Blog

  • Our front yard needs work. About 3 weeks ago, I made my first attempt at overseeding and although a couple seeds germinated, the lawn was left with lots of bare spots. So I’m taking a second stab. This time around though, I’m not just going to simply chuck seeds on top of the grass. Instead,…

    Front-yard overseeding journey
  • I just finished Spring 2021 at Georgia Tech OMSCS and published a farewell note on the classroom’s forum (i.e. Piazza platform) and would like to share that here: This was one hell of a semester! Hats off to professor Ada and our great TAs — I learned a great deal about both theoretical and practical…

    Distributed Computing – Goodbye and thanks for the wonderful semester
  • After watching dozens of YouTube videos on lawn care, I decided about two weeks ago to overseed the front lawn and water the grass twice a day (I really used to think that the earth would just magically nourish our yard). And up until this morning, I wasn’t entirely sure if all my effort was…

    My first lawn seeds germinating!
  • The above diagram I diagrammed illustrates the impact to a network packet when setting the maximum segment size in iperf3. With an MSS of 1436, the segment (i.e. TCP payload) ends up 1424, due to the overhead of the 12 byte TCP options.  

    iperf3 3 and TCP maximum segment size (MSS)
  • What did we do? Jess and I received our first dose of the Pfizer vaccination, our second dose scheduled for 3 weeks from now. We were able to get the vaccination since Jess had heard, through a mom’s group she’s part of, that breastfeeding mothers (along with their partners) were eligible through a Kaiser clinic.…

    Got the COVID-19 Pfizer vaccination
  • In the paper “PAXOS made moderately complex”, the authors introduce unfamiliar concepts not mentioned in the original PAXOS paper, concepts such as slots, slot in, slot out, and WINDOW. I found these concepts difficult to understand despite reading both the accompanying pseudo code as well as their Python implementation. This post aims to shed light…

    PAXOS made moderately complex – slots
  • I’m now half way through Distributed Computing course at Georgia Tech and us students are now tackling the penultimate project: building a replicated state machine using PAXOS. This project will be challenging (probably going to require 40+ hours) and it’ll put my theoretical knowledge to the test and reflect back, in a couple weeks, how…

    PAXOS – I’m coming for you!
  • I’m preparing for my Distributing Systems midterm and I was struggling to understand the differences between serializability and linearizability (why are these two words so difficult to spell right). Apparently, these two concepts are very different. To gain some clarity, I searched online and found this awesome YouTube video posted by Martin Kleppmann ; in…

  • Ever since I was little boy, if any of my friends were bullied or picked on, and I noticed they couldn’t defend themselves, I would speak up on their behalf. Speaking up for others has always come naturally for me and it’s habit that I still flex even as an adult. However, these days, I’m…

    Speaking up for others
  • In “Consistent Global States of Distributed Systems: Fundamental Concepts and Mechanisms”, the authors propose capturing a distributed system’s computation using a time series graph. Each row in the graph represents a process (e.g. P1, P2, P3), and each tick (e.g. e1, e2) within that row represent a an event: a local event, a send message…

    Distributed system snapshots: consistent vs inconsistent cuts