Writing

The expressway always feels faster.

We started the last year with reading articles that METR had measured experienced developers going 19% slower with AI while they believed they were going 20% faster. The more interesting thing happened in February 2026, when METR admitted it could no longer run the study, because it could not find enough developers willing to spend a day working without an AI tool.

Your agent user cannot file a bug.

What happens when our product has acquired a user that reads your error strings, acts on your defaults, and never once complains. It does not answer surveys, it does not open tickets, and when it gets confused it just retries :/

Count both queues.

A tailor can't unit-test a punjabi, so he judges his Eid season by who walks back into the lane afterwards: the customers who come back carrying new cloth, and the ones who come back with the shoulders folded in a bag. AI products have put the rest of us in the same position. When you can't fully verify the thing before it ships, the praise-to-criticism ratio in your feedback stream becomes the closest thing you have to a report card, and it's a better one than NPS ever was.

You can't sell SaaS seats anymore.

For fifteen years software was sold by the seat, one named user for one monthly fee, back when every seat was a person and the software only made that person faster. Then the agent started doing the work itself, and a single agent that clears what seven hundred people used to clear is an agent that empties seven hundred desks you were billing for. Sell that by the seat and your revenue shrinks in step with how well the thing works.

Ship an MCP or become a database.

Greenhouse shipped an MCP server this year, and the part worth sitting with is not the feature list. It is that a recruiter can now run a full hiring report, pull candidate context, and clear a batch of rejections without ever loading greenhouse.com. The interface layer of SaaS is migrating into the agent, and the product you spent a decade making beautiful is becoming a backend somebody else narrates.

Desire paths are the product.

A planning officer in Lisbon paused mid-walking-tour last spring in front of a fresh limestone plaza and pointed at the dirt line cutting diagonally across the middle of it. The same failure mode happens in product, where the team confuses the polished surface it shipped with the path the user actually wore. The cleanest products of the last thirty years are the ones that figured out which one was the artefact and which one was the data.

Build to learn vs build to earn.

Marty Cagan's distinction between build-to-learn and build-to-earn has been getting passed around in product Slacks for a year now, mostly read as advice for early-stage teams. The argument I want to add, after a quarter of running the experiment myself on an established B2B marketing-workflow platform with thousands of paying enterprise marketing teams attached to it, is that the biggest scope for build-to-learn in 2026 is sitting inside a working build-to-earn product, not in the lean-startup garage everyone keeps drawing it in.

Wanting the wanting.

There is a stand-up bit I caught on a podcast where the comic points out that you don't want new things, you want the wanting, because the moment a thing arrives in your hand you start hunting for the next thing to almost-have. The B2B PM version is that customers request features they then never use. The request itself was the value, and the feature sits in production while the same customer files the next one.

Margin notes on Spiegel.

Evan Spiegel sat down with Lenny and said, roughly, that software stopped being a moat fifteen years ago and that the people running scared from AI now are running scared from that same fact in different clothes. I watched the interview with a half-finished bKash post still open on the next tab, and most of what struck me was how cleanly the Dhaka examples already half-argue his point.

Why I stopped reading product Substacks.

Eight subscriptions ago, my product thinking was a compressed mirror of whatever Marty Cagan and Lenny Rachitsky had written that month. Then I unsubscribed, one at a time, over a single quarter. The thinking that came back was sharper, and the trade is one I am quietly recommending to anyone who will sit with it.

Why everyone in Dhaka has a side hustle.

Two colleagues running two economies on two monitors between sprint meetings. One is QAing a Saturday build for an agency client, the other is approving a Daraz refund. The day job is the visa stamp. The side hustle is the actual job, and that has been true in Dhaka since roughly 2018.

The English-medium school IPO.

Annual tuition at a name-brand Dhanmondi English-medium school sits well above what a mid-career private-sector parent can comfortably afford, and yet every gate has a waiting list. The argument here is that the school is no longer selling education; it is selling a long-dated option on emigration, priced to extract every taka the parent will not admit they are spending. School names below are deliberately fictionalised.

Don't trust the user.

A B2B customer wrote in to say our one-time codes were five characters long when the field on his screen only took four, and I spent half a Tuesday in the production database hunting for a bug that turned out to be a column he had not scrolled past. The wider claim is that watching a user does more work than talking to one ever will, and that in B2B SaaS a complaint without a session replay attached is half a complaint at best.

The bKash agent at the corner store IS the bank branch.

bKash didn't win on app polish or frontier ML. It won by realising the bottleneck on Bangladeshi financial inclusion was a trust handshake, and the handshake had to happen at a corner store with a laminated pink poster and a cash drawer. The next ten consumer categories in this country need the same retail-shaped on-ramp.

Bangladesh is the world's best A/B testing ground (and nobody's using it).

Bangladesh has 170 million people pressed into a strip a tenth the size of the US, segmented across language, religion, income, age, and which phone the user is holding, riding a unified payment rail. It is the cleanest signal-to-noise ratio in any consumer market on earth, and almost no global product team runs experiments here.

Your support team is the eval set you're not using.

In agentic-AI products, the people answering tickets and walking new customers through their first ninety days already hold the failure-mode catalogue your eval team is trying to write from scratch. The under-priced research function is sitting one floor down, badged in a different colour, and the company keeps treating it like a cost line.

Cat Wu would not hire most of you.

Cat Wu runs product for Claude Code at Anthropic. She told Lenny Rachitsky, plainly, that most PMs she interviews are approaching the role wrong, that her team prefers engineers with taste, that PRDs are mostly gone, and that some features ship in a day. I watched the interview with my own /blog open in another tab and threaded comments down the right margin.

Margin notes on Karpathy.

I watched Andrej Karpathy's vibe-coding talk with my own blog open in another tab. Most of what struck me wasn't argument, it was overlap. Five places where his sentence in San Francisco met a paragraph I'd already pencilled in Dhanmondi, plus the one place I'd push past where he stopped.

Have we confused thinking with programming?

I passed a senior engineering interview last month and I still couldn't write a React calculator from scratch. The grammar of code is not the thinking of code, and a generation of Dhaka programmers, like a generation of Dhaka grammar-exam toppers, has been confusing the two for thirty years.

