In the book, the author talks about how we rarely re-think our decisions and beliefs, and the disadvantage of doing so. Adam Grant has three parts in this book. The first part talks about how re-thinking is good for an individual. The second part talk about how influencers can get others to rethink and change their minds. The third part is about how a society rethinks collectively.

Introduction

According to Adam Grant, there are three modes of thought that hinders rethinking. He calls them preaching our own beliefs, prosecuting others' thoughts, and politicking for acceptance and validation. He says, when we lack the knowledge and skill to achieve excellence, we sometimes lack the skill and knowledge to judge excellence. We become blind to what we do not know. I think this is where we fallback onto herd mentality and find solace in group thinking.

What Hinders Rethinking

The solution to this is to have confident humility. You should have confidence that you will achieve your goals but have humility to question whether you have the right tools at the present. That is the sweet spot of confidence between the two extremes of arrogrance and self-doubt.

Confident Humility

The author says, we are entiteled to have our opinion. Yes, as long as they are inside our head. But if we decide to express it outside, then it is our responsibility to ground them in logic and facts, and change our minds when better evidence turns up.

Expression

So what happens when we express our thoughts and find them to be different from others? The author says that task conflicts are good. That is how we grow. However, relation conflicts are not. We should keep emotions out of our feedback or reaction. We should argue like scientists instead of resorting to name calling. We should concentrate on how something should work rather than why it should.

Conflicts

I am not a fan of audio books in general. Think Again by Adam Grant is an exception because I think it has been narrated well by the author himself. I listened the Audible audio book for a few minutes everyday. It captured my attention till the end.

I am not a fan of audio books in general. Think Again by Adam Grant is an exception because I think it has been narrated well by the author himself. I listened…

personaldevelopment

Personal Development

problemsolving

Problem Solving

communication

Communication

Think Again - Adam Grant

Working Backwards is a narration of the processes and work culture followed in Amazon. The authors strongly believe that the success of Amazon can be attributed to its work culture. If you get past the praises for Jeff Bezos, there are a few thought-provoking high-acheivers' processes in the book. For some, it might look like a handbook for running a factory of new ideas. Amazon has simply tried many ideas. Few of them are successful and that's good enough.

Powerpoints convey too little information. The outcome of a presentation using Powerpoint depends completely on the skills of the presenter. Instead, write 6-page description of the idea being presented. The first few minutes of the meeting is devoted to reading the 6-pager. The idea needs to speak for itself rather than the presenter.

Ban PowerPoint

Do not try to control the output metrics. They are hard to control. Instead, work on the input metrics. The output metrics will reflect your work.

Focus On Input Metrics

Articulating a company's motto or core elements will tell its employees and stake holders what is important for the company. An employee working at any level in the company will be able to take decision autonomously if they know what the values are.

Articulate The Core Elements Of Company's Culture

Everyone is a leader in their own right. Everyone is making autonomous decisions everyday. Leadership principles ensure that everyone is moving in the same direction as a company.

Define A Set Of Leadership Principles

Working backwards is a good read. Talks in depth about the processes that make Amazon successful.

Working Backwards is a narration of the processes and work culture followed in Amazon. The authors strongly believe that the success of Amazon can be attributed…

productivity

Productivity

corporateculture

Corporate Culture

leadershipandmanagement

Leadership & Management

Working Backwards

Focused mode of thinking is when you concentrate intently on something, like solving a math problem. While, diffused mode of thinking is a more relaxed kind of thinking. It is when you zoom out of the problem and see new connections, new patterns, and the bigger perspective. At any given point in time, you are either in focused mode of thinking or the diffused mode. It seems you can't be in both thinking modes at the same time.

Focused Vs Diffused Thinking

Chunking is the mental leap that helps you unite bits of information together. With practice, the bits of information, or the chunks, become bigger and more efficient.There is also the concept of "over-learning" that is quite detrimental. This happens when you practice a single method for too long that you try to use the same solution or expertise for every problem. The solution to over-learning is called Interleaving. Mastering a new subject does not mean learning only the basic chunks of the subject, but also to learn how to select and use these chunks in different situations.

Chunking And Overlearning

Research says that when we try to do something we do not like, our brain experiences a pain. We natually try to put the task off to soothe the brain. This is procrastination. However, research also shows that, not long after you start doing the task the neuro-discomfort disappears. It seems that we just need to get over the initial hurdle.

