UFOs have been around for thousands of years, but their explanations are always changing. Taken at face value, Unidentified Flying Object just means something that flies about which we can’t make any concrete statement on what it is.

In prehistoric times, a UFO would probably be explained as a bird. In the days of the ancient Greeks, a visit from Zeus. In medieval times, an omen from God, and in our modern age, advanced spacecraft from space.

While there is no hard evidence of extraterrestrial visitation on Earth, there are interesting records that would get even a skeptic interested. …

I’ve been there. A few years ago I was halfway through university, and I had a lot of time on my hands. I was an OK student, I’d do 90% of my studying during exam season — meaning I would loiter around most of the time.

I was left to my own devices — nobody telling me what to do, what how to do it, what to say and where to be. So I did what a lot people would do with no direction: I mindlessly browsed Youtube. I saw a video with a crazy title which went something like this; ‘WHAT THE ELITES DON’T WANT YOU TO KNOW’. …

Robert Rodriguez is a name synonymous with grit in Hollywood. A director, he has worked with many A-list actors such as Antonio Banderas, Salma Hayek, Robert De Niro and Mel Gibson to name a few.

His road to working in Hollywood is like a movie itself. After making a few short films, he decided to make his own feature-length movie. That film was El Mariachi, a fun tale of a wandering guitar player who got mixed up for a killer that keeps guns in his guitar case.

El Mariachi went on to make over $2 million at the box office off of a $7000 budget and won awards at film festivals. Turns out the lessons Robert learned during the making of the film can also be applied to many things we all tend to do, so I’ve put together some that we could all use. …

The Nazis are infamous for their murderous schemes and willingness to use any means necessary during World War II. In 1943, the war had turned sour for them. The massive gains they made in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe were being chipped away, its navy decimated and the Battle of Britain had inflicted heavy losses on the air force.

With the prospects for a land invasion of the UK gone, the Germans tried a hilariously sneaky trick to sow chaos — killing Winston Churchill with deadly chocolate. …

Common sense dictates that when you set off on a journey, you seek the advice of someone who has been on the same path before , hopefully many times before. I would agree, but a lot of life advice is usually shallow such as; ‘go find a mentor’ or ‘find your tribe’ — it’s easier said than done.

A good way I learn things is to look at someone who’s been something that I want to do for a relatively short period of time. …

Something weird happened when I got my first smartphone. I realised that I could basically throw my expensive laptop out the window and still be able to play games, surf facebook (back when young people were on it too), watch movies etc. Except, unlike a laptop, I didn’t have to sit down indoors and carry a case around. This is like black magic for a 12 year old.

Like a lot of young adults today, I was in my formative years when I got my first smartphone which means I got hooked easily by its convenience and ability to kill boredom at any time. It was only a decade later, when I was 22 that I realised my addiction. …

Being a developer is hard — especially while you’re finding your flow in the early stages of your career. I’m still going through it. Being productive? That’s even harder.

As a dev, you have to put up with long meetings that eat up time you could spend on writing code, management that takes too long to make decisions, acceptance criteria that are vague, etc. These are all time-suckers, and we hardly acknowledge the worst of them: our habits and practices.

These are the habits and practices that have allowed me to minimise wasted time and maximise output.

Set an Easy-to-Define, Concrete Endpoint for Each Day

I would usually find myself slacking in the middle of the day. I would be writing many lines of code per minute only to find myself looking at motorcycle reviews a while later. One day, I had to fix a serious bug before the end of the day since it was affecting a large number of customers. On that day, I worked better, faster, and more clearly than ever before due to one simple reason: I had a concrete and easy-to-understand goal. …

In 90s, NASA was thinking big — not Apollo programme big, but big nonetheless. By then, the now legendary space shuttle was coming to be around two decades old, had served reliably on 34 missions and was a marvel of 20th Century engineering. NASA however, was already looking at the next logical technological step after the Space Shuttle: SSTO.

SSTO stands for Single Stage To Orbit. Basically, it means a vehicle that’s a single unit and is the same when it launches and returns — unlike the rockets we’re still using today. Today’s rockets, even those fancy SpaceX ones, ‘split up’ at some point(s) of their journey; this is done to reduce ‘dead weight’, that is, used-up fuel tanks, payload coverings, spent boosters etc. …