Calibrate (verb) mark (a gauge or instrument) with a standard scale of readings Managers across corporate america have a yearly ritual of bench marking their reports according to standards set by Human Resources (HR) for their assigned job level and role. This process results in rewarding (bonus, additional equity) and or promoting employees to higher levels and roles. A popular way of performing this calibration is by asking managers to place their assigned reports into a 9 box grid....

Bulk Execution Engine or BEE is a simple job runner. While writing distributed control plane APIs, there was a need for: waiting for distributed asynchronous transaction convergence retrying for intermittent errors providing status without holding up network connection After a brief survey of available solution landscape (and definitely not an intensive one), I found that popular products like Apache Airflow, AWS Step Functions could solve the problem, but at a high operational and cognitive cost....

Synthetics is a testing technique born in the crucible of cloud software engineering. In this blog post, we will review what role synthetics play, and how to exploit them to full advantage. Microservices modularize the functionality built by the organization. An API call on the cloud service typically results in multiple microservices being called to fulfill a given request. Microservice architecture also provides capability to change a single service in isolation with other services....

The last two decades have seen an incredible rise in humanity’s ability to manage information, and ultimately be in control of changing reality. For example, through a search engine app, we can research any problem, anywhere, all the time. Not only that, we can act on that research immediately as well. We can summon food, transportation, and even adhoc labor. All this just by clicking a few buttons on a web browser or on a mobile app!...

Software projects consistently remain over budget, late and most importantly, many times miss solving the very problem they set out to solve in the first place. A recent and poignant memory was the rollout of the Obamacare health insurance exchanges. Why does this happen? As technology has improved and become more human centric (good), architectures to solve these problems have become more complex. For example, kubernetes is the latest and hottest virtualization technology promising efficient and reliable compute resources in cloud computing....

Once there is an agreed concept of what changes would be required to solve a problem, a good engineering practice is to write a design document and solicit feedback from peers, users and stakeholders. Often companies have internal templates on how to write good design documents. However, I have seen many engineers miss stating key information in their documents. This post hopefully can provide an overview of what information is useful for reviewers....

Cybercrime is up, up and away. However, our systems to deal with it remain antiquated and wishy washy at best. A good example is our old staple of banking system - the check book. The entire finance and banking system has check as a dying vestigial organ in the modern mobile world we live in. So, how you may be wondering is this actually a problem? Three simple pieces of information can help us understand the fraud:...

The quintessential american dream of a white fenced single family home is alive, well and thriving in Silicon Valley. The melting pot of incoming immigrants buy into the dream, and crave to conform to the luxurious life style painted by the media and their social circle (no doubt influenced by facebook, twitter, nextdoor, ..). However, California and Silicon Valley welcome immigrants, but not construction. Housing is in perennial shortage. The infamous NIMBY rules strong (bad), and coupled with environment protection measures (good) severely limits capitalism’s capability to meet the demand....

Hosting costs are dramatically down. Companies not only offer free hosting, but also offer free publishing workflows. The only tangible costs remaining are domain name purchases and renewals. Setup Buy domain name: I purchased desilifeintech.com from namecheap for ~$7/ year. Choose a hosting provider: I liked using Cloudflare’s Pages, as it provides a free tier. For this to work, I had to switch my domain registrar (namecheap’s) nameservers to be Cloudflare’s nameservers....

I use the excellent pass utility locally for managing myriad passwords for all sites on the internet. These passwords are available in my macs, ipads, and iphone. My reasons for not using a cloud based solution (like lastpass or even keybase): Passwords are synchronized and encrypted on personal endpoint devices(ex: MacBook, iPhone, iPad, …). This provides redundancy as well as zero leakage of sensitive information over the internet. Password store on the local server is encrypted and versioned....