Blog posts
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Stretch Journal – Monday July 01, 2024
I’ve entered the 6th week of my stretching journey. In today’s program (12), we focused on the following muscles: calves, quadriceps, and ankles. Throughout this journey, I’m semi-regularly tracking my progress because I have this vision — a very clear image (which almost brings me to tears thinking about it) — of me moving gracefully,…
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Short self analysis on house dance move: toe tap
I almost always post recap videos on Instagram after taking dance classes (of course unless the class does not permit or discourages filming). In addition to capturing, creating and posting these videos (that hopefully show the spirit of the class), I’ll sometimes review clips of me dancing in class, playing back certain moves that I…
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Sadness following receiving a hurtful Instagram comment
Yesterday I experienced a moment of sadness after reading a comment (see screenshot below) posted by (burner) Instagram account. I had thoughts that this person may be Jess (since I had blocked her account — along with her family — after she had repeatedly brought up my Instagram stories up during mediation and it was becoming…
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2023 – Brief Life Update
I haven’t posted on this blog for almost a year. And I miss writing. A lot. Interestingly enough, I observed that I stopped publishing my own writing when my attention and intention shifted towards growing an audience, when I had decided to “professionalize” my blog and create a funnel for business. A part of me…
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Stop being caught off guard: the art of setting software limits
Are you a software developer building scalable web services serving hundreds, thousands, or millions of users?
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Take the guessing game out of your metrics: publish counters with zero values
I remember designing a large-scale distributed system as an AWS software engineer. Amazon’s philosophy that “you build it, you own it” means that engineers must, at all times, understand how their underlying systems work. You’re expected to describe the behavior of your system and answer questions based on just a glance at your dashboards. Is…
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CloudWatch Metrics: Stop averaging,start percentiling
AWS CloudWatch is a corner service used by almost all AWS Service teams for monitoring and scaling software systems. Though it is a foundational software service that most businesses could benefit from, CloudWatch’s features are unintuitive and therefore often overlooked. Out of the box, CloudWatch offers users the ability to plot both standard infrastructure and…
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Dirt cheap, reliable cloud infrastructure: How to deploy a Python worker using Digital Ocean’s serverless app platform for $5.00 per month in less than 5 minutes
In this blog post, you’ll learn how to deploy Python based worker using Digital Ocean’s Cloud App Platform for only $5.00 per month — all in less than 5 minutes. Deploying a long running process Imagine you’re building an designing a distributed system and as part of that software architecture, you have a Linux process…
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Stop using keywords (or tags) like an archivist. Think like a writer
As part of your digital organization journey, you’re likely using a combination of two strategies to organize your digital database: Using folders/directories for imposing structure and creating well-defined categories Leveraging keywords to overcome the constraints of either-or categories. While choosing keywords may seem simple at first, it’s a skill that develops overtime and improves with…
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Burning fat with intermittent fasting? 3 weeks of monitoring body ketones
I began my intermittent fasting (i.e. time restricted eating) journey just over 3 weeks ago and since the beginning, I’ve been measuring, tracking, monitoring both my glucose and ketone body levels. Collecting these data points require pricking my fingers with a lancet and feeding small blood samples into the monitoring devices. Although the process of…
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On developing an intuition of glucose levels
Over the last two weeks, I’ve measured my glucose levels over 150 times. Starting on July 11, I’ve pricked the tips of left-hand fingers with an annoying lancet, producing anywhere between .5 – 3.0 micro-liters of blood each about once every hour. Why? Because I introduced intermittent fasting (also known as time restricted eating) into my…
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Hello again
Feels like forever since I last posted on my blog. Looking back at my post history, it’s been close to 5 months. Time flies. In the last half year, nothing and everything has changed. Since my last post, I’ve launched my own company: Crossbill. It’s a software consulting company and boy, am I learning a…
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Georgia Tech OMSCS CS6515 (Graduate Algorithms) Course Review
To pass this class, you should digest everything written in Joves’s notes (he’s a TA and will release these notes gradually throughout the semester so pay close attention to his Piazza posts) join or form a study group of a handful of students dedicate at least 20+ hours per week to drill, memorize, and apply…
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Leaps of faiths
Today marks my last day at Amazon Web Services. The last 5 years have flown by. Typically, when I share the news with my colleagues or friends or family, their response is almost always “Where are you heading next?”. Having a job lined up is the logical, rational and responsible thing to do before making…
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“Is my service up and running?” Canaries to the rescue
You launched your service and rapidly onboarding customers. You’re moving fast, repeatedly deploying one new feature after another. But with the uptick in releases, bugs are creeping in and you’re finding yourself having to troubleshoot, rollback, squash bugs, and then redeploy changes. Moving fast but breaking things. What can you do to quickly detect issues…
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3 project management tips for the Well-Rounded Software Developer
This is the second in the series of The Well Rounded Developer. See previous post “Network Troubleshooting for the Well-Rounded Developer” Whether you are a solo developer working directly with your clients, or a software engineer part of a larger team that’s delivering a large feature or service, you need to do more than just…
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Why all developers should learn how to perform basic network troubleshooting
Regardless of whether you work on the front-end or back-end, I think all developers should gain some proficiency in network troubleshooting. This is especially true if you find yourself gravitating towards lower level systems programming. The ability to troubleshoot the network and systems separates good developers from great developers. Great developers understand not just code…
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Why all developers should learn how to perform basic network troubleshooting
(Also published on Hackernoon.com and Dev.to) Regardless of whether you work on the front-end or back-end, I think all developers should gain some proficiency in network troubleshooting. This is especially true if you find yourself gravitating towards lower level systems programming. The ability to troubleshoot the network and systems separates good developers from great developers.…
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Building an audience: A lesson from the younger me
When it comes to building an audience as a solo-entrepreneur, the younger me was much smarter, much more in tuned with himself. These days, I operate 95% of my life from the left side of my brain, analyzing and taking a data driven, logical approach. While necessary in many respects, I need to make more…
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My introduction in the Piazza forum for Graduate Algorithms (GA)
At the beginning of every semester, each student is encouraged to post on the forum (i.e. Piazza), introducing themselves and answering the following questions: What is your name? Where do you live? Why take Graduate Algorithms? What do you hope to learn? What other OMS courses have you taken? What is something interesting about you?…
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Distributed Computing @ OMSCS over – what a ride!
Last semester, I decided to enroll in the brand spanking new Georgia Tech’s Distributed Computing course offered for the first time (as part of OMSCS) this past Spring 2021. What a ride! Learned a ton, including Lamport’s Logical Clocks, the FLP theorem, and the notorious PAXOS for consensus. Hats off to Professor Ada and the…
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Distributed Computing CS7210 Distributed Computing – A course review
Distributed Computing was offered in the OMSCS program for the first time this past semester (i.e. Spring 2021) and when the course opened up for registration, a storm of newly admitted and seasoned students signed themselves up — me included. I was fully aware that I was walking into unknown territory, a bleeding edge course,…
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Front-yard overseeding journey
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,…
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Distributed Computing – Goodbye and thanks for the wonderful semester
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…