Hi, I'm Arcadiy.

In July of 2016 I quit my job to travel the world with my wife. Over a year of country-hopping through Europe and Asia later, I'm coming back to the U.S. and rejoining the real world. Before that, I was a PM at Microsoft, working on OneDrive (the important bits you can't see at a glance) and then SharePoint (where I fixed at least 1% of our customers' nightmares). That's what I'm good at: understanding and then overhauling important, messy, non-obvious things for the better.

In my quest to make things better, I've learned a little bit about a lot of stuff. Here, though, I'm focused on travel, technology and careers. Want to take a look? Just the highlights, coming right up.

How to travel around the world

Traveling for a year is more than a little different from traveling for just a few weeks on a holiday, but it turns out that most of the lessons I learned apply to every trip I take. Here's what I've figured out:

• Preparing for the trip was both exciting and exhausting. We got rid of the vast majority of our possessions, quit our jobs and figured out a bunch of logistics; here's everything we did to get ready to go. Coming soon!
• The hardest thing about planning a big trip is figuring out the list of places to go.
• Once you decide where you're going, you have to work out what you're going to bring. We did the whole trip with carry-on backpacks (and successfully conquered all the major European low-cost carriers without having to pay). Here's everything I brought, and what did and didn't make the cut in the end.
• When you're traveling on a tight budget, you have to be pretty smart about how you handle money while abroad so you don't lose a chunk of your cash to senseless commissions and fees. But really, you should learn to avoid needless fees whenever you're traveling anywhere.
• You can't always stay in hostels and hotels and keep your sanity (or your budget!). We spent a large chunk of our time abroad staying at AirBnBs–enough that I wrote a guide to using AirBnB if you're worried about getting started.
• We know tourism can easily ruin some of the most beautiful places in the world. We did our best to avoid being Those Guys and generally be sensitive about our presence in other countries.
• How much 14 months of continuous travel actually cost us, given we weren't willing to travel like Super Hardcore #RealBackpackers. Coming soon!
• What coming back looks and feels like, and how we restarted our lives. Coming soon!

You can also check out everything I've written about travel.

Technological musings

It's been my job to keep up with technology for many years, but it became my passion long before that. Occasionally, that spurs me to think deeply about a subject and write it up.

• Password managers are great, but to really get them to hit the mainstream, we need sites to adopt a common password management API. Here's a very high level overview of how I'd design it. (I also presented about this at Seattle's Ignite conference!)
• Speaking of APIs, there's an enormous difference between a company that releases a bolt-on API just because and one that considers it their main product, and treats it accordingly.
• When highly visible platforms like Twitter have policy issues, all sorts of people weigh in. Often, they don't understand why policy discussions at an online platform are so hard, nor what agents at those companies can do. New!
• After several years at Microsoft, I found myself caught up in the Microsoft hardware and software bubble. Here's why I switched to Android and a Mac.
• When a codebase grows organically over years or decades, you often end up with a giant monolith and then look to figure out how to refactor it into, say, microservices. There are two paths to approach that refactoring, but only one of them is likely to work.
• When my wife and I planned our wedding, we were shocked at the complete failure of wedding planning tools to account for the fact that modern-day partners plan a wedding together. You can, instead, plan your wedding the 21st century way.
• Techies, myself included, often start to cast doubt on popular technologies just because they've gotten popular. It's worth fighting that contrarian urge, though, because it hurts people who are just learning.

Here's everything else I've written about technology.

Jobs and careers

Your career is one of the most important aspects of your life, so I think it's important for everyone to share what they learn about the business world over time. Here are some of the top takeaways I've had over the past decade:

• No one really starts a job these days expecting they'll be working at the same company for even five years, let alone decades. But you might find yourself at a job much longer if you find one that actually clicks.
• Many teams of otherwise-competent people are plagued by communication problems. The solution is almost always to broaden the groups you talk with.
• We used to celebrate generalists, but the modern world is built to reward specialization. We should all find our niche and demonstrate our expertise.
• All the way back in 2008 during my first real job hunt, as a sometime columnist for Georgia Tech's student newspaper, I was thinking about how you find the right fit, not the "best job."

Want more of my thoughts about careers? Here you go.

The last thing I wrote

It's hard out there for a generalist Oct 20, 2017

Want to get the best opportunities? Better commit to a specialty

Every single day, the news overflows with doom and gloom: politics is a disaster, people are at war, the gap between the rich and the poor is higher than ever, and everything is just generally awful. It's easy to fall into the trap of thinking that the world is going to hell in a handbasket. And yet reality is very different: fewer people live in poverty than ever before, more and more people have the ability to benefit from the modern world's conveniences, and many seemingly-intractable problems are being solved.

Modern life is quietly the best it's ever been for many people, and yet there is in fact something we're losing: breadth of knowledge and ability.

History is full of praise for the "Renaissance men," who painted, wrote poetry, read all the books, studied the sciences and had tremendous impact on their societies, but these men (and similarly gifted women who, for many complex and often unjust reasons, are not as well-remembered in history) demonstrate just one aspect of the generalist knowledge that abounded in historical society: that of the comfortably well-off.

Lots of people had a broad set of skills, though: societies were smaller, and while towns had the butcher, the cobbler and the tailor, each person was capable of a wide range of tasks and possessed a surprising variety of knowledge. Most importantly, as a percentage of the sum of skills and knowledge that existed at the time, folks generally knew quite a bit, even if they only knew the basics.

How things have changed!

Read more...