Blog posts
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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.…
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Operating System Transactions – Summary and notes
This post is a cliff notes version I scrapped together after reading the paper Operating Systems Transactions. Although I strongly recommend you read the paper if you are interested in how the authors pulled inspiration from database systems to create a transactional operating system, this post should give you a good high overview if you…
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Snapshotting my understanding of MapReduce
Like my previous posts on snapshotting my understanding of gRPC and shapshotting my understanding of barrier synchronization, this post captures my understanding of MapReduce, a technology I’ve never been exposed to before. The purpose of these types of posts is to allow future self to look back and be proud of what I learned since…
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RioVista – Summary and notes
Introduction Key Words: ACID, transactions, synchronous I/O RioVista picks up where LRVM left off and aims for a performance conscience transaction. In other words, how can RioVista reduce the overhead of synchronous I/O, attracting system designers to use transactions System Crash Key Words: power crash, software crash, UPS power supply Super interesting concept that makes…
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Lightweight recoverable virtual machine – Summary and Notes
Summary and main take away As system designers, we can make persistence into the virtual memory manager, offering persistence to application developers. However, it’s no easy feat: we need to ensure that the solution performs well. To this end, the virtual machine manager offers an API that allows developer to wrap their code in transactions;…
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Distributed File Systems – Summary and notes
This lesson introduces network file system (NFS) and presents the problems with it, bottlenecks including limited cache and expensive input/output (I/O) operations. These problems motivate the need for a distributed file system, in which there is no longer a centralized server. Instead, there are multiple clients and servers that play various roles including serving data…
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Daily Review: Day ending in 2020/11/11
The last couple days at work have taken a toll on me emotionally. To lift me up, Jess used her arts and crafts skills to make a doll — made from Metric’s shedded hair (see featured image). Family Felt myself tear up when pushing Elliott in the stroller. The two of us were having a…
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Testing your gRPC services using grpc_cli
This post may be helpful for you if you are building gRPC services and want a convenient way to test your service using a command line tool. Similar to using cURL when testing HTTP(s) services, I wanted an easy way to test the gRPC services that I’m building. Originally, I had originally planned to whip…
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3 tips on getting eyeballs on your code review
“Why is nobody reviewing my code?” I sometimes witness new engineers (or even seasoned engineers new to the company) submit code reviews that end up sitting idle, gaining zero traction. Often, these code reviews get published but comments never flow in, leaving the developer left scratching their head, wondering why nobody seems to be taking…
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Daily Review – Day ending in 2020/11/05
Family Assembled our Berkey water filtering system. The instructions are quite complicated, actually. In addition to reading the manuals, I had to pull up a couple instructional YouTube videos to make sure that I was priming the filters correctly. Took Elliott on a late night walk. She had missed her nap and we needed to…
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Daily Review – Day ending in 2020/11/04
My favorite part of the day was waking up to a video that Jess recorded while I was asleep, a video capturing a little frog dancing on our window facing the backyard. My wife: she’s super cute. Work Hosted and moderated a tech panel on career growth and promotions. On behalf of Asians@ at Amazon,…
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Daily Review – Day ending in 2020/11/03
Family Jess and I felt nervous about the presidential election results while watching the news online. Despite Biden leading in the polls, just as Hilary four years ago back in 2016, I’m sitting at the edge of my seat as the results come in, not confident at all that Biden can pull off a victory.…
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Daily Review – Day ending in 2020/11/02
Family Elliott and I drove to Lowe’s home improvement store and picked up a new faucet. Normally, Elliott will cry after sitting in the car for more than 10 minutes but not this trip. She did amazing and the two us had a blast at Lowe’s and she helped me select our new faucet since…
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Weekly Review – Week ending in 2020/11/01
No Halloween this year I used to love Halloween growing up, not so much the dressing up part but the knocking on doors and getting handed fist fulls of candy. Now, as an adult, I love returning the favor and always think about giving out larger than average candy and chocolate. But not this year,…
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Daily Review – Day ending in 2020/11/01
What a weird morning. Totally forgot the the time changed, the clock moving back an hour (i.e. we gain an hour), and found myself studying and working at 03:30 AM (instead of 04:30 AM). When I first woke up and glanced at my Casio watch, I debated whether to get out of bed or not…
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Five tips for surviving (or thriving) in the OMSCS program as a computer science graduate student
Overview In this post, I’m sharing five tips that I’ve picked up over the last 2 years in the program. At the time of this writing, I’m wrapping up my 7th course (advanced operating systems) in the OMSCS program. This means that I have 3 more courses to complete until I graduate with my masters…
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Distributed Shared Memory (Part 2 of 2) Notes
An example Summary Key Words: Conditional variable, pthread_signal, pthread_wait in the concrete example (screenshot below), P1 instructions that update memory (e.g. flag = 1) can be run in parallel with that of P2 because of release consistency model Advantage of RC over SC Summary In a nutshell, we gain performance in a shared memory…
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Distributed Shared Memory (Part 1 of 2) Notes
Introduction Summary Main question is this: can we make a cluster look like a shared memory machine Cluster as a parallel machine (sequential program) Summary One strategy is to not write explicit parallel programs and instead use language assisted features (like pragma) that signal to the compiler that this section be optimized. But, there are…