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 stretch her and keep her awake until her 7pm bed time.

Work

• Spent about an hour or so chipping away at codifying our operational dashboard, as part of hackathon.
• Read through a ton of documentation and watched a couple videos on virtual private connection (VPC). I should’ve read and watched all this training when I first joined the organization. Oh well. At least the material makes more sense now, now that I’ve had first hand exposure to the dataplane code. Anyways, all this material helped me build a better mental model needed to deliver my tech talk.

Graduate School

• The word coordinator kept popping up in the lectures. This coordinator often shows up in different code bases and systems within Amazon and I didn’t realize that the term has roots in the theory of distributed systems.
• Learning more about the value of checkpoints. I can definitely see me adopting and integrating checkpoints into the software I design and build, at least for the stateful applications that need to have robust recovery mechanisms.
• I’d like to learn more about two phase commit protocol. Similar to the word coordinator, two phase commit protocol term continues to pop up in the lectures and I bet it’s worth learning more about the specifics of this transaction strategy.
• Window of vulnerability. The trade off between persisting in memory log records to disk

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, I lead a conversational fire side chat with four (Asian) senior software development engineers about some of the non technical barriers that our community often faces throughout our career. Not speaking up. Not advocating for one self. Everyone on the panel nailed it (despite how nervous they were) and I look forward to creating and hosting new events in the future.

Health

• Fought off a killer headache that kicked in after I ate che (a Vietnamese dessert). My body rejects processed sugars and when I consume too much of it, my body sends me a strong signal in the form of a painful headache that lasts several hours, the only way to fight it off is to gulp down as much water as possible and flush the sugars out of my system.

Daily Photo

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. Again, as I mentioned in earlier posts, although I cast my vote for Biden, I’m more voting to get Trump out.

Graduate School

• Learned of a brilliant technique to simplify crash recovery by removing an edge case and exercising the same code as the abort transaction. Technique from RioVista papers. The crash recovery is also idempotent so it can withstand power failure during the crash recovery itself. Idempotent. First heard of this term when I was learning Ansible back in the day. Something to think about again.

Work

• Checked in some GRE header code that basically implements RFC 2784 and 2890. Stepping through the RFC, I learned how much unnecessary overhead the protocol carries with it. A 3 bit version field that MUST always be zero? Granted, I understand that the protocol designers were trying to future proof the protocol but now I understand why a protocol like IPIP prevails given that IPIP will encapsulate only IP.

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 the one installed in our kitchen busted, causing water to leak into and underneath the sink. Luckily, my dad is in town and helped replace the existing broken faucet with the one I just purchased.

Graduate School

Submitted project 3 assignment on gRPC and multi-threading. Similar to project 2, I partnered up with another Seattle based student (who also happens to be Vietnamese as well) and we divided the work down the middle and stitched our code together.

Watched half the lectures on RioVista. This lecture series seems to be a continuation of the last lecture series (on lightweight recoverable virtual machines), adding on top of the idea of using transactions to keep a log record of changes to the virtual memory address space. The key different with RioVista though is that they are targeting performance as their primary goal.

Health

Walked about 3 miles on the treadmill yesterday while working and studying. Last week, I could not find the remote that controls my treadmill but luckily Jess found it buried in the back of my office and luckily I was able to get some exercise in.

Work

Held a dry-run kick off meeting for a panel that I’m hosting and moderating this upcoming Wednesday. The purpose of the panel is to give people a sense of what it looks like to grow one’s career as a software engineer at Amazon.

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 since I was my body was telling me it needed a little more rest. However, knowing that Elliott would soon wake me up and knowing that I had a very small window of time to myself, I rolled out of bed. Parent life.

