Blog posts
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Spring 2021: Distributed Computing
Yes! I’m finally registered for the distributed computing course. This course is hot off the press! It’s spanking brand new to the OMSCS program and offered for the first time this (Spring 2021) term. I’ve been eagerly waiting over two years for a course centering around distributed systems, combining both theory and practice. The course…
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2020 year in review
Survival First things first: I’m grateful for surviving this difficult, weird and straight-up dystopian year. 2020 was the absolute worst; although the year will permanently leave its mark in our memories, we’re all ready to leave it behind, ready to move on. Who could have, apart from maybe Bill Gates during during 2014 Ted Talk,…
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Two memorable quotes from Ira Glass’s interview
While perusing Aaron’s Swartz’s blog, I stopped and read his post titled “Writing A Book: Part 2”. In this post, Aaron swoons over Ira Glass’s unparalleled storytelling skills. Wanting to learn more about Ira, I whipped out my iPhone, opened up my YouTube app, and loaded a (podcast) interview where Ira Glass shares his thoughts…
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Just a thought: On working from home
Like almost everyone else working remotely due to the COVID-19 global pandemic, I struggled with adjusting to the work from home situation, more than I could’ve possibly anticipated. I found difficulty in my daily routines suddenly disappearing; my deeply ingrained habits vanished out of thin air: no more commuting to the office; no more breathing…
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Reader expectations and three dimensions for emphasizing writing
Fred the dog beater Look at the above example, the four sentences. Now, take each of those sentences and imagine you poll an audience of 100 people, asking them the following question: “Does the author want you [the reader] to give Fred either a thumbs up or thumbs up?” How do you think the audience…
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You should NOT always prefer active over passive voice
Like many other aspiring authors, I’m always sharpening my writing skills, dozens of writing books (including one of my favorites: On Writing by Stephen King) lined up on my bookshelf. Almost all these books share the same stance when comparing the active and passive voices. They strongly prefer the active voice over the passive voice.…
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Want to improve your craft of writing? Imitate!
There are no shortcuts to becoming a great writer. As Stephen King says, great writers need to read a lot and write a lot. But that’s not enough. Nope. I’d argue you need to take writing one step further: imitate good writing. Imitating great tennis players When I was a young boy, about 8 or…
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To fading memories
One silver lining of COVID-19 is that I’m working remotely from home and despite the constant interruptions, I’ve grown to appreciate situation. I’m afforded experiences not normally available to me when working physically in the office. Among which is seeing my daughter grow up, right before my eyes. Every day, I catch these fleeting moments,…
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A short review on Zettlr (open source Zettelkasten app)
I serendipitously stumbled on another Zettelkasten desktop application called Zettlr. Perusing the online forum over at Zettelkasten.de, I had noticed that at least three of four members repping the app in their signatures. Naturally, I was curious so I followed the scent on the trail and loaded up the Zettlr website in my browser. After…
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Top 5 Zettelkasten.de forum posts
I’m obsessed with personal information management (PIM) and as I learn more about the discipline, one concept continues to repeatedly crop up: Zettelkasten. I first learned about Zettelkasten after reading one of my favorite books “How to take smart notes”, and since then, I’m sold on the idea and continue to tweak my digital workflow…
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Tagging my personal information management (PIM) with key/value pairs as key words
Generally speaking, there two ways people store their digital assets. Some file their digital assets— PDF documents, images, videos, bookmarks and so on — into neat, hierarchical structures. In the other camp are people who leverage tagging, assigning one or more key words to their files. When retrieving assets, these people tend to leverage their…
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Squeezing the most out of your study sessions (midterm and final exam preparation)
Why publish my studying techniques? This semester, I manage to pull off an A not only for the midterm and final exams, but for the class as a whole. My intention of revealing my grade is not to boast (that’s poor taste), but to give some credibility to the techniques and strategies below, techniques and…
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Neil Strauss’s 3 pass writing technique
Three passes World class writers sit down and pour out beautiful prose in a single sitting, right? That’s the image I image I held in mind for many years and this belief is not only far from the truth but this belief crippled me as a writer. I would sit down to type and proceed…
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Giant Scale Services – Summary and notes
Introduction We’ll address some questions like “how to program big data systems” and how to “store and disseminate content on the web in scalable manners” Quiz: Giant Scale Services Basically almost every service is backed by “Giant Scale” services Tablet Introduction This lesson covers three issues: system issues in giant scale services, programming models for…
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Free E-book: Advanced operating systems (AOS) refresher course – summary and study guide
Click here to download “Advanced OS refresher course – summary and study guide” I compiled my various blog posts from the advanced operating systems refresher course and bundled them together into a nicely packed e-book. So, if you are about to enroll in Georgia Tech’s advanced operating system course (AOS) and want to step through…
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Failure: I want more of it.
Students in the Georgia Tech program collaborate with one another — and collaborate with professors and teacher assistants — through a platform called Piazza. But at the end of the semester, this forum shuts off to read only mode, meaning we all lose connection with one another. Because of this, I recently created an e-mail…
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Enterprise Java Beans – notes and summary
Introduction Key Words: EJB, enterprise java beans Discuss how we can structure system software for large scale distributed sytem service Inter Enterprise View Key Words: monolithic, supply chain model, amalgam, survivability, complexity From a user perspective, we view a system (like Ebay or Google) as a blackbox. But in reality, much more complex than that…
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30 different ways to write paragraphs – series introduction
This blog post is the first in the series on the different ways to write powerful paragraphs, inspired by Victor Pellgrino’s book “A writer’s guide to powerful paragraphs”. According to Victor Pelligrino, a paragraph is a unit of thought that expresses a single idea, communicated through related sentences. And although there are many ways to…
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Recovery management in Quicksilver – Notes and Summary
The original paper “Recovery management in quicksilver” introduces a transaction manager that’s responsible for managing servers and coordinates transactions. The below notes discusses how this operating system handles failures and how it makes recovery management a first class citizen. Cleaning up state orphan processes Key Words: Ophaned, breadcrumbs, stateless In client/server systems, state gets created…
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Software craftsmanship: convey intent in your error codes
ENOTSUP stands for “Error – not supported” and it is one of the many error codes defined in the error header file. I recently learned about this specific error code when reviewing a pull request that my colleague had submitted. His code review contained an outline — a skeleton — of how we envisioned laying…
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20s for education, 30s for experience, 40s for career.
In my mid twenties, I was blessed to receive some of the best career, and quite frankly, life advice. During that period of my life, I was working as a director of technology, leading a small group of engineers. But I was getting ready to throw in the towel. I lacked both the experience and…
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Three project management tips for software developers
As a software developer, you will sooner or later lead a software development project. Of course it would be nice and ideal to relegate the responsibility of project management to a dedicated project manager — but not all of us are afforded that luxury. And let’s face it: many of us rather be heads down…
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A letter from my future self: “Dear 2019 Matt”
In 2019, Sal Khan wrote a letter to his past self as a reflection exercise and made that letter public and published it on his blog. Thanks Sal. Inspired by his post and this reflection exercise, I decided to write a letter from my future self (Matt in 2029). In other words, I wrote the…
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Interesting research papers on database transactions
While reading Advanced Operating Systems research paper, I found myself following the citations, flipping to the last page and scribbling down the referenced papers because I want to learn more about database systems. In particular, I’m interested in learning more about building reliable software that withstand unexpected failures by using transactions, the techniques and methods.…