Notes

I am one of those people who function better by writing things down. One day, I realized that most of my notes don’t have to be private, so here they are - my second brain. Be warned that, if you stumble upon something here that doesn’t make sense to you, it isn’t meant to!

Approach to prepare for system design interviews

Over time, I’ve compiled a giant list of resources for learning the theory behind distributed systems. It has so much content that it’s intimidating and has its fair share of heavy research papers. I just realized that it’d be foolhardy to try to consume all that content. My goal is to be well-prepared for system design interviews and passively consuming and trying to memorize the stuff in these resources won’t help with that. So, I am going to keep them aside and focus on more important things. Those are: ...

Resources for distributed systems

There is no dearth of resources where I can learn the theory behind distributed systems. Here are some meta lists (and some of these contain more such lists). However, how much of this will help with preparing for system design interviews, that’s questionable. https://github.com/checkcheckzz/system-design-interview https://github.com/resumejob/system-design-algorithms https://aws.amazon.com/builders-library. This is more operations-focused as opposed to system design. https://github.com/binhnguyennus/awesome-scalability - a big collection of articles. Not all of them are relevant. https://martinfowler.com/articles/patterns-of-distributed-systems/ https://github.com/theanalyst/awesome-distributed-systems - looks good. Some of my favorite technical papers. Summaries of a bunch of concepts. https://github.com/karanpratapsingh/system-design https://github.com/donnemartin/system-design-primer

Welcome 2023

I don’t take new year goals, probably because they induce anxiety if I don’t stick to them. Instead, I think in terms of themes, a list I can look back throughout the year. So, here’s such a list for 2023: I’ve already collected a a lot of good content that I haven’t consumed. (This includes books, music and side-project ideas.) I’d like to stop collecting more and chug through what I already have. Staying healthy will obviously be high priority. I’d also like to go out in nature more. I want to stay away from new tools (in terms of software or services) and continue using those I already know to achieve my real goals. Less passive content consumption - for e.g., Hacker News, Reddit, news headlines, etc. But I do want to understand more deeply some topics from the world around me. For that, I am thinking Economist, YouTube and gradually curating a list of blogs etc. Research papers are a good idea. Writing blogs can be another good way to go deep into sone topics.

Code Crafters, and other project-based tutorials

The projects here seem to be short, well-defined and decent way to familiarize with internals of a few technologies (such as Redis, Docker etc.) https://app.codecrafters.io/tracks This repo also seems to be good: https://github.com/codecrafters-io/build-your-own-x. For e.g., write and OS in Rust - complicated and likely not useful for me. https://github.com/jepsen-io/maelstrom#documentation - uses Ruby though.

De-DRM Audible books

Some open-source tools that allow de-DRM-ing Audible books: https://github.com/rmcrackan/Libation - seems to allow signing into your Audible account so that you can automate the process to some extent. https://audible-converter.ml

De-DRM my Kindle and Audible purchases?

I recently read couple of posts on Hacker News and Reddit where people claimed that Amazon banned their account when they issued a chargeback through their credit card. Consequently, they lost access to all their Kindle and possibly Audible books. That got me thinking that it’d be a good idea if I took un-DRMed backups of my content on these services, lest something similar happens to me for any reason. ...

Follow up to Crafting Interpreters

It’d be a cool side-project to implement a programming language. Lua is a good candidate as it seems to be small and comes with a test suite that I can reuse to verify the validity of my code. I could make it more challenging, a lot more challenging actually, if I tried to do that in a language that’s new to me, such as Rust.

HVAC technicians near home

Adams Heating & Air Conditioning (425) 598-0656 https://maps.app.goo.gl/pU8LcKZaKHu2TpgK7?g_st=ic $99 annual fee. Repairs on top with 10% discount. Evergreen State Heat & AC (425) 252-3114 https://maps.app.goo.gl/7yk85EsZkToNQ8gW9?g_st=ic $360 service call. Warren Heating & Cooling (425) 366-7742 https://maps.app.goo.gl/DYvCrcRNotr9CsJD6?g_st=ic CM Heating (425) 259-0550 https://maps.app.goo.gl/r8kceeQk1urhu8qh8?g_st=ic $139

Good games for M1 Mac

I was looking for games that will run well on my M1 MacBook. I already bought Disco Elysium and I found 2 more that I can try in future: Factorio. Baldur’s Gate 3. (Its hardware requirements could be high though.)

Lunar Vim

This tool looks nice: https://www.lunarvim.org/ Has sane/opinionated defaults for using NeoVim as an IDE for some programming languages. So, can be a good alternative to paid IDEs like Jetbrains'.