Home care

• Manually aerated the front yard using core aeration tool. The video advertisements for aerating make the process of aerating seem so pleasant. It’s not. It’s actually a lot of hard work and I broke a massive sweat aerating the front yard.I totally understand now why people rent aerating machines at Home Depot (or Lowe’s) for $20.00 bucks an hour. Renting a machine would make the work so much easier.
• Fed the lawn fertilizer. After aerating the lawn, I poured about 2.2 pounds of fertilizer into the Ace branded bucket, transferred the food into the spreader, and then dispensed the it all over the front yard.

Family

• Family trip to Lam’s seafood located in Tequila. This Lam’s seafood location blows the other location (i.e. International District) out of the water. The location in Tequila is not only larger, but it’s cleaner and closely resembles the layout and feel of Uwajimaya.  Shopping in the store reminds me of growing up in Little Saigon, all the Vietnamese chatter and all the people bustling in the background.
• Dropped off our ballot at the library located across the street. Just before sliding the ballot into the drop off box, I sat in the front seat of the car (with the two dogs next to me) with the Stranger’s cheat sheet opened up, filling out the last few choices that I was undecided.

Work

• Defined a data specification (in the form of a protobuf definition) that’ll be used to help drive the conversation between us and our customer. Our customer (AWS Networking) will be vending us data but its unclear (at the moment) what data they will be providing not only to us but to other teams. So to help steer the conversation, I documented a one pager that includes a (Google) protobuf definition.

Mental health

• Attended my weekly therapy session. Since I moved to Renton, this session (and the previous one) were held over Zoom. However, next week, I’ll drive to North Seattle early in the morning (around 06:30 or maybe even 06:00) to avoid traffic since that upcoming session will occur in person.
• Sort of figuring out why I find it difficult to articulate love feelings for Jess. Her and I chatted last night and as I’ve mentioned before, I essentially freeze up when Jess feels upset and needs comforting. But during those moments I’m unable to verbally or physically comfort her: essentially I freeze up. Long story short, it’s obvious now the reason why: that’s just how I grew up. This doesn’t mean that I want to carry on this habit but it is helpful (for me at least) to understand the root of the behavioral patterns.

Home

• Drove home at 2 miles per hour (MPH) since the new lawn more I picked up at Ace did not fully fit inside the trunk of our Ford Escape.  I drove to our local Ace Hardware store last night since the lawn mower that I had ordered online arrived. Unfortunately, the lawn mower box was about one foot longer than length of the size of the trunk … so I made a judgement call and deciding to drive home — with the trunk open — very very slowly, given that we live less than a mile away from the store.

Graduate School

Grades Released

• Somehow nailed the midterm but didn’t do as well as I expected on Project 1. I managed to store 94.5/100 for the midterm and I can thank all the people who helped out during the war room study sessions that I created. As for Project 1, I thought I hit the ball out of the park but apparently, my virtual CPU scheduler failed many of the test cases. This is ironic since I spent more time on my virtual CPU than I did with the memory scheduler and I somehow aced the memory scheduler.

Project 3

• Debugged a silly segfault for about 1.5 hours. Long story short, I called a function that expected a variable stored on the heap but accidentally passed in a variable declared on the stack. Such a silly mistake and the problem was that I had defined the variable twice: once on the heap and once on the stack. Surely this mistake could’ve been caught simply by enabling some flags on the compiler. Oh well.

Family

• Went on a cleaning binge. Not sure why sometimes I get totally obsessed with cleaning but yesterday was one of those spurts. I had watched about a dozen YouTube videos (from Clean My Space) on cleaning tutorials, followed by vigorouly scrubbing down stove tops with baking soda and vinegar, buying cleaning supplies (e.g. micro fiber, empty bottles for home made cleaning supplies) from both Ace Hardware and Big Lots, and ending the day with wiping down the entire marble kitchen counter
• Got into an argument with Jess around finances. Seems like talking about finances triggers me, the topic putting me in a bad mood almost every time. Although I have some ideas on why this is the case, I cannot exactly pinpoint why I go into fight or flight mode.But if I’m honest, I do find the idea of splitting the money down the middle uncomfortable. But I know that’s ridiculous.  I do want to sort out these feelings but I think they run deep and stem from my awful past experiences with money between me and my family members.

