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Category: Word of the day

Daily Review – Day ending in 2020/08/31
Yesterday

Most interesting part of yesterday was a 1 on 1 video Chime chat that my co-worker scheduled with me. What started off with me stepping through our code base (for a set of features I added to the dataplane) morphed into a lengthy discussion around mental health and burning out and the idea of feeling confident in our own abilities. They had shared with me that they were starting to feel physically ill and after paying visits to the doctor for a full body check up, they discovered their symptoms manifest from mental health issues.

I’m very familiar with these feelings and can empathize.

In turn, I shared that I prioritize mental health and well being above all else and that I attend weekly therapy sessions (for the past four years) to deal with very similar issues that they are encountering: learning how to set boundaries, learning how to believe in oneself (i.e. imposter syndrome). It’s not as if I’ve completely overcome and mastered these problems; in fact, I wrestle with these issues — every day — but I now have have tools and data points to support me.

Although I love working as a software engineer, I sometimes wonder if I would pivot into a position or line of work where I can directly help people. It feels meaningful.

Writing
- Kept up with my writing cadence, publishing two small blog posts (a daily review and summary notes for the SPIN operating system structure)
Music
- Sang and played my own original guitar song I titled “Elliott’s in the house” for little Elliott while she was bouncing up and down on the couch while dinner, her mom guiding spoon fulls of avocado and noodles in her dime sized mouth
Graduate School
- Read first paper “SPIN”, performing a first pass on the paper (good to reinforce the learning material since there’s so much information packed into the lectures)
- Finished watching lectures on “Introduction to Virtualization” (learned that with paravirtualization, less than 2% code modification is necessary to integrate nicely with the underlying hypervisor)
Work
- Represented my team at the weekly operations meeting for my organization, stepping through all the high severity issues that I encountered and how they affected our metrics
- Finished a first draft of my design document, a paper that I am presenting to my organization today
- Met with a colleague of mine and confirmed that he will be participating in my fireside chat that I am organizing on behalf of Asians@ Amazon (I’m on the professional and development committee)
Family
- Gathered all the necessary documents (e.g. 2 months of pay stubs, last 2 years of W-2, etc) to submit to our lender since we needed to send an offer in for a house by today and needed a preapproval letter.
Today

Organization
- Plan day and week out by reviewing OmniFocus forecast events
- Process e-mail inbox down to zero
- Migrate sticky notes (written down while walking dogs in the morning) into writing tracker and OmniFocus
Graduate School
- Begin second series of lectures for advanced operating systems, lectures on “Memory Virtualization” (exciting stuff, I think)
Work
- Polish one pager design document for work and present
- Review dashboard in preparation for organization wide, weekly operations meeting
Family
- Morning routine of walking dogs at local Northacres park, blending a strawberry and banana smoothie (wait: no much coconut milk so that’s out of the question), eating lunch together, bathing Elliott as part of her night time routine
- Put together loan documents so that we can get a pre-approval for house that we are putting an offer in
Word of the day

insolent – adjective (adj) – showing a rude and arrogant lack of respect.

My strict teacher does not tolerate insolent behavior in her classroom

What are you grateful for?

I’m glad I’m writing down what I’m grateful for because its so easy for me to get trapped inside my own brain, my own world, when work (on call specifically) feels like a tornado.
- Jess being an amazing mom (so patient, so communicative) and leading parenting my example
Feelings
- I had lamented and avoided writing a paper at work and realized, after setting ink on paper for just a few minutes, I actually enjoyed the task but had to overcome my own fear of “not knowing enough” or “looking stupid” in front of my colleagues
- As mentioned above in the summary, I feel good when I can help and serve others. Not in a purely intellectual way, but mentally and emotionally. This is important and perhaps will steer me in a new (or same or different) direction with my career
September 1, 2020
Daily Review – Day ending in 2020/08/30
Yesterday

