Posts

A Postmortem Template for Nettle

Postmortem: YYYY-MM-DD - Incident Postmortem Owner: John Doe |  Incident Runner: Jane Doe Start Time: YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS TZ | End Time: YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS TZ | Duration: Postmortem Review Date: Today’s date | Postmortem Verification Date: Future Date of Verification Meeting Executive Summary Cover in this section what happened, why it happened, how long was the outage, what fixed it and what the action items are.  A post-mortem review is done in 2 meetings - one when the Postmortem is reviewed and discussed to figure out the right root cause (owner: Postmortem-lead or delegate) and two when the implementation of the AIs from the Postmortem are verified as implemented and deployed to production (owner: SRE-lead or delegate). The second meeting should happen no later than 1-2 weeks from the postmortem review date. The process of a postmortem needs to be tracked in a ticket. The first item of the post-mortem review meeting is to schedule the verification meeting and ticket. Ve...
Post a Comment
Read more

New Parent Tips: Handling ages 1-5

1.⁠ ⁠The first year is the hardest. Spend as much money as you can on services - nannies, amazon, cleaning services (1-2x/wk) & cooks (1-2x/wk) - all are a must. You should spend 75%+ of your HH income this year without blinking.  2.⁠ ⁠⁠2yrs 3 months (27 months) is when the pressure will reduce from the first kid. Immediately plan kid #2 - the pediatric recommended gap is 2-3y. 3.⁠ ⁠⁠You’re signing up for 5 years of intensive care and support. Kids become a lot less pressure at age 5-6 (and that’s why schools at K work).  4.⁠ ⁠⁠Every year before age 6 is entirely different.  5.⁠ ⁠⁠If you have 1 kid, you’re signing up for 17 years of parenting and energy exchange. If you have 2 kids, you’re signing up for only 6 years (the 2nd one will work with the first one at age 2-3 and you’re all good).  Our kids have just reached 6 and 3 and the pressure is now letting up.  Keep expectations clear - life before kids is over. It’s a 6 year journey to stability, and +10y ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Parse, don't validate

This is common lore that experienced programmers have long understood. When working with data types, strongly avoid free-form types like `str`, `string` or integers. Instead, prefer types that say what they are and can't be misinterpreted. This lore is compacted into "Parse, don't validate". A typical example is: should a column name be "str" or a ColumnName type? The answer is always the latter. The reason being that it's easy to locate all places in your codebase where a ColumnName is used. If you'd used str instead, the battle is already lost. If you're writing AI Assisted Python, there's little to no way that you'll be able to do any reasonable refactor once this pattern is well set in the codebase. Therefore, use your language's type system, use the types and avoid bare types like int, long and str as your fundamental code layers build up.
Post a Comment
Read more

10 years of ML at Pinterest: it’s been good to be a part of it

Image
Post a Comment
Read more

Critical days in my life

1988 - My year of birth. 2006 - Graduated school, went to IIT-Roorkee. My friends wrote me a spiral bound notebook. 2010 - Came to the US for the first time to Qualcomm 2011 - Came to the US for the second time with Google 2013 - Bought my first car 2015 - Married my wife 2017 - Bought a home 2020 - Dhruv is born. 2023 - Viraj is born Nov 30, 2023 & Dec 2, 2023 - Enlightenment Jan 12, 2024 - Last day of enlightenment. I wrote a spiral bound notebook. 2024 - Left Pinterest 2025 - Founded Nettle
Post a Comment
Read more

23 TB on a laptop

Image
  In 75 days, my laptop has processed about 23 TB of data. Not bad for a laptop. A terabyte used to be a lot of data some time ago.
Post a Comment
Read more

Voting Rights: Anomaly Free Boards

The following are the only anomaly free Board structures possible for board sizes 1, 4, 7, 11 and 13. Note that Corporate Governance research says that anomaly free boards are in 4D and 11D+ and anything in between doesn't work (because of the obstruction from exotic S7 which can embed only in R11 (flat) and R12 torsioned). We fix that by taking the 7 member board and mapping it to 11D. [See the discussion on Stable Homotopy Groups of Spheres in the appendix].  Please double check the case of 13 (only 12 people must vote on any issue, 1 must be the observer and the special resolution pass threshold is 9/12 and the budget pass threshold is less than 5/12 unified no-votes and 7/12 yes votes, abstains don't sink the budget vote. [There's a more nuanced variation using the Binary Golay Code voting at the bottom of this document; the ultimate bottom of this document is an attempt by Gemini to create something that works, I'm not sure how well it did, but it does maintain som...
3 comments
Read more