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I had recently listened to Chuck Palahniuk in Tim Ferris's podcast. I got hooked immediately by Palahniuk's views on minimalism in writing. The man is right. The novelist has no business telling how the characters feel and how you should feel. Literary minimalism is characterized by an economy with words and a focus on surface description. Minimalist writers eschew adverbs and prefer allowing context to dictate meaning. Readers are expected to take an active role in creating the story, to "choose sides" based on oblique hints and innuendo, rather than react to directions from the writer.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimalism#Literary_minimalism
It was clear that Palahniuk had thought a lot about how to choose words and how to give a rhythm to the story. So to learn more of his craft, I picked up his new book on writing: Consider This: Moments In My Writing Life After Which Everything Was Different. I loved it. I recommend it if you care about improving how you commu…

The new school year is on its way. My daughter is a kindergartener, my other daughter is a fourth grader, and my son is an eight grader. They will all be attending school as remote. It is going to be a challenging school year for all of us.
The school offered a hybrid version of 2 days of in-person teaching followed by a day of remote teaching, and assignments. But we chose the all remote version. Our reasoning was that these schools will all be converting to remote in a month or two anyways, so why keep up the facade. A better strategy for the schools would be to keep it simple, and put all their preparation efforts for a fully online platform. I think most of the reason for putting up the facade is because of the pressure from the parents who are unable to accept this new reality. 
For my little daughter we sure had imagined this year differently. We were thinking that she would be holding hands with her older sister, sharing seats on the school bus ride to school and back, and have g…

For the Fall semester distributed systems seminar, we will discuss these papers:Bipartisan Paxos: A Family of Fast, Leaderless, Modular State Machine Replication ProtocolseXtreme Modelling in PracticeStarling: A Scalable Query Engine on Cloud Function ServicesLambada: Interactive Data Analytics on Cold Data using Serverless Cloud InfrastructureTiered Replication: A Cost-effective Alternative to Full Cluster Geo-replicationScalable State-Machine ReplicationDesigning Distributed Systems Using Approximate Synchrony in Data Center NetworksArmada: Low-Effort Verification of High-Performance Concurrent ProgramsOcean Vista: Gossip-Based Visibility Control for Speedy Geo-Distributed TransactionsConsolidating Concurrency Control and Consensus for Commits under ConflictsTales of the Tail: Hardware, OS, and Application-level Sources of Tail LatencyNear-Optimal Latency Versus Cost Tradeoffs in Geo-Distributed StorageScaling Symbolic Evaluation for Automated Verification of Systems Code with Serva…

I read this book recently. Going into this, I knew I wouldn't learn many new/surprising things. After all, I have been following Google from outside since 1999. After I saw Google in action, I had switched to it immediately. I was quick to get on board with Gmail as well, and followed many Google services over the years. I have seen things.As I anticipated, I didn't find many surprises in the book. But I liked the book nevertheless. It is always nice to read stuff from Steven Levy. Steven Levy is one of my favorite authors. I have a dog-eared copy of the Hackers book he wrote. It was excellent writing. So much research went into each character in the book, and he made each character come alive. He also weaved the narration together artistically around a handful of themes and related new information/events back to these themes. He had put a lot of his interpretation and insight in to the facts/narrative, and I really enjoyed that. This book is not as colorful. It has a raw blan…