On DevOps, the modern day Heimdalls or Gandalfs

 Someone recently asked about a tech vacancy and it seemed like they had plenty of developers, back-end, front-end designers and data scientists on their team. What was missing is someone who would be the gatekeeper, someone in whose hands you could hand over the keys and they could ensure your sound sleep. They asked for help on what qualities to look for while interviewing someone for the role and I hope this post is useful for someone looking to hire or evaluating their own career trajectory in this role. 

A description on the wiki page goes like this : 

"A set of practices intended to reduce the time between committing a change to a system and the change being placed into normal production, while ensuring high quality."

In the present context, the foremost skills goes along the agile concepts:

• Continuous Deployment: Containerization, its packaging, deployment and monitoring of cloud native applications and dependent services. 
• Continuous Integration: Knowledge of setting up an integration pipeline which involves gather unit test, integration test results, building and maintaining artifacts versions etc. 

Dilletante & Communicator

General qualities which one sees in such an individual is a know how about practically everything. As a devOps, though coding might not be an everyday task, it is preferred that it is someone who considers themselves as a dilletante of languages, new frameworks, sdk and api libraries with a sprinkle of scripting and handy with the shell commands. He / She knows not only all the team members and stakeholders on a first name basis but perhaps even their family and kids. This relationship is often reciprocal in nature and even they have him / her on speed dial and become the goto person when anything goes south. 

Systems thinking + Attention to Detail

Being the true gatekeepers of any solution, a system thinking approach to the overall solution is of priority. At any stage the architecture of data flow and control show should be so clear that they can draw it even if asked at 3am. Attention to detail could seem contrary to the previous quality but it is the team priority to inform and keep the devops person updated of the parameters and controls for each of these individual systems.

Integrity

Situation specific integrity is also another trait amongst these Jedi masters. They are the ones who will refuse to promote a change to prod without being tested on a regular day at the risk of sounding like a blocker. But at the same time, when shit hits the fan, they will take the call to rip apart the prod server module by module with their root admin access. They are the ones who would ensure IPs have been whitelisted, SSL certificates have been installed, backups been taken, config been setup. 

Experience and Exposure

Finally a reliable devops is usually someone who doesn't panic at the drop of the hat. They have seen their fair share of deployments, misconfigurations, backup failures, production bugs and roll on with the day even be it with some grumbling along the way. 

Term Life insurance

     Insurance aggregators agents are probably not the only advice you should take before buying a term insurance. Often what you get are incessant calls by their agents just asking you to close the deal somehow. Not pointing fingers, but perhaps they are either ill-equipped to guide you or their incentives are not aligned with getting you the best deal. 

This post is perhaps useful for people planning to quit their regular jobs or moving abroad, pursue business or people returning to India after a stint abroad where they never cared about taking a personal insurance relying on corporate plan throughout. This post is absolutely a personal opinion and I am happy to take inputs from others. These are not observations from a qualified or expert financial advisor. 

Here are some of the points to keep in mind while buying a health of life insurance. 

• Total cover distribution: Keep the cover amount practical and relevant to your needs and don't get carried away by 1Cr / 2 Cr pitched by the agents and advertisements. Check what is the present needs of your family and dependents, consider if you have a family house, alternative sources of income already in place, expected expenses etc. 

• Consider your Corporate cover: If you are planning to stay in some form of organization(small or large) for most of your career, you can assume that some default life insurance will be provided to you. This is usually 2x to 5x of your Annual salary. Eg. If in today's scenario, if you feel a cover amount of 1 Cr is needed, then first check how much of this will get covered by the corporate one. 

• Consider NPS and EPF: With the tax benefits and expected steady returns one gets through investing in NPS and EPF, investing 50k per year on NPS and 50k-1L on EPF has become a no-brainer. Although this sum would be small in the initial stages of the career, this corpus will grow in time to become significant with 10-15 years of investment. We should keep in mind that this too will add to our overall cover amount. 
•  (1) Shows your investments growing over time. 
•  (2) Shows your inflation adjusted value of your term life insurance cover.

• (Don't ?) Consider ULIP: If you have a pension plan linked to ULIP, do consider it. However, the current returns offered by ULIPs aren't that promising yet and investing into it from a life insurance perspective may not be as beneficial.

