You might find this surprising but there was a time when I used to be extremely paranoid of giving any kind of negative feedback. This, you have to agree, kind of sucks if you are in a position where one of your primary duties IS to do so. Actually scratch that. I wasn’t scared of […]
Lessons learned after 30 days of being a first-time dad
Well, I think the most important thing that happened during these first 30 days is that we survived 🙂 Like, I’m not even joking. It wasn’t easy, though. If you dig deep into Reddit or if you talk to parents who are willing to share their real feelings, most of them will tell you that […]
Lessons learned after 14 days of being a first-time dad
Last week I published “Lessons learned after 7 days of being a first-time dad”, where I outlined how the first 7 days went through. Compared to week #2, that was a breeze. For us, week #2 was when his stomach cramps started kicking in and let me tell you – this is absolutely awful. It’s […]
Lessons learned after 7 days of being a first-time dad
Calendar says it. It’s been a week. I still can’t believe it, but yep, calendar claims so. It’s been 7 days since my newborn son and wife were released from the hospital. I’m sure some would expect that I’d describe these seven days as complete and utter horror. No sleep. No time. No food. Dirty […]
Using different GitHub users on same machine
Here’s a scenario – for 99% of time, I’m using my work account for GitHub. That means that out of 90 GitHub repositories that I have cloned, 88 of them are work related (numbers are made up!). What that further means is that, I almost never need to push stuff to my personal repositories. Well, […]
What should I do if I can’t (or don’t want to) afford therapy?
It’s a fact. Some people can’t afford it, whereas some explicitly don’t want to do it. No matter what your reasoning is, one thing is certain – price of ignoring your mental health is horrendous (and yes, I’m writing a separate article on that). I will try outlining everything that I’ve learned through my 7+ […]
Crash, Recovery and Binary Logs
We had a funny situation. Our Sphinx Search Engine crashed the other day and, once restarted, it reported that it’s doing crash-recovery of Real-Time (RT) Index using a 76GB binary log. And you don’t need to be Computer Science major to understand that recovering anything from 76 gigs would take … a while. Now, here’s […]
What I didn’t know about ‘I’ in ACID
From having your ORM randomly lose data to getting $50,000 in BTC stolen, is a range of documented issues related to faulty understanding of DB isolation levels and how they behave under concurrency. And that’s stupid, because, if you took 10mins to read this article, you’d be well equipped to actually understand how your system […]
Ability to Deliver: Rather important and yet often ignored Engineering skill
Ability to deliver working software within an agreed timeframe is one of the defining characteristics of a Senior Engineer. Understanding WHAT you are building, WHY is it being built and WHEN it needs to be delivered is obligatory. And, just like any other skill, it requires knowledge and constant practice. This article will provide you […]
Integrate-first approach
This is a mistake I keep seeing, and occasionally becoming a victim of, which just shows how easy it is to be fooled by it. Whenever it comes to building anything involving more than one component, I’d always have a tendency to try and build in isolation-first, and work on integration later. I’d even fool […]