Today I’m posting a super short daily review given that the midterm (for advanced operating systems) opens up in about 13 hours.

Writing

• Published on drifting apart (as part of my daily review)
• Published my first set of guesses to the mid term questions

Parenting and family matters

• Held Elliott in my arms while we danced to her favorite song (above) titled called Breathing by Hamzaa. As soon as this song plays on our bluetooth sound bar speaker, Elliott immediately tosses her arms up in the air (even if her hands are full of food) and starts rocking back and forth. I hope she never loses the confidence to dance so freely like us adults.

What I am grateful for

• A wife who I’ve learned to develop so much trust with over the years and one of the very few people that I can open up to completely and share thoughts that cycle through my head.

What I learned

• Writing a simple line parser in C one has to protect against so many edge cases
• Most of the C string functions return pointers (e.g. strnstr for locating substring)
• Learned how you can ensure that you are not statically creating a large data structure by using the -w-larger-than=byte_size compiler option
• Able to visualize what an IPv6 data structure looks like underneath the hood: 16 char bytes. Also these are big endian, the least significant bit starting first.

Work

• Wrote some code that performed some string parsing (so many dang edge cases)

 

Thanks to my wife for encouraging me to pull the trigger and start my online study group (i.e. the “war room”) for my advanced operating systems course. Basically, the idea came about after chatting with a class mate of mine and during our video call, I realized how many of us are basically studying alone (in isolation) without practically no peer interaction. On top of that, we’re in the midst of COVID-19 pandemic, most of us cooped up inside our homes or apartments, disconnected from the rest of the world.

We’re living in weird times …

Anyways, how does this warm room work? It starts with me scheduling a 30 minute zoom call and then sharing the meeting details with the rest of the students, publishing a note on the the class forum website (i.e. Piazza). The invitation is open to all students and the meeting itself is informal and low pressure. However, there are a few guidelines to help steer the conversation:

• Feel free to just hang out and study silently
• Collaboration is encouraged
• No obligation to ask questions or comment on other peoples questions (although I myself will try and chime in whether or not I know the answer)
• You do not need to participate and can just hang out
• You do not need to turn on video

Here’s what I had originally sent out to the class:

 

 

Writing

• Published on drifting apart (as part of my daily review)
• Published my first set of guesses to the mid term questions

Parenting and family matters

• Held Elliott in my arms while we danced to her favorite song (above) titled called Breathing by Hamzaa. As soon as this song plays on our bluetooth sound bar speaker, Elliott immediately tosses her arms up in the air (even if her hands are full of food) and starts rocking back and forth. I hope she never loses the confidence to dance so freely like us adults.

What I am grateful for

• A wife who I’ve learned to develop so much trust with over the years and one of the very few people that I can open up to completely and share thoughts that cycle through my head.

What I learned

• Writing a simple line parser in C one has to protect against so many edge cases
• Most of the C string functions return pointers (e.g. strnstr for locating substring)
• Learned how you can ensure that you are not statically creating a large data structure by using the -w-larger-than=byte_size compiler option
• Able to visualize what an IPv6 data structure looks like underneath the hood: 16 char bytes. Also these are big endian, the least significant bit starting first.

Work

• Wrote some code that performed some string parsing (so many dang edge cases)

 

Before stepping into parenthood, my wife and I would often read about other couples scheduling time for being “intimate” (aka sex), time alone just for the two parents. Without this deliberate effort, parents can fall into the trap of focusing 100% of their time on raising their children and forgetting what its like to be a couple.

When I first heard and read about these couples, I couldn’t wrap fathom how the gradual drifting of relationships could possibly happen to me. No — that’s reserved for other couples. Thanks for the universe (and karma I suppose), I’m now noticing that my wife and I are drifting apart … but luckily at a glacial pace. To be fair, the two of us are brand new parents raising a (almost 1 year old) daughter.

Fortunately, we’re acutely aware of this drifting apart so her and I are reeling it in. So what are we doing about it? Well, the idea of scheduling time for being intimate sounds ridiculous but we’re going to muse on it.

