Tomiwa's Blog

Introduction

Last week Thursday I was at the library doing some work and “somehow” I “mysteriously” ended up on Twitter. I noticed that OSAP was trending and usually when a student loan program is trending, that’s usually not a good sign. 

Sure enough, I clicked on the trending topic and it was trending because student loans were getting cut and people were very upset. People like me were trying to figure out how the heck we were going to be able to pay for school next year. 

In February 2019, I was on the Youtube homepage looking for something to watch while eating dinner. Refusing to enjoy the meal until I could find the perfect video to watch, we’ve all been there. When the almighty Youtube algorithm recommended that I watch the most recent episode of The Joe Rogan Experience with Andrew Yang.

I thought to myself: “Yang? Is that an asian name? An Asian man running for president? Has this ever happened before? Interesting, I wonder what he has to say…” and that started my deep dive into the Yang Gang.

First, I should give a couple disclaimers. I don’t really follow politics or read the news and I am not affiliated with any political parties. I am not a Democrat or Republican, neither Liberal nor Conservative. I’m just Tomiwa.

I am also a software engineer and very interested in the technology industry. I try to not just focus on interesting technical and business concepts but also to be very empathetic towards the impact that my work has on broader society. This article is not really about politics but more of an analysis on technology and human nature.

At the beginning of May my coworker mentioned she had extra tickets to Collision Conference, the “fastest growing tech conference in North America” and asked if anyone would be interested. I messaged her and said yes. So first, I want to thank Jessica for getting me free tickets to the conference. Second, I want to share some of my thoughts on Collision Conference specifically and Conferences and Networking in general.

Sections

• Strong Opinions Weakly Held Disclaimer
• Are Conferences Overrated?
• Is Networking Overrated and a better way to Network
• Why I Respect and Disagree with Ev Williams

In Jeff Bezos’ 2016 Annual Shareholder Letters for Amazon, he talks about measuring Amazon’s success as a function of experiments run. Essentially, instead of looking at net income or revenue as a way of tracking progress, you can use the number of new things tried. I think in 2018, I ran the most experiments in my life.

• In 2018 I finally had the guts to “drop out” of University.
• Then I decided to come back to University and finish my degree.
• Started an interview podcast series called Atila TV
• Travelled through 5 European countries in 10 days
• Worked an 8-month internship at Properly
• Started a Youtube channel about software engineering, programming, business and self-improvement

Big Ideas and Lessons Learnt in 2018

The biggest thing I learnt in 2018 was the nuances of human nature and how irrational we can be. I sort of knew that humans can be irrational but seeing how people react in the face of contradicting evidence and how they can create narratives to support their worldview was a bit surprising. Though, in 2019 I would learn that creating these narratives is actually a very important part of human progress, but we’ll get to that in 2019 year in review.