As a programming sicko, one of my favorite activities is refactoring God models. When I joined Taptap Send , the engineering team was being slowly crushed under the weight of steadily increasing database load. Peak load was tipping beyond functional CPU thresholds, degrading performance and causing intermittent downtime. To make matters worse, the PostgreSQL RDS instance—already the single largest…
I started one of my favorite projects of the past ten years back in 2017 when I joined a company called Sonian . They had built an archival and search product for digital communications that was supporting petabytes of data. Primarily used by law firms and other organizations with legal compliance requirements, the product ingested documents and applied rules 1 to tag, archive, and report on them.…
Yoga centers don’t usually bring to mind high-tech IT organizations but Isha Yoga Center, nestled in the foothills of the Velliangiri mountains in Southern India, is another story. For decades, Isha Foundation has been working tirelessly to bring spirituality and the classical Yoga of ancient India to the whole world. The organization utilizes over one million volunteers annually to teach Yoga,…
I was briefly prescribed Ritalin during middle school. I was often distracted and disruptive at school—one of those annoying students who never seemed to pay attention, but still managed good grades. The pills didn’t make me a better student. They did turn me into a borderline-suicidal zombie though, so I wasn’t made to take them for long. Since then, I have known my mind works differently from…
I recently watched a video on Instagram where a professional cyclist spoke about her experience being hit by a car, her miraculous survival and difficult recovery, and the anger she felt toward the teenage driver who never so much as tried to contact her. She couldn’t fathom how someone could be so thoughtless and return to their life as if nothing had happened. The anger became so intense it…
Tinker: to repair, adjust, or work with something in an unskilled or experimental manner. —Merriam Webster This past week, after months of serene idleness, I found myself once again venturing into cyberspace… to tinker with my workstation. I have been an ardent Arch lover for many years, but had not meaningfully changed my setup in ages. 1 I decided to give CachyOS a whirl and fully embrace…
In mid-2024 I relaunched this website after a decade-long hiatus from public writing. Some family and friends had expressed interest in reading about my experience living at an ashram in southern India where I moved for eight months to focus on my Yoga and meditation practice. Maybe they were just being nice, but I took them seriously and stood up a simple 11ty blog. I wrote 14 posts while abroad;…