Somewhere in the tubes

Working on what matters

Fri, 25 Sep 2020 15:13:19 +0000

I recently read a post by Will Larson that really spoke to me and I wanted to share: Work On What Matters

In Tech, I’ve found that there’s a great deal of freedom in the day-to-day of what problems you can choose to solve. While this is one of the great parts of being in Tech, it’s also a potential trap - the self-determination means that you can convince yourself that you’re working on “important” things, when in fact you’re just indulging yourself.

Having the vocabulary of identifying these traps is powerful - it’s helped me keep myself honest and focused on the things that actually the move the needle for the business, and my personal career. Check Will’s post out!

The Sandman: Endless Nights

Wed, 29 Jul 2020 13:28:52 +0000

I’m already beginning to fail my promise of more regular blogging; I think a pretty good way to break through the activation energy is to have shorter posts about relatively uncontroversial topics.

To that point - The Sandman: Endless Nights. Holy shit, it’s so good. I have no idea how I missed reading this over years of obsession with the Sandman series.

I learned about the Sandman series some time in 2012 and I was instantly hooked - since I was still a grad student living without a lot of (or any?) disposable income, I deferred reading the series. But once I started my first job, collecting the Sandman series was my first true indulgence. I was elated when I finally got myself to purchase all 10 Trade Paperbacks (used, of course), and I still showcase them with pride in all the houses Rishita and I have lived at.

Reading Sandman was always a visceral experience. I didn’t just think about the things Gaiman wrote - I luxuriated in the ideas and feelings. For me, there’s a unique melancholy in all his stories. The idea that there’s so much of our story (and others’ stories) that we just don’t understand resonates deeply.

There’s also Morpheus himself, Dream of the Endless, who is the anchor around whom most stories revolve. Inspite of all the power he has, and his responsibilities (something extremely important to the character himself), there’s so much growth in his personality over the course of the series. He has to contend with bad choices he has made, and genuinely grows and changes as a result. And he pays the price for some of these choices as well.

I could gush about the series for a long time, but suffice it to say that it remains my favorite comic book series of all time.

And then to discover that there’s an entire issue I had missed!! Soaking in the atmosphere of the world after so long was the best reading experience I’ve had in a while. Nostalgic and melancholic, both because of the book, but also because of the memories of my first read through the series from so long ago.. Definitely time to re-read the series from page 1.

Back to blogging

Sat, 11 Jul 2020 23:53:04 +0000

This has been a pretty strange (mostly miserable) year, all thigs considered. But one silver lining out of it has been my relationship with social media - specifically the complete abolishment of the aforementioned relationship.

After a brief obsession with “being caught up with news” in the middle of the Pandemic, I realized that social media is basically bad for me in a lot of ways, and I decided to cut most algorithmic feeds out of my life. I’m not really a hermit - but I’m trying to be more intentional and active with the people that I engage with online, as opposed to a passive consumer.

As a result, I’ve also had some free time on my hands recently, and the itch to try to write consistently has resurfaced. This blog is going to be my (second? third?) attempt at scratching that itch.

My plan is to write basically once a week - mostly technical topics, sometimes assorted musings, sometime just links to things I’ve read recently. I’ll try my best to be cogent - beyond that, no promises. Caveat emptor!

Stuff my mom wrote on being a doctor in India

Fri, 01 May 2020 10:09:00 +0000

Mom continues a great writing streak, this time talking about the experience about being a doctor in India. The things she writes about definitely resonate with me, having seen both parents taking their duties as healers very seriously throughout my childhood.

Is it easy being a doctor?

Stuff my mom wrote on COVID

Tue, 21 Apr 2020 10:48:00 +0000

My mom wrote some good blog posts about her perspective on dealing with COVID, from the perspective of a doctor who’s dealt with pandemics in the past, melded with the point of view of someone living through quarantine herself. I think they’re pretty great, but I’m biased. Check them out yourself:

World Now and After The Corona Pandemic 2020

Quarantine, Lock down and Covid 19

The necessity of disconnecting from work

Sun, 20 Nov 2016 14:08:00 +0000

I started writing this post during a great break, when Rish and I are on in Tahoe - where I actually have time to think about what forms the kernel of this post, in a very circular way.