Bangladesh's biggest casino is the land registry office.

Two colleagues wear the same tight pleasure on their faces, one with a Crash bet slip on his phone, the other with a Purbachal deed on his desk. The argument here is that the only honest difference between the two is the timeline, and that Bangladesh has been pretending otherwise for thirty years.

Streaming is UX, not plumbing.

From a Banani 11 cha stall, a small argument about why token streaming is the most underrated UX primitive of the decade. The act of watching the characters appear changes how the user reads, edits, and trusts the response, and a product team that mistakes the pour for plumbing is selling cha by handing the customer a thermos.

Your Slack channels are your real org chart.

The printed reporting structure is a fiction. The real org is who DMs whom, which channels stay alive, which ones go quiet. A traffic constable on the Mohakhali flyover reads the road the way a senior engineer reads a Slack workspace, and the painted lines are not the lanes.

Pricing AI products by token is a trap.

A Karwan Bazar fish caller has watched six pricing units come and go in thirty years, and the SaaS bhais selling AI agents are about to discover the per-token unit moves under them the same way the maund did when the ice started melting. The only shape that holds is per-outcome, and nobody has worked out how to bill it yet.

Migration is the silent product job.

Most product writing is about new features. The unwritten skill is moving fifty thousand users from v1 to v2 without losing any of them. The actual job lives in the labels on the boxes, the way Mintu bhai does it on a Friday afternoon in Banani.

The half-life of a benchmark.

MMLU was a real measurement in 2023 and a polite formality by 2025. HumanEval, GSM8K, MATH all went the same way. A benchmark is alive only as long as the gap between models still maps to something a customer can feel; once the labs train against it, the rate card on the wall becomes decoration.

The coder who taught the model to ship.

Vibe coding is real but mis-described. The actual skill is the older one of reading a diff and saying which lines stay. Compiling is the floor a tabla apprentice clears in week one of riyaz. The ceiling is taste, learned the way the apprentice learns it, by being corrected on the same bol until the wrist stops cheating.

The product brief as a prompt.

When the brief is what generates the implementation, the brief becomes the spec, the test, and the documentation collapsed into one artifact. A film-set script supervisor in Old Dhaka has been doing this for forty years with a 40-page screenplay in one hand and a one-page call sheet in the other. The crew shoots the call sheet.

Stop typing tokens, start typing schemas.

Most agentic codebases treat the model's output as a string to parse. The clerk at counter no. 3 of Gulshan post office knows better. Schemas are the form, and tokens that don't match the form go nowhere.

The PM who reads twenty roadmaps and writes one.

Twenty inputs land on the desk by Friday afternoon. Customer interviews, sales notes, support tickets, three rival roadmaps, a legal risk register. The job isn't planning. It's de-duplication, prioritisation, and the kind of grammar that lets a tired team find the spine of next quarter.

Why your RAG retrieves the wrong thing 14% of the time.

Six specific failure modes I keep meeting in production RAG over brand-voice corpora, in roughly the order I find them. Most teams discover them after launch, because their eval set was built from happy-path queries that never asked the awkward question.

The new PM stack. Prompt, eval, observability.

Roadmaps and PRDs are still around, but the day-to-day for AI-product PMs runs on three rails. The prompt is the artifact, the eval is the test, and the trace is the truth-teller. If you can't read a Langfuse trace, you can't ship.

Being multilingual is a moat.

Old Dhaka, off Tipu Sultan Road, a signboard painter who has been mixing enamel for forty years explains the part of PM work nobody puts on the JD. Translating between PRD, SQL, customer-voice, engineering-speak and the boardroom is the same job as choosing whether the next letter should be brush-stroke Bangla or stencil English.

Hiring in 2026 is hiring for taste.

Tools have flattened output. Anyone can produce a wireframe, a sales email, a roadmap. The moat that's left is taste, the curated set of what's worth shipping and what's worth a polite no. Here's how to test for it in 45 minutes.

Eval suites are the new release notes.

The PR description has stopped being the changelog. The pass-rate movement on the eval suite is. v2.3 lifted retrieval-grounded quotes from 81% to 89%; that one line is the release note. Everything else is the annual-day speech.

The death of the PRD-as-document.

The Product Requirement Document was a 1990s artifact for waterfall org charts. In 2026 the artifact is the eval set, the prompt, and the trace. PRDs still get written, but past page two nobody is reading. The new spec is executable, and a stamp doesn't make a document; it certifies one.

The compounding cost of LLM context.

Every agentic call drags the whole running history back into the prompt, and the meter on that ride is quadratic. Teams stop noticing because each individual hop feels cheap, the way a CNG passenger stops watching the meter once Mohakhali clears.

The career advice that doesn't survive a year.

Most career advice has a shelf life of roughly eighteen months. A retired Sylheti headmaster spreads forty years of notebooks on the clothesline after the monsoon, reads what dried, what curled, what buckled. Six lines that didn't make it, and one rule that did.

Caching is a hospitality problem.

The cache is a boarding-house register, not a hash map. The bua of a four-room mess in Sutrapur explains who she lets stay, who she evicts before noon, and why LRU is a landlady's instinct that the Netflix caching team eventually wrote down on a slide.

Bun is the new Node and that's fine.

A team switching JavaScript runtimes is usually less dramatic than the standup that decided to do it. The interesting part of moving from Node to Bun isn't the runtime, it's that the audit forces you to confront which of your dependencies were quietly lying about being standard the whole time.

The build is the brief.

Compile errors and broken tests are the most honest user research you will ever get from a feature. The PRD only tells you what the team wishes were true, the build only ships what is actually true, and the fastest way to close the gap is to let the build read the spec back to you.

AI eats QA before it eats engineering.

Everyone has been worrying about whether models will replace engineers. The role they have been quietly merging with for the last eighteen months sits one floor down, counting colonies on agar plates at 7am, and the technician is still on the seven o'clock bus.

Agentic products need contract tests, not unit tests.

A unit test on a deterministic function asks for an exact byte. An agent answers in a different shape every Tuesday, and the byte changes. What you actually want is a contract on what the answer must look like, witnessed by three named clauses, the way a kabin-nama gets signed in a Wari sitting room.

