Daily Review – Day ending in 2020/09/01

Yesterday

Writing

• Blogged and published an entry for my daily review
• Blogged and published an entry that snapshots my understanding before starting on project 1 of advanced operating systems: writing a scheduler and writing a memory coordinator

Music

• E-mailed the singing instructor that I’ve been seeing for the last couple years, informing her that lately I’ve been too busy and had to shift around my priorities, now that I’ve stepped into fatherhood. I sorely miss singing and felt that the activity brought a breathe of fresh air into my life. Maybe I can continue and maybe I can do one off lessons: that’s always an option.

Graduate School

• Starting working on project 1 by ensuring that I can launch the virtual machines inside of my virtual box environment. Ran into a slew of issues that I’ve document and will publish on this blog

Work

• Presented and my design document for a new feature/service that AWS will be offering in the future. I had to shake off my nervousness, a feeling I get despite how well prepared and despite how number of years I’ve practiced and polished my public speaking skills
• Starting debugging a crash discovered by our Fuzzer. I never dealt directly with the fuzzer so this is a great learning opportunity to not only fix a problem but deeper understand what the fuzzer exactly is doing

Friends and Family

• Bathed Elliott last night. She only lasted about 5 minutes (about 1/2 to 1/3 of the time we usually take a bathe for) since she was so sleepy, despite her clocking in a one and a half hour nap, an hour longer than her other naps. Maybe she’s going through some sort of growth spurt? Maybe she’s sleeping better because I hung up curtains in room that shield her from the setting sun?
• Video chatted with Martin, the two of us discussing software and architecture design for an authentication system he is working on. Nice that I can share my thoughts around trade offs, trade offs that I’ve picked up from both working at Amazon over the years and from graduate school. For example, talking about the trade offs of caching and caching is not free: need to tackle cache consistency and cache coherency.
• Panicked panicked panicked. The offer that we put in on the house the day before has been accepted and my wife and I are officially pending on a new house located in Renton. Although I’m nervous and scared and will miss North Seattle, I know that this relocation is the right step for our family. Elliott needs more space and seeing her crawl around the living room — over and over and over again — reaffirms my decision. Not only that, but I can finally build myself a real work from home office, one that feels warm and one that I can call my own.

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

• Revisit the open comments from design review and follow up with AWS Networking teams

Family

• Check work calendar and check if I can perform the home inspection at 2:00 PM on Thursday

What are you grateful for?

Despite the fact that we’re in the midst of a pandemic, despite that the massive layoffs in America and 10% unemployment rate,  I’m fortunate enough to be in a position to have earned and saved enough money to buy a house. I feel both very blessed and also guilty at the same time. I acknowledge my hard work and perseverance but also acknowledge that I could not have done this on my own: so many people have helped me along the way in my life. I must continue to return the favor.

Feelings

• Simultaneously excited and nervous about buying and moving into a new home