Over the past year, I’ve been finding myself spending increasingly larger amounts of time devoted to work. This is only natural - with time, our profession usually brings more responsibility, at any reasonable workplace.

Additionally, it’s kinda what we moved from Seattle for - as I’ve expounded fairly often. The move was great for me since I get to be in a position where I’m motivated to work all day everyday; because the work is interesting and I believe that I’m making a difference while learning and leading a lot.

But taking on new, larger challenges does not preclude the necessity to decompress and disconnect - I’d argue that that decompression is actually more essential in those cases.

Long amounts of time spent thinking and working on a singular problem ends up blinding me to my inherent biases in my interpretation of the problem - and sometimes the same thing happens when there’s too many things to be done, and not enough time to devote the deserved time to them. The disconnect helps brings fresh perspectives to problems, where sometimes I have found myself blinded by hidden assumptions and biases.

It often also helps to take a break and be able to ask more fundamental questions, ranging from “Am I solving the right problems?” to much harder ones like “In my career, am I where I want to be? Do I enjoy the path that I’m on?”. Like me, I’m sure that their career is a big part of of a lot of folks’ lives - and every now and then, it’s good to make sure that the time spent on it is time well spent.

In slight contradiction the previous sentiment though.. People are also definitely more than their jobs. Taking time out from work to discover and experience things that you enjoy - books, travel, new hobbies, spending time in coffee shops with loved ones talking - is precious time.

I realize that the sentiments here amount to a really tall order - one must enjoy work, but take breaks to further be better at/enjoy work, but also value break time for growth in other aspects. And that’s true - time is the more precious, basic and impactful resource we have at our disposal, for spending and investment. And trying to make sure that none of it is wasted; that as much time as possible can be spent on things I find valuable - I find that that makes me a more well-rounded, and happy individual.

As always, feel free to get in touch if you have additional thoughts!

GIT_SSH

Tue, 26 Jul 2016 12:49:55 +0000

At Uber, I’m currently building a self-service task execution platform, which involves getting code/artifacts from different sources, building them if necessary, and executing some commands using the artifacts.

One thing that we wanted to support is to allow users to point to a git repository, specify some build commands and a final execution command. Using JGit to clone the repository, and a ProcessBuilder to start the processes, that sounded easy.

BUT.

There’s a lot of golang services where I work, and building go services from scratch usually needs git to resolve dependencies. This was a problem for me, because like many other production environments, the infrastructure to access source control is missing in production - even for internally hosted repositories. The main problem is that the private keys needed to securely access repositories aren’t deployed to the production hosts.

The obvious (dumb?0 solution is to customize the environment setup for our service to have private keys placed within ~/.ssh/ of the production instances as part of the build process. This works, but not in a general way - it assumes that the user running the service has access to all the repos - which is definitely untrue in the cases secret projects or private repos.

This is where GIT_SSH comes in - essentially, git allows you to explicitly specify the ssh command that should be used while talking to remote repositories.

So, users can specify: GIT_SSH=team/service/git_ssh_command.sh

And the contents of git_ssh_command.sh can be something like:

#!/bin/sh
exec /usr/bin/ssh -o StrictHostKeyChecking=no -i /magic/location/id_rsa "$@"

And there you go! The great thing is that your glide or equivalent-go-build-tool commands will just use this automagically, and it can change this per process. That’s great for multi-tenancy in your system, and a single instance can handle multiple jobs, even if each job needs a different private key.

Writing is hard

Tue, 26 Jul 2016 12:49:55 +0000

I started this blog some (many?) months ago with the hope that it would be an outlet for opinions or thoughts that would be interesting and worth reading. But as the months have gone past, and is obvious from the amount of output I’ve produced, I haven’t been able to write about things well enough for other eyeballs to look at.

Writing is hard.

Hard not just because of the mechanics of finding the right words, the right phrases and punctuation to crystallize the nebulous thoughts one has. More fundamentally, writing is hard because for me, putting something down is a way of committing to something, mentally and publicly.

It’s easier to do one or the other in different settings - easier to state a dissenting/dumb opinion while shooting the breeze with friends. But that’s fundamentally different from writing a blog and throwing it into the ether, never to be forgotten and readily available for dissection by anyone.

