Swinging on the swings with Elliott. She was sitting on my lap, facing my direction, as swung us on the swing back and forth. The entire time she was smiling and when her cold chubby cheeks brushed up against mine, some dad love feelings ran through my body.
Eating a kick ass lunch. My wife whipped up a delicious Vietnamese dish with bean sprouts and pickled cucumbers and fermented tofu.
Therapy Session
Vented about on call the past week. I shared the handful of times that I was paged out of bed at 03:30 AM and the operational issues that lasted until 10:00 pm on the evenings and being tied to the computer.
Shared the sense of betrayal I felt at work. How someone who I thought was in my corner, rooting for me, actually no longer advocates for me after I declined their “opportunity” to lead a project.
Declining the project that “sets me back for a promotion” allows me to bring my best self to work. Although one could argue that me not accepting the “opportunity” to lead a project (that would’ve easily tacked on additional 5-10 hours per week) sets me back for my promotion, I did it so maintain a balance between my professional and personal life, which quite frankly is what I am all about: living a balanced life, not one where I am endlessly pursuing the next thing.
Realized that I need to build a stronger community of supporters. Take away from this sense of betrayal is that I need to widen my network of supporters and not to put all my eggs in one basket, so to speak.
Random
Cool Quotes
“Academia is ripe for pursuing ideas on the lunacy fringe”.
Graduate School
Skipping Java and Spring (for now) and jumping into Distributed System lectures. I almost always follow the curriculum in the order prescribed by the syllabus. But I’ve decided to skip (for now) some video lectures on Java and Spring… and this makes me a little bit anxious. Honestly, I find the Java and Spring lectures a bit boring (to be fair, I might actually enjoy them once I start watching the lectures). Right now, I’m interested in learning more about the fundamentals and theories of constructing distributed systems so I’ll jump to those videos.
Music
Dusted off and played the ukulele for Jess and Elliott. I feel like I abandoned the ukulele after picking up the guitar. And strumming my beautiful Soprano ukulele yesterday reminded me that the instrumental has its own vibe and own personality, the strings sounding much more … bright.
Family
Fell asleep at 06:30 pm. I normally fall asleep between 08:30 and 09:30, on both weekdays and weekends. But yesterday I was shattered after my sleep was interrupted several times throughout the night, the most notable when Jess had a coughing fit at around 03:00 AM, at which point I was pretty much unable to fall back asleep.
Slept in the same bed as Elliott and Jess last night. This was pretty sweet actually. Although I woke up multiple times throughout the night, I loved having Elliott and Jess in the same bed since I’ve been sleeping alone — well, with the dogs — for the last six months or so.
Wrapped a baby net around stair railings. Installing the net (my sister’s idea) prevents little Elliott from slipping through the rails. Although I do not think her head could possibly squeeze through, the net gives Jess piece of mind and that’s important since she’s the one watching her throughout the day.
Hooray! Today is the first day in a couple weeks that air quality is considered good, at least according to the EPA. I’m so pleased and so grateful for clean air because my wife and daughter have not left the house since the wild fires started a week ago (or was it two weeks — I’ve lost concept of time since COVID hit) and today marks the first day we can as an entire family can go for a walk at a local park (it’s the little things in life) and breathe in that fresh, crisp pacific northwest air. Of course, we’ll still be wearing masks but hey, better than staying cooped up inside.
Yesterday
What I learned yesterday
Static assertion on C structures. This type of assertion fires off not at at run-time but at compile time. By asserting on the size of a structure, we can ensure that they are sized correctly. This sanity check can be useful in situations such as ensuring that your data structure will fit within your cache lines.
Writing
Published my daily review that I had to recover in WordPress since I had accidentally deleted the revision
Best parts of my day
Video chatting at the end of the work day with my colleague who I used to work with in Route 53, the organization I had left almost two years ago. It’s nice to speak to a familiar face and just shoot the shit.
Graduate School
Finished lectures on barrier synchronization (super long and but intellectually stimulating material)
Started watching lectures on lightweight RPC (remote procedure calls)
Submitted my project assignment
Met with a classmate of mine from advanced operating systems, the two of us video chatting over Zoom and describing our approaches to project 1 assignment
Work
Finished adding a simple performance optimization feature that takes advantage of the 64 byte cache lines, packing some cached structs with additional metadata squeezed into the third cache line.
Miscellaneous
Got my teeth cleaned at the dentist. What an unusual experience. Being in the midst of the pandemic for almost 8 months now I’ve forgotten what it feels like to talk to someone up close while not wearing a mask (of course the dentist and dental hygienist were wearing masks) so at first I felt a bit anxious. These days, any sort of appointments (medical or not) are calculated risks that we must all decide for ourselves.