Good things are good things.

A friend's old-money-versus-new-money list landed on my feed and got two hundred likes by lunch. What the list is actually doing, more quietly than the sociology it's pretending to be, is laundering virtues through a class label nobody questions until you point at it.

Tests are the spec now.

Specs rot in ninety days. Code, in an agentic codebase, rewrites at the speed of pull requests. The only artifact that can't rot is the test suite, because CI runs it on every push and a stale test fails. That changes whose job it is to write them.

The agentic A/B test doesn't exist.

Classical A/B testing assumes humans branch. When both sides of the marketplace are agents, what's the control group?

Privacy is the product.

Most products treat privacy as a constraint. A few make it the entire value prop. The inversion changes everything about how you build, market, and price.

A field guide to RAG that doesn't lie.

Lessons from building retrieval against brand-voice corpora at Fortune 500 scale. What actually breaks, what to evaluate, and why retrieval is the easy part.

2 kinds of PMs: diagram-first vs document-first.

Two PMs face the same problem. One reaches for a whiteboard. The other reaches for Notion. The artifact you start with sets the ceiling on what you can ship.

On successfully failing.

What seven years and one wound-down EdTech taught me about the kind of quitting that compounds. Why dissolving with grace beats dragging the corpse around.

The roadmap is a compression algorithm.

Leadership sees four boxes. The team sees forty. What ships is three, plus an unrelated thing. We're not behind. We're compressed.

The retailer is the protocol.

How SupplyLine survived because we built around trust networks, not against them. A short B2B FinTech story from a country where the bank is the ninth-most-trusted name on a shopkeeper's phone.

What 'MVP' means by role.

Engineering's MVP. Design's MVP. Sales' MVP. Customer Success's MVP. The intersection is empty. The fights live in the circles.

Half-life of a spec.

Day 0 the spec is god. Day 30 we mostly followed it. Day 90 the spec is folklore. Day 180 the team is making fun of you for caring.

Editing a literary magazine taught me product.

Notes from seven years running UNaB Magazine, Bangladesh's only writer-led literary publication, on what an editorial brain brings to product reviews. The roadmap is a table of contents. The sprint is an issue.

Tbh, Dhaka traffic is a distributed system.

Honking is gossip protocol. Right of way is consensus. The rickshaw is an unkillable daemon. The metaphor is real and it survives scrutiny.

The PM career map (with traps).

Associate PM to Principal looks like a clean ladder. It is not. Here are the hazard tiles between each level, written by someone who's stepped on most of them.

What 'product sense' actually is.

Two words doing very different work. 'Product' is what to build. 'Sense' is how you know. Most of the people teaching it are teaching half.

The BCS exam is a leaky funnel.

Two million applicants enter. A few hundred land a cadre posting. The drop-off rate at each stage is exactly what every product onboarding funnel looks like, with worse posters.

Your feature has eight stakeholders.

The customer is the easy one. The auditor who replies in six weeks is harder. Past-you who wrote the PRD is the hardest of all.

Deprecation grief.

Five stages of killing a feature you loved. Denial, bargaining, metrics, graceful, archive. The middle one is the trap.

The 3 prompts every PM eventually writes.

Draft me a strategy memo. Summarize this customer call. Is this a feature or a bug. The one you should worry about is the third.

Week 52, 2024

I keep getting fleeting urges to teach in some mentorship program. The catch is I never feel I know any one thing well enough to actually teach it.

Week 52, 2024

হ্যামিল্টন আইল্যান্ডের মানুষ চিন্তা করে কাকাতুয়া ঢুকে চিনির প্যাকেট ছড়াবে কিনা। আর আমরা হিসাব করি বনানি পার হতে আজ ২ ঘণ্টা লাগবে নাকি ৩।

Week 51, 2024

৪ মাসে ইউসুফ সরকার কিছু করতে পারেনি বলে যারা ক্ষুব্ধ, তারা কর্পোরেট রিস্ট্রাকচারিং কখনো দেখেনি। ইন্ডিস্ক্রিমিনেট ফায়ারিং ছাড়া ৪ মাসে কিছুই হয়না।

Monotale: The MFS Receipt

Monotale: The Comma War

Week 46, 2024

স্বপ্নের গরুর মাংস কম্বো ৯ দিনে ৭৫,০০০ প্যাকেট। সংখ্যাটা বড় শুনালেও প্রতিদিন মাত্র ১৭টা গরু, যা আসলে মার্কেট ডিজ্রাপশন না।

Monotale: The Frontend Treadmill

Monotale: The Forex Anxiety

Monotale: The Dhanmondi Cafe

Monotale: The Mehmaan Economy

Monotale: The Pasta Truth

Monotale: The Shaheb Ji Effect

Monotale: The Prompt Engineer

Monotale: The Tab Bar Conspiracy

Monotale: The GPU Shortage

Monotale: The Bus Honking

Monotale: The Strategy Deck

Monotale: The Currency of Attention

Monotale: The Zoom Background

Monotale: The AI Summary Trap

Monotale: The PM Roadmap Tense

Week 41, 2023

ছোট স্টার্টআপের কালচার বুঝতে গেলে ফাউন্ডার একটা খাসড়া পাবলিক কিনা সেইটা আগে দেখুন। স্যার-স্যার কালচার আর তেলবাজি দুটাই বড় রেড ফ্ল্যাগ।

Monotale: The Startup Perks

Monotale: The Engineer Meme

Monotale: The Emoji Meeting

Week 40, 2023

Benchling Engineering used a suffix tree and DFS to find the longest common substring in DNA. Frontier work like this is rare here because we keep racing to be the cheapest.

Monotale: The Deck Philosopher

Week 39, 2023

Everyone's complaining the iPhone 15 Pro runs hot. Most of us aren't gaming on it for hours. If it doesn't cook during a Teams call, that's the bar I care about.

Week 38, 2023

Microsoft is hiring a lead for nuclear-powered AI data centers. Starting to wish private nuclear plants were a thing here too.