• Premium period: Term insurance provides various schemes on the premium period. Try and keep this to a minimum, eg. The premium paying period could be 20 years and life cover until you are 70 or 75. This also carefully should be evaluated and decided based on personal career goals.
• If you are someone who is deciding to quit the regular work force or plan early retirement, you want to pay the larger premiums for a shorter span and get this over with.
• If you envisage being on a payroll for most of your career, do keep in mind the time value of money and increase in your salary would make paying smaller premium amounts in later stages of your career seem negligible.

• Premium returns: Although this scheme is often pitched where the sum of premiums paid with a nominal interest is returned at the end of premium paying period, this needs to be carefully evaluated.
• The term insurance is generally an device where you are willing to pay and forget an amount every year to give you peace. Expecting good returns is not often feasible in such schemes and unnecessarily often drives up the premium amount.
• Consider the difference in such schemes to regular and calculate if you put the same amount SIP, the possible returns you could get.

• Add-ons: Insurance aggregators have built a great amount of transparency to this field and makes it a breeze to compare various schemes. Do spend enough time comparing the various add-ons like disability cover if available by the provider. 

On a funny note, don't keep the life insurance cover so large that leaving this world seems profitable even from your perspective. Try to keep a positive outlook on life while buying insurance and good luck!

Instrumental Earworm - Part I

This post is just a collection of instrumental songs that I have come across over the last few years that have been on a loop on my playlist. They have been so, because they contain specific sections which became earworms for me when I heard them for the first time. Earworms are tunes which you keep hearing repeatedly 24x7 turning away your focus from anything for hours, days or even weeks. 

1. Divenire - Ludovico Einaudi

When I first heard this song, my immediate reaction was that this song was Music 2.0 for me. It redefined how I could perceive a song. Even without any lyrics the song is equivalent to a full length feature film. It was packed with all varieties of emotions with its changes and its general flow. The song magically maintains a theme through a constant base tune while conveying so much through the changes. It has action, romance, tragedy a pre-climax, a climax and everything in between. 

2. The Queen of All Everything - OTT

This is without an ounce of doubt the trippiest song I have come across in the recent past. There hasn't been a time, that this song came up and feeling of gratitude hasn't run through me for the guy who introduced me to the works of OTT. Like many other trippy songs, this one has the ability to soak you with nature. The song seems to me be roughly composed of 2 sections, the second one starting with the progressive beats somewhere midway and continuing till the end. A pleasant surprise is the source of the soulful echo you hear through the song which people more often than not aren't able to guess unless they see a live performance video. 

3. Come On Tars - [Interstellar] Drum Remix by Tom Grosset

Who doesn't recognize the genius of Hans Zimmer and Christopher Nolan in their master stroke docking scene in Interstellar where Cooper [Matthew McConaughey] urges the TARS to help him to dock to the exploded and spinning Endurance. Though we know that the scene and the soundtrack were perfect in every sense, Tom Grosset's drum remix adds some extra flavour to the tune. Many of us who love percussion, often add our own beats from the anxiety we experience from such epic music. Tom Grosset leaves no stone unturned adding beats which makes our heart race and remind us of the original experience we had when we watched the scene for the first time. 

4. Stranger Things Theme Song Remix - by C418

Ok, just like (3), this one is probably not for those who do not have the context of where the original soundtrack is from. So if 'Interstellar' or 'Stranger Things' (season 1 to be specific) didn't happen to you, then whatever I say won't make any sense. Stein and Dixon hit the nail on the head with their title track for Stranger Things. The synth based tune is a definite earworm for anyone who has watched the show. C418 with this remix gives you that additional kick that you needed after you heard the original piece during the show which lasts for roughly a minute. 

More to come...

Shivpuri Trip

A very random 1.5 days trip to Hardwar, Rishikesh, Shivpuri area(Gular). Not much to write but the trip was quite amazing. Below is the Google Photo story link.

Random Trip to Hardwar and Shivpuri

Alive is better !

    Sometime in the last week of April 2014, my b-i-l and sister were on apartment hunting phase. I had visited them and had to disappear for a few hours as they meticulously evaluated the options. My b-i-l enthusiastically suggested that I spend my precious next hours paying a visit to the London's Natural History Museum and hinted that I would have missed out on 'life' itself by not visiting it. At the outset, I was not just skeptical but outright against spending my time within the walls of a museum. However, like most of his suggestions, I was confident it would be worth it. Here is the link if you have not visited http://www.nhm.ac.uk/  and now I would highly recommend it to others too. 

Getting to the museum is best through the South Kensington tube station, from where you have a glamourous tunnel to get to you to the entrace of the museum. This entrance will take you directly into the Red Zone which is described as the following on their website. 

