I’ve been hospitalized thrice before the age of 18 because I was stubborn yet passionate about computer science. — In my defense, the above line is absolutely nothing to be bragged about. Now that I think of it, it seems a very immature act, and I reprimand my past self for not being cautious about my own health. I mean, what was I thinking? Just because my code did…

Find What You Love and Let It Kill You. — I’ve walked into work when I got hit by a car. I’ve worked when I had broken ribs and even a semi-broken wrist. People have called me insane and a psychopath at times, but sometimes, all you need a little push to do the unthinkable. I might never be able…

Engineers should never be attached to their creations. — It had started as an idea during my 2nd year of my undergrad. I envisioned it, I knew what all had to be done, I knew what had not to be done, and I knew that it might take some time to build it. I had a great friend back…

Stupidity at its finest. — The never-ending tale of “I told you so” from numerous systems engineers. Adding instances/memory/vCPU’s is essentially just throwing hardware to fix a software problem. Unless a system runs a JAVA or SCALA application, an actual microservice in python/golang, etc., does not need more than 500Mb of memory; if any service consumes more than that is killed (OOM). A service is scalable if…

Stock options offer the opportunity to buy equity in the company at a later date. — Ask them for a very detailed offer letter rather than saying for eg: We’re giving you a 5% stake in the company. 1] What was the most recent appraisal ? When this happens, the value of the stock options falls. 2] How big the discount would be, compared to preferred shares? 3] Can you tell me how the options are valued? If the stocks weren’t values by Fair Market Value standards, then the…

A world-class company cannot retain its strategic edge unless talent pool which it comprises of isn’t retained. An organization should not only be magnet for extremely talented individuals, it also has to restrict churn by ensuring extraordinary talent are managed with extraordinary care. 1. Culture Fostering an environment of extraordinary…

If you can automate it, you should. — DevOps and SRE culture’s are all about automation and making your life easier, there is no debate on that but what about solving chaos between internal teams. Once in a while you stumble upon problems that are present in clear sight but people just aren’t able to see. And that’s…

A simple question with a complex answer. — Is it when he/she is able to solve the most complex leetcode questions? or is it when others rely on them for help when they are blocked? Or if they are the only goto person they can think of? Throughout my career, I’ve met multiple engineers in my field. Some…

Simplified to its core, a shell really doesn’t do a whole lot: it loops forever, reads commands from the user, then executes them. When a program finishes executing, it displays that program’s output. — a. The shell reads the input, from the getline function STDIN (Standard Input), parses the input and its arguments (if supplied any). The shell also checks if the input entered is an alias of a sort, and expands the relevant value.