Graduate School

Project Work

• Chatted over the phone with my project partner. After working together on the previous assignment (i.e. Project 2 on Synchronization Barriers), my project partner (Will) and I have decided to work together again for project 3 (using gRPC and building a multi-threaded, asynchronous web server). We’re approaching the division of work a bit differently than last time, when I took on majority of the development and he took on the performance testing and benchmarking. This time around, we’re going to try and parallelize the work and split down the development (and design) right down the middle.

Lectures

• Completed lectures on distributed shared memory and started on distributed shared memory. The biggest take away for me (so far) for the distributed shared memory lectures is that from a sequential consistency perspective, the system does not distinguish a read/write for a normal memory data access from a read/write of a synchronization read/write variable. Why does this even matter? At first, I could not my wrap my head around the significance of this idea and how/why this related to distributed shared memory. But the more I thought about, the more it makes sense: if a thread locks a critical section and updates one (or more) variable(s), why generate cache coherence while inside the critical section — why not wait until an unlock happens? Actually, as I type this out, there might be a good reason: for readers of that variable to make forward progress on their (non critical) section.

Questions I have

• Why do we have a GCD (global cache directory) and how does this “one level of indirection” help as part of building the larger global memory system?

Home Maintenance

• Watched several YouTube videos on mowing grass. I found an awesome YouTube channel called the The Lawn Care Nut. I had been searching around online on good content that will teach me how to maintain and care for my front (and back) yard.  Now, although the owner of the YouTube channel tailors most of his videos for more intermediate or advanced lawn enthusiast, he’s recorded a quite a few videos for people like me: people who know nothing about lawn care and are trying to learn how to maintain their first lawn.

Family

• Elliott and I walked the dogs at cedar river trails. Jess needed an extra 30 minutes of sleep so during that time, which actually turned into almost 2 hours, Elliott and I walked the dogs at cedar river trails, a trail that also has an off-leash dog park (would not recommend for playing fetch, the field practically filled with rocks and dirt)
• Ran errands for 2 hours, driving from Renton to North Seattle. I picked up two (1/2) gallon bottles of home made Chai from Cloud City, what used to be our local cafe that I had walked to almost every day. Then I drove over to the Grateful bread, picking up Jess (3) loaves of Challah and a baker’s dozen of cinnamon raisin. Then, I ended the trip with stocking up on raw pet food from DD Meats located in Mount Lake Terrace.
• Roamed around Ikea in Renton. Jess and I bought a couple household items while shopping at Ikea but mainly we spent time walking the show room to collect ideas for our house.

Family

• Took Elliott shopping at Safeway while Jess took her work call. We picked up some avocados for our morning smoothies and some blackberries and blueberries (side note: why does a palm sized box of blueberries cost $6.00). While paying for our goods, our cashier awkwardly pulled down her mask for Elliott to see her face. Outside the context of COVID-19, this would be totally normal and even appreciated. But given we are in the midst of the pandemic, I felt awkward but didn’t feel compelled to ask her to put her mask back on given there was a glass screen positioned between us.

Graduate School

Lectures

• Did not read any lectures but did download all the videos for Spring Operating systems. I normally do not download the videos to my laptop however wind was hitting us pretty hard and our lights were flickering so I was preparing for the situation in which our internet disconnected.

Project Work

• Completed writing documentation for project 2 submission. This included an analysis of the algorithms that I wrote (i.e. centralized barrier with sense reversal, dissemination and tournament) and why some barriers performed better (or worse) than other barriers.
• Skimmed through requirements for project 3i.e. build a distributed service using grpc). This project got announced Monday evening and will be due in about 3-4 weeks and I like to get started early to avoid last minute cramming, which leads to unnecessary stress.