The Platform Conundrum (and an Answer?)
Dec 16, 2022
A friend of mine shared this article with me titled Things I want as SRE/DevOps from Devs. An excellently written post that talks about the pains of being SRE, Platform Engineer, DevOps* etc and a lack of easily discoverable information which helps with solving problems like outages, ill health of systems etc which are stressful.
Having been a platform engineer for the last few years and currently incubating a platform to be used by a big population of engineers at my workplace, a couple of questions that is often brought up is how much abstraction is too much abstraction and how can we reduce the cognitive load for the developers when they are solving a business problem and shouldn’t be worrying too much about the platform itself.
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How I Habit Tweaked to Read a Novel
Dec 8, 2022
Habit changing is hard. It’s harder when the cues in one’s surroundings are so distracting that the only thing they think they can do is just go with the flow and not do much to change things. A few months ago, a friend of mine kept raving about a book called Atomic Habits. While recovering from a severe lower back pain episode, I decided to give this book a shot because I thought to myself, “What’s the worst that could come out of reading a productivity porn book?
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Always Done It This Way
Apr 24, 2021
Being on the constant lookout for improving things at work, I proposed a change the other day to the way we did the slide deck for our bi-weekly product demo. The response I immediately got from a couple of team members was “But we’ve always done it this way.” This disappointed me because it’s such an easy excuse to provide in order to not look for improvements to the process or culture.
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Seeking Boredom
Dec 31, 2020
Growing up, I used to have plenty of time. Time that I’d either spend doing something constructive things or doing nothing. These days, the definition of doing nothing has changed. It means time that’s utilized to stare at the phone or a gadget aimlessly while waiting for things to happen, or while things are happening, or none of that. I have been trying to insert some activity into my life during all my waking hours and keep myself occupied in some manner that seems to convince my inner self that I’m utilizing the time well while in reality, it’s the exact opposite that’s happening.
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Slowing down communications at work
Aug 11, 2020
Our modes of communication at work has a problem. It’s the problem of moving at rapid speeds. We don’t wait enough to evaluate a piece of information from all angles before hitting the send button. This means we make decisions on imprecise, disjoint information as well as not spend enough time to sit back and chew on an idea, problem, process etc before coming up with a well rounded, thought out decision.
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A Case for Taking Control of "Your" Internet
Jul 27, 2020
You can’t propose that something be a universal space and at the same time keep control of it. - Tim Berners Lee, Inventor of WWW
Over the last few years, we’ve seen the rise of mega corporations that have had a significant impact on our lives. They’ve made our lives easy, they’ve given us platforms to use that help us connect with the rest of the world with a few taps on our devices, they’ve provided you with means to watch cat videos for free.
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