With that kind of permanence in mind, I want to write things infallibly - opinions or thoughts that I truly believe in, that I can justify my beliefs for convincingly. Something that is ridiculously hard to do, especially given no practice and in a vacuum. The stakes aren’t probably really as high - there’s people yelling into the void of the internet every second. But it’s important to me. And that’s what makes writing such a slow process.

There’s other reasons why writing is hard too - life is filled with too many things to have time for them all - which is incidentally what this post started out being about, but I’m pretty sure I’ll pontificate on that thought at a later time. I hope to, in any case.

On moving

Mon, 28 Mar 2016 12:49:55 +0000

This post spent a long time fermenting in my brain; I’m still not conviced I’ve truly nailed down what I want to say about moving from Seattle to the Bay Area. There’s so many aspects to it - from the motivation, to the process, and finally the aftermath. But I figure a half-baked post on a blog that no one reads is better than another dead blog. :)

September last year my wife and I moved from Seattle to the Bay Area. Both of us had stable, well-paying jobs in Seattle. We both enjoyed what we were doing, had found a great group of friends from work and college, and basically loved it in Seattle. I think it still remains my favorite city - and Washington State my favorite state - in this country. I loved almost everything about Seattle - I loved that I could afford to live in a nice part of the city, without having to live in the suburb. I loved that our apartment building there wasn’t 20 years old, and was only 8 blocks away from the Pike Place Market and the waterfront. I loved that we could go hiking on Saturdays and kayaing on Sundays without having to drive more than 30 minutes to either destination.

I absolutely loved the coffee places there, and the fact that I could go for random walks and just happen to find interesting quirky places that I had never been to and meet interesting people there. Even right now, reminiscing about the time I spend there puts a smile on my face and makes me pang to be there again. In some ways, this post will probably read like a love letter to this city as much as a recounting of how life takes you unexpected places.

That said, if I loved Seattle so much, why on Earth did I leave?

There’s a few superficial reasons why we started thinking about moving - Rish moved to Seattle from Stanford, and having lived there for a couple of years while being in the tech industry herself, we joked that her yearning to move back would never subside. But as it turned out, Rish fell in love with the PNW just as much as me. My fears over moving were matched, possibly overshadowed, by hers.

I think the real reason we moved was to fight complacency.

I’ll speak for myself personally and let Rish tell her side of the story herself. :) Around the start of 2015, I found that I had gotten extremely comfortable at my current job. I had begun coasting - I wasn’t challenging myself with the projects I was working on, nor did they really align with my long term vision of things that I wanted to work on.

One aspect of this was making an impact - a really significant impact, personally - which I didn’t really feel like I was making. With large organziations, the problem that any one team can handle usually narrows in scope to the point. This makes sense, and it’s the only sane way in which things can still get done without total cognitive overload - but at least in my case, it also meant that I was working on an extremely specific problem - one that I wasn’t convinced could/would be solved, or required solving to begin with.

Another part of this was to make something that other developers actively wanted to use, and solved an infrastructure problem they were facing. There was a disconnect between what my team needed to deliver on, and the kinds of things I enjoyed building - and by the time 2015 began, it had caught up with me. I had spent a great deal of time working on things without having drunk the necessary kool-aid, and my motivation was slipping, and I felt the need for a change.

Taking stock of these things - the fact that the main discontent was professional, and not personal, I started looking for opprtunities to do all the things that I really wanted to do. And as disappointing as it was to admit, the same kind of opportunties that were available in plenty in SF just didn’t exist in Seattle. Sure, there were companies that were challenging interesting problems in Seattle - there were even a bunch of SF-based companies that had opened offices in Seattle, Uber being one of them. But having worked for a couple of years I truly valued being in HQ for any company - the sense of purpose and collectiveness is tough to emulate at remote locations. While this may not be true in general, it was important enough for me that moving kinda became inevitable.

Ultimately (with the help of hindsight), I think life decisions - like all decisions - come down to priorities, and the things you choose to prioritize over others. For the two years I was in Seattle, lifestyle was definitely what I was optimizing for. But come 2015.. Priorities started shifting. Lifestyle took a backseat to the temptation of working on something interesting, something that induced genuine drive. I’m not sure how long I’ll be in the States for (that’s a topic for a different post maybe), so the urgency to make sure that I made my time here count seemed even higher after a couple of years of not having done so. And given the constraints that we had to play with - moving is what had to be done.