Writing

• Published my daily review & on being present in the moment
• Published my notes on scheduling policies for advanced operating systems

Parenting and family matters

• Bathed Elliott for only about 5 minutes last night. Normally, our little bed time routine normally lasts between 15-20 minutes but lately she hasn’t really enjoyed the experience and merely tolerating. I’m hoping her allergy to the bathes is temporary since this is one of the few times throughout the week where I get real 1:1 time with Elliott.
• Jess and I watched three short video clips from Roxanne Gay’s Skilshare course titled Crafting Personal Essays with Impact. Taking a little fun course like this one, while washing the dirty dishes, is one way for husband and wife to mix things up since as I mentioned earlier it’s so easy at the end of the day for two tired parents to just mindlessly eat dinner in front of the television.

What I am grateful for

• Jess preparing a snack for Elliott and rinsing cotton candy grapes for me. Side note: if you haven’t had the experience of a cotton candy grape exploding in your mouth you are seriously missing out. These seasonal grapes are basically (healthy) candy for adults.

What I learned

• Learned that hierarchical locking (or locking in general) hinders system performance, preventing concurrency. What should we do instead? Reference counting for existence guarantee.

Music

• Recorded a little harmony and melody based off of some lyrics that I wrote down as I winding down for the evening. Usually, I start with writing the harmony or melody first but this time around, I’m approaching the song writing with whipping together lyrics. This lyrics first approach tends to be working well for me actually so I’m curious what else I can come up  over the next few weeks as I experiment with this new process.

Work

• Ran benchmarks for an optimization I added (basically adding metadata to a data structure that fits within the first three cache lines). Also ran a bench mark for a longest prefix match data structure that I’m evaluating for a new feature that I’ve designed.

Being fully present as a parent all the time seems like an impossible feat. Although I’d like to think that I’m always present with my daughter, I do find myself sometimes mentally checking out.  For example, yesterday, Jess had reminded me during lunch I should be in the here and now instead of scrolling on my iPhone, searching for some funny video (found on Reddit) that I wanted her to watch (I did end up finding it and it’s a video of a failed attempt of shuffling).

On a separate note, I’ve been really enjoying doodling. If that’s something that you are interested in, I’d highly recommend checking out Cathy Wu’s courses on Skillshare. So far, I’ve watch these short lessons (between 10-30 minutes) — I watch them when winding down from a long day of parenting, work, and studying for graduate school — that combine helpful exercises and I must say that they are helping me unlock my creativity and reminded me that I too can draw:

Writing

• Published my daily review
• Published notes on remote procedure call (from the perspective of the operating system)

Parenting and family matters

• Jogged to Maple Leaf Park (maybe a mile away) while pushing Elliott in her stroller and when the two of us arrived, I lead her to the playground and swung her on the swings. After maybe 2 minutes of swinging back and forth, I carried her over to the kitty slide and then held her underneath her armpits as she slid down the slide for the first time. She loved it and had a blast. But really what she enjoyed the most was sitting crossed legged on the wood chips and watching all the other little kids running around. Now I normally don’t watch Elliott during the day but Jess had an important meeting at 04:00pm so I figured it would be helpful if I watch Elliott so Jess could focus her entire attention on that that video call with no interruptions and without feeling bad about propping Elliott in front of the television for an hour.

What I am grateful for

• Good health. Something so simple is so easy to forget. That is until we are sick. Although I’ve packed on a little of that COVID weight, some extra flub sagging around my belly, I’m still grateful that overall nothing major concerning with my health. This is a good reminder to continue with eating a plant based diet and maybe cut down on oreo cookie (yes, they really are vegan).

What I learned

• To build high performance parallel systems we want to limit sharing global data structures. By reducing sharing, we limit locking, an expensive operation.
• Heavy use of typedef keyword with enums creates cleaner C code

Work

• Built a prototype for a new feature that I’m delivering and next step for me is to benchmark the solution to ensure that the underlying algorithm scales

Thoughts

• Just under two years ago I was not writing C code (neither during my personal leisure time and neither during my professional life) and now I’m loving the language, using it to build and prototype features for networking devices at work. Not only that, but developing the skill makes taking advanced operating systems during graduate school so much easier. So the two (academia and industry) feed into one another, a loop of learning and improvement (I like the way that sounds).