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3-2-1 Quotes 8-6-20

A difficult lesson to learn: Your most persistent distractions will seem justified to you.

This is something that I think is absolutely true with me. There’s several things that I justify spending time on (for example, shooting 50 shots when I need to focus my mind or something) that definitely is just a distraction from what I actually should be doing in that moment, but I justify it to myself. I need to challenge every thing that I do very regularly, and think carefully about whether that thing is worth the time that I’m spending on it.

“When feedback is immediate, clear, and concrete, people learn quickly. When feedback is delayed, abstract, and opaque, people rarely learn.”

Honestly, this is probably one of the biggest differences between my time with Theorem vs. my time with Amazon. With Theorem, even though I didn’t get a whole lot of constructive feedback, with PRs and consistent review cycles, and working with Josh much more regularly than I am working with Balaji, I got more feedback on my code-writing and development than I’m getting at Amazon. The reasons for the discrepancy are two-fold I think. The first is that inherently, my work at Amazon has been less problem solving through code and more of setting up infrastructure for code, so I’ve definitely have less changes for writing interesting code and getting feedback for it. The second is that my personal productivity also hasn’t been as high as when I was working for Theorem (probably a combination of the team not being as interesting to me, also concurrently doing EE 16B, and being the second internship over the summer and getting a bit used/complacent with the internship lifestyle).

uid: 202008060818 tags: #quotes #productivity

February 22, 2023

Daily review 07-17-20

How did your goals turn out today?

Be organized.

Do my best on all my commitments.

Honestly, I definitely didn’t do my best on all my commitments today. (As evidenced me shirking on my work-related streaks for today. https://www.dropbox.com/s/niwgadl72dkca1u/Screenshot%202020-07-17%2023.52.04.png?dl=0). I convinced myself I was “blocked” because my SCP running (I ended up canceling it anyway). On top of that, I told Sile that the work that he assigned me would only take me around 10-15 minutes. He said, oh, I thought it would take you longer (like 2-3 hours), but I said that I didn’t want to waste his time. After saying that though, I went downstairs to eat, and then briefly talked with Sile around an hour afterwards, and then went to shit (and played Hearthstone in the meantime), then briefly talked with Sile again, then went downstairs and pretty much got ready for EE. Now Sile either thinks that the task took me longer than I thought it would take (so I’m bad at estimating how long tasks will take, not a good quality for a software engineer), or I just didn’t work on the task once Sile told me that he expected it to take longer (which suggests that I only work on tasks right before they’re due - I don’t try to finish them earlier than I have to). Both of those impressions I’ve created in the mind of someone who’s going to play a major part in determining whether I get a return offer or not are not good for me. I didn’t play that very smartly to be honest.

16B midterm post-mortem 202007180109

Be practically independent.

Grow grow grow.

Not relaxing after meetings 202007172359

Develop my social network.

Be a good son/brother/boyfriend/friend

Contribute to the world

Be more forward-thinking

Be more disciplined

Be physically healthy.

Any other thoughts?

uid: 202007172335 tags: #journal

February 22, 2023

Meeting With Sile

Beta, gamma, different stages in the pipeline After beta, Approval workflow (integration tests), then goes to gamma

Difference between gamma and beta is that they use different sources

  • in beta, although we share the same code, our beta might be different (typically your user is using the prod database), but you might not want to sync the prod and beta/gamma databases
  • all sources are different, database, lambda, api keys etc are all different
  • beta’s environment is pretty close to prod, and usually just has dummy data
  • gamma’s database might have some real email IDs
  • in prod there is always a little bit of test data, but it was very few.
    • before we release the product, we’ll usually go one or two rounds of tests with small data
  • gamma has real data, but not all of the real data
  • beta is typically dummy data
  • in beta, we can manually change the records as we want
  • in gamma, we won’t manually change the data
  • in some teams, they will invite some users to attend tests - those tests also happen in gamma

Ask balaji if the account should be spss team, or the BI

Recommends that we first have a beta accounts and then move to multiple stages

We definitely would need to make a VPC, and create a new aws account

Setting up the API pipeline also needs the AWS account, so Sile will help with that

