Tag: Life

Unresolved Resolutions

At the start of 2014 I wrote a post about what my goals were for this year. Now that we are 9 months in I thought it would be good to see how much progress I’ve made. And yes, I do agree that I should have done this 6 months in.

(Charts generated using the awesome pygal library. Code can be found here.)

  1. Learning Go – 10% progress has been made on this. I got distracted by various other things happening in life and forgot about this endeavor. I think I can still achieve this.

    Screen Shot 2014-09-10 at 10.27.51 PM

  2. Reading three research papers a month – I’m disappointed that I haven’t been able to keep up with this. While I have read a lot of research papers this year, it falls short of my goal of three a month. Papers I have read include Omega, Orleans, Photon, Raft, Paxos Made Simple, and F1.

    Screen Shot 2014-09-10 at 10.29.06 PM

  3. Blog more – My original post was pretty ambiguous by what I meant by “more”. Let’s assume “more” meant 4 posts a month. I’m tempted to make a POST related joke here but I won’t.

    Screen Shot 2014-09-10 at 10.32.38 PM

  4. Play guitar for at least 30 minutes a day – I think I’m averaging 20 minutes a day.
  5. Work out 6 days a week and start running again – Achieved minus the running. I’m definitely going to make up for that in the last 4 months though.

One Year Later

Wow. I can’t believe that it’s been a year at LinkedIn already. When I look down at my  employee badge,  it seems like it was only yesterday that I was waiting to get my picture taken before heading out for new hire orientation. Despite me looking terrible in the photo, I’m happy to say that my first year at LinkedIn has been nothing short of fantastic.

In true developer fashion, I thought it would be fun to look back at the year that passed and talk about some of the significant, and seemingly not so significant, numbers. So, without further ado, here are some statistics about my first year at LinkedIn:

(I’ve used 220 work days in a year for all my calculations)

Amazing coworkers I have: too many to count. I think this is one of the main reasons I love working at LinkedIn.

Lines of code written (additions): at least ~16000. Yes, I know lines of code is a terrible metric to measure an engineer’s productivity, and I’m not trying to do that here. This is just an approximation for lines of code I’ve written for the projects I’ve worked on that are on GitHub (Rest.li, Rest.li API Hub, and linkedin.github.com).

Coffee consumed: 495 cups. I drink 2-3 cups of coffee per day, but closer to 2 most of the days (I used 2.25 cups/day for my calculations). I’m hoping to cut down my coffee consumption but it is hard because COFFEE IS SO DELICIOUS.

Time spent working out: 180 hours. My overall fitness levels were pretty low at the end of my undergraduate life. I’m working hard on improving that.

Time spent at the pull up rings: 25 hours. One of my coworkers showed me these around 3 months after I started. I now spend 15-20 minutes a day there during my workouts.

IMG_1194
The three sets of rings.
The rings do mess up your hands.
The rings do mess up your hands.

LinkedIn shirts I own: 10 (and one hoodie). One of the first LinkedIn shirts I got was a shirt for the team that I was an intern on. Each shirt was personalized with the last name of the person as well as a number of their choice. I really wanted the number 7 on mine (I like 7 for some reason, don’t ask why) but one of my coworkers had already claimed it for themselves. I chose 91 instead. Wasn’t that a fun anecdote?

My favorite LinkedIn shirt.
My favorite LinkedIn shirt.


Internal hackdays I’ve taken part in: 2. This number is abysmally low and is something I hope to improve on.

Unofficial team mascots broken: 1. The unofficial mascot for our team is a small blue Pegasus figurine (after the name of the Rest.li data layer). I dropped it on the ground on Friday 7/25 and one of its wings sort of broke. I’m looking for a suitable replacement.

The left wing is broken :(
The left wing is broken 😦

Times I’ve felt like quitting my job at LinkedIn: 0.

black & white

Books are wonderful.

I read a crazy amount while in school. And then for some reason this changed while in college. The only books I read were those that were required (or sometimes optional) for a class. Semi-related: I got really good at reading research papers.

I’m hoping to get back into my old reading habits. I recently (7 weeks ago) bought a book shelf for my room, after which I may or may not have gone and bought a lot of books. I read The Road, Persepolis, Persepolis II, V for Vendetta, Batman: The Killing Joke, Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, Batman Vol 1: The Court of Owls, and Batman Vol 2: The City of Owls (I also discovered that I really like graphic novels. Which makes sense since I like art. And books.). I’m currently reading Cloud Atlas. Next on the list: The Stranger, and Blindness.

I love the fact that I live close to an amazing bookstore.

It feels really good rediscovering what was once a part of my life.

“Goodbye grandpa”

My grandfather passed away today.

I didn’t realize how close I was to him until I heard of his death. That’s when it really hit me.

Some of my earliest memories of India are associated with him. When my family moved to India I remember staying with him and my grandmother. He used to drive me to school. I was still not used to Indian food, a result of which I used to put the food they served us at school in my school bag. What I was not so good at was removing the food from my bag once I’d get back home. He discovered this when he found a trial of ants leading to my bag. I remember him having a good laugh over it.

He taught me a lot about Hinduism. He used to take me the EME temple close to his house whenever possible. He also used to try and tell me snippets from the Ramayana when I was growing up.

Cricket and politics were his passions, and I must admit it was quite fun to see him getting worked up about both. He loved telling people that his son looked like Sourav Ganguly (which I believe he does).

Like me, he loved his food. We were both huge fans of my grandmother’s mutton curry. Kamling, his favorite Chinese restaurant in Mumbai, soon became one of my favorite places to eat as well. And man, did he enjoy his seafood! He tried to explain to me numerous times how to eat bony fish without choking by correctly deboning it, and I hope one day to actually be able to do that.

In later years I became one of his go-to people for all tech related issues, be it how to check his email on his phone, or how to configure his computer. In fact, the last time I visited him before leaving for the U.S. was when I helped him setup Gmail to allow him to reply in Bengali. That was the last time I saw him.

In short, my grandfather was awesome.

Goodbye grandpa. You will be missed terribly.