Mindfulness is the practice of living in the present.

I previously discussed software feature scope in Quality, time, scope: pick any two. scope skōp noun: scope; plural noun: scopes the extent of the area or subject matter that something deals with or to which it is relevant. “we widened the scope of our investigation” Please keep in mind that we are addressing scope in a narrow sense of developing features for software distributed through the magical powers of the “zero additional” cost internet (after the recurring costs of connectivity, bandwidth, and access device)....

I have a lust-regret relationship with food. I love good food, variety, texture, spices, herbs, smells. Invariably, when I extend myself, I have the following regretful consequences: Weight imbalances that depress my fitness target Stomach upset that invariably happens Adding alcohol makes overeating worse Too much alcohol adds in hangover Changes I did to make this lust turn to love: Measure, measure, measure: I weigh myself daily, and make a note of it in my journal....

One of the corner stone value of my adult life, has been the old adage that “Actions speak louder than words”. The original saying is meant to convey that people’s action show their real attitudes, rather than what they say. Growing up, I was shy and introverted (I still remain that way). My childhood books (and maybe movies) led me to look up to the strong silent protagonist. I also mistook the saying to mean that I do not need to counter people’s assumptions, and that they would see and understand what I have to say by my actions....

“Choose any two: quality, time, or features” is old age wisdom of software project planning. This rule of thumb makes for lively discussions, and used to advantage by many an engineering leader. Lets start with definitions first: Quality refers to known and unknown bugs that lie in the released features. Typically enterprises have SDETs (Software development engineer in test) who help craft a test plan, feature coverage, and regression scenarios to guard against unwanted side effects....

I’ve existed on this revolving rock in space for 50 years. In this time I’ve acted like the needy child of a bird, requiring and craving constant undivided attention, care and praise. It has taken me half a century to realize that I’ve been extremely fortunate and misled at the same time. This post is a cathartic examination of people whose love I have been lucky to experience. My mom, mummy, is the unconditional forever champion of me....

A positive outlook begets success and support, and conversely a negative outlook fosters failure and bitterness. Successful people are optimistic, and bitter people remain pessimistic.

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....