Biweeklycast

By Biweeklycast

Friendly discussions about life, business, engineering, and learning between Dima Malenko and Slava Rudnytskyi.

... more

5

22 ratings

Download on the App Store

Download on the App Store

Get it on Google Play

FAQs about Biweeklycast:

How many episodes does Biweeklycast have?

The podcast currently has 378 episodes available.

Biweeklycast episodes:

March 06, 202554: Thought leadership
📺 Watch this episode on YouTube.
Dima and Slava discuss the ineffable concept of thought leadership and politely disagree with the author of publication that sparked the discussion.
Dima's contribution to the pile of undead documentation
The Ineffable Concept of Thought Leadership
"Thought leadership is content" – how can that be?
Martin Fowler
Serhiy Haydaychuk
Cortext podcast
Meta-discussion: last-minute praparation and different ways approaching multi-step tasks
...more
46min
February 09, 202553: Undead documents
📺 Watchthis episode on YouTube.
Dima and Slava discuss documentation for systems, processes, and so on, and debate how to prevent it from crossing the line from being helpful to being actively misleading.
Dima's January of putting one foot in front of the other
Hacker News
Fighting undead documentation
Documentation evolves independently of the systems/processes it describes
Put date of last update in the document to signal that it may be outdated
Doing something vs documenting something
Finding a updated document can also be a challenge
How often and how much to document?
Ideally, documentation is integrated into the system is documents
1-2-3 rule for automation writing documentation
Just feel it!
...more
55min
January 28, 202552: Needs Analysis
📺 Watch this episode on YouTube.
Dima and Slava kind of follow up on the discussion of Customer Development in the previous episode and talk about chains of results in assessment of customer needs.
Other ideas that are connected to what The Four Steps to Epiphany discusses
Jobs To Be Done

Disruptive innovation

Theme corner: Slava's winter of nucleus

Results chains in needs assessment: inputs - outcomes - outputs activities inputs

"The more "whys" the better."
In education, output of a learning activity (e.g. training on giving feedback) is clearly disconnected from desired impact (supportive culture of effective continuous improvement)

How does one know if a learning activity is going to lead to the desired impact?

How does one know how to do something if they are not an expert in the particular field?

Reshaping expectations of a customer
...more
55min
January 12, 202551: The Four Steps to Epiphany
📺 Watch this episode on YouTube.
Dima and Slava read and discuss "The Four Steps to Epiphany" – a classical book for entrepreneurs and startup founders.
The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Products That Win

Steve Blank

Opt for paper or e-book. This book isn't really meant to be an audiobook.

Key idea: for success enterpreneur needs to hit product-market fit. The book explains how to approach that systematically.

Spreadsheet mentality: not everything that is important can be expressed numerically

OODA loop: observe, orient, decide, act

Thought experiments for CustDev for the theme journal and a coffee shop

Jobs To Be Done (JTDB)

Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)

What if CustDev tells something different from what one wants to hear?
...more
1h 7min
December 31, 202450: More precise
📺 Watch this episode on YouTube.
Dima and Slava follow up on the conversation they started in episode 47 and Dima tries to articulate more precisely what he means by people not being specific enough and gives example of common pitfalls of obscure communication.
Theme corner: Dima's year of next

Example 1: "System X is broken"

Clear call to action is very helpful

High context and low context situations and personalities

Example 2: "Uber for X"

Metaphors can be useful, but must not be the only means of describing an idea

Effectiveness of metaphors depends a lot on pre-existing context

Example 3: "System will to be reliable"

Context is important for everything!
...more
56min
December 24, 202449: Season of strategy
📺 Watch this episode on YouTube.
Dima and Slava dive into wonderful season of strategic sessions and try to deduce why everyone does them in December and how to make working on strategy a time well spent.
Theme corner: Slava's fall of nucleus
Slava's another podcast: Starsphere Talks (in Ukrainian)

What is a "strategic session"? And why everyone tries to have them in November and December?

Difference between strategizing and yearly planning

What to consultants or external facilitators bring to strategic sessions?

Leadership and collaboration for strategy development

Work on strategy: a point in time or a process

What's "strategic" in your work?
...more
56min
November 14, 202448: Founder Mode
📺 Watch this episode on YouTube.
Dima and Slava discuss "Founder Mode", an essay by Paul Graham about differences between more founders and hired managers in tech companies.
Founder Mode

Format of an essay

What is special about founders?

Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky: ‘I Never Called it Founder Mode’

"An argument can be perfectly biased in two different ways."
Perils of delegation: where to dive deep and where to step away

Is "manager mode" about driving towards short-term objectives and "founder mode" about executing on a long-term vision?

"Care about what you do."
...more
48min
October 28, 202447: Can you be more specific?
📺 Watch this episode on YouTube.
Dima shares his longing for the necessary details and the right level of abstraction, while Slava tries to persuade him that all the details aren't always necessary and everything can be fine anyway.
Dima's knowing-doing gap in working on the theme

Is lack of specificity really a problem and when?

Level of details is what matters, but are all the details always necessary?

Understanding of the details shows even an high level of abstraction

Details vs trust
...more
1h 2min
October 07, 202446: Creative Procrastination
📺 Watch this episode on YouTube.
From the discussion it is not entirely clear if Dima and Slava talk about procrastination that gets in the way of them accomplishing creative endeavours or all the creative they find to postpone working on hard and important things.
Dima did a bit of research on "Lord of the Rings" and J. R. R. Tolkien and he came to appreciate the amount of effort and rigor that went into creation of that fantasy universe

Dima also read "Some Desperate Glory" by Emily Tesh, the novel that won the Hugo Award in 2024, and found it a better story, but also not beyond reproach

Slava's fall of nucleus

Cognitive distortions that lead to procrastination and passive and active procrastinators

Writing is (un?)surprisingly challenging for everyone

Is procrastination are result of our mismatched expectations?

How does one recognize they are procrastinating?

Common theme for how procrastination creeps in: big ambiguous task is replaced with a small and easy win

Self-help and social methods for getting oneself out of the procrastination trap

Reassertion using positive feedback on your prior work

Create a crystallization point to start working on a big daunting tasks
...more
52min
September 13, 202445: Starter Villain
📺 Watch this episode on YouTube.
Dima and Slava play literary critics and discuss "Starter Villain" – a book by John Scalzi.
Biweekly 32: We Are Bob

All Biweekly bookclub episodes on the site and on YouTube

Other books by John Scalzi
Lock In series: Lock In and Head On

Fuzzy Nation

The Kaiju Preservation Society

Other books Dima and Slava enjoyed
Permutation City by Greg Egan

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke
...more
48min

FAQs about Biweeklycast:

How many episodes does Biweeklycast have?

The podcast currently has 378 episodes available.