat for my height. We rode to Alemedra Central, a beautiful park in Mexico City.
Thereās a group of 30+ people in roller blades ready to roll.
We take off out of the park at a blazing speed. We were taking up all the lanes on the roads. I realize quickly theyāre more organized than even the Century Bike Tours Iād paid for in New York.

They had 2-way radios. Whenever someone fell, they had designated first aid people. When we were crossing big roads, they had someone doing traffic control.
I had no idea where we were going. We were ripping through the barrios of Mexico City. By the time we took a break, we were outside the city limits.
āI thought you were getting kidnapped and taken to the airportāĀ -Venky.
We rode for 35 kilometers with stints on the highway. Even cops were helping us do traffic control. And yet, it was the safest Iād ever felt on a bike.
The way this group of people looked after each other reminded me of how I connect with my family and close friends.
They deeply cared about each otherās well-being.
After we got back, they took me to their favorite taco stand. Her husband ordered tacos campechanos, a mix of suadero and longaniza, for all of us. They wouldnāt let me pay.
They wouldnāt even let me pay for the bus back to my apartment.
Weāre conditioned to be so skeptical of strangers. Weāre conditioned to be fearful of them. But what if we realized that conditioning did more harm than help?
If Iād been fearful like my cousin, I would have missed out on the wildest bike ride of my life.
Iām a strong believer in everything happens exactly the way itās supposed to.
A few weeks back, I shared a self-limiting belief I have that strangers didnāt want to talk to me.
This experience reinforced for me that strangers love to meet me.
But only if Iāll let them.
I'd love to hear any feelings you felt while reading this and until next time - be easy.Ā
With Love,
Janahan
P.S. Thank you so much for reading the 29th edition of the TTT Newsletter.
Love following your adventures, Janahan! That ride looks unreal, what a huge crew.
I love this passage, itās something Iāve been thinking a lot about too:
āWeāre conditioned to be so skeptical of strangers. Weāre conditioned to be fearful of them. But what if we realized that conditioning did more harm than help?ā
I remember my first backpacking trip to Europe when I was 20. So many people warned my friends and I to be careful and not talk to strangers. But in the end, most of our best memories were these little exchanges with (former) strangers. š