"Take a journey through our spectacular Earth sculpture and find out about the tremendous forces that shape our planet."

I must admit my experience was rather dull in this Geology section with most of time spent in picking  up pamphlets and plodding along uninterested. Just display after display about silicon, soil, rock, rock materials makes one question their visit. Like a disineterested teenager in a school lab, I was careful with the exhibits but moved on with a dismissive 'so what?' attitude. After about half an hour of dragging my feet through all the sections diligently as if I was expecting viva-exam at the end, I was hungry and tired from the mind-numbing experience. It was not only me but about every other visitor exuded the same lethargy. The section was as quite as an abandoned warehouse. 

I neither recall any of the details today nor do I have snaps to prove that I was ever in that section. 

The most surprising turn of events then happens at this point.

After this is life, one enters the Green Zone starting with the Birds. Once you enter this section, the entire aura and energy levels change. Kids running around, people clicking away on every other display,  laughing, pointing fingers at minute details on description labels. If I had a scouter ( Sukautā ), it would have burnt away most likely. I rather leave it to the following snaps of what I saw next as one would need the vocabulary of  'evolution' to describe what followed, both figuratively and literally. 

So no offence to geology, but ALIVE is better. 

Scrapping Web Sites using Python

I was trying to scrap some content from the web and there are so many videos on the web on how to use Python to do this. I thought I should write something about this. Here you go!

1) Install Sublime to get the cool hacker look for writing python code.
2) Install the Python (3.4 seems to be the latest at the time of writing this blog.)
3) Create a python file and import requests library by:
        import requests
4) Decide what do you want to parse the response with. Eg.
         (i) For HTML/XML content you could use BeautifulSoup4 libraries.
                  from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
        (ii) For JSON, you can use the JSON library
                  import json
       (iii) For other kinds of content, you could use simple regular expressions
                  import re

   Check out each of these libraries' usage to better understand what can be done with them. I really struggled with the BeautifulSoup library and ended up writing regular expressions instead.


5) For preparing your request, all you need to build is a URL and you could add the headers like this.
    headers = {'Content-Type':'text/plain;charset=utf-8','Accept': '*/*'}
    url = r"http://www.xyz.com/blahblah.aspx?parameters"

6) Send the request by the following way and capture the response into an object.
     resp = requests.get(url,headers=headers)

Looks simple right ?
Setting up python is a bit of a pain initially though. I simply followed instructions present online used pip install  to install the libraries. Also, python has some problems printing different encoding. Plenty of posts are there regarding encoding errors seen with the print command.


Cheers! and Happy Scrapping !

Nostalgic diarrhea

Factfulness by Hans Gosling and his talks give a great insight on how sometimes we are tuned to perceive the world as getting worse. The pleasure we derive through nostalgia is perhaps a safety net we create for ourselves when faced with uncertainty.

Nostalgia is mostly accompanied by positive and relaxing thoughts. In such a mood, the past seems simple and cohesive, irrespective of how it was. Perhaps the nature of our biological memory is such; that such emotions supercede the pricky details. Is this why we often find people talking about 'Golden days' ?

The tricky part is that our few fleeting years of life somehow merge with a million years of a perfect utopian world (unknown though), but then "just" got corrupted. I am not referring to any particular generation here, but pit two people with an age gap of 10 years against each other and we will get to hear some equivalent of 'good old days'. For Indians born between 60-90s the fine line between modern and western also confuses on what is progress and what is influence. Nevertheless, in a nostalgic mood,  old is gold! The interesting bit is the micro-craving to bring back that elusive bliss. 

Statements like "people were healthier", "television plots had meaning", "depression was unheard of and cancer only a zodiac sign", "music has melody" or even "test cricket had character" unapolgetically crush today's progress.

Guillotines, iron maidens, polio and small pox are done away with. Wars, even though they could be out of vested interest or self righteousness, are atleast proclaimed to be for unenslaving. There is a spectrum from tinder to divorce matrimony instead of waging Wars for women. People are diabetic because there are mouths being stuffed beyond limits and 24x7 high definition sattelite tv and ott streaming to your face. If compared with a century earlier, the modern urban educated youth is perhaps  living like royalty, with unlimited potential access to education, entertainment, health and nutrition. 

I would end this post with a wonderful talk show clip from Louis CK on the Conan show about 'Everything is amazing but nobody is happy'.