Today
Writing
Publish Part 1 of Barrier Synchronization notes
Publish this post (my daily review)
Review my writing pipeline
Mental and Physical Health
Slip on my Freebird shoes and jog around the neighborhood for 10 minutes. Need to take advantage of the non polluted air that cleared up (thank you rain)
Swing by the local Cloud City coffee house and pick up a bottle of their in house Chai so that I can blend it in with oat milk at home.
Review my tasks and project and breakdown the house move into little milestones
Family
Take Mushroom to her grooming appointment. Although I put a stop gap measure in place so that she stops itching and wounding herself, the underlying issue is that she needs a haircut since her hair tends to develop knots.
Walk the dogs at either Magnuson or Marymoore Park. Because of the wild fires, everyone (dogs included) have been pretty much stuck inside the house.
Pack pack pack. 2 weeks until we move into our new home in Renton. At first, we were very anxious and uncertain about the move. Now, my wife and I are completely ready and completely committed to the idea.
With working remote and establishing a (somewhat) daily routine (that has become pretty monotonous), it’s sometimes easy to forget that we’re in the midst of a global pandemic. But that reality is amplified because of the recent wild fires, forcing those of us living in the pacific north west (PNW) — and those living in Northern California — to remain indoors. This additional layer of lock down definitely impacts the mental health for both my wife and I. I’m almost certain that not breathing in fresh air from outside negatively affects my 11 month year old daughter, who has not stepped (or carried) outside this past week — not even for a few minutes. I really want her to join me for the daily walks with the dogs, even if it is for a few minutes, but my wife and I agreed that’s its best for the long term if she doesn’t inhale any of the ashes trickling down from the sky.
Unrelated to the above comment about the pandemic, I was reading Write it down make it happen on my Kindle while sitting on the can (you’d be surprised how much reading you can get done during your trips to the bathroom) and there’s a section in the book that suggests sometimes the way to make things happen is to simply let go of the reins and relegate all control.
On some level, I agree that sometimes you’ll find the very thing you’ve been looking for when you stop searching. This concept rings true to me because during my mid twenties, I stopped searching for “the one” and instead, began looking inward and healing myself (my life was spiraling out of control due to my compulsive and addictive behavior) and on the path to recovery, I ended up meeting the one, my now wife, the two of us bumping into each other while volunteering at a children’s orphanage (she often jokes and tells people that I adopted her … not everyone gets the joke).
Yesterday
What I learned yesterday
Learned a new data structure called n-ary tree (i.e. each node can have up to N children). Picked up this new graph theory inspired data structure from watching the video lectures for advanced operating systems
Funny moments
Professor made me laugh while I was watching his recorded lecture videos, the professor describing the tournament barrier and how the algorithm “rigs” the competition and how the algorithm seems applicable to real life given professional sports rig competitions all the time (e.g. baseball and world series) Okay, reading this out to myself now doesn’t sound that funny but I guess its something you have to hear first hand.
Writing
Published my daily review describing how I crashed and burned during the afternoon
Eating dinner with Jess while grubbing on some delicious Vietnamese take out food from our favorite (for now) local restaurant called Moonlight. They sell the best Vegan Vietnamese food, dishes including Ca Co (clay pot fish) and Canh Chua (Vietnamese Sweet and Sour Soup) and Pho. All this wonderful food while the two of us planted in front of the cinema sized television playing “Fresh Off The Boat”.
Bridging the gap between theory (computer science) and practice (life as a software engineer at Amazon). While walking through code with a principle engineer, he described the data structure he came up with that (classically) traded space for lookup performance, describing an index that bounds the binary search. To clarify the data structure, he “whiteboarded” with me, using (an internally hosted) draw.io, and the figures made me realize that the data structure resembles how page tables in operating systems are designed.
Mental and Physical Health
Remembered to stretch my hamstrings a couple days throughout the day. Not really enough exercise but the best I could do given that the weather outside still is labeled “very unhealthy” due to the wildfire smokes.
Graduate School
Watched a few more lectures from the “Barrier Synchronization” series, learning more about the tree barrier and the tournament barriers, two slightly more advanced data structures than the simplistic centralized barrier
Finished putting together my submission, a .zip file containing: source code, Makefile, log files (from running my program against the test cases).
Work
Met with a Vietnamese senior principle engineer yesterday who I reached out to for two reasons: asking him to participate in a future event that I’ll host on behalf of Asians@ and asking him for some tips given he’s excelled (at least on paper) in his career while bringing his full self to work (i.e. being a father).
Walked through some C data structures with a principle engineer and successfully imported the code (with a few minor tweaks) into my team’s package
During my 1:1 with my manager, he straight up asked me if I was leaving the team. I realized that I may have given him that impression because during a team meeting, I spoke up about how if the operations on the team continues to disturb me and wake me up consistently in the middle of the night then I would reconsider switching teams, which is true. Although I love my position and love what I’m doing at work, I do value other things such as a good nights sleep because poor sleep means poor mental health which leads me down a very dark path.
