Optimise, not to outside factors

Everyone optimises for one factor, or another in the scheme of things. What you optimise with a feverish pace, might not be another’s last priority to say the least. What one of them optimises might not feature in your rung of the pyramid. That’s fine, never a thing for you to ponder, let alone respond to. Do yourself a favour, and if you can afford to, build walls of glass. Let observations of the other side exist from either direction, at best. ...

July 8, 2020 · Sriram Velamur

Of first, quarters to millenia, and more

And thus, PR #1 goes in (well, #250 because aap chronology samjhiye). Silly stuff aside, made the first set of changes to the Pubninja code base today, as an independent module. The good thing about the chronology now is an important discussion from last evening. From migrating the monolith to micro services and to what extent, to dev. disciplines. What stands out in all, is as much daunting as it seems looking at the meta of it, there’s acceptance and direction. So far, so very good I should presume, and hope it stays that way. ...

July 8, 2020 · Sriram Velamur

Of frescoes, free birds, and threads that stay

Seven years on since this; eleven since Heath and a longer seventeen since Nalla. The soul, Aurelius said, is stained in the colour of its thoughts. Fleeting, I wonder if mine would thus ever form a fresco panel; Nalla’s analogy of the bird and a wind carrying with it the fragrances and otherwise.

July 8, 2020 · Sriram Velamur

Of hidden gems and unforeseen shovels

The best part of a day with visiting sinusitis has been discovering stuff. Stuff that I’ve been running behind for ages now. Sort of a holy grail if that rings a bell. Sat down late in the afternoon with an APM setup from last evening, trying to understand the API surface. After all, ought to get the picture of a well before one dives right in. My! what a wonderful liberating feeling in letting someone take care of your own messy work. I now understand how some might have felt, when I lugged their shit around. ...

July 8, 2020 · Sriram Velamur

Of hollow, brazen towers that tend to scale high

aNNAvappa~NgAr’s episode about Swami desikan and peria AccAn piLLai is chronologically so inconsistent, one cannot avoid laughing hard. Now, that particular episode could be discounted as a random one or scrapped as interpolation in all earnest, if a section of the TK crowd did not use it to slander Swami desikan (and in a consistent manner, lest one forgets) This I guess is fair grounds to question the validity of certain cohorts within the school at large and their horrendous records/lines of argumentation. ...

July 8, 2020 · Sriram Velamur

Of hurt shins and painful uphill walks

Quintessential, apocryphal, and more, the validity and importance of this one can’t ever be overstated. More so, coming from an environment where tests lack were rationalized with flow tests but never the lack of documentation. These few days have been quite the culture shock, so much so, I wonder if I’ll last here long after this uphill a change; however dramatic it sounds.

July 8, 2020 · Sriram Velamur

Of lower overheads and territories of comfort

Much unknown to many is the fact Crisp has entered an autopilot mode since January. We’ve moved on to others, while keeping tabs on certain internal changes. What a recent change to situations at my end gave way to, is the long pending changes to surface. Migrating the data pipeline which is one of the two “close to heart” components of Crisp, I’ve been working on and off. Late last week, sat with migrating the core of the pipeline to C++ and performance has been much on expected lines. Last September when I repurposed most of the content fetcher, we achieved a 50s running time. As much as it was good enough for running as a cloud function, the overheads of runtime were a point of contention. ...

July 8, 2020 · Sriram Velamur

Of Murphy, a rough derby, and some course corrections

Learning for the day - When shit hits the fan, it is bound to spray all around. Running in a frenzy is never a worthy solution however. Had a disastrous event at work midway through the day. Guess gut is right once again; starting the day on some unknown uneasy note should have been noted. This being the third week of me trying to put affairs in order (pun not intended), was a bit sceptical when it became the crux of discussions. ...

July 8, 2020 · Sriram Velamur

Of newer sails and an ocean that never fails

I arrive at the last three days of my resting schedules. So, it is time for an update. My ~six year run with crisp wrapped up on NYE and the last month or so has been a hard one to both think about, and pen down. As I told an acquaintance, the day we wrapped up, saw a lump that called its home my throat. Or, to the melodramatic me, was akin to a father (my gender, nothing otherwise) losing his kid. ...

July 8, 2020 · Sriram Velamur

Of phased changes and fortuitous, freeform discussions

Late last evening, was discussing with a colleague who wanted to build small APIs. While looking at the pro-s and cons-s of choices like Sails and how some of them come with batteries included. Quite reminiscent of my earlier days with Django I should say, some of these features. As the discussion got into specifics, I had mentioned about the HTTP framework I wrote for NodeJS. And, a line of code says more about things than an hour of talk, does it not? Natural progression then was trying to setup a minor REST-ful API using the framework. The primary focus to show how Express is completely open while the likes of Sails enforce a pattern. Some, not so hard bound, some quite otherwise. ...

July 8, 2020 · Sriram Velamur