120bits

My first movie that introduced me to Tim Curry was Home Alone 2. It was maybe first few Hollywood Movies that I watched with parents(non-english speaking).

Now I'm 42yrs old, and when my parents visit me, I watch Home Alone 2 with them. It has somewhat become a family tradition now.

Thank you Tim for such a memorable moments. Great actor!

> 8. Avoid hero culture. Build systems that don’t require heroes.

This right here is the what I always have encountered at every team I have ever worked. There will be a production outage, one person comes in and be like "Oh, let me do this.." Magically fixes things that was never documented becomes a hero and then we do a root cause analysis and then never address the fact that, what that one person knew that service that no one else on the team did.

Almost 12 years ago, I wrote my first web server in C. It was for a router/firewall device running Linux From Scratch(LFS), I can't recall the kernel version(2.6.x?).

Reading this just took me back and made me realize even though we have progressed so far with tech stack and new technologies(LLMs), there is so much joy in just writing plain C code. To me its just feels like working on a classic old 68 mustang and getting your hands dirty. What a joy!

So now its dereference a null uber eats code?!

Funny how I got rejected today from crowdstrike because I couldn’t code a hard leetcode problem under 40mins. I guess leetcode isn’t true software engineering after all.

Fast inverse square root

0x5f3759df - ( i >> 1 );

https://github.com/scienceetonnante/Fast-Inverse-Square-Root...

During my early days in my tech career. I joined a small tech firm that did linux kernel programming and embedded stuff. It was my first job out of college and I was really excited. My mentor was a 50+ guy whom I walked everyday from work to back my home. It didn't started out like that, we would leave work around different times and one day it was raining, so we waited and then it became sort of habit. I learned so much about programming and life in general. Made me a better programmer for sure. I'm always grateful!

I switched companies and I had to use teams. From my experience coming Slack, teams feels heavy app. The bootup is slow and overall it felt like its bloated app. I'm using M1Pro Mac.

What I don't like the most of the teams app is, the freaking code editor. If I paste code in teams, it feels hard to read, in Slack it looks much better. Also, I hate it when on teams having some serious chat about prod issue and some in the group post a random message and whole thing just goes side ways. Lack of threads is bad experience for me. I can go on..

OK, I wasn't going crazy then. I had recently used Google Maps for a road trip that I was planning and I asked my GF if it looks weird. My initial thought was if someone changed my monitor settings. (I use different one for just gaming) . The design and graphics reminds me of Apple Maps a lot(the mac version). The look and feel was slightly off and it felt dullish. Not sure how I can explain it.

The suggestions are definitely good in the post. I like to have a clean maps panel and rest can be hidden away.

Thank you! Great advise.

LFS taught me so many things in my beginning for software engineer career(2011). 5 years later, we moved to minimal centos7.

I also remember working on getting LFS work on AWS EC2 back then.

My urge to work for FAANG company is faded away. Being in my late 30s I don;t want to grind leetcode anymore. I had interviews in Apple/Google/Facebook and I felt luck played a huge part of that. I got some live coding questions that prepared the day before and I aced them and in some cases I practiced so much and couldn;t even write more than 10 lines of code.

I really want to watch Interstellar in 4K on Vision Pro. I do wear glasses so I'm not sure how long I can wear this.

Tesla.

They already have army robots on the streets. Some day the cars will become fully aware and then can replicate. They will make better versions of themselves.

A Happy New Year!

I'm always optimistic and I believe humans will do good thing. Looking forward to more advancement in AI, curing cancer, moving to more cleaner energy.

Going to watch some good ol star wars my girlfriend and enjoy my Macallan sherry oak 18

Congratulations! This is a great achievement at his age. Maybe a Fields medal next?

I was working in tech in Bay Area and left to a mid-west 13 years ago. My friends called me crazy. Who is crazy now?!!

I was really burned out and though the tech scene was good in silicon valley(startups, good companies), it still felt my life was just monotonous. I had same tech friends, which were competing against each other. Talking about FAANG companies.

I took a pay cut when I moved away to my new place. I joined a small tech company and was happy. 9-5 job and skiing on the weekends. Taking dog to the walk everyday.

I feel happy.

(I had this issue, not sure if its fixed now or I was doing something wrong)

I'm not sure if its related, but I had some DNS resolution when I switched on WARP. I know that 1.1.1.1 is DNS over SSL, some ISP don't like that? I don't remember which applications had issues(guessing it might be steam client, I could be wrong)

Also, never noticed a significant gain in network speed or reliability either. I don't use it anymore, but will give it a try again.

