Tag: Life

Scary

“Before I go” (make sure to watch the video as well) is an essay by Paul Kalanithi in which he talks about life, time, and cancer. It’s one of the most beautiful and touching essays I’ve read in recent times. It made me think about the inexorable forward march of time and the inherent fragility of human health. I think that’s really scary – we cannot really do anything about either of those things. All we can hope to do is live life in such a manner that when (not if) our time comes we realize that every moment leading up to now isn’t a flat line of points, but rather a gorgeous valley of peaks and troughs.

Building a building

Instead of reading two research papers for the month of March I’ve decided instead to read as much as possible (yes I know that’s not a measurable quantity) of The Architecture of Open Source Applications: Volume 1. I’d read the LLVM and HDFS chapters in the past and was blown away but how well written they were. I’m pretty excited to read the rest of the book.

My favorite album of 2014: The Amanuensis by Monuments

Of all the albums I listened to in 2014, The Amanuensis by Monuments is definitely by favorite. The powerful, soaring vocals, excellent bass and drum work, and FANTASTIC guitar riffs make this an absolute joy to listen to. My favorite track from the record is probably Horcrux.

I’m quite disappointed I missed seeing them (and Animals As Leaders and Devin Townsend Project) in December. I had tickets but was feeling a bit unwell the day of the concert and didn’t want to risk my upcoming vacation plans.

Goal Tracking: February 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 February –

  1. No volunteering.
  2. Decent progress in eliminating shyness.
  3. No progress made on learning Rust or Erlang.
  4. 1 book read – All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr. An incredibly sad and beautiful book.
  5. 1 paper read – Read-Copy Update.

  6. 5 blog posts.
  7. Zero muscle ups.

New goal for 2015 – contribute to an open source project

Every year I decide that I will contribute to an open source project but somehow it always falls under the radar. This year I’m going to make a more determined push (pun very much intended) to make at least a small contribution to one of the many open source projects out there. GitHub Showcases is an excellent feature that should hopefully help me in this endeavor.

EDIT – By “contribute to an open source project” I meant something that I don’t work on during my job. So projects like Rest.li and the Rest.li API Hub don’t count 🙂 It has to be something I do in my free time.

Goal Tracking: January 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 January –

  1. No volunteering.

  2. I think I’ve made some progress in the “being less shy” department. It is also harder than I thought it would be!

  3. No progress has been made on learning Rust or Erlang.

  4. 1 book read – Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage by Haruki Murakami.

  5. 2 papers read – The Tail at Scale and Immutability Changes Everything.

  6. 5 blog posts.

  7. Zero muscle ups 😦