mishrag — Systems. People.

What I'd tell myself at 22

Sun, 14 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

If I could talk to myself at 22, I would say three things.

Communication is not about language

I studied in a Hindi-medium school, in a second-tier city in north India. Then I moved to college, where everything was in English.

For years I thought my communication was weak because of my English. And I was very poor in English. But after 19 years, I have realised the problem was not the language. The problem was how to communicate: how to think, and how to explain my view.

Language is just a medium. It is not the obstacle.

Communication is an art, and everyone should study it in school and college: spoken and written. Language is only one part of it. How you construct your thoughts, and how you explain them, is the biggest thing.

If you ask me what I should have done at 22, I would say: spend more time on communication.

Go deep

The other thing I missed at 22 was going deep into technology. We stayed on the surface. We started to go deep, but we got lost in the noise.

So my advice to the young generation: spend real time on technology. Write very good quality code. Go deep. Write solid algorithms. Focus on the core engine.

This is not only about technology. It is true of any field. If you don't go deep, you will never see the whole picture.

Learn to focus

The third, and maybe the biggest, is noise. One thing we don't teach our kids, or our generation, is focus. Focus is something everyone has to learn for themselves.

Colleges, schools, society and companies should have separate training for young people, just to improve focus. Focus is one of the key things that gets a task done.

This matters most for fresh graduates, straight out of college. Teach them through innovative, practical work on real tasks. With innovation, good teaching and practical work, we can help them focus on the key task.

Today there are so many social media apps, TV and other things that distract people from proper focus. If you don't focus, you cannot do justice to your work. You cannot do deep work, as Cal Newport calls it.

If I were 22 again, I would focus on my communication, my thought process, and my core technology or domain. I would spend more time learning how real systems work, and understanding them deeply.

No big bang: reaching a target architecture one step at a time

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

As my career moved from programming to designing systems, and then to large transformation projects, I often saw that people prefer big-bang transformations: multi-million-dollar programmes for digital transformation, infrastructure transformation, and so on.

But what I have learned over the last couple of decades is that the better approach is to take one step at a time. Visualise the whole transformation first, then plan it in iterative phases. Assessing the risks and the capabilities is the key.

Why big bang is risky

A big transformation puts huge risk on the whole programme, especially for non-technology companies. They often rely heavily on consultants and partner vendors.

The key risks fall into three pillars:

Business outcomes change very often. What the business wants in year three is rarely what it wanted in year one.
Technology changes fast. A big transformation programme runs for years, and the technology moves on while it runs.
Adoption. People have to adopt the new technology and systems. Every transformation depends on this.

Then there is the cost. I often feel that a company is ready for a big bang from one perspective, but not from the others. A company has to think about systems, processes, people and data, in every area.

Map the capabilities first

In the target architecture, the full capabilities map has to be evaluated first. Then plan iterative phases to fill those capabilities, making sure the scope of a capability is not duplicated across phases.

For example, suppose you are modernising an e-commerce platform, and you have five capabilities to choose from:

Capability	Business impact	Complexity	Priority
Checkout optimisation	High revenue impact	Medium	High
Product discovery	High conversion potential	Medium	High
Inventory accuracy	High customer and operational impact	High	High
New CMS	Medium	Medium	Depends on dependencies
Complete backend replacement	Possibly high, long term	Very high	Later, unless it blocks other priorities

I would start with the first three, if the existing architecture can support them. Why? Because they can show measurable improvement in revenue, customer experience and operational efficiency, without replacing the whole platform.

But imagine checkout optimisation depends on a payment service that cannot support the planned changes. Then fixing that dependency becomes part of the first phase, even if on its own it gives customers very little they can see.

I have done this kind of work myself. I got the opportunity to work on a few systems that were tightly coupled and kept the same copy of data. I helped design and modernise the solution so that they could be decoupled easily.

In a multi-year programme

If I were part of a multi-year transformation programme, I would first focus on the capability map and the target architecture. The key points:

Reuse. Reuse the existing capabilities, and map them to the new ones.
Principles. Define the overall architecture principles from every perspective: people, process, technology and data.
Adoption. Check how quickly customers and processes can adopt the change, and roll out capabilities to customers and people in iterations.