Procrastination

Learning is not linear. The concepts you understand one day may not make sense the next. However, if you persist, you will find that your knowledge base will take a surprising leap foreward. While learning create lively visual metophors or build stories to memorise information. This helps your brain to retain the information. It takes persistence and modesty to be a great learner. You will find that people with higher IQ are sometimes set in their ways and might fail to see new opportunities or new applications. Thus a humble brain with a growth mindset achieves breakthroughs.

Renaissance Learning

Learning How to Learn: Powerful mental tools to help you master tough subjects is an interesting course offered on Coursera. The instructors, Barb Oakley and Terry Sejnowski have put together a series of videos and reading material that are concise yet full of information. There are interview videos with experts with multiple backgrounds that are insightful. Here are some of my take aways from the course.

Learning How to Learn: Powerful mental tools to help you master tough subjects is an interesting course offered on Coursera. The instructors, Barb Oakley and…

health

Health

habits

Habits

education

Learning & Education

Learning How to Learn - Coursera

Self awareness is how clearly we see ourselves and understand how others see us too.

What Is Self Awareness

What did I get frustrated by during the day?In what situations did I do my best work?

Ask The What Questions

Get feedback from "critics who care".

Spend Time With A Feedback Friend

Pay attention to your mistakes and learn from it.

Become A Mistake Monitor

And reframe your thinking traps into positive prompts.

Spot Your Thinking Traps

Answer this yourself.Ask for feedback on this.Compare how you see yourself vs how others see you. Is there a gap?

You At Your Best Vs You At Your Worst

career

Career

How to accelerate your self-awareness | Amazing If

<ul><li>When you use a service mesh, all requests to-and-from your service go through it. That is, the service mesh acts as both forward proxy and reverse proxy. It adds two extra network hops. If this is not a trade-off you can do (may be because your network capacity is small), then consider other solutions. </li><li>On Kubernetes, service meshes run on side cars. Thefore, the number of containers in your system doubles. It consumes CPU and memory (though service meshes are very light weight and super fast, this is something you should consider). </li> </ul>

Do You Need A Service Mesh?

On a high level, service mesh is used by one service to talk to another. You will eliminate from your service features around service-to-service communication that are non-functional such as telemetry, whitelisting, error handling (such as retries, circuit breaking, etc).

What Does Service Mesh Do

<ul><li>Service Discovery: Service mesh gives an abstraction to map service names to IP addresses. our service needs to understand that it is contacting the "login" service, for example, and need not worry about what is the IP or the domain of that service.</li><li>Security, reliability and Observability: You can configure service-to-service authentication, user authorization, and telemetry on service mesh.</li><li>Connectivity: Some service meshes provice load balancing. They can help with canary testing or A/B testing new features by routing a portion of the incoming/outgoing traffic through different deployments.</li></ul>

Features Of Service Mesh

I came across a few blog where they use "Service Mesh" and "Istio" interchangably. However, Istio is only one of the examples for Service Mesh. A few other famous examples include <a href="https://linkerd.io/">Linkerd </a>, HashiCorp's <a href="https://www.consul.io/">Consul </a>, AWS <a href="https://aws.amazon.com/app-mesh">App Mesh </a>, <a href="https://www.nginx.com/products/nginx-service-mesh/">NGINX service mesh </a>.

Examples Of Service Mesh

Service Mesh is not new. But it continues to be a buzz word. It sounds quite complex for someone new. So, I intend to break it down (for my own understanding as well 😉).

Service Mesh is not new. But it continues to be a buzz word. It sounds quite complex for someone new. So, I intend to break it down (for my own understanding as…

technologyandthefuture

Technology & The Future

computerscience

Computer Science

Service Mesh and Micro Services

The author reminds us that companies don't want to invest in you anymore. Hence take the trainings and learnings into your own hands. Plan it the way you would plan a curriculum. Be prepared to be in permanent "beta" state and learn continuously.

Invest In Yourself

Find a skill that is based on what you are good at, that which gives you joy and that which will pay you. These three parameters will tell you if you will survive in a job in the long term.

Assets, Aspirations & Market Realities

You do not have to be the best in the world. It is sufficient to be the best in your organization, in your timezone, in your industry segment. Pick a hill that has less competition.

All Advantages Are Local

The author says, "your career success depends on both your individual capabilities and your network's ability to highlight them". When you want to create a connection, do not think, "how can that person help me?". Instead, think, "how can I help that person?". In corporate careers, the connections are not transactinal. You will have to build relationship for years to see the fruits.