Family and Friends
Watched after my daughter yesterday morning from 06:00 to 06:45, allowing my wife to catch up on some sleep due to a difficult night with Elliott, who we think is teething, given that she’s been waking up in the middle of the night, waking up more than usual.
Left a couple voice notes in WhatsApp for my brother-in-law, who is getting into writing and who asked me for some suggestions on writing platforms to host his blogging content. In short, I say it doesn’t really matter all that much but what does matter is that he owns his content and syndicates it out
Miscellaneous
Downloaded 30 days of Wells Fargo and Morgan Stanley transaction history, proving that my wife and I have the funds needed to complete the transaction on September 30th, the day we close on our house located in Renton
Today
Writing
Publish Part 1 of Barrier Synchronization notes
Publish this post (my daily review)
Mental and Physical Health
Stretch stretch stretch! Add a 5 minute event that notifies you on your phone so that step back from your desk and reach for your toes. Squat a couple times. Drop to the ground for a couple push ups. Get that heart pumping!
Submit code review for small feature the optimizations look up time on the packet path
Administrative
Attend my dentist appointment at 02:30 in the afternoon. How the hell is that going to work with the pandemic? Obviously I won’t be able to wear a mask with the pandemic … I should probably give them a ring this afternoon, before stepping into the appointment
Family
Pack pack pack! There’s only a couple weeks left until we are out of this house. It’s difficult to pack at the end of the day because both Jess and I are both exhausting, her from watching Elliott and me from working. But maybe we can pack while eating dinner instead of sprawling out on the couch and watching “Fresh off the boat” (one of my favorite TV series, I think)
I had mentioned yesterday that I slept horribly, waking up early and starting day off at around 03:45 AM. That wake up time was brutal and as a result, I crashed and burned in the afternoon, leveraging those precious 30 minutes of my lunch to nap in my wife’s / daughter’s bedroom (a room with an actual mattress, unlike my office, where I’m sleeping on the floor on top of a tri-folding piece of foam).
I slept so well during that afternoon nap that I didn’t hear the ear piercing alarm that I set on my TIMER YS-390 ; luckily I warned my wife before hand and had asked her to wake me up just in case I overslept. Thankfully she did.
Yesterday, I had suspected that I woke up so early and slept so poorly due to the loud air conditioner shaking on and off throughout the night, but I’m 100% confident of what woke me up this morning at 03:00: my daughter belting out a loud scream (and then immediately fell back asleep).
Yesterday
I’m in great company while working from home. Here’s metric sleeping by my foot
Writing
Published my daily review
Best parts of my day
The afternoon 30 minute nap. Seriously. The nap makes me wonder how I would’ve taken that sort of break if I were not working remote and if I were working back in the office?
Mental and Physical Health
Attended my weekly therapy session with good old Roy. As anticipated, we followed up on our tension filled conversation that occurred last week. What was comforting and brought me solace was that he opened up (just a little) and shared that he was similar to me in the sense that he often will take on additional work that just needs to be done, a person who sees a hole and fills it. That conversation made me think of the term transference: “a phenomenon in which an individual redirects emotions and feelings, often unconsciously, from one person to another.”
Graduate School
Watched no lectures yesterday (as mentioned, I was like a zombie) and instead ran my programs (i.e. virtual CPU scheduler and memory coordinator) across the various use cases, collecting all the terminal output that I’ll need to include as part of the submission
Work
Conducted an “on site” interview. I say onsite but because of COVID-19, all interviews are held over (Amazon) Chime.
Debugged an unexpected drop in free memory and realized that it pays off to be able to distinguish memory allocations happening on the stack versus memory allocations happening else where (like shared memory in the kernel).
Family and Friends
Miscellaneous
Got my second hair cut this year (damn you COVID-19) at nearby hair salon. I love the hair salon for a multiple reasons. First, the entire trip — from the moment I leave my house, to the moment I return back — takes 30 minutes, a huge time saver. Second, the stylist actually listens to what I want (you’d be surprised how many other stylists get offended when I tell them what I want and what I don’t want) and gives me a no non-sense hair cut. And third, the hair cut runs cheap: $20.00. What a steal! I don’t mind paying more for hair cuts (I was previously paying triple that price at Steele Barber).
Today
Mainly will just try to survive the day and not collapse from over exhaustion. If I can somehow afford the time, I’d like to nap this afternoon for half an hour. Will gladly trade off 30 minutes of lunch if that means not being zapped of all my energy for the remainder of the day.
Writing
Publish “Synchronization” notes (part 2)
Publish daily review (this one that I’m writing right here)
Mental and Physical Health
Attending my weekly therapy session today at 09:00 AM. Will be an interesting session given how entangled we got last week.