Keep ownership

External partners and consultants can bring valuable experience, especially when introducing new technologies. But I believe organisations should keep ownership of the transformation, and of the key architecture decisions.

If the CEO wants the big bang

Even if the CEO wants the big bang, I recommend prioritising the key capabilities that give measurable business benefit within 90 days. Assess each one against customer impact, implementation feasibility and architectural dependencies. This shows early results, and builds the foundation for the rest of the transformation.

I don't believe every big-bang transformation is wrong. Sometimes a large, coordinated change is necessary. But wherever possible, I prefer to design the complete transformation upfront and deliver it in measurable phases. This gives the business the chance to learn, adapt and validate its investment.

Walking alone

Sun, 26 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In my whole career I have travelled a lot, mostly on business trips, and mostly alone. Wherever I go, I walk: in parks, along beaches, in the mountains. I like to walk alone for hours.

It started in college

This did not start with my jobs. In college I did one or two solo trips, mostly to Mussoorie in Uttarakhand. Back then, a college student travelling alone was something people laughed at. But I did it.

Work took me further

When I joined HCL Technologies, I got many chances to travel for work. The same continued at Huawei, and at my current organisation.

In my Sydney days I often went to Bondi Beach and did the Bondi coastal walk, or went to Manly Beach, or walked along the Parramatta River. These long walks showed me the beauty of both nature and cities.

As work took me to more countries, the habit grew. I have taken many pictures along the way: cities, food, people, nature, heritage and architecture. Some of them are on walks.

Why alone

When I walk alone, many things come into my mind. Sometimes I think about work, family, old memories, future plans, or ideas I want to try. One thought leads to another. Sometimes I remember things I had almost forgotten.

I don't always walk with a destination or a problem to solve. I just keep walking, observing people, places and nature around me.

I feel these walks give me time with my own thoughts, something I don't always get during a busy day.

What it gives me

Walking alone helps me focus on my health, my stamina and my thinking. It takes my mind away from work, towards nature, people and heritage.

Sometimes I come back with an answer. Sometimes I just come back feeling better.

I think that's why I have continued doing it since my college days.

Mishra G: why this site exists

Sun, 12 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

It all started in my school days. My classmates often called me Mishra G, where the "G" is for "ji", a mark of respect.

I was born and brought up in Kanpur, the biggest industrial city of Uttar Pradesh. I went to college in Ghaziabad, another city in UP, but part of the National Capital Region around Delhi. There, my friends and close mates called me Mishra ji. In north India this is a normal way to address people, by surname with "ji" after it: Sharma ji, Gupta ji, Chaubey ji. In college it became my other name.

When I joined my first startup, I was inspired by a few colleagues and the developer community around them. Most of them wrote code for open source and shared what they knew through blogs and code. I wanted to do the same, so in 2009 I bought mishrag.com. I wrote a few posts. For most of the last 17 years, I was just renewing the domain.

Why now

Over the last year I have seen AI-generated content posted everywhere. It is becoming very difficult to tell what is genuine and what is written by AI. That is when I started thinking about this site again.

At the start I was very shy. I worried about what people would think of my grammar, my vocabulary, my thinking. Now frontier models have become super advanced. So I feel writing in my own words, the way I actually think and speak, will show a unique identity, and make my writing feel more human.

Recently I read some articles and heard podcasts where engineers said they don't want AI to run everything in their systems. They keep some hardcoded checks on purpose, so the AI cannot take over. I feel writing needs the same. My own words, mistakes included, are my hardcoded check.

These thoughts helped me start writing again, and pin down my views. Who knows, maybe one day an AI agent will become like me and write in my style.

What I want from it

To improve communication and think clearly, I feel practice matters most. How well you communicate depends on how deeply you know the subject. Deep subjects are a challenge of their own, because people know them but cannot express them in writing.

So I want to use this site to focus on my thought process: to make my thinking very clear, to say the right point to the right audience, and to lose my shyness about explaining my views openly in public.

So what will you find here? Engineering decisions, and why systems work or fail. Lessons from leading teams and building products like Adyakshar and Gharana. And sometimes family, travel and human nature. Some of these are things I hesitated to share until now. Real experience, in my own words.