My office today

Working from home has its perks. Kids are home and this is the only place they want to play.

Don’t pretend you’re purpose driven

Don’t start a business when you have already thought about when to exit. Exits should happen organically.

Link to video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GcvL7BB0UT8

Building Reactive Systems: Conference Talk.

I watched an interesting talk about building high availability systems and thought the simplicity was quite fascinating.

Simple systems are those where the focus is business logic and not compute complexity. Complex business logic should not imply a complex system.

Reactive systems scale very well as they are:

Responsive
Resilient
Elastic
Message Driven

In this talk Dave Farley explains how to design these reactive systems. It’s all based around the premise of passing messages and progressing the state of domain models. With this approach components/sub systems can be decoupled, which makes it easier to reason about the system.

Note that this is not about asynchronous processes, as in call backs , but rather asynchronous design where the domain model caries the weight of process state.

Video URL: https://youtu.be/tKRa0O7aepo

33

I’m blessed to have another year added to the tally. On 20 January I turned 33.

I’m grateful for the life I have and I’m truly fortunate to have quality relationships all around me. I love my Wife and Kids and the extended family and all of them add uncountable heaps of joy and fulfillment to my life. In terms of relationships, I realised that it doesn’t actually matter if everything else falls in place, you will fee the emptiness if the quality of your relationships suffers.

During this year I moved to a new team and learned that the only way to grow is to stretch yourself, meaning that you must go after the hard things. They may seem to take longer at first, but as you pursue them you grow and they become more and more attainable.

For the next year I hope to double down on a few things:

Investing in relationships.
Taking more breaks and spending time with loved ones.
Better focus and productivity while choosing to do the hard/important things.
Writing and reading more.
Making time for thinking.

I look forward to another year and I hope that it is full of quality people, quality time and more growing into a better version of myself.

Previous year: 32

We’re on earth for a reason.

‪For those people fantasizing about living on the moon. The dust can actually kill you:

How many bytes are emoji characters in GO?

It takes 4 bytes for each emoji character and 1 byte for every ASCII character.

package main

import (
	"fmt"
)

func main() {
	a := []byte("😂")
	fmt.Println(len(a))
	// prints 4

	b := []byte("H")
	fmt.Println(len(b))
	// prints 1

}

What happens when you reply to spam email

If you need some time to let your subconscious mind figure out a problem, I enjoyed watching this.

The opposite of addiction is connection

I watched this interesting TED talk about how we treat addicts; we shy away from them and further inflict damage by pushing them into isolation. The talk below gives us a better alternative and a possible way to help those, who themselves don’t want to suffer, grow into a better versions of themselves.

Link to TED talk.

The process before the content

From my perspective, I still have a long way to go. I do however think that sharing what I know today is valuable, not for the sake of what I share, but for the process of refining the idea. I place the process before the content, with the hope that a refined process will lead to fine content.

Writing is thinking is a good metaphor for how I use this blog. I blog and share my posts public-ally so that I can exercise structured thinking. Looking for ways to better express my thoughts and find the best words to illustrate my ideas.

Both the content and the process really do matter, but as I shape my writing process I make sure that I continually fill my mind with things to write about. I believe that applying the correct writing style to great content will be a valuable skill in any context.

I have already started noticing a change in the way I write at work. Doing blog posts forces me to think through what I’m writing. Knowing that it will be shared publicly puts enough pressure on me to ensure it is at least decent.

Blogging is only for the successful, is how I used to think. Now I know that blogging leads to success. Being ables to communicate clearly is a skill worth practicing.