Today is going to be rough. I slept horribly, waking up multiple times throughout the night. Ultimately, I rolled out of my tri-folding foam mattress (a temporary bed while my daughter and wife sleep on the mattress in a separate room as to not wake me up: that parent life) at 03:45 AM this morning. Perhaps the gods above are giving me what I deserve since I had complained yesterday that I had “slept in” and as a result didn’t get a chance to put in any meaningful work before work. So now they are punishing me. Touché. Touché.
Yesterday
Fell into a black hole of intense focus while hunting down a bug that was crashing my program (for project 1 of advanced operating systems). Sometimes I make the right call and distance myself from a problem before falling into a viscous mental loop and sometimes (like this scenario) I make the right call and keep at a problem and ultimately solve it.
A poop explosion. Elliott’s nugget rolling out of her diaper and landing on the bathroom floor. Making us two parents chuckle
Teaching Elliott how to shake her head and signal “no”. For the past few months, I’ve tried to teach her during our daily bathes but when I had tried to previously teach her, her body and head were not cooperating with her. When she had tried say no, she was unable to interdependently control her head movement, her entire body would turn left and right along with her. But yesterday, she got it and now, she loves saying “no” even though she really means yes. She’s so adorable.
Jess yelling out for me to rush over to the bathroom to help her … pick up Elliott’s poop that rolled out of her diaper, two nuggets falling out, one landing on the tile floor while the other smashing on the floor mat
Catching up over the phone with my friend Brian Frankel. He’s launched a new start up called Cocoon, his company aiming to solve the problem of slimy mushrooms and slimy strawberries in the refrigerator. I had bought one of his new inventions mainly to support his vision (it’s always nice to support friends) but also I’m a huge fan of refrigerator organization and cleanliness. Unfortunately, the box arrived broken (looks like something heavy in the delivery truck landed on the box, crushing it into pieces)
Mental and Physical Health
At the top of the hour (not every hour, unfortunately) I hit the imaginary pause button, pulling my hands off the keyboard and stepping back from my standing desk to stretch my hamstrings and strengthen my hips with Asians squats
Graduate School
Watched no lectures yesterday, all the time (about 2 hours) dumped into polishing up the virtual CPU scheduler, adding a new “convergence” feature that skips the section of code that (re)pins the virtual CPUs to physical CPUs, skipping when the standard deviation falls 5.0% (an arbitrary number that I chose)
Wrestled with my program crashing. The crashes’s backtrace was unhelpful since the location of the code that had nothing to do with the code that I had just added.
Work
Attended a meeting lead by my manager, the meeting reviewing the results of the “Tech Survey”. The survey is released by the company every year, asking engineers to answer candidly to questions such as “Is your work sustainable?” or “Is your laptop’s hardware sufficient for your work?”. Basically, it allows the company to keep a pulse of how the developer experience is and is good starting point for igniting necessary changes.
Stepped through code written by a principle engineer, C code that promised to bound a binary search by trading off 2 bytes to serve as an index.
Family and Friends
Fed Elliott during my lunch. Was extremely tiring (but at the same time, enjoyable) chasing her around the kitchen floor, requiring me constantly squat and constantly crawl. She’s mobile now, working her way up to taking one to two steps.
Bathed Elliott last night and taught her how to touch her shoulders, a body part she’s been completely unaware of. Since she loves playing with my wedding right, I let her play with during our night time routine and last night I would take the ring, and place the ring on her infant sized shoulder, pointing to it and guiding her opposite hand to reach out to grab the ring.
Caught up with one of our friends over Facetime. Always nice to see a familiar face during COVID-19, a very isolating experience that all of society will look back on in a few years, all of us wondering if it just all a bad dream because that’s what it feels like
Miscellaneous
Got my second hair cut this year (damn you COVID-19) at nearby hair salon. I love the hair salon for a multiple reasons. First, the entire trip — from the moment I leave my house, to the moment I return back — takes 30 minutes, a huge time saver. Second, the stylist actually listens to what I want (you’d be surprised how many other stylists get offended when I tell them what I want and what I don’t want) and gives me a no non-sense hair cut. And third, the hair cut runs cheap: $20.00. What a steal! I don’t mind paying more for hair cuts (I was previously paying triple that price at Steele Barber).
Today
Mainly will just try to survive the day and not collapse from over exhaustion. If I can somehow afford the time, I’d like to nap this afternoon for half an hour. Will gladly trade off 30 minutes of lunch if that means not being zapped of all my energy for the remainder of the day.
Writing
Publish “Synchronization” notes (part 2)
Publish daily review (this one that I’m writing right here)
Mental and Physical Health
Attending my weekly therapy session today at 09:00 AM. Will be an interesting session given how entangled we got last week.
Graduate School
Write up the README for the two parts of my project
Change the directory structure of project 1 so that the submission validator passes
Submit the project to Canvas
Watch 30 minutes worth of lectures (if my tired brain can handle it today)
Work
Interview a candidate “on-site” later this afternoon
Continue troubleshooting unreproducible fuzzing failure (will try to tweak our fuzzer for a potential out of memory issue)
Family
Pack a couple more boxes with Jess. Only a couple more weeks and we move our family unit into a new home in Renton.