Writing
- Wrote and published an article on Time Management Tip #1: Pomodoro Technique. How I use the technique and how I’ve adjusted it to fit my needs.
Music
- Had my bi-weekly virtual guitar lesson with Jared. This was the first lesson back, after he took a 1.5 month sabbatical, a vacation he deserves and a vacation that he takes once a year. During the lesson, we didn’t actually focus on any mechanics of guitar this time, which was fine by me because instead, we had a lengthy discussion around where we want to take guitar lessons: what’s the point and what do I want to work towards. More on this in a separate blog post.
Graduate School
- Submitted both homework assignments (apparently a day before it was due: so hooray me) and watched the video lectures while sitting in the back seat of the car, while my wife drove us from Seattle to Renton (see house hunting below, under family section).
Organization
- Miss: I had a scheduled call at 06:00 PM PST with a fellow class mate and I missed the chat. For two reasons: my phone died on the way home and two the event was not scheduled in my calendar, no alerts or notifications. Fortunately, he was still online at the time so we were able to meet over Google Hangouts despite me being 30 minutes late or so.
Family
- House hunted in Renton, viewing three homes and one of which we will submit an offer. We’ll go in at listing price and per our realtor, a friend of my sisters, escalate to about 20k above if there are competing offers. I could really see Jess and I living in the home, the square footage practically doubling the size of our current rental. Funny how having kids changes things. Up until a week or two ago, I opposed the idea of moving to the suburbs, opposed to moving away from Maple Leaf/North Seattle: all favorite local cafes are within walking distance, the amazing off leash dog parks like Magnuson, top notch vegan restaurants. But since COVID hit, my view has changed. Based off of the amount of time we spend at home, which is about 23 out of the 24 hours in the day, I’d love for Elliott to have a little more space, more than the 15 square feet of crawling space that we have now.
Today

Organization
- Plan day and week out by reviewing OmniFocus forecast events
- Process e-mail inbox down to zero
- Migrate sticky notes (written down while walking dogs in the morning) into writing tracker and OmniFocus
Graduate School
- Begin on lecture series for the week, the lecture focusing on virtualization (curious what this means)
- Write up notes taken over the weekend on L3 Microkernel, SPIN, and Mach, three different underlying OS structures, each with their own trade offs
Work
- Finish one pager design document (due tomorrow)
- Review dashboard in preparation for organization wide, weekly operations meeting
Family
- Morning routine of walking dogs at local Northacres park, blending a strawberry and banana smoothie (wait: no much coconut milk so that’s out of the question), eating lunch together, bathing Elliott as part of her night time routine
- Put together loan documents so that we can get a pre-approval for house that we are putting an offer in
Bonus Image

Elliott standing up at the beach

Word of the day

decry – adjective (adj) – publicly denounce

“SPIN and Exokernel used Mach as a basis for decrying Microkernel-based design”

What are you grateful for?

I’m glad I’m writing down what I’m grateful for because its so easy for me to get trapped inside my own brain, my own world, when work (on call specifically) feels like a tornado.
- To be in a financial position to even be looking to buy a home in the midst of COVID-19
Feelings
- Nervous about the move. Just like Jess. Leaving behind North Seattle is scary: we’ve grown to love the city. Will we regret it? Maybe. But the way I see it is that this decision (of moving to Renton) is not a one-way door: we can always move back and rent in North Seattle. Sure, we might not get the same awesome rental that we been living in for 4+ years but that’s a fair trade off. We are doing the right thing by listening to our gut and being heedful to our fears.
August 31, 2020
Daily Review – Day ending in 2020/08/27
What’s your chief aim for today

Learning that while I’m on call for my team, I very rarely hit my targets for the day (see section on “How did yesterday go”). Not only that, but I’m drained by the end of the day, little to no CPU cycles left for studying (although this window of time is ripe, since Elliott is asleep). Nonetheless, I’ll still call out what I want to accomplish today since these little tasks, when added together, help me fulfill my long term goals (a separate page for this will be pinned up on my blog soon).
- Writing
  - Write and publish one piece on this blog
- Graduate School
  - Complete typing up answers for assignment #1
  - Edit answers for pre-lab assignment
  - Watch and take notes on second module in advanced operating systems (Lesson 2)
- Organization
  - Review Inbox items sitting in OmniFocus
  - Scan projects sitting in my OmniFocus
- Work
  - Continue to chip away at writing one-pager design for a prototype for new feature at work
  - Survive today’s on call and flurry of operational issues that may arise
How did yesterday go?

Basically, when I’m call, the entire day is blurry, the day flashing by right before my eyes. During the day, I’m in a completely different state, a reactive mode, dealing with whatever gets thrown at me from auto cut tickets to Chime messages or Slack messages or e-mails. Chaotic days like this put me in a despondent state.
- Another emotionally draining day, thanks to the on call operations for the week. I got paged at 12:00 AM and after troubleshooting for about half an hour, I was unable to fall back asleep for at least another 45 minutes. When getting woken up in the middle of the night, I find that there’s a very small window — about 15 minutes — in which I can fall back asleep. After that amount of time has elapsed, falling back asleep requires serious deep breathing
- Because of the interrupted sleep, I was unable to wake up early and use that morning slot to squeeze in studying before work. I’ll borrow back some time during the day to make up for it though. Oh yea, I also am a bit flustered that I was unable to comfortably hang out out with my daughter and wife and dogs because I did end up getting paged this morning (at around 07:00 am). Fortunately, we had already walked at the park so I was nearby my laptop: so no breach in service level agreement (SLA).
- Did not get to put any study time in (as mentioned above) so I’ll need to carve out time today to catch up with watching videos lectures and typing up my homework assignment for advanced operating systems.
Word of the day

remiss – adjective (adj) – lacking care or attention to duty; negligent.