Network

You will not find good fortune accidentally. You will have to make efforts to be in the right place at the right time. It takes hard work, smart work and good network for opportunity to knock on your door. When you have no resources, create them.

Serendipity

The Startup of You by Reid Hoffman and Ben Casnocha is a short book. It is practical and has actionable advices at the end of each chapter. The book encourages you to treat your career like a start up company.

The Startup of You by Reid Hoffman and Ben Casnocha is a short book. It is practical and has actionable advices at the end of each chapter. The book encourages…

business

Business

startup

Startups

The Startup Of You - Reid Hoffman and Ben Casnocha

One of the goals I have set for myself is to be consistant at writing. This means I will have to frequently publish the articles. For the first few posts, I did manual deployments from my laptop. Now, I have automated the process. As soon as I merge a post to the master branch, a deployment script will publish the website. I have achieved this using <a href="https://github.com/features/actions">Github Actions </a>. Setting up the automated deployment involved writing a <code>workflow </code>. A workflow is nothing but a sequence of jobs, each involving a sequence of steps. I kept my workflow simple. It consists of a single job with a few steps.

Motivation

The first step, of course, is to checkout the master branch. This is done using the <a href="https://github.com/actions/checkout">actions/checkout </a>action, which is a pretty standard action everyone uses.

Checkout The Code

Next, I have to build the source code. For that I need NodeJS setup in the machine where the job is running. The <a href="https://docs.github.com/en/actions/learn-github-actions/introduction-to-github-actions#runners">runner </a>is simply a blank server at the time of creation (of course it has the "runner" software needed to run the workflow). I use the Github-hosted runner. The default Ubuntu server that Github provides is sufficient for my usecase. I digress. On the runner server, I setup NodeJs using the action <a href="https://github.com/actions/setup-node">setup-node </a>. This, again, is a fairly common action. It takes as input the node version you need. I use version 14.x

Setup Node

The next step is pretty obvious. It is to install the library that the application needs using the command <code>npm ci </code>. If you are wondering why I did not use <code>npm install </code>, <a href="https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/difference-between-npm-i-and-npm-ci-in-node-js/">this </a>article might help.

Install Depend

<a href="https://github.com/joshi-aparna/blog/blob/ba5ae29eaff4932eae3442e83897d7d72e240713/package.json#L57">package.json </a>contains deployment script. This script is a combination of two commands; <code>gatsby build --prefix-paths</code> and <code>gh-pages -d public </code>. In the last step of the workflow, I run this command by running the following shell script.Before running the <code>npm </code>command, I have to set the remote url of the repository, which requires a secret GITHUB_TOKEN . This is a secret that is automatically created for you when you enable Github Actions on your repository. Also, the <code>npm </code>command needs the information of the user running it. We provide it using the param <code>-u </code>. Read about it <a href="https://www.npmjs.com/package/gh-pages">here </a>

Build And Deploy

I decided to write this blog with Gatsby and run it on Github Pages because I am on a quest to learn markdown and I like the idea of having version control over…

Gatsby - How to automate deployment using Github Actions

Funcational Programming is a declarative way of programming.

What Is Functional Programming

Remember how we assign different values to a variable through out the program? How we use setters in classes to modify the value of class variables? That is not allowed in FP. A variable once set remains unchanged. Sort of like, making all variables <code>final.</code>We usually think of variables as vessels that hold the values. The vessel can hold different values at different times. But in FP, variables are just another name for their values. Like, PI is always 3.14..Ever imagined a different value for PI? No? In the same way, every x, y in your program can now have a single value.

Immutability

If a function returns same value for the same argument every time, then the function is pure. That generally means that, the function cannot use any state values that could potentially change.

Functional Purity

In OOP we treat data and functions separately. In FP, they are all the same. We can create an array of functions, pass a function as argument, return a function from a method.

First Class Function

Let's say there is a function that takes three arguments. Usually, we need to be aware of all three values to call this function, right? In partial application, the three arguments are provided at different times. I could not find a decent blog that explains this well. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partial_application">Here </a>is the wikipedia page.

Partial Application

Recursion is when a function calls itself and an end condition exists in the function to stop the method call. We could talk about this in depth another day. For now, <a href="https://dzone.com/articles/functional-programming-recursion">here </a>is a good explanation.

