Notes

On 2023: Somewhere in the middle of the year, I was wondering how great it’d be if 2 things happened before the year closed: I got promoted to Principal Engineer and the US government approved my EB-1A petition for a green card. Both of these seemed tall order back then, primarily because many things were outside my control. However, quite incredibly, they both went through! We finally visited Europe. It was second time for me, albeit after almost 10 years, and first for wife and kiddo. We also traveled to Big Island, Hawaii. So, travel wise, we did good. I spent a lot of time on side projects, probably more than I should have. For instance, I improved my self-hosting setup, switch from iOS to GrapheneOS-on-Pixel and got started on smart home automation. I want to continue those things next year but through a better time-commitment routine. I am also grateful that everyone in family is healthy and doing well. Especially, the kiddo is groing up well. As for 2024: ...

https://sandstorm.de/de/blog/post/my-first-steps-with-nix-on-mac-osx-as-homebrew-replacement.html https://juliu.is/tidying-your-home-with-nix/ https://xeiaso.net//blog/nix-flakes-1-2022-02-21/ https://github.com/the-nix-way https://github.com/the-nix-way/nome https://nixos-and-flakes.thiscute.world/introduction/ Recipes: https://nixos.org/manual/nixos/stable/index.html Nice configs I could copy-paste from: List of configs, go crazy! https://nixos.wiki/wiki/Configuration_Collection https://github.com/dustinlyons/nixos-config Similar: https://github.com/MatthewCroughan/nixcfg https://github.com/Misterio77/nix-starter-configs https://gitlab.com/rprospero/dotfiles/-/blob/master/flake.nix - maybe simpler to follow. https://github.com/sdugre/nix - might be good too. https://github.com/fbegyn/nixos-configuration - pretty thorough. https://github.com/reckenrode/nixos-configs https://github.com/mitchellh/nixos-config - MacOS and Linux VMs. Seems to have a good mkSystem setup. https://github.com/borgmanJeremy/nix_config - another simple setup. Likely keeps system and home separate.

Sometime back, I was thinking of setting up a new home page for myself on the internet (and phase out this website). Here are some interesting tools that I found for that: https://john-doe.neocities.org/ https://github.com/cfenollosa/bashblog Seems to be more focused on proper blogs.

Just a few days back, I got worried about my gym habits: given I am lifting fairly heavy weights at an age of ~35, how badly could I injure myself, especially because I began serious lifting late in my life? Well, I injured my lower back today while squatting. It is painful but I am not sure how bad it really is - I think I’ll find that out by tomorrow. ...

BrainStation invited me as a guest: In terms of the content for the talk itself, the narrative would surround your overall career trajectory and life on the job as a Software Engineer. Attendees: ~20 professionals, who are about to embark on their journey into the world of software engineering, from BrainStation’s ongoing cohort in Vancouver. Where: Virtually, on Zoom. Recording: The talk wasn’t recorded. See slides here. The feedback later was positive: ...

Ask from the coordinator: To break it down further, a potential format for the 1-hour session could be something like: - Introduction to yourself, your career journey, and your role at AWS - A potential case study or work example, exemplifying how you utilize your skills at work - Job search tips for when they eventually begin applying - Q&A Portion Flow: Intro: Major stages of my career and some of my mistakes along the way so that you can avoid those in your career. Adobe and Snapdeal: Adobe Story and e-commerce website: distributed systems and some frontend work. Excited about technology but didn’t know expectations in a corporate environment. They don’t teach you this in college. Tip 1: Ask for feedback from well-intentioned peers. Amazon: 10+ years now. Won’t bore you with all the teams I’ve been part of, so just the interesting ones. Lambda: I joined because I was excited about the potential of serverless. However, a very new field for me and I struggled. VM ballooning. Tip 2: How to make learning durable? Code yourself. Even if you are following a tutorial, rewrite on your own. Anki. Lookout for Metrics: Intentionality == “know what you’ll get out of a certain project”. I work in SageMaker. About SageMaker. I-ML org: we provide cloud based IDEs - JupyterLab or VS Code - for ML. Example of my work: Cosmos. Tip 3: Work backwards from customers, not a solution == solution should follow the problem, not the other way around.

Fairy lights: Red is load, middle is data and the third wire is ground. For power, red is again load and the other is ground. Regular LED strip lights: They mention +ve, ground and data on the strip itself. Make sure data direction is correct while wiring up. In long runs, you need to inject power in between connections because of voltage drop. Even if power supply can provide enough amperage, you may need injection, possibly using the same supply.

An example use case is to pass hard drives to Open Media Vault so that it can club them together behind MergerFS. Helpful commands: # Commands to find the right disk ID. lsblk -o +MODEL,SERIAL,WWN ls -l /dev/disk/by-id | grep -i sdb find /dev/disk/by-id/ -type l|xargs -I{} ls -l {}|grep -v -E '[0-9]$' |sort -k11|cut -d' ' -f9,10,11,12 # Then, pass through. # Here, use the right number for `-scsiN`. Once the following is run, the disk will show up in Proxmox GUI too, under the VM's "Hardware" section. qm set 103 -scsi1 /dev/disk/by-id/ata-ST4000VN008-2DR166_ZDHBBLLT Helpful resources: ...

Don’t want “string lights”. How to control via HAOS? WS2812B. Nice brands: ALITOVE or BT-Lighting. (The latter is available on Ali Express too.) Might need multiple power supplies depending on the length of the lights. Lights usually take DC and will dictate output voltage of the adapter you need to buy. 0.02 amps per LED is safe. (Max requirement is thrice that.) Power adapter should obviously support a higher number. 30 LEDs per meter: 150 LEDs * 0.02 == 3 amps total. 60 per meter -> 300 LEDs -> 6 amps total. Alitove good brand. Calculator: https://wled-calculator.github.io/ WLED controller. Check Athom WLED controller. List of tools: https://quinled.info/2018/10/01/tools-and-equipment/ Diffusers: Muzata is a good brand. Logic level shifting: https://electricfiredesign.com/2021/03/12/logic-level-shifters-for-driving-led-strips/

In the past, when I tried applying some DS record(s) to nic.eu.org, it sometimes complained that they were invalid. To remedy that, I had to format those similar to the following. Specifically, the first 4 fields were missing when it complained. ketanvijayvargiya.com. 3600 IN DS 2371 13 2 64_CHARACTER_LONG_STRING