Notes

To do: I should update the following with what awards I’ve already judged so far or will judge in the near future. Cover letter Hi, I am a Staff/Senior Software Development Engineer at the AWS division in Amazon, Seattle. I have more than 12 years of experience in the IT/software industry, almost 10 of that with Amazon. For the past 4 years, I’ve been working for AWS, as part of which I am building the “cloud” itself. I solve hard problems in distributed systems and help democratize the cloud for people around the globe. AWS has taught me deep expertise in running software at high scale. Before that, I spent almost 5 years in the advertising organization of Amazon. As part of that, I built automated systems that advertised for Amazon on social networks (like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest etc.). These systems would spend XX million dollars a year all without any human involvement! So, they had to be highly optimized on ad targeting, bidding and reporting - and I helped those. Long before that, I built the mobile business of India’s 2nd biggest e-commerce website from ground up. (You may still find some of my code running on https://www.snapdeal.com/.) I have been deeply involved with the internet for majority of my life. And would love to get an opportunity to contribute back. ...

Resources https://www.tradepressservices.com/: you can pay to build some parts of my profile. https://www.breakthroughusa.com/eb1-green-card-publications-ideal-for-stem/ Interviewing attorneys Ask lawyers: I want to put my best foot forward and I am in no rush. Can we take time (6 months or whatever)? Fees? What about RFEs? Covered through Met Life? Anyone in Amazon I can talk to? Possible bad outcomes of the petition: RFE. Denial: Appeal on denial: only 33 days to tell them you want to appeal. Different attorney. 3 motions or something. Infeasible, just ignore I should completely ignore these criteria: ...

US only. 6 cities. Want to be where millenials want to be. 2 types: Distribution warehouses. 2 closing next week. Multi-family. Minor: grocery and retail. 15% of portfolio. Minor: suburban office buildings, not skyscrapers. Multi-tenant. Altis will do monthly valuations. Lot of transparency. 3 year lock up period. 1099-DIV reporting. No need to file tax returns with any state.

Physical clocks aren’t reliable in a distributed system. (Basically, assume that each server has different timestamps all the time.) Therefore, logical clocks help. Two main algorithms: Lamport clocks. Version vectors. (Somewhat related to but different from “version clocks”. Haven’t dug into details though.) What are “events”? Server receives a message or request from a client. Inter-server communication (i.e. when a server receives message from another server). On differences, I won’t describe how the two algorithms work as that would be too much stuff to write down. However, I’ll describe key implications of the two. Lamport clocks. If a happened-before b, it implies L(a) < L(b). However, if you are given L(a) and L(b) such that L(a) < L(b), all that means is b did not happen-before a. You can’t deduce anything else. If you have a bunch of events, you can deduce a total order which is consistent with causality. So, if two events had a happened-before relationship, they will be ordered correctly in the result. However, you can’t pick any two events from the order and deduce that the one earlier had happened-before the other. Basically, the total order is some order which is consistent with causality. It is not the actual order in which events occured in physical time. Version vectors. Each data record is associated with a vector. Each element in the vector is associated with a server that had processed that record. a -> b implies V(a) < V(b), both ways. That’s the key difference from Lamport clocks. Given any two events and their version vectors, you can identify whether one of them happened-before the other or they were concurrent. Important note: happens-before has nothing to with whether one event happened before the other in physical time. Instead, it means whether they are causally connected: one caused the other. Helpful resources: ...

Docker stores container logs in a local file and doesn’t rotate them by default. Add something like the following to /etc/docker/daemon.json to setup rotation. { "log-driver": "json-file", "log-opts": { "max-size": "10m", "max-file": "2" } } Do a systemctl restart docker to restart Docker daemon. Also, this config only applies to new containers. So, recreate them by doing something like docker-compose up -d --force-recreate foo. json-file is the default log format and it might be a good idea to stick with it. For e.g., Promtail doesn’t work with local.

Just search for something like “Ghost and Hugo” on Google or YouTube and you’ll easily find stories of people moving from one to the other. They’ll even cite the same reason (such as Hugo is just a static site generator) for both directions of the move! Today, I store both blog posts and notes on this website. And I was thinking of decoupling them into 2 websites instead: Ghost and Wikijs respectively. ...

Seems to offer a nice collection of browser based apps: Main website: https://www.kasmweb.com/ Firefox within a browser: https://hub.docker.com/r/kasmweb/firefox Could be useful if I want to access the web from a non-trusted or non-personal computer. There are more: https://www.kasmweb.com/images. For e.g., Ubuntu desktop in a browser.

Nice collection of scripts that I can run on Proxmox to achieve some common scenarios. https://tteck.github.io/Proxmox/ or https://github.com/tteck/Proxmox

Covid-19 upended our lives at the start of 2020. It was a quintessential black swan event: something I never imagined could happen in the modern age and took me (and probably the whole world) by surprise. I remember reading an article during the early days of the pandemic that said something along the lines of “this could be a big deal; even though people around you are acting normal, you are allowed to be worried; and, finally, it wouldn’t be a bad idea if you prepared yourself a bit”. Truth be told , I didn’t take it seriously but did act on it. I wound up a couple of friends, rented a Zipcar and drove down to Walmart in Renton to “stock up as Americans”. In hindsight, I may just have wanted an excuse from work and this was one. We shopped without masks because we hadn’t taken the pandemic seriously enough at the time to purchase some, and didn’t buy too much because we lived in small apartments. ...

A shallow research on the internet tells me the following are good brands for drip coffee machines: Bunn. (Its ommercial products are fantastic, home ones are probably okay too.) Bonavita. Technivorm Moccamaster.