Recursion

This is a method where we take simple functions and combine them into a more complex function. Let's say we have two methods <code>f(x) = x * 2 //(timesTwo) </code>and <code>f(x) = x - 1 // (minusOne) </code>. And we want to compute <code>f(x) = 2x -1 </code>. You call the <code>timesTwo </code>function first. With the output of <code>timesTwo </code>, you call the <code>minusOne </code>function. How would you code this? The requirement here is that the next function takes as argument the same type that the previous function returns.

Composition

I completed a course on Functional Programming on LinkedIn Learning and here is what I want to remember from it. What is Functional Programming? Funcational…

softwareengineering

Software Engineering

Functional Programming

Hadoop, as we know is just a large distributed file system. Hbase uses it to store data as files (they are called Hfiles, really). Does that mean I can spin up a Hbase database from a large amount of data I have on my Hadoop cluster? No! Hbase requires that you start with an empty database. It will then insert data into this database as it sees fit.

Hbase Runs On Hadoop

If you have a Java application that uses Hbase, the client that runs in the application talks to Hbase region servers. Region servers are processes that keep data in memory. Once the memory is full, they flush the data to the data nodes. They also read Hfiles from data nodes and store in memory to serve the read operations from your application. Each region server is responsible for a range of keys (Remember Hbase is a key-value store?)

Hbase Region Servers

There are so many region servers. How does your application know which region server to connect? There is a single Hmaster (with a backup) to get map of Region servers and the range of keys they serve. Usually this map is cached by your application and is refreshed periodically.

Hmaster

Hbase keeps data in Hfiles. Initially the Hfiles is stored in memory. As you add data to the database, the keys are added to the Hfiles in sorted order. Once the Hfiles gets full, it is written to the disk (in the data node). If you want to add a new key, the full Hfiles where the key should belong is read into the memory, the new key is added to the sorted place where it belongs and the updated full Hfiles is written to the disk again. The previously written Hfiles is no longer used (it will be cleaned up by a different process). This is why it is easy to look up keys in Hbase.

Hbase Keeps Data In Sorted Order

Introduction to hbase. Important terminology.

We are all familiar that Hbase is a NoSQL datastore. Let us go one level deeper to understand how it works on a high level. Hbase is a key-value store Every…

Basics of Hbase

If you are an Instagram Reels addict like me 🙈, then you are familiar with the song "<a href="https://youtu.be/7zok9co_8E4">I am on vacation every single day cuz I love my occupation </a>". Kleon says that every profession has monotonous days. Even creative people like cartoonists, painters, content creators deal with it. You HAVE to get comfortable with it. Having a routine helps to keep going despite the monotony.

Everyday Is Groundhog Day

You need to set a dedicated space and dedicated time for your work. Disconnect from the world and give your work full concentration it deserves. No notifications. Some music, maybe. I have tried the <a href="https://shows.ivmpodcasts.com/show/the-habit-coach-with-ashdin-doctor/episode/ep-85-pomodoro-technique-I2UcKHuRSaOGZmM5">Pomodoro technique </a>and found it working for me. I have an office space (just a table and a chair, nothing fancy) where I work. I sit at that chair and my work mode begins.

Build A Bliss Station

How many times do we cling on to the title or the position at office? Do we really care how good our work is as long as we are the CEO or CTO of something? Kleon says, the titles don't matter. Work does. Stay playful. Do the work you like. Do not wait for the tile to be bestowed on you.

Forget The Noun. Do The Verb.

A line from the book that struck me was "We used to have hobbies. Now we have side hustles". If your friend makes beautiful cakes, do you compliment by saying, "you could start a bakery!"? Why do we impose that our hobbies make money for us? Why can we not excel at something just for the pleasure of it? Why do we always need to take things to the next level? Who are you trying to impress? This hit home. Kleon suggests that keep atleast a tiny bit of your work off the market. Make gifts. Gift your work to your family, your friends, to the world. Do not put a price tag on it.Are you

The ordinary + extra attention = THE EXTRAORDINARY

The book, Keep Going by Austin Kleon has several such pearls of wisdom.

Keep Going By Austin Kleon

Keep Going by Austin Kleon is a book I admire very much. The author has done what I intend to do in this blog. The book is small. No, it is compact. A lot of…

Think Again - Adam Grant

Working Backwards

Learning How to Learn - Coursera

How to accelerate your self-awareness | Amazing If

Service Mesh and Micro Services

Aparna R