Week 37, 2023

Robots cooking eggs is a setup for failure. Even human chefs blow it. But LLMs teaching actuators how to whisk one is the dream project I keep wishing for.

Week 36, 2023

Phenylephrine is basically a placebo as a decongestant. I've taken it for years thinking FDA-approved meant vetted. Who do we trust now?

Week 35, 2023

How exactly do rocket fuel pumps work? Pressured gas, turbo pumps, solid fuel engines. Wish there were better videos explaining the plumbing.

Week 34, 2023

I have genuinely tried to find the logic in climate activists gluing themselves to roads, and after weeks of trying it still does not make any sense to me.

Week 33, 2023

An NYT op-ed argues sex work is neither sex nor work. I disagree, Huffington Post disagrees. The interesting bit is finally reading two real perspectives in the same week.

Week 32, 2023

A PwC piece on a UK housing-management firm whose leaders assumed app uptime was their continuity risk, until a What-if exercise showed paying third-party suppliers mattered far more.

Week 31, 2023

Time isn't just clocks. A 2019 Current Psychology study found a worker's time perspective changes engagement even when personality is held constant.

Monotale: The Cricket Economist

Monotale: The RDR Rule

Monotale: The Final Monotale

Week 30, 2023

Why don't Dhaka hospital lab reports just tell you if you're fine? Reading 1.23 < n > 2.31 against my own number is not a UX, it's a riddle.

Week 29, 2023

Bangladeshi news portals keep clickbaiting about Parimoni's son or Shakib Khan's son. Those kids will grow up and have to live with what we wrote.

Week 28, 2023

Top Dhaka hospitals charge premium fees and still expect a patient&apos;s attendant to sleep on the same half-sofa, half-divan reclining chair every cabin seems to be issued.

Monotale: The Design System Debt

Monotale: The Grammarly Effect

Week 27, 2023

A short, very smug weekly check-in. Asking everyone who got loud about their NFT portfolios how the floor price is treating them now.

Week 26, 2023

My Eid-ul-Adha feed had zero gore this year, which is either my own bubble closing in or cheap image classification finally being affordable enough to filter every photo at upload.

Week 25, 2023

Next time you're scared to share an idea in a meeting, remember somebody pitched a tornado full of sharks and got it greenlit.

Week 24, 2023

The 12 Jungian archetypes are supposedly universal and unconscious. A caveat to everyone who likes typing other people into ABCD boxes.

Week 23, 2023

Started following somedeafguy on TikTok. A small, wholesome corner of the internet worth pointing at.

Monotale: The Shaadi Dance

Week 22, 2023

Fariha bought me a Chekhov collection with gold-foil edges. The sentence on the back said more than I could about a book I haven't even read yet.

Monotale: The 1:1 Format

Monotale: The Fintech Name

Monotale: The Hyphen Debate

Week 20, 2023

You can learn to speak better by collecting the phrases other people use better. "Leaves a lot to be desired" instead of "this sucks" was the start.

Week 19, 2023

The mayor's daughter as Chief Heat Officer sounds nepotistic until you read the job description. For a foreign-funded role with the mayor as the bottleneck, she's the right pick.

Week 18, 2023

মুক্তাদিরের বিয়ে নিয়ে আশেপাশের লোকজনের যে কনসার্ন, সেইটা থেকে সরে আসার সময় হয়েছে। লাইফ ভ্যালুয়েবল।

Week 17, 2023

বঙ্গবাজার আর নিউ মার্কেটের আগুন আরসন না। কন্সপিরেসি থিওরি বিশ্বাস করিনা, আর বড় ডিজাস্টারে পাবলিক ডোনেশনের পক্ষেও না।

Week 16, 2023

রাজউকের টিচার সংক্রান্ত স্ক্রিনশট শেয়ার করা একটা ক্রাইম। ভিক্টিমকে জেনে বুঝে পাব্লিকলি শেইম করার নাম রিভেঞ্জ পর্ণ।

Week 15, 2023

বিদ্যানন্দের বিরুদ্ধে এই অভিযোগগুলো পার্সোনাল কিংবা পলিটিক্যাল গ্রাজ থেকে আসছে বলে মনে হয়। সিম্পল মিস্টেইক নিয়ে এত তেনাপেঁচানির কী আছে?

Monotale: The Marketing Hex

Monotale: The SaaS Pricing Page

Week 13, 2023

A newfound respect for chaana daal, which refuses to soften after 12 hours of soaking, refuses to give up after 30 minutes of boiling, and refuses to even burn properly when ignored.

Week 12, 2023

Buy 2 Get 1 is misleading framing. If I bought two, I should get two. Call it Buy 2 Get 3 if you want me to feel anything.

Week 11, 2023

Facebook now translates Urdu written in English characters back into Urdu script, even when the romanisation is not a clean 1:1 map to the original pronunciation.

Monotale: The Banglalink Call

Week 9, 2023

Britain ran wartime tests on Gruinard Island that involved dropping anthrax-laced cakes, and the small Scottish island stayed off-limits and contaminated for the next fifty years.

Week 8, 2023

A fantastic Bangla book on the 1971 war by Kishor Pasha called &apos;আমরা তোমার শান্তিপ্রিয় শান্ত ছেলে&apos; that I wish someone would translate into English.

Week 10, 2023

GPT-4 release speculation everywhere this week. People are mostly worried, not curious. Also, who decided clocks should still go back?

Week 7, 2023

The Cheap-Good-Fast triangle is missing a fourth axis. When the deadline is constant, the quality you can deliver shrinks faster than you'd think.

Monotale: The Mid-Meeting Mute

Monotale: The Tech Twitter Cycle

Week 6, 2023

Lost a token at the IVAC desk for the Indian Embassy and somehow ended up filing a General Diary, then spent the rest of the week being absurdly billed by BRTA and Adobe Illustrator.

Week 5, 2023

A Xiaomi mouse died in a month, sat in a drawer for a year, and turned out to be perfectly fine. The off switch had a stupid second position.

What is the difference between a Product Owner and a Product Manager?

Product Owners run the backlog. Product Managers run the strategy. The difference matters more in Dhaka than people think.