A colleague once told me that change is often a good thing - sometimes necessary to bring around motivation. There’s a finite amount of hours anyone in the world has - and I recognize that I’m more fortunate than most for getting the opportunities and support I’ve gotten throughout my life. It felt like what I truly owed myself was the opportunity to try something that I hadn’t done before, but something I would learn from and something I was excited by - even if it meant giving up the city, friends, and life that I had learned to love deeply. So that’s what Rish and I both did.

Looking back almost a year after moving.. I’m happy with the way things turned out. I can’t say that life is better here across the board - but then again, that was never the point. The point was to be happier at work, and that I genuinely am. As for life outside of work - it’s not bad! I’ve managed to find new coffee shops and places of fancy, and I actually quite like some of the neighbourhoods here.

But Seattle will always be Seattle. :)

On Creativity

Tue, 02 Feb 2016 23:33:55 +0000

Rish and I recently went to see the excellent Jad Abumrad, co-host of Radiolab give a talk at Stanford campus.

(I’ve always loved Radiolab’s story telling technique; I’m a big fan of podcasts in general but I don’t think I’ve come across many others that can weave a story so powerful, so full of heart, using just sounds and words as consistently as them.)

The talk was part of The Stanford Storytelling project, and drew mostly from Jad’s experience as he set about becoming a radio host and eventually the host of Radiolab, a lot of what he talked about really resonated with both of us. The stuff that really hit a nerve (in my mind) really touched on more fundamental things - like the nature of work, and everyone’s relationship to their work/passion/whatever - to the extent that I felt like sharing some thoughts.

The first thing that I totally related to was his thought after reflecting on his early career on the radio. Trying to bring authenticity - your own form - is always uncomfortable, be it when you’re trying to fill a void, or as part of a giant organism. I think this is true not just in creative endeavors (which is why this blog is rarely updated) but also as part of a semi-regular routine at work where I frequently find myself asking the question of whether the work I’m doing is truly significant, whether it is the best I could be doing. I suspect that for some people, impostor syndrome doesn’t really ever go away; it just becomes more seasonal. And who knows, at the start of my career, I probably wasn’t “being all that I could be”.

But like Jad pointed out with this fantastic quote by Ira Glass, for creative pursuits the only reliable solution to this kind of problem is to keep at it, to keep cranking and just putting yourself to work till you build a volume of work to bridge that gap from where you start and where your taste wants you to end up. (Hence me coming back intermittently to write something.)

I think the same can be said about the impostor syndrome in all of us while pursuing any passion - the only reliable way to reduce it’s efficacy is to keep at is, to doggedly pursue what we set out to, and to keep getting better at what we love doing.

Rish’s favorite part of talk came towards the end: Imagine working on something and being on a deadline. I can very easily see impostor syndrome in me bringing out fears that may not actually exist - like the fear of disappointing authority figures, or your peers, or the fear of being flat out wrong, in the very core of your thought process. It’s like being in a spooky German forest. There’s no creatures really in sight, but you can viscerally feel the presence of something that scares the ever-loving daylights out of you.

But usually.. you get out of that forest. You do what you set out to, and you come out on the other side not too much worse for the wear. The thing is though, you don’t ever really stop visiting your German forest. Jad mentioned that after 13 years of doing what he’s been doing, he still finds himself in it from time to time. The real thing to keep in mind, is that you were there once, and that you got out - and you can do the same thing again. You probably get trained to brace yourself for a fight sooner the more often you visit the forest.

The other thing from that talk that stayed with me was the story of Scott Carrier, and the story of pursuit of the antelope. In any pursuit - creative, and probably otherwise - you have to allow your self to allow it to pervade every sense and nerve you have. You need to ‘become the question’ you’re trying to answer. Personally, I love the idea of having that amount of energy, passion, and commitment. I don’t think it’s possible, given the sheer number of pipe dreams anyone has at any given point in time - but I do think it’s a great thing to aspire to. I’ve found that that way, it’s possible to devote just a few hours a week more on projects/reading/things that I would have otherwise spent numbing my brain through TV.