Blog posts
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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.…
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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…