Week 4, 2023

Alems pushing back against evolution being added to the national curriculum, plus a fuchkawala in Dhaka who now bleeds cash on every weekly grocery run he makes for his stall.

Week 3, 2023

Random people just discovered ChatGPT and are misunderstanding it loudly. Meanwhile RAB caught would-be militants in the hilltracts and nobody noticed.

Week 2, 2023

Got approved to sit for the PMP exam in March. Not much else happened. The exam fee is its own life event.

Week 1, 2023

Why are we still setting Dhaka's already-poisonous skies on fire to celebrate New Year's? And other small dread-notes about the year ahead.

Product VS People

Product-first means optimising for the artifact. People-first means optimising for the user. Two valid stances, and where they actually conflict.

Okay, you are hired. Now what?

Everyone preps the interview. Nobody preps for week one. A list of questions a new Product Manager should be asking from day zero.

Monotale: The Roadmap Confidence

Monotale: The Eid Money

Monotale: The Trial Email

Monotale: The Cofounder Myth

Monotale: The AirPods Summit

Does your Kindle make you forget the Book/Writer?

Reading on a Kindle erases the cover and the author's face. I'd read Gurnah's Paradise and didn't recognize his name when he came to Dhaka.

A random thought on Elon Musk

Watching the world's richest man redefine free speech inside his new empire while it burns around him. He bought the right, but it's still odd to watch.

Monotale: The Button Placement War

Random Thought about Dengue (Sept 29, 2022)

ডেঙ্গু পরিস্থিতি অবনতি হয়েছে এই কথাটার কোনো ডেফিনিশন নাই। কতজন মারা গেলে ইমার্জেন্সি, সেইটাই কেউ বলেনা।

My biggest failure.

The first fund I raised back in 2015 became PorashonaOnline, a conversational-AI MCQ tutor I sunset before launch because I was too embarrassed by the version I had built.

Random Thought (Sept 24, 2022)

We get excited every time AI mimics things humans do casually. Chatbots, copywriting, image generation. Maybe the bar we're setting for ourselves is the real story.

Monotale: The SaaS Trial

Random Thought (Sept 04, 2022)

একটা আন্ডার-কনস্ট্রাকশন বিল্ডিংয়ের নিচে ৪০ মিনিট অপেক্ষা, একটা ঘুমন্ত কুকুরছানা, এক বাবার গান। দুপুরের একটা নোট।

Is tea worth the slavery?

১২০ টাকার বদলে ৩০০ টাকা চা শ্রমিকদের দিতে গেলে কেজিতে দাম বাড়ে মাত্র ৩০০ টাকার আশেপাশে। মানে আমরা যা চা খাচ্ছি সেটা আসলে দাসত্বের ছাড়ে চলছে।

Is selling more important than building?

You can build the perfect drink. If it's not within two minutes of a thirsty person, it doesn't sell. Tech keeps forgetting distribution is the actual product.

Monotale: The Ghost of jQuery

Monotale: The iPhone Loan

Monotale: The Typography Purist

Monotale: The Hartal Memory

Monotale: The Rickshaw Ratecard

How early do you wake up?

European colleagues casually book 7 AM meetings. American ones rarely set anything before 9. Bangladesh starts somewhere after 10. Is this culture or commute?

The golden rule of software demo's

Software runs perfectly through the twelve internal demos and the QA passes, until one edge case picks the exact moment you are standing in front of a hundred-person audience.

Monotale: The Airbnb Bangladesh

Why should someone visit Jessore?

We picked Jessore on a whim with no plan, and it turned out to be the rare Bangladeshi city where you can dodge tourists, take an overnight train and still get hotel service.

Three random things I can't come to terms with

Three forced-on-me lessons I still resent. Reading Vernier calipers, writing MIPS to wiggle a triangle, and Saint Joseph's leaky pipettes.

The payments infrastructure in Bangladesh is pretty terrible.

PayPal onboarded a friend&apos;s site in a day and Stripe in two, while SSLCommerz wanted twenty documents, wet signatures and a phone call about which page needed sealing.

Fintech 2.0 for Bangladesh

The next fintech wave probably won't come from an MFS company. It'll come from whoever builds an ATM aggregation network that recycles cash.

The problem with discourse (with John Doe).

I no longer want others to agree with me. Why arguing to convert is exhausting, and why arguing to understand is the only kind worth doing.

Monotale: The Cha Economy

Bangladesh needs better CCTV Service Providers

Local CCTV providers are stuck on DVR/NAS hardware while the cloud passed them by. Banks and ATMs deserve real redundancy, not a microSD card.

The institutional impact of war

Meta downranking Russian media sounds righteous. The second-order effect is every government slowly realizing they don't want a Delaware company controlling their news.

Monotale: The Traffic Meditation

Monotale: The Dollar Rate

Monotale: The Product Debt

You are probably not investment-ready - and that's okay.

Asking random Facebook strangers for VC contacts at the idea stage isn't fundraising. Why most young founders here are nowhere near investment-ready, and that's fine.

95 Reasons why Standard Chartered Bank's Online Banking Platform UX (and overall service) needs a major revamp!

Ninety-five specific UX failures I&apos;ve hit on Standard Chartered Bank&apos;s online platform across four years, kept in one running rant for whichever PM eventually inherits the redesign.

Monotale: The Onboarding Modal

Monotale: The Job Title Inflation

Monotale: The Microcopy Ego

Monotale: The Figma Illusion

Monotale: The LinkedIn Post

Monotale: The Meeting Recap

Six thoughts on Shohoz

Calling your terminated employees "underperforming and temporary" in a national newspaper isn't crisis comms, it's bad leadership. Six notes on how Shohoz handled their layoffs.

Throw away the old Stack

Drawers full of old USB cables "in case I need them." Build for the present, plan for the future, and let go of the legacy of monitors past.

A year at Welcome Software

Joining a 12-year-old company on its actual Day 1 of operation, with HR informing me on arrival that the previous main product had been sold off that same morning.