This morning my body woke me up later than usual. After a few blinks, I squeezed the corner of my Casio G-Shock watch, the green background lighting up and shining the time: 05:55 AM. Ugh. About an hour later than I wanted to wake up.
On one hand, I’m bummed because I won’t be able to squeeze in as much uninterrupted time before work but on the other hand, my body and brain probably needed the extra sleep. Otherwise, why “sleep in” ? I try to honor and listen to my body’s signals, another reason why over the past 5 years I’ve stopped setting an alarm clock and instead permitted my body to wake up naturally, whenever my body is ready.
My co-worker unintentionally making me chuckle. During my team’s daily stand up meeting yesterday, I had asked my co-workers how they were coping with all the smoke blanketing the Seattle skies. And my co-worker’s response caught me by surprise. She said that back home in India, there’s always a thick cloud of smoke always resting above their heads and really, the wildfire smoke in Seattle reminds her of home.
Mental and Physical Health
Yesterday I resumed my ritual of switching back and forth between sitting and standing (thank you Jarvis standing desk). At the top of every hour, I try to hit the imaginary pause button and stretch my hamstrings by reaching for the ground with my finger tips. Not much exercise but every little bit counts.
Graduate School
Started watching Barrier synchronization lectures. It’s so amazing how deep I am diving into computer science. I really do enjoy learning how to an OS system designer (maybe me somebody) implements primitive structures such as mutual exclusion and barrier synchronization.
Started updating virtual CPU scheduler code to support the notion of “convergence”. The idea is that if the underlying physical CPU utilization ever so slightly deviate (that exact percentage is yet to be determined) then the scheduler should leave them as is and not try to re-balance the work load.
Work
Scheduled an ad-hoc meeting with a principle engineer that took place that day, the two of us troubleshooting a fuzzing failure, the worst kind of failures: failures that cannot be reproduced.
Read a design proposal written up by a different principle engineer who evaluated different types of data structures. Realized that the data structure that I had envisioned us using will not meet performance requirements for IPv6 traffic
Family
Took dogs on a very short walk of about 15 minutes at the local park. I skipped walking them over the weekend because of the thick smoke but the two puppies were getting a bit restless so I compromised, sacrificing a (hopefully) very tiny bit of our long term health in order to get them the physical stimulation they needed for the rest of the day
Today
Quote of the day
Have you ever felt out of place in your place?
I pulled that quote from a rap line from the song Breathing (Part 2) by Hamzaa featuring Wretch 32 & Ghetts.
Most of my life, I always felt “out of place”. One instance of being out of place was during my teenage years and being one of the only (or perhaps the only) Vietnamese kids attending Calabasas high school, a high school where mostly everyone is white and where everyone thinks they are white.
Writing
Publish “Synchronization” notes
Publish daily review (this one that I’m writing right here)
Mental and Physical Health
Won’t be running in this smoke so instead, let’s spend 2 minutes (really, that’s all) throughout the day to get the heart pumping. Maybe some jumping jacks or some push ups. And of course, stretching the hamstrings and hip rotators while working behind by standing desk
Graduate School
Fix memory leak with my recent additions to the CPU scheduler
Start writing up documentation that will accompany the submission for project 1
Watch 15-20 minutes worth of lectures from the barrier synchronization series
Work
Meetings and meetings and meetings (not a really fun day) of sprint planning, Asians@ planning and development meetings, interview debrief
Miscellaneous
Hair cut at 4:00 PM. This will be the second hair cut this year, the last one taking place in June. Obviously I’m trying to minimize unnecessary interactions with other people but damn, I look like a shaggy dog with my heavy and coarse hair weighing me down.
My weekly review that normally takes place first thing in the morning on Sundays was completely derailed this time around, all because I could find the URL to a website that I had sworn I bookmarked for my wife’s birthday present. I ended up coughing up two hours of searching: searching directly on Reddit’s website (where I was 100% confident I stumbled upon the post), searching through 6 months of my Firefox browser history, and searching through 20 or so pages of Google Results.
I ultimately found the page after some bizarre combination of keywords using Google, the result popping up on the 6th page of Google (I would share the URL with you but I want to keep it tucked away for the next two week until my wife’s birthday or at least until her present arrives and I gift it to her).
How about you — when you stumble on something interesting on the internet, what steps do you take to make sure that you can successful retrieve the page again in the future? Do you simply bookmark the page using your browser’s built in bookmark feature? Do you tag that the entry with some unique or common label? Or do you store it away in some third party bookmarking service like pinboard? Or maybe you archive the entire contents of the page offline to your computer using DevonThink? Or something else?
So many options.
Ultimately, I don’t think the tool itself really matters: I just need to save the URL in a consistent fashion.
