Environment design is a gamechanger

her favourite thing recently

🐈‍⬛ Life

Hi friend! How’s the week going for you? For me, this week was frantic. A lot of client deadlines that I somehow managed to meet. It’s miraculous how much you can get done right before a deadline. Ah, Parkinson’s Law 😅

(๑*ᗜ*) Anime

Although this week was intense, I can’t not watch anime so I finished watching Hanasaku Iroha but it was meh. To distract from the disappointment, I rewatched a bit of Hachimitsu to Clover. For some reason, I’ve been on a slice-of-life streak lately.

Honey and Clover is about college kids at an art school going through college stuff ie. existential crises. I wasn’t super into it at the beginning but the character developments were amazing and the anime reminded me of what I felt like when I was in college. Except for the last part….not gonna spoil it for anyone but if you watch it you’ll know what I mean lol. Btw if you have any anime recommendations please reply to the email! ❤️

📖 Books

I finished reading 2 books: How to Not Die Alone and Never Split the Difference.

As its name suggests, How to Not Die Alone teaches you how to not die alone ie. how to properly date people, find love, and hopefully marry someone if you’re into that (and not get divorced). What I liked about this book is that it takes an evidence-based approach to explain what works well and what doesn’t work well.

A very interesting read that made me realize I am doing most things wrong.

There’s this quiz you can take to see your dating tendencies. It seems I am very much a romanticizer. I like to think of myself as quite logical but evidently I’m the opposite when it comes to love. 🥀

Never Split the Difference is very interesting and surprisingly practical. It’s a book about negotiation strategies and tactics by Chris Voss, a former international hostage negotiator for the FBI.

I will definitely be revisting this book

I actually managed to put what I learned into practice immediately and helped my friend negotiate a 10% increase to his base salary + additional perks and stocks by using a combination of these tactics.

He was very nervous so we actually only used the more basic tactics:

⚖️ “Fair”: The use of the word “fair” elicits a psychological reciprocity because people want to be fair.

📏 Ranges: Using price ranges makes the person want to go with the lower boundary.

🛑 Saying no: You gently say no by apologizing and acknowledging that they are being generous but you simply cannot.

Next time when I have a chance to negotiate I’d also love to try tactics such as:

⚓ Extreme anchors: Saying a ridiculous price point if you’re forced to name a price first.

🔢 Using very specific numbers: Apparently it’s a psychological thing that makes people think you’re at your baseline.

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🌻 Learning & Productivity

I’m getting more and more into the lockbox with a timer that I mentioned in last week’s newsletter. It’s a box to put stuff in and you can’t access it for however long it is that you initially set.

genius.

Initially, I just put junk food and sweets in it but I realize I also have an issue with just opening the fridge and eating random things when I’m bored. Like I said, I literally have no self control…

Unfortunately, you can’t put the box in the fridge so this is going to sound even more ridiculous but I got these fridge locks…

I think it’s usually meant for keeping your kids out of the fridge.

What I do is lock the fridge and put the keys in the lockbox too. ENVIRONMENT DESIGN. It’s been a week and has worked very well so far. Fingers crossed I finally manage to develop the habit of intermittent fasting.

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👨‍💻 Coding

I did not manage to get much blockchain coding done. Honestly, the only coding I did this week was very light for the video coming out on Saturday: 5 coding projects for beginners. Hope y’all like the video. ❤️

For those of you who ask: I am x years old, can I still learn to code?

I was 48 when I got my first software job, now 49 and not far from 50, so I feel like I've achieved something special by doing this. - Vernon

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💻 Today’s coding challenge (SQL/Python)

Find the 3-month rolling average of total revenue from purchases given a table with users, their purchase amount, and date purchased. Do not include returns which are represented by negative purchase values.

Output the year-month (YYYY-MM) and 3-month rolling average of revenue, sorted from earliest month to latest month. A 3-month rolling average is defined by calculating the average total revenue from all user purchases for the current month and previous two months. The first two months will not be a true 3-month rolling average since we are not given data from last year. Assume each month has at least one purchase.

Head on over here to answer the question!

*Btw if you’re prepping for data science interviews or just want to keep yourself sharp, Stratascratch is a great platform with 10k+ real interview questions on SQL and python coding, probability, product sense etc. You can use my code ‘tinahuang’ at checkout for 20% off. ❤️

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PS: Reply to this email about what you’d like to see in future editions of Boop’s Keyboard! I’m super new to writing a newsletter and I know there’s a lot for me to learn. ALL constructive feedback is greatly appreciated :)

-Tina