Rahul gives unsolicited advice

    I love Chain Bear for my F1 news .

Kurzgesagt and CGP Grey are two of my favorite YouTube channels and I watched this video from Kurzgesagt yesterday night, which reminded me of the older CGP Grey video. I love knowing what goes into producing the amazing content on these channels. The CGP Grey video is especially interesting because he talks about the content production process in the context of understanding how a mistake was made and dissects where all in the production process they could have/should have noticed and fixed the error. Wait a second. This actually just reminded me of another favorite channel of mine, Every Frame a Painting .

I've been watching a looooot of Scott Hanselman lately and in one of his videos, he googles for the sentence "penny pinching in the cloud" and a bunch of his articles are the top hits. He talks about how he blogs about things as a way of maintaining notes for his future self. My articles might not be top hits on google for any sentence but I can still find them in my blogpost history. Over the weekend, I spent a little bit of time profiling a Python GUI application. It's been a while since I profiled Python code and every single time I forget how to set things up and get it working. There are the usual Python standard library modules cProfile and pstats but there are a lot of powerful visualisation techniques that help you better understand the profiling results. First of all, when you are profiling a GUI application (or profiling anything for that matter) in Python, the first question to answer is what exactly are you trying to measure? In my case, what I was real...

Start watching the video but once you understand the puzzle, pause the video and try solving the puzzle by yourself. I figured out the key insight to solve the puzzle after playing around for a few minutes and I am on a high right now :D Also, if you don't already follow and subscribe to 3Blue1Brown, you really _really_ should.

An alternative title for this post is : "What you should expect from a good engineering manager?" I started reading The Manager's Path and the second paragraph in the first chapter poses this question. I think it was a rhetorical question and not one the author asked to provoke thought/discussion. But here we are. I abruptly put the book down (well, the tablet) and started writing. Leadership and/or mentorship are always on the back of my mind, mainly because I want to lead one day and I would like to be good at it. I also want to constantly grow and I would like to be mentored. One day, maybe I'll be good enough that I will be able to mentor others. Aside : There is a separate discussion to be had about whether your technical manager should also be your technical mentor but let's leave that aside for now. Given that, here is how I would like to be managed (as a software developer): Give me context about the team and/or the company, Give me an introduction to the...

  I'm a traitor to my "race" and gender and culture. These are boxes to contain and divide us. ... The debt of privilege is massive, yet it is like any debt. You repay little by little, as you can. You never forget it, and you never justify it. From  Five Years, Five Wishes . Over time I learned that if you chat with a stranger, in the course of any kind of interaction (like buying a hot dog, or groceries) they'll chat back with a beam of pleasure. Slowly, like a creeping addiction to coffee, this became my drug of choice. In time it became the basis, and then the goal of my work: to go to strange places and meet new people. I love the conferences because you don't need an excuse. Everyone there wants, and expects, to talk. I rarely talk about technical issues. Read the code, if you want that. From A Protocol for Dying .    This is how it happens: we construct, and then when we reach a plateau, the wolves come along, destroy what we make, and liberate us to go fo...

I have known about Chaos Monkey for a while now. If you didn't know, Chaos Monkey is a tool that Netflix developed and uses to test the resilience of it's network. Chaos and Monkey seems redundant because I don't think a Monkey's behavior in an engineering environment can be predicted but yeah, the idea is to make unpredictable changes to the software engineering environment of the application to see what happens. And more importantly, to ensure that the software is immune to such chaotic events. What I didn't know until now is the Simian Army . Latency Monkey Conformity Monkey Doctor Monkey Janitor Monkey 10-18 Monkey Chaos Gorilla Finally, "Chaos Monkey" is obviously obviously a genus with various subspecies   Simius Mortus Simius Quies Simius Amputa Simius Cogitarius Simius Plenus Simius Delirius Simius Desertus Simius Nonomenius Simius Noneccius Simius Amnesius Simius Nodynamus Simius Politicus Simius Tardus Simius Perditus Simius is Latin for ape, m...