Life – Page 11 – Karan Parikh

Warmth

Returned back to a much warmer San Francisco this morning. It was one of those rare SF days where I wished I had air conditioning in my house. I worked from home for most of the day but realized I wasn’t feeling my usual cheerful, awesome self (euphemism for I was feeling a bit sick) and decided to sleep/rest for the remainder of the day. I blame not getting enough sleep last night (my flight from Portland was at 6:44am) and then not being able to sleep on the flight.

My brief stay in Portland was a lot of fun. Or as my friend would say, it was “hella fun”.

I’m about a third of the way through in Immortality. This is the first Milan Kundera book I’ve read. I quite enjoy his style. This book has already given me a lot to think about.

Cart

Got a chance to check out Portland’s food cart scene today. I was quite impressed. I’ve eaten at a lot of food trucks in San Francisco so I was looking forward to trying something new/different in Portland. I was not disappointed.

The first cart I ate at was Mumbo Gumbo. Their seafood gumbo was quite excellent. I was starving and totally forgot to take a picture. But it was delicious.

Cart #2 was Kargi Gogo. I’ve never had food from the country of Georgia before so this was a first for me. I ordered the khinkali and it was amazing. It reminded me of xiaolongbao, another dish that I absolutely adore. Highly, highly recommend trying this place out.

Blue

If you’re ever in Portland make sure to visit Blue Star Donuts. Easily the best doughnuts I’ve ever had. Serious Eats has a great article on what makes these doughnuts so amazing.

My sweet tooth has been extremely happy in Portland.

Page

I visited Powell’s Books today. It’s one of the largest and most well organized bookstores I’ve been to so far. I can easily see myself spending days here and never getting bored. And discovering something new and wonderful each time. Here’s what I bought today:

I love mathematics, so this book seemed like an obvious choice.

Can't believe I haven't read this yet. — Can’t believe I haven’t read this yet.

Falls

Today was my first full day in Portland, OR. I’m visiting for the long weekend.

My first impression of Portland is that it is a beautiful city. The food is great. And so is the beer.

We visited Multnomah Falls during the day. The drive was gorgeous and an added bonus was that I got to be in charge of the music. I won’t even try to describe the beauty and serenity of the place. I’ll just let my wonderful (not really) photography skills speak for me instead.

Fall

(post for 4th September that I wasn’t able to publish yesterday)

I went for my first bouldering session in August and instantly fell in love with it. There was something incredibly satisfying about starting at the bottom and (slowly) working your way to the top. Falling (which I have done a lot of) is fun too. It’s also a great workout.

My initial approach to climbing was brute force; basically do pull-ups on each hand hold (is that the right term?) and hope that you make it. I quickly realized that this was not a winning tactic. While it worked for easy V0s it caused wonderful (and painful) failures at everything else. I listened to what my friend told me and started using my lower body more. I instantly felt a difference. I feel (as an obvious expert at bouldering after 6 sessions) that using your entire body is key to vertical scalability. Another piece of advice my friend gave me that was super useful was to plan your route to the top before you started climbing. Having a mental map of how you want to get to the “summit” reduces the probability of you clinging to the wall for dear life with no idea where to go next. Oh, and chalk on your hands helps too.

The one downside — it wrecks your fingers. Or maybe I’m just doing it wrong.

I hope to be able to climb V4s by the end of the year.

VIP

On Sunday I bought tickets to go see TesseracT, The Contortionist, ERRA, and Skyharbor play in San Francisco. I found out about the VIP upgrade tickets for the concert last night and bought them a few minutes ago.

This is probably the concert I’m most looking forward to right now. Getting a chance to see some of your favorite bands all play at the same concert is not something that happens everyday.

TesseracT introduced me to the sub-genre of modern progressive metal most commonly known as djent, and over time it has become my favorite kind of music.

I first listened to Altered State, TesseracT’s second album. It was quite literally like nothing I’d ever heard before; heavy, yet full of melody. My appreciation for the band and the music they played grew with each listen of the album. I then listened to One, and I was blown away by how incredible that album was as well. The singles from their new album Polaris sound amazing and I can’t wait to listen to the album when it comes out.

Challenge

Shannon, Sam, and I have agreed to write one post a day on our blogs throughout September. Given my usual posting pattern of 3-4 posts a month this should be quite challenging. I’m looking forward to this.

I finally bought weightlifting shoes for myself. Ryan Ata had recommended the Adidas Powerlift 2.0 shoes to me and I ordered them this morning. When I started lifting I just wore my running shoes since the weights were not too heavy. A couple of months ago I started working out barefoot and noticed a significant improvement in my overall stability while lifting. I’ve heard people say nothing but good things about weightlifting shoes so I’m pretty excited to try the Powerlift 2.0s on and hopefully achieve my goal of a 3 plate squat by the end of the year (I’m currently squatting 250 lb, just over 2 plates). Yes, I know these shoes are not going to make me magically stronger (unfortunately) but I hope to leverage the added stability and support to work my way up to a 310 lb squat.

Goal Tracking: August Edition

At the beginning of the year I published a post outlining what some of my goals for the year were. In the spirit of being transparent, here is the progress I made on them over the course of August —

0 hours of volunteering. This is extremely disappointing.
No shyness at all.
No real progress made on either the Rust or Erlang front. With 4 months left in 2015 I have a long way to go.
2 books read — The Bone Clocks (took me a bit of time to get into the story, but I was soon hooked. A lovely book) and The Joker (as crazy and dark as one would expect)
Two papers read.
3 posts in August.
6 consecutive muscle ups. This was also the month where I was injured the most — I somehow managed to injure both my wrists, the left side of my chest, my right knee, and my right toe.
On the plus side I discovered I love bouldering. More on this later.

Deux

A few weeks ago I hit my two year mark of working at LinkedIn. Just as I wrote about my first year at LinkedIn I thought it would be interesting to capture my feelings and thoughts at the end of two years and briefly chronicle what has happened since that post.

The biggest change that has happened in the past year is that I’ve moved to a different team. I started working at LinkedIn on the Service Infrastructure team where I worked primarily on Rest.li. Working on Rest.li was fun, and I learned a lot. I got to contribute to an open source project early on in my career which was incredible. I even got the opportunity to work on a Rest.li protocol upgrade for all our services, which was a non-trivial problem to solve. TL;DR — working on Rest.li was great. However, I wanted to learn what it was like to work on a lower layer of our technology stack. I’d heard very good things about LinkedIn’s distributed graph team and I knew they were working on solving interesting problems. I joined the distributed graph team in 2015 and I’m extremely happy with the decision that I made.

I had the opportunity to speak at a tech conference! Steven Ihde and I spoke at QCon 2014 on the evolution of LinkedIn’s service architecture. Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine that I would be speaking at a conference so early on in my career. It was an honor and a fantastic experience, and I can’t wait to do it again.

I mentored two interns (one in 2014 and the other in 2015) as part of LinkedIn’s summer internship program. Mentoring is a rewarding and challenging experience. I would recommend everyone try it at least once in their careers.

While this might be hard to quantify exactly, I feel that I’ve become a better software engineer. I’m more confident about the code that I write and the technical decisions that I make. Part of this confidence can definitely be attributed to the great people that I work with who have helped me grow and learn.

Oh and I got promoted. That was very awesome. 😀

I can’t wait to see what my future at LinkedIn holds.