Writing
Published 15 blog posts (half of the number are from the daily review)
Got around to finally calling my Grandma and video chatting with her so that she could see Elliott, who has grown exponentially over the last couple months
Signed off on tons of paper work for the new house and pulled the trigger on selling a butt load of my Amazon stocks that will cover the down payment and the escrow costs that we’re going to get hit with on September 30th (my wife’s birthday)
Packed about 5 more boxes worth of our belongings (e.g. books, clothing, kitchen goods)
Music
Recorded about 5 different melodies and harmonies using the voice memo app on my iPhone, moving the recordings off my phone and sending them to my MacBook using AirDrop)
Attended my (zoom) bi-weekly guitar lesson with Jared, the lessons focusing on three areas: song writing (creative aspect), jamming (connecting with other musicians, mainly my little brother), developing a deeper understanding of the guitar (mastery).
Exercised maybe about 10 minutes in total combined for the entire week. Normally I’d be ashamed of myself but these days, I’m okay with slipping, cutting myself some slack. I’ll just rebuild the broken habit back up, ramping up slowly, aiming for just 2 minutes a day.
Graduate School
I’d estimate I put in roughly 15 hours into graduate school in order to read research papers, write code for project 1 (i.e. writing a virtual CPU scheduler and memory coordinator) and of course watch the Udacity lectures.
For the development project, majority of time gets eaten up trying to grok the API documentation to libvrt. In second place would be debugging crashes in my code (which is why I always riddle my code with assert statements, a practice I picked up working at Amazon).
I really enjoyed watching and taking notes for this past week’s lectures. I’m taking the class at the perfect time in my career and in my graduate studies, after taking graduate operating systems and after taking high performance computing architecture. Both these courses prepared me well and provided me the foundation necessary to more meaningfully engage with the lectures. What I mean by this is that instead of passively watching and scribbling down notes, I tend to frequently click on the video to pause the stream and try to anticipate what the professor is about to say or try to answer the questions he raises. This active engagement helps the material stick better.
Organization
Brother label maker
Tossed out the cheap $25.00 label marker from Target and instead invested in a high quality Brother PTD600V label maker. Well worth the investment.
Culled my e-mail inbox, dropping the unread count from hundreds down to zero (will need to perform same activity this week)
Work
Wrapped up my design for a new feature long, getting sign off from the technical leadership team at work. Only open action item will be to benchmark the underlying Intel DPDK’s library against IPv6 look ups (which I think I already have data for)
Yesterday was September 11. On this day, every year, Americans grieve and we are all reminded of the unforgettable day back in 2001 when the New York twin towers collapsed to the ground after being struck by the hijacked planes.
I sure remember the day.
I was about 12 years old at the time and on that weekday morning — like every other morning — I was sitting crossed legged in front of our living room television, eating cereal and watching cartoons (“Recess”, the best cartoon ever) before walking to school as a sixth grader. While balancing a spoonful of cereal and milk into my mouth, the channel on the CRT television switched unexpectedly to live news, news that was live streaming the planes nose diving into the New York twin towers, bringing the towers to their knees. As a child, I didn’t understand the implication of it all and I just remember burrowing my eyebrows and shrugging my shoulders, shutting off the television and heading to school.
The day following September 11 were unforgettable: there was an uptick of both subtle and not so subtle racism against Muslims.
Back then, my best friend’s name was Osama, and I recall an incident that still makes my blood boil 20 years later. Him and I along with 20 or so other innocent children were packed in the classroom, all of us waiting for our substitute teacher to arrive (not sure why exactly our teacher was absent that day). The teacher for the day, white male aged about 40-50 years old, and was taking roll call, working his way down the list of student’s names on the clipboard resting in his hands.
As he was running his finger down the list, he paused on Osama’s name, slowly lifting his gaze. He then spat out some flagrant racist comment, asking whether or not my 12 year old friend was a Jihad. Us student were stunned, confusion rippled throughout the room. And poor Osama, his head down in shame.
Being his best friend, I took it upon myself and I marched out the room, heading full speed towards the principle’s office. After arriving at his office, I explained the situation. What happens afterwords gets a bit fuzzy but I do recall never seeing that substitute teacher again.
This story reminds me the importance of speaking up for others, something I wrestle with these days. Lately, I bite my tongue because as an adult, realizing that it’s easy these days to offend people and I’m constantly evaluating the unique situation, taking in the context and trying to determine whether or not me speaking up for someone is warranted. Eh, it’s a never ending learning process.
Singing and playing guitar during lunch break with the the entire wolf pack. Sang my acoustic rendition of “Punching in a dream”
Watching an episode of “The Boys” with Jess while eating dinner. We both found the episode to be unnecessarily violent (no spoilers).