Api Design 202007101439

Create table with cloud formation: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/database/how-to-use-aws-cloudformation-to-configure-auto-scaling-for-amazon-dynamodb-tables-and-indexes/

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSCloudFormation/latest/UserGuide/quickref-dynamodb.html

Bones CLI: https://builderhub.corp.amazon.com/docs/native-aws/bones-cli-guide/getting-started.html

https://builderhub.corp.amazon.com/docs/native-aws/developer-guide/regional-expansion.html

CloudFormation DynamoDB, capacities for different stages: https://sage.amazon.com/questions/664503

SAMToolkit: https://sage.amazon.com/questions/424730

https://builderhub.corp.amazon.com/docs/native-aws/developer-guide/using-samtoolkit-cdo.html#bones-samtoolkit-setup-role

https://builderhub.corp.amazon.com/docs/native-aws/developer-guide/using-samtoolkit.html

https://w.amazon.com/bin/view/SAMToolkit#HDeveloperEnvironmentConfiguration

uid: 202007101422 tags: #meetings #amazon

February 22, 2023

Cardinal Rankings Are Essential For Society

When we think about the factors that make large-scale human societies possible, it’s easy to focus on technologies, agriculture, metals, machinery. But the cultural practice of measuring status with quantifiable metrics might be just as important.

The book starts off with a discussion about animals, and how animals spending time on stuff like beautiful markings and rituals, to establish a pecking order, are super important for the functioning of society, because otherwise every time there’s a conflict between two animals who haven’t fought before, there would have to be a fight to resolve it, as compared to people already knowing their place, and preemptively avoiding the fight.

This is important for humans as well - the fact that we have so many cardinal metrics to rank each other, while seemingly obvious, is pretty important to our (conflict and disagreement-laden) way of life.

Created from: Book review: Algorithms to Live By 202005302204

uid: 202006110153 tags: #insights

February 22, 2023

Modern Javascript Course

Going to Learn and Be Comfortable with Modern Javascript Syntax

Course url: https://www.educative.io/courses/simplifying-javascript-handy-guide/N8XV31KZxJp

Useful insights:

  • const variables cannot be reassigned to, but their values can change (e.g. if they are a list or an object, you can add values to them)
  • let variables are block-scoped - they only exist within the block. They also can’t be reassigned within the same block.
    • They are useful for the case where you’re doing a for loop, returning something each time (e.g. the index), and you want to return the index at that specific iteration, not the index at the very end (as it would be if you used var).
  • Javascript template literals:
function greet(name) {
return `Hi, ${name}`;
}
console.log(greet('Leo'));
  • Modern Javascript is very functional—as such, avoid mutations, and push to arrays

Outline:

COMPLETED: Do the full-stack open course 202006071749

uid: 202006070113 tags: #projects #programming #javascript

February 22, 2023

My Walk With Rohan

Interesting conversation, but also made me feel uneasy

Going to record all the thoughts I have after I go on walks with random people, like I did with the Yash one 202006010927

  1. It was pretty disturbing how Rohan mentioned when he was talking about his sister that “all girls go through some stuff” when they’re at that age, when he was talking about the arguments that I used to have with Arya.
  2. When he was talking about AOC, he was talking about how a lot of people think that she’s crazy - don’t a lot of people think that Trump’s crazy? But the disturbing part - he talked about how beautiful she was, and if she was president, he would tune in to all of the state of the union addresses, etc.
  3. This was a thought that I actually thought was interesting - he argued that it wouldn’t be too bad if Trump was elected 202006062348, because it would make it so that in 4 years, there might be another Obama, who would actually shake the system, instead of Biden, who’s just going to be in the pocket of special interest groups and won’t actually get stuff done
  4. When we’re older, we might vote conservative as well - at some point you have to think practically
  5. America is interesting - the fact that American can elect Obama, and just 4 years later elect Trump, says something powerful about the power of the Democratic vote, and how the winds of society can blow in many different directions
  6. When Trump was elected, people needed someone who was going to address the issue of manufacturing jobs going away from America and America losing its sheen, which was something that Democrats didn’t mention at all. The only problem was, people thought that eventually, Trump would actually be able to deliver on his promises, but that turned out not to be the case. 202006080227

uid: 202006062329 tags: #talks

February 22, 2023