Pranay Prakash

I care about tech and work on reference implementations for idealistic projects

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Say their name

The sweetest sound in any language is one’s name

People are very diverse but there are a few universal truths. Everyone wants to feel understood. People need to belong. Nobody wants to be ostracised. If you can make someone feel understood, they’ll like you. The more you do it, the more they’ll like you.

Try this exercise - Think about a person you love. Think about their interests and their goals. Specifically think about the things they value that you don’t. What do you do when they talk about those interests? Shut them down? No. If your relationship is healthy and you’ve had enough time together, you’ve tried to empathise and maybe even get involved in what matters to them. It’s why they love you.

There’s a lot more to say here but I’m keeping this one short - say a person’s name when you talk to them. Say it a lot! Do it enough that it feels awkward and forced, because it will be...

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How to learn things at 1000x the speed

Throughout my schooling and career, I’ve impressed people over and over again with how quickly I pick up things, especially hard things. For instance, exactly 4y ago I did my first ever interview, got a simple question and failed miserably after spending 4h on it and finally asking the interviewer what “recursion” was. Since then I’ve created core UI components at Facebook used by billions, worked on the language spec for GraphQL and Relay, ported an optimization made popular by Haskell to JS by writing an optimizing compiler, built an extension for VSCode that has half a million installs and has been listed on multiple top 10 articles, scaled a botnet of over 2,000 bots that made money from a popular trivia game, shipped to production an IPFS inspired decentralized file server and the fastest Serverless Docker runtime, almost completed a design minor while successfully creating a brand...

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