Mental and Physical Health
Sprinted full speed up and down the hill for about 2 minutes, all while wearing a mask (not only to protect myself again COVID-19, but because to prevent breathing in the wildfire smoke blanketing the entire pacific northwest). Apparently, cotton masks do not block smoke particles so I apparently inhaled some amount of smoke (I deserved my wife reprimanding me for running under these conditions)
Graduate School
Finished the “balancing” aspect of memory optimizer. My initial code was riddled with bugs, the program dropping the memory too fast and too much, causing the underlying guest operating systems to (presumable) swap and crash
Work
Back to back to meetings. Mostly administrative, a few with some value.
This was one of the rare (very rare) days where I ate lunch at my desk. I don’t want to make that a habit and cherish lunch time, the one hour of the day where my wife and I and get to (sort of) peacefully eat lunch with our daughter.
During sprint planning, our scrum master (a colleague on my team) was driving the conversation and asking during our retrospective how we could “improve” our velocity. I shared with her and everyone else that although I am always up for improving our performance and striving to deliver, I wanted to call out the big elephant in the room: we’re in the midst of a pandemic. Things are not okay. Things are not normal
Cherry-picked some of my git commits into other feature branches that our team will be deploying over the next few weeks
Today
Writing
Publish notes on CPU and device virtualization
Publish daily review (this one that I’m writing right here)
Publish the terminal output from the memory coordinator test cases and their expected outcomes
Music
Upload all the little melodies and harmonies captured on my iPhone.
Organization
Review OmniFocus’s forecast tab to get a sense of what meetings I have this week and any items that are due soon
Mental and Physical Health
Poor air quality due to wildfire smoke
Stay inside as much as possible and limit outdoor activity (will only walk the dogs) due to wildfire smoke. In lieu of outside exercise, I’ll throw down some push ups, some pull ups (with the door pull up bar) and some light hamstring stretches
Graduate School
Finish the “optimizer” portion of my memory coordinator
Finish the lecture on “Synchronization” (fascinating and challenging topic that reminds me of high performance computing architecture course, the concepts very similar)
Family
Pack up the house into our cardboard moving boxes
Bathe Elliott for our night time routine
Sing and play guitar during lunch again (what a treat that was yesterday)
Sign the final real estate contract for the new house that we are buying in Renton
Attempt to sell some of my Amazon stocks since we need the cash for our down payment for the house (not sure if socks can be sold over the weekend but let’s just and find out)
Follow up with landlord over text since they did not respond to my e-mail that I had sent around regarding ending our lease since we are moving
We often talk about work life balance, separating the two major parts of our lives. On some level, I agree with the philosophy, believe that work is work and life is life. But at least for me, what happens at work bleeds into my personal life, and vice versa.
When I have a shitty day at work, I feel despondent and mope around after hours and that impacts the mood for my wife and my daughter and my two dogs. In contrast, when I end the day on a good note, I tend to radiate with happiness. For example, yesterday I was really pleased with the work that I produced (i.e. finished delivering a design for a new feature) and as a result, when I closed the lid of my laptop shut at 05:00 pm sharp (this is the time Elliott and I bathe together), my energy levels were high and I was able to stay completely mentally and emotionally — not just physically — present with my daughter during our night time routine.
Listening to my veterinarian deliver news (over the phone) that both of the puppies (they’ll always be puppies in my heart) are healthy. The the little bump in Metric’s ear was just a benign cyst that they simply popped.
Eating a kick ass lunch: Jess whipped together an aesthetically pleasing lunch (equally tasty) consisting of a roasted cauliflower drizzled with pesto sauce and glazed pasta. All of this topped off with a blue berry pancake for a (lunch) dessert.
Pushing my design document over the finish line. No major objections from the technical leadership team with moving forwards with the project that will need to launch by Q1 2021
Watching an episode of “The Community” with Jess while eating dinner. Jess didn’t have to cut the dinner short since Elliott didn’t wake up so I consider that a little victory
Mental and Physical Health
Yesterday was extremely busy at work so not going to knock myself for this but looking back, I should’ve taken just 5 minutes out of the day to run up and down the hill to get blood flowing through my body, which (surprise surprise) helps with mental health.
Fixed a silly segfault in my memory_coordinator program. I had dynamically allocated memory on the heap (i.e. malloc system call) for my array of arrays but had incorrectly calculated the number of bytes, incorrectly passing in the wrong type when calling sizeof.
Work
Edited by design document, incorporating numbers and figures from AWS Networking’s document that I had asked them to put together
Presented my design document (for the second round) to the technical leadership team within my organization (i.e. Blackfoot)
Family
Moved us an inch closer towards finalizing the home loan, collecting documents and proof (e.g. lease contract, monthly mortgages, property tax) to provide for the underwriter
Took both puppies to the Vet to get checked up. Nothing major to report back: thank goodness.
Today
Song of the day
Discovered Hamzaa while listening to Spotify, the song showing up in my “Discover Weekly” playlist. I’ll definitely cover this song this song with my acoustic guitar.
