DeeKaying @ Nettle

"Never base your life decisions on advice from people who don't have to deal with the results." "Don't make a permanent decision for your temporary emotion." "The people with the best advice are usually the ones that have been through the most." "Sometimes we need to be hurt in order to grow, fail in order to know, lose in order to gain, some lessons are best learnt through pain." "When you say yes to others, make sure you're not saying no to yourself." "Forget what hurt you in the past, but never forget what it taught you."

You know... over the past many years in software development, I've seen and gone through several projects and seen a bunch of teams do their work. I've worked with several managers and directors and I've learnt a few golden principles of leadership: 1. You need to be a master of the area relevant area that you're going to be working on. 2. Lead by example: set high standards and then meet them. The second part is critical. 3. Be the hardest worker on your team. 4. Have a clear vision and work towards it. 5. Know your goals. 6. Do not get sidetracked. Sidetracking is a killer disease. 7. Have a heart. A leader doesn't remain a leader if he / she doesn't have a heart. Cheers! Divye

"Software quality isn't really getting 90% code coverage, test cases for the domain, formal proofs or conforming to APIs and specs. Software quality is defined by the sustained rate of change a codebase can support through the promotion of clarity of thought and fluency of execution."

I love to create beautiful things with elegant code. I particularly like low-level optimisation for bare metal performance and systems programming, but I also enjoy high-level functional programming. I prefer a strong type system over excessive unit testing and I prefer common sense over agile development methodologies. I am mildly allergic to buzzwords. Data should be immutable. -- Ruud van Asseldonk, https://ruudvanasseldonk.com/ Sums up my feelings completely.

As some of you might know from my last post , I've recently joined LinkedIn after 4 years at Google.  LinkedIn is a Java company through and through. It's not a bad thing: it allows the company to consolidate its efforts and spend its resources wisely. The flip side is that everything assumes that Java will be around. I've spend the past month ramping up on the tooling, infrastructure and code. Coming from C++, I've been pleasantly surprised by a few things: Refactoring Support Java has a mature IDE ecosystem.  IntelliJ is an awesome IDE, *much* better than Eclipse . Even though I'm coming from the Vim / Emacs world and I'm used to high productivity editors, there are things that IDEs can do for you much faster than you can do yourself (the big one is of-course extracting, moving and renaming methods). C++ needs to get its act together and expose ASTs for C++ code. There's a dire need to write tools that can automatically refactor parts of C++ code ...

"Arranged marriages aren't so bad after all"....can u elaborate? Ramnik asked me this question over chat and it was thought provoking... I've always held a few beliefs about marriage that I established after quite a bit of research (journals and plain old internet trolling). I can't really reference everything that I went through but these are the principles that I established for myself: Why an arranged marriage? In an arranged marriage, "you" are taken out of the picture while selecting a pool of eligible candidates... Your parents know you and seek to find people with a similar background, culture and most importantly values... Having shared values is super important.... it's very risky to have a marriage where the two partners have been brought up in such disparate environments that they value things differently (eg. would one of the partners consider it beneath them to help maintain the house? How do you treat parents? What is the role of helper...

Divya and I had some free time. We spent it making this crazy free hand drawing. We did it turn by turn, each putting in a stroke or two from a blue pen. It's kind of reflective of the times. :)