📖 My Takeaways from Our Next Reality by Alvin Wang Graylin and Louis Rosenberg ☞ Buy - Exploring the Metaverse ☞ Buy - Our Next Reality Our Next Reality topped my reading list for months, and travel always helps me catch up on books! After meeting Alvin at AWE Asia 2024, I was eager to dive in and finally complete it. Following recent trips to Singapore and now the US, here’s what I found worth sharing from the book.

The Metaverse Metaverse is the most talked, understood and misunderstood topic these days, and every other industry today is trying to define it in their own way to suit their narrative. It would end up creating many sub-metaverses, with different sets of features and, would lead to confusions, and conflict of interests. Acceptable definition of Metaverse will evolve with time. At this stage, I treat the metaverse as a result of technological evolutions in the key areas such as ARVR, AI, Cloud, Blockchain, 5G/6G and hardware.

The year 2020 was the year of change, it may be painful for some, but at the same time, it has taught us lessons in life. I have written about it earlier that we have to accept it, and it will be remembered and will have an impact on our whole life and after our life, no matter what we do. So it is important that we live the present fully.

Change is the only constant, it requires continuous effort from humankind to understand the change that leads to success, and make us even more successful. In my earlier article, I talked about the success mantra, and also wrote about accepting the change when required. Sometimes the way we perceive our success becomes a blocker for becoming more successful. We accumulate some habits knowingly or unknowingly along the path of being successful, and mostly we never realize that those habits start blocking our way forward.

Everyone in India is talking about Jeff Bezos, the richest of the world, who was on India’s visit recently. People are talking about the investments he is making in India, talking about his prediction about India’s “21st Century is going to be the Indian century”, and discussing the impact on small businesses. We have seen disruptions lead by Amazon in multiple sectors, now people have a fear that whatever Amazon touch, it becomes Amazon’s.

I just finished a book “Life’s Amazing Secrets” by Gaur Gopal Das. It covers the topic of balance and purpose in life nicely. Few of the concepts from the book I can very well relate to my current organization’s focus on cultivation and collaboration culture. It’s now more than 6 months of my journey with Thoughtworks, an organization which started as a social experiment more than 25 years ago, and believes in balancing 3 pillars in life ; sustainability, excellence and purpose.

The book “Agile IT Organization Design - For digital transformation and continuous delivery” by Sriram Narayan explains software development as a design process. Following statement from the book means a lot. “Software development is a design process, and the production environment is the factory where product takes place. IT OPS work to keep the factory running..” It questions the way we traditionally think of operation support, maintenance, production bugs, rework, their costs and budgets and the focus in software development life.

Agile software development methodology is the key selling point for most of the IT organisations, however many of the organisations have gone by the literal meaning of the word “Agile”. They follow agile practices without really being agile. If we go by Manifesto for Agile Software Development, it focus more on human factor (people, interaction, collaboration) which produces working software as per the need of time, than on processes, tools and strict planning.