Engineering Guardrails

Guardrails are meant to protect us from tripping over. The same can be said about engineering guardrails.

Sometimes the middle ground is most empowering

Writing a blog post in plain text isn’t fun. Neither is writing it in a bulky word processor like Microsoft Word. The former is too constrained, the latter too unbridled. Writing in Markdown is fun. It has sufficient features without creating bloat. Building a backend in lambda functions has a strong lock-in. On the other hand, deploying web services on Virtual Machines (or physical machines!), while having little lock-in, is complicated....

April 30, 2023 · 1 min #Life      Misc
Copenhagen Skyline

Copenhagen

Day 1 Start the day with a free walking tour to get an idea of the important places and the history of the city.

VCs are anti-personas for a B2C startup

The early adopters of Instagram were not VCs.

Book Summary: Staff Engineer by Will Larson

The book talks about what it means to be a staff engineer. It is an interesting read for those who would prefer to stay on the engineering as opposed to the management track of career growth.

Generics in Go

Generics in Go were added about a year back in Go 1.18. In my experience they are great and they fix one of the biggest roadblocks in terms of writing reusable code in Go. I’ll illustrate that with an example. First, do ensure that you have at least Go 1.18 Bash 1 2 $ go version go version go1.19.1 darwin/amd64 Let’s consider a simple case of implementing a Map function in Go that maps an array (well, a slice) to another array (again, actually, a slice)....

Book Summary: Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America's Social Justice Scam by Vivek Ramaswamy

The book takes a nuanced take on the uncanny marriage of corporate America and the “woke” social justice movements. The author, Vivek, was born to an immigrant Indian family, studied at Harvard, worked on wall street, and started his own biotechnology company before writing this book.

Common pitfalls of GitHub Actions

If you create GitHub Actions via GitHub’s UI by going to the URL of the form `https://github.com///actions/new`, it provides templates for setting up the build. However, the template is broken. There are four problems with the default template

White Tank

A day at Joshua Tree National Park

Joshua Tree National Park, about a three-hour drive from the city of Los Angeles, is home to Joshua Trees. If you have a day to spend, I would recommend a hike followed by the viewpoints.

Inheritance in Go language

Go language does not have the concept of a class directly. It, however, has a concept of an interface as well as a struct. I’ll illustrate how this can be used to build most of the inheritance constructs that a language like Java or C++ offers.