Silicon Valley is a hotbed of technology innovation, scrappy startups, and has seen the rise of a few lucky startups to be worldwide industry titans. Most innovations try to solve problems cheaper, faster and better. I immigrated to the US, and Silicon Valley at the end of the dotcom boom cycle (just before 2000). And shortly after that, America as a super power went through a generational transformation with the shocking terrorism attacks of 9/11....

It is surprising to learn just how much of the world’s philosophical & spiritual advances happened at roughly around the same time period of 600 BCE. Some of the greatest spiritual leaders of this time period are Buddha in India, Confucious in China, Thales, Anaximander in Greece, and Pythagoras in Italy. Deep in the pandemic (Sept 2021), I started my own spiritual journey with the reading of A guide to good life: the ancient art of stoic joy by William B Irvine....

After being through two startups (story for another time), I got an opportunity (way back in 2012) to work in a more traditional American company, one with a different business model than software development. UL (Underwriters Laboratories) is a trusted product safety certification corporation. It is wildly profitable (around $4 billion in revenues in 2012) and completely private. The business pitch was to create an online marketplace of UL certified products....

I have set up engineering teams many times in my career. Each time is unique, and it is fascinating to observe a new team building its own micro culture and character. Cloud Application Management (CAM) is a brand new platform engineering team that provides services to manage platform extension applications. A customer or the application author decides: which configurations need to be changed for their solution what data sources are required what processing is required for the new data whether to list the application in application registry or keep it private An administrator installs, upgrades or removes an application on their cloud solution....

\( life=\sum(people) \) For my 50th birthday, I wish to thank, appreciate and celebrate the people who influence the way I think, decide, and act. Loving mom, happy dad and doting sister Without papa’s early morning cramming for my exams, I would never have become an engineer. Papa is the workhorse: he ironed my school uniform daily, and dutifully bused me to school. Papa is the sole athlete in our family, and I have been jealous of the almost effortless skill he displays at almost any physical game, be it tennis, basketball, cricket, billiards, swimming, …...

Our cloud solutions are the eyes and ears for its customers to monitor and troubleshoot their own software operations. Our enterprise search software is an on-premise native, that is to say that it is designed to be managed by a single customer administrator at a time. An administrator requires direct access to software system nodes in order to manage networking rules, performance settings, security knobs, and extension capabilities. For assistance, there is comprehensive documentation and training certification made available as well....

I was three years old in 1975, and I have no recollection of watching the movie, only that I have always loved listening to the song, its lyrics and the uplifting music. My mom tells me that I loved this song from the moment I heard it in the theater with her and dad. The song is surprisingly deep, beautiful, poetic, and philosophical. I dedicate this post for my 26th anniversary with my beloved ❤️....

\( Thoughtfulness = Empathy + Consideration + Kindness \) Being thoughtful takes time and deliberate work to perform consistently. Thoughtfulness typically plays a role when two people are interacting, but can sometimes apply to multiple people situations as well (for example, when trying to mediate in a conflict). Identifying thoughtful friends or colleagues is not hard, as we just need to recall discussing our problems, frustrations, desires, and hopes and with thoughtful people, as they not only listen patiently to our issues, but also provide helpful suggestions making us see and realize what we might be missing....

Earlier this year, I got an opportunity to work on an existing cloud provisioning automation effort that wasn’t going as well as leadership had hoped for. This was puzzling, as there is no shortage of scripting, APIs, and 3rd party tools available for automated cloud provisioning. Public cloud providers go out of their way in helping (for obvious reasons) corporations ramp up to their cloud offerings in an automated way. The platform teams that were tasked with this effort were also reasonably smart, motivated, and the goals they were shooting for felt reasonable and well thought out....

Our journey through life is a pathway created through the decisions that we make. Most non trivial decisions are costly and or impossible to revert. It is no wonder then that “undo” is a valued super power when working on complex software systems. The ability to reverse a decision completely (and without lingering side effects) in a given context is magical and godlike. Undo makes users of a software system more confident in exploring new features and options, as “undo” always provides a lifeline....