I have been in situations were I had to pair program for an interview. The artificial pressure is true, I don't know how to react and even speak out when I'm trying to show my coding skills.

I don't have issues with whiteboarding and pair programming with my current teammates. I can speak up and have enough confident to do. But its not the same in an interview situation. I prefer take-home as well.

The Hacker News comments was so accurate! I'm having so much fun going through Seinfeld shorts.

This is the 4th time I have heard this news in a month. I wasn't paying much attention till it happened to my girlfriend.

A person with a linkedin profile, that looks very legit saying they work for Nike at a senior level position reached to my gf for a job role. Well, at first she was excited and then she forwarded me their profile. It was really good presentation, however, few things were way off. Like the timelines on their profile were not accurate. The related experience was shady and more. As I dig deep I was convinced its a scam.

I reported the profile to Linkedin.

I went from simple flat file with tab separated configs to xml to Protobuf and to JSON/TOML.

Every time we had issues, it was because we were trying to spin our OWN version of configuration file. It breaks backward compatibility and versioning. Code collaboration was horrible and devs were getting frustrated.

My parents are from India as well. They are not the best when it comes to tech and gadgets. My Dad was super excited when he learned to share memes with me on WhatsApp. Before pandemic they were visiting me in US and I invited a very close friend of mine who works for Uber to hangout with us. He stayed for a week and it was fun for me to watch him describe his company to my Dad. My Dad "acha to tumhari company taxi chalte hain.." I meant its not wrong but I laughed so hard.

This is definitely some interesting stats.

When I was looking at the stats, I realized I can never make something like this. Just alone the list of flying spots mentioned are huge for me. I don't think I have travelled at much internationally. Having a location graph for myself would be mostly few cities and maybe 1 or 2 countries(connecting flights).

Maybe 1 day I get to travel a lot. :)

AWS billing has been the main concerns in few projects that I worked on. I took some on perm APIs and moved it to cloud(lambdas, api gateways, route53 and such) from a on prem LAMP like single server application. Not matter how much I demoed the advantages about security and high availability and scalability, it wasn't good enough. I was always asked "How much would this cost us?" and everything else comes to halt.

Blog like this makes me wonder if I even want to work for FAANG companies anymore. I have never worked for a big corp and never for FAANG companies in particular.

>What I found was that the decent salary and excellent benefits came at a much greater cost.

I know you can get in with a big paycheck work your ass for 10 years and get out with lot of money in your bank. Maybe it my early 20s. Now I'm 35+ I don;t have the motivation to be a Google or Apple Software Engineer. I work in small firm and on interesting problems, and I'm OK with it.

> If it was after 6PM and I heard a notification on my phone, the hair on the back of my neck would stand up. Often times it was someone from work asking a seemingly innocent question.

This happens to me at my current job. But I don't have similar reaction to it. I'm more like "Oh, someone is working late..." And I respond to their queries. I believe performance and getting your task done faster has to do something? I know Amazon PIP thing is scary place to end with. No idea just read it on HN.

I was surprised too! I was sent a link and then it opened the replit site. The window was split vertically and one half it was coder editor. It looked like a "free" version where you can type some code and run it. And every time I hit tab the editor went out of focus.

I came to know replit after a coding interview. It was coding editor on the page and I picked Java. I was used to leetcode coding environment. I use tab. My biggest mistake. Every time write something and hit tab, the editor goes out of focus. It was so frustrating that I could barely focus on the coding part. Not only that, it wasn't full screen coding editor. I was coding in small window and had to scroll up and down. I didn't clear the interview, but the memories for replit stuck with me.

Very well written.

- I have nodejs server for the APIs and its running on m5.xlarge instance. I haven't done much research on what instance type should I go for. I looked up and it seems like c5n.xlarge(mentioned in the article) is meant compute optimized. That cost difference isn't much between m5.xlarge and c5n.xlarge. So, I'm assuming that switching to c5 instance would be better, right?

- Does having ngnix handle the request is better option here? And setup reverse proxy for NodeJS? I'm thinking of taking small steps on scaling an existing framework.

Nice read.

> The strategy is to avoid getting stuck doing analysis paralysis in a data swamp and instead, capture only the data needed, analyze it, and try again.

This was my take away from this. I worked on an analytics project and analysis paralysis is what I got stuck into. How much data is too much? What we need and what we don't? Those were the bigger concern that writing the code itself.