স্ক্র্যাচ থেকে শুরু করতে নেই

আরাফাত ভাই সেরা বিরিয়ানিটা বানাতে গিয়ে স্ক্র্যাচ থেকে শুরু করেছিলেন। সেই গল্প বলে কেন স্ক্র্যাচ থেকে শুরু করা ভুল।

ঘুমের ঘাটতি যেভাবে আপনার ব্যবসার ক্ষতি করে

ঘুম মৃতের জন্য এই প্রবাদ ব্যবসার ক্ষতি করে। কম ঘুম যেভাবে মুনাফা আর সিদ্ধান্ত দুটোই গিলে ফেলে।

উৎপাদনের ওপর ব্যবসার আধুনিকায়নের প্রভাব

ব্যবসার আধুনিকায়ন উৎপাদনে আটকে থাকেনা। বিপণন, প্রচার, আর নতুন বাজার ধরার গল্পও এর সাথে জড়িত।

দৈনন্দিন কাজের তালিকা কাগজে নাকি ফোনে রাখবেন?

দৈনন্দিন কাজের লিস্ট কাগজের ডায়েরিতে নাকি ফোনের অ্যাপে? দুই পদ্ধতির ট্রেডঅফ, আর আপনার কাজের ধরণ বুঝে কোনটা কখন বেছে নেওয়া উচিত।

সময়ের সঠিক ব্যবহার করার চারটি কার্যকর উপায়

সময় ফুরালে সাধন হবে না, লালন বলেছিলেন। সময়ের সঠিক মূল্যায়ন করার চারটা প্রয়োগযোগ্য উপায়।

কঠিন কাজ দ্রুত আদায় করবেন কিভাবে?

অফিসের সেই একটা কাজ যেটা কেউ করতে চায়না। কঠিন কাজ দ্রুত আদায় করার ম্যানেজারিয়াল কৌশল।

সাফল্যের চাবিকাঠি ঘুম

পরিশ্রম না, পর্যাপ্ত ঘুমই সাফল্যের আসল চাবিকাঠি। গবেষণা কী বলে, আর কেন আমরা ঘুমকে অবহেলা করি।

আপনি কি ‘ডিসিশন ফ্যাটিগে’ ভুগছেন?

একজন প্রাপ্তবয়স্ক মানুষ দিনে ১০ থেকে ৪০ হাজার সিদ্ধান্ত নেয়। ডিসিশন ফ্যাটিগ কীভাবে আমাদের কাজের মান নষ্ট করে।

কাজের মান কমে যাওয়ার পেছনে দায়ী ৫টি অভ্যাস

পরিশ্রমের পরও কাজ এগোচ্ছে না কেন? পাঁচটা চুপিসারে অভ্যাস যা আমাদের আউটপুটের মান নিচে টেনে আনে।

‘উদ্যোক্তা’ হোন, মাত্র ৭ দিনে!

চাকরি ভাল্লাগেনা, নিজের কিছু একটা চাই। সাত দিনে উদ্যোক্তা হওয়ার বাস্তব একটা প্ল্যান।

সাফল্য বাড়াতে নিজের পরিকল্পনা লেখার অভ্যাস গড়ুন।

লক্ষ্য কাগজে লিখে রাখলে সফলতার সম্ভাবনা ৪২ শতাংশ বাড়ে। ডোমিনিকান ইউনিভার্সিটির গবেষণা আর তার পেছনের লজিক।

সময়ের সদ্ব্যবহার করার ৩টি কৌশল

৮ ঘণ্টার অফিসে সব কাজ শেষ করতে না পারলে লোকসান শুধু সময়ের ব্যাপার। সময় ঠিকঠাক ব্যবহার করার তিনটা প্রায়োগিক কৌশল।

রিয়েল লাইফ মাল্টিটাস্কিং: একসঙ্গে অনেক কাজ করছেন? নাকি অনেক পিছিয়ে পড়ছেন?

মাল্টিটাস্কিং একটা মিথ। মস্তিষ্ক একসঙ্গে একটাই কাজে ফোকাস করতে পারে, বাকিগুলো আবছা হয়ে যায়।

ম্যানেজার হিসেবে আপনি কতটা সফল?

ম্যানেজার হিসেবে সফল হওয়া মানে সব সিদ্ধান্ত নিজে নেওয়া না। একটা পুরোনো রাজসভার গল্প দিয়ে দেখানো যাক।

কাজের গতি বাড়াবে ‘এজাইল স্টোরিটেলিং’

এজাইল মানে শুধু দ্রুত কাজ না। সফটওয়্যার আর প্রোডাক্ট টিমে এই শব্দটা একটু আলাদা দাঁড়ায়, এবং কেন সেটা গুরুত্বপূর্ণ।

আপনার অফিসের পরিবেশ কি বিষাক্ত?

অফিসের পরিবেশ চার দেয়ালের ভেতরেও দূষিত হয়। বিষাক্ত ওয়ার্কপ্লেস কীভাবে কর্মী আর প্রতিষ্ঠান দুজনকেই ক্ষতি করে।

সহজ বাংলায় প্রোজেক্ট ম্যানেজমেন্টের আদ্যোপান্ত

প্রোজেক্ট ম্যানেজমেন্ট আসলে কী, একদম বেসিক বাংলায়। সংজ্ঞা থেকে শুরু করে প্রতিদিনের চ্যালেঞ্জ পর্যন্ত।

Monotale: The Dad Suggestion

Monotale: The Corporate Hai

Monotale: The Sprint Name

Monotale: The Load-shedding Light

Monotale: The Dependency Graveyard

Monotale: The TypeScript Strict

Monotale: The noobWords

Monotale: The 100th Tale

Monotale: Biryani as a Service

Monotale: The Cold Call Button

Monotale: The Chrome Tabs

Monotale: The Dawat Decline

Monotale: The Bangla Keyboard

Monotale: The README Fiction

Monotale: The Investor Deck

Monotale: The Product Hunt Launch

Monotale: The Mishti Doi Test

Monotale: The AirDrop Shame

Monotale: The Coding Interview

Monotale: The Stripe Envy

Monotale: The Coffee Fluency

Monotale: The Status Emoji

Monotale: The Empty State

Monotale: The VAT Receipt

Monotale: The Dark Mode Defense

Monotale: The AI PM Paradox

Monotale: The OKR Translation

Monotale: The Zoom Nod

Monotale: The Old Money Uncle

Monotale: The Uncle Question

Monotale: The CSS Religion

Monotale: The Server Component Discourse

Monotale: The Loading Spinner Lie

Sadhguru's take on understanding where we stand and what we must do about it.

