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Overheard : Call to action

I don’t even recall where I heard this :)..  but it stuck with me for me to write it down

For somebody to do something.. three things much happen at once. The person must want do do it, they must be able to and they must be prompted to do it.

A trigger – the prompt for the action – is effective only when the person is highly motivated, or the task is very easy. If the task is hard, people end up frustrated; if they’re not motivated, they get annoyed.

May 14, 2018 by OverHeard 0

Overheard : Paradoxical Commandments

My sister shared this awesome “thought” by Dr. Kent M. Keith.

People are illogical, unreasonable, and self-centered.
Love them anyway.

If you do good, people will accuse you of selfish ulterior motives.
Do good anyway.

If you are successful, you will win false friends and true enemies.
Succeed anyway.

The good you do today will be forgotten tomorrow.
Do good anyway.

Honesty and frankness make you vulnerable.
Be honest and frank anyway.

The biggest men and women with the biggest ideas can be shot down by the smallest men and women with the smallest minds.
Think big anyway.

People favor underdogs but follow only top dogs.
Fight for a few underdogs anyway.

What you spend years building may be destroyed overnight.
Build anyway.

People really need help but may attack you if you do help them.
Help people anyway.

Give the world the best you have and you’ll get kicked in the teeth.
Give the world the best you have anyway.

January 14, 2018 by OverHeard 0

Optimizing cache infrastructure

I love when engineering teams share their tricks of trade for other organizations to benefit. While this might seem counter-intuitive, sharing knowledge makes the entire ecosystem better.

Etsy‘ engineering team does a great job of publishing their architecture, methodologies and code at https://codeascraft.com.

This particular article on how they optimize their caching infrastructure (https://codeascraft.com/2017/11/30/how-etsy-caches/) is pretty enlightening. I always thought the best method to load balance objects (app hits, cache requests, queues etc) to hosts was to use mod operations. In this blog post Etsy’ team talk about using consistent hashing instead of modulo hashing.

At a high level, it allows cache nodes to fail and not impact the overall performance of the application drastically in addition to making it easy to scale the number of nodes. This method is useful when you have a large amount of cache nodes.

More reference links

  • http://www.tom-e-white.com/2007/11/consistent-hashing.html
  • https://www.toptal.com/big-data/consistent-hashing
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consistent_hashing

 

January 3, 2018 by Programming Technology Web 0

Overheard : Attitude

Saw this on a t-shirt a girl was wearing recently

Let me pretend I care…

OK, I’am done

:). Simple but such a strong message.

January 2, 2018 by OverHeard 0

Cooking with Soy

Am planning to experiment cooking with Soy (soya) granules, which is considered a good alternate for meat, since I became a “temporary” vegetarian :).  Although it is a cheaper and healthier way to get protein than mean, I am not sure why it never gained more popularity.

This receipe site by  Aarthi is a source of great inspiration. 

https://www.yummytummyaarthi.com/2011/05/chukka-soya-curry.html

Look forward to sharing the results of my experiment 🙂

January 2, 2018 by Food 2

DID YOU KNOW : Advanced Search in Microsoft Explorer

I was trying to search for some files on my laptop today and wanted to filter the search for filed modified in the last few weeks. Like, show me all files that contain the word “American” and modified in the last 2 weeks. Doing this on a Linux machine would have been a simple filter using find. But this is Microsoft :).

Thanks to some Googling, I ran across something called “Advanced Query Syntax” that is a core part of Microsoft’ ecosystem (OS, Office etc).

So the same search ended up being

American datemodified:this month

There are a lot of cool ways you can filter your queries using the other keywords in AQS.

December 27, 2017 by DID YOU KNOW Technology Windows 0