Harpreet Singh - Harpreet Singh

2022 PICT96 "jab we met" reunion recap

The idea for the reunion started in my living room—as a side conversation. We were trying to distract Natasha from an incredibly stressful week. My mother-in-law had passed away about a week or two earlier. We still were walking through the logistics of her funeral and working on getting

Meditation

Assessing 26 years of meditation practice

The last 90 days have been tumultous. I reluctantly accepted that my meditation practice stuttered in the years of covid. I have been talking to myself (& others) as though my practice was all fine but it wasn't. I had skipped way more days than I actually practiced my meditation.

Harpreet again - recap from 2018

Hello again my friends - let's introduce ourselves again. You are getting this email because you subscribed to hear from me. "Subscribe to hear from you. When did I do that?" I wouldn't be surprised if this is the first thought that comes to you. You likely did that in

Mankanwal Rana funeral

Mankanwal Rana (Ma) passed away on 3/22/2022. The family is holding her funeral on 4/15/2022. Post funeral, there will be kirtan and langar at the San Jose Gurudwara from 1:00pm to 2:00pm. Folks who want to pay their respect to Ma and meet Natasha,

Biking

Cycling Milan to Venice

Early last year, I was thinking about picking up some way to exercise regularly. My last hiking trip to Everest Base Camp was too far in the past and I wanted to set an exciting goal. I decided to pick up cycling. I was an avid cycler in school days

Leadership

Building a startup — 9 lessons from my hike to Everest Base Camp

We were completely tired after a 6 hour hike to Phakding (8.6k feet). Crushed is a better description. It was the end of day 1 — the easiest hiking day and mostly downhill. The hardest part was supposed to be landing at the Lukla airport (9.3k feet) considered as

Productivity

Get Shit Done days - making time for deep work

I sighed with resignation as I looked at my completely packed calendar. “Quality” work delivered between meetings or after work, juggling email and slack responses while doing so. I had become a highly paid email and task traffic handler — routing tasks than doing them. Anything that took a reasonable amount

Productivity

3% flywheel method - a system to make daily progress on goals

T’is is the season for setting goals. If you set goals and struggle to achieve them then I have a system that sets a flywheel of momentum going and helps you achieve these goals. The approach was tested in 2020 and has held up fairly well for me. It

Product Management

Building differentiation - a mental model

Lately, I am reading a book called Different: Escaping the Competitive Herd by Youngme Moon. The book writes about why intense competition begets homogeneity. The writing resonated with me and wrote this note for my Zettlekasten. Examples heavily inspired by the author (all credit to her). When you measure something,

Positive Thinking

Using a rubber band to become positive

Someone close to me is going through tough times. His health is not where it used to be and trips to the doctors are wearing him down. I can see a downward spiral as his morale dips down with each new trip to the doctor. Negative thoughts reproduce themselves faster

Positive Thinking

Find the middle way in a hyper opinionated world

Opinion A: The Muslims are out to kill Hindus. The Hindus will take control and finally get back for the 1,000 years of subjugation. Opinion B: The Hindus are out to kill muslims but Muslims will push back and will build an Islamic sharia in India.The above polar

Leadership

Step up and lead. It is expected.

Today, I met an ex-colleague piqued with his current organization. He asked me for input to navigate his environment since I understand its ebbs and flows. My analysis… He is waiting for someone to give him permission to offer his perspectives. He has opinions but he is holding them back.

Leadership

6 tips to finding mentors

Life as an entrepreneur is exciting because it throws completely new challenges your way. In the last few weeks, a new challenge popped up on my radar that requires stretching way outside my comfort zone. Handling this challenge requires velvet gloves. Though, the interwebs have an article for every situation,

Product Management

User centered thinking - whats the right speed limit in a garage

What is the right speed for driving a car in a car parking lot? What is the acceptable speed range that we should be driving in a car park? Is it 8, 15, 22 mph? Coming to think of it — Who thinks about the user experience of driving through a

Product Management

Framework to build loveable products

Recently, I came across a pictorial that showed all the products in the DevOps market and the sheer number was mind boggling. As the head of products at CloudBees, I am often asked about recipes to build standout products in such markets and I will share my thoughts here. I

Meditation

Happiness - easier done than said

Lately, I have been ruminating on happiness and joy — a lot! I live in Silicon Valley and work in San Francisco. I see a number of individuals in a constant state of stress and anxiety despite being paid salaries that will qualify amongst the top 1% earners in the world

Meditation

Meditation - Happiness not mindfulness

It is disheartening to see people struggling with meditation. Meditation is not supposed to be hard but we have made it so. There seem to be three equations prevalent in the meditation domain: Meditation = mindfulness where Mindfulness = no thoughts Meditation = no emotions The second and third equations are messing with

Miscellaneous

Prem Narula - lessons from an extraordinary human

About 3 months back, when I heard that Prem uncle passed away in his sleep, I broke down and cried. I cried like I haven’t in a long time. His passing away has left a huge hole that can never be filled. I was 18 when I had my

Productivity

Get more done with the Pomodoro technique

I have long believed and now I know that is backed by research that multi-tasking doesn’t quite work. When you switch context to check that beep from your phone, it takes your brain about 15–20 minutes to come back into the flow state. A surprising research in the

Travel

The four surprising things about a Santorini sunset

So you made it to Santorini. You flew half-way around the world, changed flights in Athens and were surprised that there was such a huge plane could land in a decidedly small island with a minuscule of an airport. Hired a car and drove into Oia — the village to be

Leadership

The super hero anti-pattern in teams

You know her; you have seen him in action; and too often you have been one — a superhero who flew down, laid yourself on the broken tracks and let the train pass over your shoulders and saved the day. Have you been one? I know I have. There is an

Machine Learning

Deep learning to detect faces in pictures

//embedr.flickr.com/assets/client-code.js I was fascinated when Facebook launched the feature where it put a box around a human head (and a bit creeped out when it started suggesting the name of the human next to the box). I always wondered how they did it and filed

Product Management

Run a success product management summit

As product managers, product roadmapping and planning is one of the most rewarding activities that we do in our jobs. Determining the most valuable problems to solve and finding the shortest path to bringing them to the market is the engine that drives business growth. The biggest challenge that I

Travel

Things to do in Oia Santorini

(If you rather see the pictures, here they are) Describing Oia in a blog post is very easy — we went to Oia and stayed there for 2 days :-). Because there isn’t anything else you do in Oia — you get there and enjoy it. On the other hand, Oia

Machine Learning

What is softmax in neural networks

A softmax function squashes its inputs to be between 0 and 1 and also normalises them so that the sum is equal to 1. Let’s take a problem where we have to classify between three classes. Softmax is used to classify for greater than 2 classes for less than