Sadhguru&apos;s small thought experiment about dropping today&apos;s youth a thousand years back, where most of us could not carry two buckets of water for a mile.

Monotale: The Beard Ratio

Rainmakers

A passage on rainmakers, the people who generate revenue by simply asking. Asking feels uncomfortable until the first yes shifts everything.

Monotale: The MVP Myth

একবার কাটলে কেন তিন-চারটা শিলাই লাগে?

৩ স্টিচ মানে ৩টা গিঁট, কাঁথা শিলাইয়ের মতো নয়। ছোট্ট একটা মেডিকেল আবিষ্কার যা অনেক দিন বুঝিনি।

What interests me?

At fourteen I really wanted to vote. Now I would rather understand the maths SpaceX uses to land two boosters at once, or how a binder knows which page goes where.

Hi, what are you doing these days?

A short open call. If you're building something, tell me, and I'll shout for you. Friends shouldn't have to ask for likes on their own pages.

Banana Peels Suck - and so do Forced-Social-Sharing in Competitions

Forced-social-sharing competitions are the marketing equivalent of banana peels on the road. Stop making students spam their walls for likes.

Monotale: The On-Call Prayer

Monotale: The Airport Uncle

Monotale: The Monorepo Promise

Is silencing creators okay?

Letting policymakers decide what's culturally acceptable is a sinkhole with rough edges. The same crowd plays Baby Doll at every holud.

Bangladeshi Doctors invent the best Vaccine alternative that doesn't cause Autism

A short jab at anti-vaxxer logic, with a Pinterest board collecting actual answers to actual nonsense.

What makes a good burger?

tldr: what you guys call a "juicy" burger these days is actually an abomination.

Unpopular Opinion

Extrajudicial killings are bad on the surface, but the longer threat is the way Bangladeshi public conversation keeps quietly romanticising vigilante justice around them.

Bhai, harraaam!

Running the math on the missing KUET student case. Why "bhai haraam" justifications collapse the moment you actually count how many devout adults exist.

How good do you think you are at what you do? - Because it matters more than you think it does.

The Dunning-Kruger finding itself is fine. The actual problem is rule one of the Dunning-Kruger club, which is that you never know whether you are inside it.

Why are our elections so boring? >_-

Instead of ten lakh black-and-white posters and round-the-clock miking, a Banani 17A company is quietly winning Dhaka with rickshaw-puller water faucets that nobody campaigns about.

Monotale: The Feature Flag Graveyard

Monotale: The LLM Confidence Bug

What do I feel like?

A short collection of similes for an indistinct mood. Forest at night, mountains in spring, a sleepy blue ocean.

The worst marketing award of the year goes to ---

শুধু ০.০১% মানুষ ট্যাক্স দেয় বাংলাদেশে। এইটা ইকোনোমিক বা সামাজিক সমস্যা না, পুরোটাই এক বিরাট মার্কেটিং ফেইলিউর।

Why are't you living your life in the moment?

If you had the privilege of front-row tickets at the Dhaka Folk Fest and spent the night filming a 7-second Instagram story, you wasted both the seat and the music.

Did she have to die for cheating?

Unpopular opinion drawn from two BUET courses where the exams were open-book by design. In a system this broken, the rational student response really is to cheat.

The relation between alone and lonely.

Alone and lonely aren't synonyms. Worth sitting with the difference before you blur them.

Why do I judge smokers?

If someone lacks the self-control to stop doing the thing they themselves know is killing them, that is not helplessness, and it quietly tells you how dependable they are.

Who is Eshpelin?

What is the peculiar thing at any Bangladeshi University?

The most peculiar thing at any Bangladeshi university? Student clubs treating themselves like Fortune 500 firms with embossed business cards.

আরও বাংলা বই প্রয়োজন!

বাংলা বই দুই ঘণ্টায় শেষ হয়, কাগজ চকচকে, আর পাইরেসির গিল্ট নাই। আরো বেশি বাংলা বই দরকার।

How much cheese too cheesy?

Do you need a gorgeous female front desk executive?

Front desk job ads asking for beautiful young women aren't a hiring strategy, they're a confession. The role just needs someone helpful and organized.

The Dissociation problem with Pathao, Pran, and Bangladeshi Companies as a whole!

Pathao quietly uploaded users&apos; SMS to its servers unencrypted, then dismissed the outcry as a planned misinformation campaign, and Pran handled Jamuna TV the same way.

Why is cheesecake so important?

The craziest Quora question I have randomly come across?

The answer lies in the word "opposable thumbs".

How important is impact factor?

Need an ambition?

Here is an easy aspirational target for the week. Become important enough in life that closing a door on someone makes the international news cycle.

Monotale: The Dhaka Rain

What should be the goal of humanity?

If you had to pick between Thanos and China&apos;s one-child policy as the more honest answer to overpopulation, which one would you actually defend over coffee?

Monotale: The Elevator Pitch

The thing about national pride

We keep confusing pride with joy in Bangladesh, where a half-Bangladeshi winning a gymnastics medal abroad somehow becomes a feeling the rest of us claim to share.

Monotale: The Gulshan Lift Debate

The thing about misleading statistics

When a Bangladeshi lawmaker laughed off three child deaths by quoting India's hourly road-death rate, the statistic was technically true and morally bankrupt.

Can we predict Dyscalculia using performance/result statistics?

A loose, non-researcher hypothesis about whether a Markov chain over temporally clustered math questions could flag dyscalculia in kids before a teacher would.

Defining stuff outside a class - the cool Dartlang Feature

Coming from Java, declaring constants and getters outside of any class feels sacrilegious until Dart shows you that a top-level `const g = 9.81` is actually fine.

Does your religion define you?

If your religion sets your moral code, and your moral code drives every decision, then how much of your identity is actually yours?

What amazes you?

Feynman&apos;s ARW357 license-plate joke is a small lesson about how easily we mistake a baseline probability for a personal miracle.