“it would be very remiss of me not to pass on that information”

What are you grateful for?

I’m glad I’m writing down what I’m grateful for because its so easy for me to get trapped inside my own brain, my own world, when work (on call specifically) feels like a tornado.
- My German Shepherd dog (Metric) is in good health (she eats raw, gets daily exercise) and behaves wonderfully with my daughter. I do feel a pang in my heart when I notice small signs that she’s aging, signs like an additional grey whisker sprouting out.
- Jess ordering two delicious vegan sandwiches for lunch, sandwiches glazed with moist hummus and filled with soft chick peas. Yummy.
Feelings
- As mentioned above, on call operations for my team (and many other teams in Amazon) can drain every ounce of energy. Every time my phone sounds an alarm, my body releases cortisol and stress washes over me. Granted, there are some weeks where very little issues crop up: but that’s the not the norm as of late. But is this how I want to live my life 24×7, once every 5-6 weeks? Sure, the work is rewarding and challenging and intellectually stimulating but one entire week of pure exhaustion may not be worth the cost
- Seeing my wife watch over both my daughter and niece (Maiya) sends butterflies to my stomach. She’s patient and gentle with them, two important qualities for anyone.
References
1. https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2020/08/lovecraft-country/615259/
August 28, 2020
Daily Review – Day ending in 2020/08/26
What’s your chief aim for today
- Writing
  - Write and publish one piece on this blog
- Graduate School
  - Complete typing up answers for assignment #1
  - Edit answers for pre-lab assignment
  - Watch and take notes on second module in advanced operating systems (Lesson 2)
- Organization
  - Review Inbox items sitting in OmniFocus
  - Quickly glance over project
- Work
  - Continue to chip away at writing one-pager design for a prototype for new feature at work
  - Survive today’s on call and flurry of operational issues that may arise
How did yesterday go?
- Realized that checking my work laptop first thing in the morning for just that one little thing doesn’t work: I get sucked in and begin tackling other items, including checking my e-mail inbox, or slack messages, or whatever. So my rule of thumb is to not flip open the lid of my work laptop until I am ready to fully work
- Work drained me. All the back to back operational issues not only enervated me but derailed my entire day, something I should just expect since on call is so variable
- Being on call yesterday, I was unable to break away from the laptop while my mom was visiting Seattle, not getting to spend much quality time with her. Bummer. These feelings make me reevaluate work (see Feelings section)
Word of the day

underscore – verb (n) – to underline or to emphasize

Even Atlanta, Donald Glover’s Twin Peaks–esque FX series, toys with the supernatural and the surreal to underscore points about race made in its quieter moment¹.

In an internal memo, Stan Deal, chief executive of Boeing Commercial Airplanes and Greg Hyslop, Boeing’s chief engineer, sought to underscore the message that safety is the company’s top priority ²

What are you grateful for?
- My sister delivering a healthy little girl, her birthing free from any major complications (unless you consider an epidural a complication)
Feelings
- As mentioned above, on call operations for my team (and many other teams in Amazon) can drain every ounce of energy. Every time my phone sounds an alarm, my body releases cortisol and stress washes over me. Granted, there are some weeks where very little issues crop up: but that’s the not the norm as of late. But is this how I want to live my life 24×7, once every 5-6 weeks? Sure, the work is rewarding and challenging and intellectually stimulating but one entire week of pure exhaustion may not be worth the cost
- Seeing my wife watch over both my daughter and niece (Maiya) sends butterflies to my stomach. She’s patient and gentle with them, two important qualities for anyone.
References
1. https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2020/08/lovecraft-country/615259/
August 27, 2020
Daily Review – 2020/08/26
What’s your chief aim for today
- Write and publish one piece on this blog
- Review Inbox and Important projects sitting in OmniFocus (this was a miss yesterday)
- Put in 1 hour study session before and after work for advanced operating systems (seems unlikely since I woke up at 05:00 instead of 04:30 and made the fatal mistake of checking my work laptop first)
- Continue to chip away at writing one-pager design for a prototype for new feature at work
- Drive from Seattle to Renton in the early morning (while express lanes are flowing in our direction) to visit my sister and my new niece (Charly) who was born just a few hours ago. Looking forward to seeing my mom, who lives in OC but who is visiting us up in sunny Seattle for a few days now that Charly has arrived
How did yesterday go?
- Pretty good (although Jess says that I’m always a bit more on the edge, a little less patient, when I’m on call and getting paged throughout the week
- Felt good about squeezing in early morning and after work study sessions. I admit that I find myself taking the longer path on some homework and reading assignments, but then I remind myself that my purpose of graduate school is not to just get a master of computer science degree but to learn, to grow, to change the way my mind thinks. So I find solace in my decisions to reading a little more than necessary, generating and answering my own questions while reading the textbook
- I did not review my inbox (or personal e-mail, really) in neither OmniFocus nor my excel backed project list. Need to remind myself that to trust the system of getting things done (GTD), I need to establish a routine of extracting to-do items out of my brain and into the same location — every time. And of course, reviewing that list (which as I mentioned as part of this post, I did not do)
- But I am consistently writing, editing and most importantly, publishing on my blog, a strong cadence unfolding. In some ways, I am carrying out Jerry Seinfield’s “Don’t break the chain” strategy¹, a self motivation tool
Word of the day

