Below is based on an internal doc I shared with my team at Hiro a while back. While there are a LOT of resources on 1:1s out there, I found that my team nonetheless valued hearing my perspective in my words. Feel free to edit / adapt to make your
Ever since I discovered the Pi Hole project (not too long ago, surprisingly!) I'd been meaning to give it a try. The long weekend and COVID restrictions provided the perfect opportunity! So what is Pi Hole? Straight from the docs: The Pi-hole® is a DNS sinkhole that protects your devices
I spent a decade in your typical Silicon Valley companies. Then two years ago, I took a plunge into crypto.
Most tech companies already have fairly apolitical norms and no one expects that their employer would actively champion every single cause they might care about. But issues like systemic racism and structural oppression of minorities aren't just matters of belief.
Engineering <> Product interactions at tech companies are susceptible to common (albeit sometimes valid) stereotypes. Product Managers (PMs) might complain about engineers not acting with the right urgency or not understanding the priority; they might grumble about estimates being off and constant delays in shipping etc. Engineers, for their part, might
There's no dearth of helpful lists and pointers online, so this post is more me just cataloging what has worked for us. Some resources are likely specific to the situation in NYC, but most should be broadly applicable, in case others find it useful.
With everything that's happening around us, here's an attempt to jot down some half-baked thoughts for possible silver-linings that might emerge when the dust from COVID-19 settles. All outlier events tend to have some hysteresis effect. I suspect though that the shock-wave from COVID-19 would permanently alter human society, perhaps
I grew up in a (what used to be a) small-town in the sleepy heartland of India, called Bhilai [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhilai]. Both in and out of school, I was surrounded by kids whose "mother tongue" wasn't Hindi, who dressed differently than me, who cooked food unfamiliar
A few months ago, I described how to deploy Ghost on Google Cloud [https://floatingsun.net/over-engineered-blog/]'s Kubernetes Engine (GKE), using GCP's managed SSL offering. But that setup had some limitations, both with the managed SSL certificates as well as GCP's default ingress (which is an L7 solution). At
This post is adapted from a talk I gave at the World Summit AI, 2019. Slides are embedded at the bottom of the post. I'll include the video if/when it becomes available. First, let's align on what a "dapp" is. At the risk of over-simplifying, most applications can be
This is a quick rundown of the first crypto-scam that I saw unfolding in real time. It's by no means an exhaustive or comprehensive analysis, and I should further caveat that this isn't necessarily an area of expertise for me either. So Elon Musk tweeted yesterday: > Anonymous bot swarms deserve
Much has been written about OKRs already, so I can't claim to offer any new insights. What follows is a "cheat sheet" of sorts I use for myself and to share with my teams. Obviously, this article assumes familiarity with the OKR framework [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OKR]. Taken
The world seems to be moving firmly in the direction of Kubernetes. But I hadn't played around with Kubernetes personally all that much, and was craving a first hand experience of the alleged joys (and frustrations). Until now.
In a previous post [https://floatingsun.net/growing-without-baggage/], I covered managing technical debt at at early / fast-growing startups. As companies grow – in head count, in users, in infrastructure, in complexity – the same strategies will be insufficient. In this post let's look at how to operationalize management of technical debt at
Late last year, as I reflected upon 2018 and contemplated 2019, I started thinking the next chapter in my career. I'm so excited to share that I've joined [https://blog.blockstack.org/blockstack-pbc-adds-two-new-leaders-for-engineering-and-investor-relations/] Blockstack [https://blockstack.org/what-is-blockstack/]! Here's why. Backdrop Early on in the process, we decided that we'll
How to manage technical debt in early / mid stage startups? Technical debt [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technical_debt] is a fact of life in companies of all shapes and sizes. In early stage or fast-growing mid-stage companies, paying off technical debt often gets pushed back in favor of launching
Leadership
(if you don't know what a Manager README is, start here [https://firstround.com/review/the-indispensable-document-for-the-modern-manager/] ) Many people find these READMEs useful enough to have taken the time and mental energy to pen them down (checkout the examples here [https://soapboxhq.com/blog/management-skills/49-manager-readmes] and here [https://hackernoon.com/
Life
Boy, did 2018 fly by! Looking back, it was an year of change, major milestones, of growth and above all, of reflection. On the professional front, I was lucky enough to witness an IPO first hand; took on new roles and responsibilities; spearheaded some exciting launches and major strategic initiatives;
Technology
Last month, I got the opportunity to give a talk at the 2017 Golang UK Conference [https://www.golanguk.com/schedule/]. I'll summarize the content of my talk in this post, and you can find the full video as well as slides below. How to build SDKs in Go Lessons
Technology
TL;DR: if you run into strange oauth2 errors especially against not-so-well-known endpoints, you may want to try RegisterBrokenAuthHeaderProvider [https://www.godoc.org/golang.org/x/oauth2#RegisterBrokenAuthHeaderProvider] While working on some authentication changes for dbxcli [https://github.com/dropbox/dbxcli], I ran into a strange issue, that ultimately had
Technology
A long time ago, in a land far far way, I used to live in a one bedroom apartment. A single router provided good wifi coverage throughout the apartment. Life was good. I then moved to a modern (post 1980s construction) two bedroom apartment. I upgraded to a Linksys WRT54G
Technology
If you are familiar with dependency injection and you are in Java-land, you’ve probably heard of Google Guice. You may even have heard of this new D-I framework from the fine folks at Square, called Dagger. We have a sizeable codebase that uses Guice heavily, but I’m a