Writing
Publish notes on memory virtualization
Publish daily review (this one that I’m writing right here)
Publish the terminal output from the memory coordinator test cases and their expected outcomes
Organization
Review OmniFocus’s forecast tab to get a sense of what meetings I have this week and any items that are due soon
Mental and Physical Health
Throw on shoes and run up and down our hill for 5 minutes (seriously better than nothing)
Graduate School
Continue with watching lectures on “Synchronization”
Meetings and meetings and meetings (not a really fun day) of sprint planning, Asians@ planning and development meetings, interview debrief
Family
Continuing packing the house with Jess. We’re a little more than 2 weeks away until we need to finish packing up the entire house and loading up the U-Haul
Today’s aim is to fill up 2 more packing boxes (and label them using my new Brother label maker) and tag them with a unique ID (I’m trying out this new system that I called the “The Global Index” … will report back on this on a separate post)
After freeing a spider into the front yard, I noticed that the coffee mug (in which I trapped the spider in) was decorated with a beautiful web that the spider must’ve spun overnight.
Almost every other day, I spot a spider dancing across the white walls of my bedroom. Instead of squishing them to death like I did when I was a little boy, I catch them and release them into the front of back yard, trapping them underneath a cup and sliding a 8×11 piece of paper underneath.
Received such a thoughtful and warm e-mail message from one of my recent subscribers, a classmate of mine. We had connected over LinkedIn and I originally reached out to him, thanking him for subscribing and essentially asked him what drew him to my blog. In this e-mail response, he sent me a touching message stating how he finds it inspirational that I’m able to share my stories on my blog and that I’m able to be vulnerable.
Mental Health
BLM (black lives matter) Poster hanging up on window
My therapist and I unexpectedly spent the entire 50 minute session untangling the tension between him and I, tension that developed when I brought that the most recent invoice he handed me included a charge for a session that I had cancelled.
I had originally wanted to kick off the session with some good news with my therapist, share some moments that had brightened my days. But as mentioned above, this conversation got derailed because of the incorrect invoice.
Cancelling my sessions happen regularly. Unfortunately, I cancel every 5 weeks due to the cadence in which I am “on call” for work. History shows that, on my current team at work, I will get paged: sometimes at 12:00 AM, sometimes at 3:00 AM, sometimes at 10:00pm. You just never know. As a result, I give advance notice and cancel my therapy sessions to avoid getting dragged out mid way through to handle an operational issue.
Under normal circumstances when cancelling a session, I take on the responsibility of making up for the sessions and finding another slot. But given that I’m a new father and we’re in the midst of the pandemic, I had asked him about 6 months ago if instead of trying to find another day to come into therapy (which is expensive in terms of time and just plain out infeasible with my schedule) and make up a missed session, he could just not charge me and instead we’ll just miss one sessions once every 5 weeks.
Long story short, I felt blinded sided that he would suddenly charge me when for the past 6 months he has not been charging me. For the remainder of the session, we basically worked through the conflict, talking about why he did what he did, how that made me feel, how it impacts our relationship and trust (short and long term), and so on.
Ironically, the emotional skills that I’ve developed with dealing with confrontation were learned right there in his office. That’s been a big part of my therapy over the last four years, learning how to take a stand and deal with conflict facing me, instead of always defaulting to my gut reaction: fleeing the situation. Of course, there are some situations in which some people simply cross boundaries and the conversation just needs to end. However, in most situations, conflict is not always a bad thing and in some ways, can nourish and grow a relationship.
Graduate School
Began working on the memory coordinator (part 2 of project 1), the assignment due in roughly 2 weeks (on September 21).
Work
Met for an hour over (Amazon) Chime with a colleague working in AWS Networking, an organization that we partner with — well they are sort of our customer — to deliver networking features for EC2 networking.
Participated in a ticket bash, all of us focusing on closing tickets — some human cut and some auto-cut by monitoring system — that crept into our queue over the last couple months
Today
Writing
Publish notes taken from watching yesterday’s lectures (or lectures from a few days ago)
Organization
Review OmniFocus’s forecast tab to get a sense of what meetings I have this week and any items that are due soon
Graduate School
Continue with watching lectures on “Synchronization”
Update Quip document in preparation for design review meeting (next item below)
Lead the second design meeting for a document that I put together for the new feature we’ll be launching in Q1 2021.
Meet with my manager for our weekly 1:1
Family
Take Metric and Mushroom both to the veterinarian at 11:15 today. Metric’s pointy German Shepherd (right) ear has sort of a little hole in it and looks as if some sort of inspect or parasite carved out pimple sized home. Mushroom developed some sort of allergic reaction on a small patch on her back, in the location where I had applied the flea medication (same one I’ve been applying every month for the last couple years).
Pour some of the smoothie that I make every morning into a sippy cup for Elliott and into a big girls cup for Jess
Finish collecting paperwork (i.e. statements for my rental property, etc) to nudge the underwriting process along