The men set off in fear and trepidation

A few days ago, five-star basketball recruit Keion Brooks was asked about his level of interest in the Louisville Cardinals and expressed some trepidation².

trepidation – noun (n) – a feeling of fear or agitation about something that may happen

What are you grateful for?
- Jess dropping off snacks at my desk, fresh slices of peaches and toast covered with peanut butter helping me relax while tackling on call
Feelings
- After not speaking to my dad for 2 months and then very briefly video chatting with him on his birthday (August 23rd), he now is suddenly active on WhatsApp, sending Jess and I random links to Facebook, his way of communicating with us. I’m unsure how to engage with him: I’m never sure actually, how we — as a family — should move forward when we’re this entangled since dealing with addiction in the family is a complicated matter. Oh well. I’m not in this alone: I have Jess. And we’ll sort it out. And also, I need to remind myself that I need not figure this out all alone.
References
1. https://medium.com/@MrBuzzFactor/jerry-seinfelds-productivity-hack-don-t-break-the-chain-8d1944b8323d
2. https://grammarist.com/usage/trepidation/
August 26, 2020
Daily Review – 2020/08/25
What’s your chief aim for today
- Recover from waking up from 03:00 AM from being woken up from operational issue
- Write and publish one piece on this blog
- Review Inbox and Important projects sitting in OmniFocus
- Put in 1 hour study session before and after work for advanced operating systems
- Chip away at writing one-pager design for a prototype for new feature at work
Word of the day

You cannot geld the human race

Geld – verb (v) – to deprive of vitality or vigor

What are you grateful for?
- Having a steady income and job that I enjoy despite being in the midst of COVID-19
Feelings
- Tired as I type this out since I got paged out of bed for 03:00 AM for a NOP (no operation) issue at work
Yesterday
- Woke up naturally (i.e. without alarm) at around 04:15
- Felt good about being able to connect the dots between theory and practice (when reviewing out to generate virtual private numbers using a BITMASK and SHIFT operations)
- Followed my morning Routine (e.g. walk dogs at local park, blended fruit and vegetable smoothie, warm up chai, write)
- Pulled into Discount Tires for scheduled appointment to replace punctured front left tire
- Finished reading chapter on paging systems while waiting for tired to be replaced
- Recorded a short little melody and harmony on my iPhone while playing guitar for Elliott and Jess during lunch
- Ad-hoc shopping at Target to pick up size 4 diapers, bottle scrubber for the kitchen, plastic hooks to hang the broom, stasher reusable zip lock bags
- Ordered and picked up sushi for dinner (avocado rolls, cucumber rolls, croquette and vegetable mini tempera udon soup)
- Chopped up fresh vegetables and stored them away in the (just purchased) stasher bags
- Cut up Jess’s recently purchased book, scanning the book using my Fujitsu IX1500 ScanSnap and then converting the document in mobi format using calibre (new open source software I discovered while searching stack overflow)
August 25, 2020
Word of the day “Notwithstanding”
Today’s word of the day is “Notwithstanding”.

Definition – preposition – in spite of

Example Sentences

notwithstanding the evidence, the consensus is that the jury will not reach a verdict¹

Notwithstanding his nervousness, the young man looked his interviewer directly in the eyes as he answered the questions²

His nervousness notwithstanding , the young man looked his interviewer directly in the eyes as he answered the questions.

Synonyms
- Nevertheless
- Nonetheless
- However
References
1. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/notwithstanding
2. https://www.grammarly.com/blog/notwithstanding/
August 24, 2020