Are books redundant?

Oren Harari's line about candles and electric lights kept nagging me. Are books candles, and we're still waiting for the bulb?

Monotale: The Screen Time Shame

The very model of a modern Major General

Found a Pirates-of-Penzance riff while researching a music thesis. The comment underneath rewriting it as the modern office manager song is the real treasure.

Have you heard of Passive Haptic Learning?

A short pointer to passive haptic learning, where your brain absorbs skills through vibration patterns while you do other things.

Depression isn't a disease

Posting awareness statuses every time a celebrity dies of depression doesn't help anyone. Messaging the friend who hasn't posted in a year does.

My bucket list?

I don't have things I want to do before I die. Just want a little stability for the bits in between.

একটা কাজ করা প্রয়োজন

অনলাইনে কমেন্ট সেকশনের উগ্রবাদী মানুষজনের ডেটা সেট বানিয়ে পাত্রীর পিতা আর কর্পোরেট চাকুরিদাতাদের কাছে বিক্রি করার এক আজব প্ল্যান।

Kill it before it lays eggs!

Do you even git it?

Noobs threatening to leave GitHub for GitLab after the Microsoft acquisition. Two commits in three years isn't really a protest, it's a tantrum.

Why do MFA's coexist with strict laws?

The country's most expensive university dropping students three weeks in for late fee payment, while spending their tuition on a building they'll never see.

What is good service?

1305 clients in 180 days at GradConnect, zero left bitter. That's the only definition of good service I trust.

Monotale: The Storybook Tax

How evil is evil?

A small question about the difference between being called evil and feeling evil. Both can be true, both can be wrong.

Did you know that .net isn't as limited as you think?

Turns out .NET can talk to Java with the right libraries, and isn't actually locked to a single language. Why does it still get hated on?

monotale: What level of abstract-ism is computationally impossible to achieve?

A small thought experiment. Could quantum architecture eventually let us design a non-deterministic non-probabilistic infinite automaton?

Monotale: The half-pant confusion

lovelyShit: Have you heard of UI Kitten?

UI Kitten by Akveo is a fairly well-documented React Native component library worth pulling in as the base for any small practice project.

2Cents: The thing about killing dogs

On why I won't sign your Avaaz petition while I eat my BBQ chicken. Pick a moral lane and stay in it.

lovelyShit: Using Gulp-JS yet?

I started thinking Gulp was for compiling CSS. Then I used it to chop hundreds of PDFs and realized it's basically duct tape for any repetitive file task.

2Cents: Is facebook too slow?

Facebook stayed obsessed with social while WeChat let you order food, pay rent, and book a ride. They left the useful side of the platform on the table.

2Cents: What am I even being taught?

Foreign professors mark up dissertations with red ink and explanations. My Dhaka professors hand back a 70 percent score and not a single annotation.

2Cents: Should doctors have the right to refuse service as a form of protest?

Doctors shutting down hospitals because relatives vandalized one OT room. The collective punishment never reaches the actual perpetrators.

noobWords: An Aquarium of Golfishes

I judged my Uber driver by his 4.71 rating and walked into a long monologue about wet women, Pakistani umbrellas, and goldfish aquariums.

lovelyShit: Heard of Flutter Yet?

A throwaway one-liner from when I'd just looked at Flutter. It felt like React Native after a week of sleeping pills.

noobWords: The Ranking Case: Why a Score Based Ranking System is Inaccurate at Source

Why score-based ranking systems break the moment your user base grows or your old players keep grinding. The fix needs a decay constant, not a leaderboard.

2Cents: সিইও কি জিনিষ?

ছোট স্টার্টআপের সিইও পদটার চেয়ে দরকার একজন ফাউন্ডার আর একজন ম্যানেজার। সিইও তিনদিন না আসলে কারখানা বন্ধ হয়না।

makesYouThink: One day, we will die off a simple cough.

A man in Chittagong caught a bacterium resistant to every antibiotic but one. The Drug Administration still lets quacks sell antibiotics over the counter.

Monotale: The Headhunter Message

makesYouThink: Why do Bangladeshi people go to Singapore to treat toenail infections these days?

Two doctors at the same hospital giving my mother contradictory pressure medications on the same day. That's why people fly to Singapore for a toenail.

Monotale: The Startup Naming Shortage

Monotale: Facebook Check-In, really?

People still doing Facebook check-ins in 2018 remind me of Ananta Jalil circa 2014, and even he has moved on by now.

Monotale: Have some free time?

You can skip most of Lencioni&apos;s Five Temptations of a CEO and still get the whole point by reading the train conversation between Andrew and Charlie.

Monotale: What should you build?

A tiny note on Brian Chesky's line about building for a hundred people who love you, not a million who like you.

Monotale: The VLM Honesty

Monotale: The Iftar Protocol

The Palihapitiya Ideals

A 56-minute Chamath Palihapitiya talk worth breaking across three dinners, because he processes his knowledge live while the rest of us are fetching ours from memory.

Monotale: The lowPoly Problem

Monotale: Regarding the aboutUs text on any website

Monotale: "Papa is my Eccentricity Capitalist"

lovelyShit: Life Is Beautiful (1997)

A small note recommending Roberto Benigni's Life Is Beautiful. Some films sit in a category of their own.

Monotale: The Side Project Cemetery

Monotale: The Uncle Stock Tip

monoTale: The Infer Problem

makesYouThink: What would make a truly AI Car?

What if a self-driving car could pull up the driving record of the vehicle next to it by number plate and quietly widen its safety margin around the worst ones?

Monotale: The NoSQL Naming Problem

lovelyShit: The curious case of Irani's Tata Steel Downsizing

How JJ Irani downsized Tata Steel from 77,000 to 39,000 without firing anyone, and why the math actually worked.

Monotale: The Wrong Friends

Monotale: Space

Monotale: The Boring Heroes

Monotale: Impracticality at 15

Monotale: Pathao Physics

Who are you?

If identity isn't your name, profession, or actions, what's left? Maybe we're just whatever other people remember of us.

The End

A goodbye placeholder for an old blog. If you stumbled in here, the door's still open.