Thanks, I'll add the John Stillwell book to my reading list. And thanks for the idea of watching the newer "Cosmos" series. I'm always looking for ideas for shows to watch with my son!
I went back to college and started a bachelor in philosophy in a specific cursus tailored for people with a full time job. Met plenty of fantastic people with various backgrounds.
Business & work : Deep Work - Cal Newport, Anti fragile - Nassim Taleb
CNV : Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life. Marshall Rosenberg
"spiritual" or wisdom related : Tao Te King, Marcus Aurelius, the Gospel, Meditation on the Tarot
classics : Plato, Homer, and Peloponese's war by Thucydides.
And I couldn't explain why but I re-read Into thin air by Krakauer every year.
Hello I am myself learning React right now. I love this website : https://daveceddia.com/
He provides a free 5-day intro course which is well-paced and gives you already plenty to start with. Then he offers a full fledged paying course which I have not tried yet, but I will most likely do. I love the approach : rather fast-paced, hands on, with a lot of exercices, which makes the knowledge sticks.
I faced the same question and ended joining a climate-tech company (www.carbometrix.com). There are plenty of tech jobs in the climate tech, you can read Climate Tech VC newsletter - they have a good job board. DM me if you want to discuss the subject.
"How do they deal with vulnerability, or being wrong, or someone else being wrong?" this is indeed an excellent question. I had so many difficulties in the past with engineers who where "never wrong". Thanks very useful advices.
I deleted the app on my Iphone. I don't regret at all. My mind seems clearer, not swamped into unnecessary content curated by the algorithms. I loved Instagram because I love painting, and photography, and visual arts in general but these past years it has become terrible with all the videos, and advertisement. And to answer your second question, when I feel mentally exhausted I try to do something physical like going out for a short walk. Seek boredom is an excellent advice !
At work : to manage the onboarding of newcomers, to organize our weekly strategic meeting (we have a page where we share our subjects and reflexions), to organize the engineering wiki and more generally the knowledge of the team on various subjects. Notion is good for managing knowledge in a team, I am less convinced but using it as a tool for project management / kanban.
At home : I open a new Notion page by topic (like : Python tips, books to read, notes from a book, ideas on a specific problem I'm dealing with) and once in while I supress non useful pages or regroup them in a master page. For the todo I alternate between Notion and pen and paper. I don't know why I am better at managing my time and priorities when I write then down.
I started Zettelkasten a few months ago as I had the idea to write more, think more, and create a blog. But the system crumbled -by lack of time- as I finally ended working full time as a start-up founder...
My insight is that Zettelkasten are a fantastic tool if you have a writing purpose in mind or at least some topics on which you want to store some knowledge and reflect actively. Otherwise, you will end up piling up loosely related ideas without knowing what is relevant for you. I loved the system because it helps you to read in a more focused way. Actually, it allows you to think while you read (instead of ingesting passively knowledge). But it remains a time-consuming and intensive system to maintain. You have to commit to it. Anyway, even if I quit, I kept the Zettelkasten I wrote and intend to return to it if my lifestyle changes in the future. I loved the experience.
I've been struggling with this same question the past two years by scaling up a machine learning team (our job was to design and put into production various machine learning-based products for the company). When the team was small, there was no way we could create a product team (no enough product managers or machine learning engineers). So we started with skills. But it came with its lot of inconvenience: hard to align people across the various roadmap. Some teams were swamped and had a hard time prioritizing. Beside, teams by skills tend not to understand their constraints and way of working (thing product manager vs developer culture clash). Honestly, I feel that the product organization is the more efficient one in delivery and team alignment. But this requires vast resources if you manage a lot of different products (this was our case). And in the end, you can end up with doing some things twice or not investing enough in the common assets/architecture (my team was in charge of managing our data platform as well, so we had to think long-term and global at the same time). I quit my job by if I were still here, I would definitively cut back on the number of projects and rearrange the team by products.
Deep Work, by Cal Newport : to focus on what matters.
The talent code, by Danie Coyle : to understand the value of deliberate practice.
Brain at work, astonishingly useful mixing practical neuroscience and concrete situations.
Getting things Done : to adopt a good time management system (you can tweak the method).
Good luck !