2024 in numbers

Around this time each year, I take the opportunity to reflect on the past and plan for the future. In the past, I relied on an elaborate 20-page booklet filled with thoughtfully curated questions and exercises. The goal was to uncover patterns from the previous year and craft a vision for the year ahead. Over time, I developed my own system for simplicity and ease. I focused on areas of interest and created small trackers to monitor them throughout the year.

Yamaha FZ-S 2016

Owning a bike was a dream during college which became a reality within a year of leaving college. This bike was purchased on 16 Jan in 2017 and sold on 11 Nov 2024. It never dissapointed but when it was time to let it go, I let it go. While selling the bike, it had 30363 km on the odometer. Here is the odometer timeline and following that is a short chatGPT generated ode to the bike.

A Scala Interview

This was a coding interview in Scala. The problem statement was a simple one : Input = List(10, 10, 10, 10, 20, 30, 30, 10, 10, 40, 50, 50, 50, 50) Output = List(10, 20, 30, 10, 40, 50) Kindly eliminate the consecutive duplicates of the elements contained within this list. Approach 1 My first thought was to implement a temp variable based solution - introduce a “memory” element which keeps updating when encountering a new number and I ended up writing the below code -

A Deep Dive into my chess.com games

Since I created an account on chess.com in 2020, I have played an unhealthy amount of games on the website and all my games are saved in their database. The trail of data I have created over the years should contain huge secrets of my own gameplay, but the stats I see on my profile are too basic and do not offer useful plans to improve. If I could to decipher more from the data of my games, I could get potential insights into my strengths and weaknesses.

Setting up linode Arch Linux

Blindly run these steps once you have a brand new Arch Linux Server in linode. Connect to your Linode via SSH: ssh root@IP Set your timezone and synchronize the hardware clock with the system clock: ln -sf /usr/share/zoneinfo/Asia/Calcutta /etc/localtime hwclock --systohc date Create a new user and set sudo permissions: useradd -m pdebashis passwd pdebashis export EDITOR="vim" visudo --- add the line "pdebashis ALL=(ALL) ALL" Switch to the newly created user

Regex and Beyond

Regular expressions, or regex, can be very difficult to understand, especially for more complex patterns. I recently encountered a difficult regex problem, which required getting my hands dirty with regex. The regex work led to both understanding the issue as well as coming up with a solution. I have a string column in a table which contains LLDD DLL at the end, where L refers to a letter and D refers to a digit.

First Over the Board Chess Tournament

This was my first OTB experience. It was a 9 Round Swiss, G/15+10 time control and was open to all. The prize fund was around Rs.10 lakh and the entry fee at Rs.1299. It was held on 4th and 5th of Novemeber, 2022 in the Hitex Exhibition Centre in Hyderabad. Tournament Results - https://chess-results.com/tnr684721.aspx The rapid event had 4 rounds on day 1 and 5 rounds on day 2. There were 397 participants out of which 37 were titled players and 206 FIDE rated players.

Flavors of a Software Career

My career has been dynamic over the first few years. I have moved from project to project, within a company and across, up in hierarchy and sideways, creating a matrix of career options for myself. Sometimes the change was fast, at times slow and on some instances even in the wrong direction, but I have now built up a portfolio of experiences. These are the various roles I see and a 5 years old-like explanation of what each title entitles you to do typically.

Solving a treacherous bug on a Friday night

So, I had been trying to run a simple websocket listener. I had a system in place which will do the authentication and provide me with a wss:// address on which I can add a listener. There are a bunch of libraries to do this. So I copy pasted some code from the internet which used the ruby gems faye/websocket and EventMachine and all was good for a while. Till I decided to run this thing on a Windows machine.

Book Review : The Big Nine

How the tech titans and their thinking machines could wrap humanity Notable Qoutes This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but with a whimper. - T.S.Eliot The first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make. By not using any human data, Zero’s creators removed the constraints of human knowledge. Humans, as it turned out, would have held the system back. - in reference to the Alpha Zero

Competitive Programming memories from University

Looking back on the days in college where I felt very elated - happy and confident solving programming challenges as a sport. NMPC was one of the contests, abbreviated from NIST Monthly Programming Contest. It was introduced in my third year at college and was organized only 3 times in 2 years even though the name indicated otherwise. The Sankalp coding contest on the other hand, was an yearly contest and was organized without fail.

Why Resign and then come back

We don’t really appreciate what we have until it’s gone. I was having a good time in my first company and I expected any place I go to, to have the same standards and satisfaction of work. Reality is often dissapointing. I joined a company out in an older part of Bangalore that was a marketing analysis/telecom campaigning organisation. I was put into Customer support, where nobody gave any attention to work culture or work life balance.

Milestone 1 : 5 years in IT

This month marks the 5th year for me working in IT. The journey so far has been fairly enjoyable. It’s difficult to put it into words, so here are some infographics prepared in MS Paint. Career Timeline Travel

Monitoring Hadoop

A Hadoop ecosystem requires vigorous monitoring to identify any abnormality and prevent major downtimes. Major Hadoop service providers, provide their own tools for monitoring. But for a standalone hadoop, the monitoring aspect is an open field, and you can use your own tools and scripts to setup a monitoring framework. Here, lets try to setup a basic script based monitoring capability with essential indicators Uptime Monitoring Identify each process type running on each cluster.