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Introduction How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking – for Students, Academics and Nonfiction Book Writers by Sönke Ahrens is a small (171 pages) non-fiction genre book. The book is a manual explaining Zettlekasten method designed by Niklas Luhmann. Sönke has used straightforward and simple English to explain the concepts. For anyone who is a knowledge curator or wishes to publish non-fictional content in any form (text, video or audio), this book is a must-read. I came across this book when I was watching a video by Ali Abdaal named “How I Remember Everything I Read”. Here he explains various levels of note-taking, how this book has influenced his note-taking capabilities and the foremost reason for making the video. I saw the book wasn’t that huge, I bought it and started reading immediately. ...

Introduction The book “Algorithms to Live by — The Computer Science of Human Decisions” is written by “Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths”. It fits into the genre non-fiction, psychology and computer science. The book is written lucidly. If you have a background in computer science, then this book is easy to follow. The book creates analogies of computer science algorithms with real-life situations. I felt that some metaphors sound good in reading than their application, so if you plan on applying the things explained in the book directly to your life, they might not work. Because real-life has a lot of constraints that can be simplified in a computer algorithm to solve a problem, so the algorithms don’t apply vis-à-vis. ...

Have you ever had a sidecar in your Kubernetes Job? If no, then trust me that you are lucky. If yes, then you will have the frustration of your life. The thing is Kubernetes Jobs are meant to exit on completion. But if you have a long-running sidecar, then that might twist things for Kubernetes and in turn of you. Why would you even want a sidecar for Job? Well, one of the most prevalent use case is when using service mesh proxy. There could be something else as well like metrics endpoint, log collection or whatever. Given the complexity and heterogeneity of the workloads, there could be any kind of use case that involves having sidecar for a Job pod. ...

We generally use some sort of scripts in application container images. They serve various purposes. Some scripts might do an initial setup before the application starts, others may have the whole logic of the container image, etc. Whatever the goal may be the general pattern is to copy the script into the container image, build the image and then the script is available when you consume the image. Cons of the Traditional Method The round trip time during development and testing of such script is very long. You make some change to the script, you need to build the image, push it and then it is downloaded again. On an average for every change adds a couple of minutes to your feedback loop. Bash scripts are generally precarious in nature. You have to hammer it down, consider edge cases and thereby make it robust. This, of course, takes a lot of iterations. And with iterations comes the added time. So the question is, how do we reduce this feedback loop? ...

Contents Introduction Bash Aliases Configuration Installation Global Git Configuration Configuration Installation Repository Specific Git Settings Configuration Installation Bash Git Prompt Configuration Installation Git Push PR Reviews Configuration Installation Demo Conclusion Introduction Git is a day to day tool for version control. It has become a de facto method of source code versioning, it has become ubiquitous with development and its an essential skill for a programmer. I use it all the time. ...

This blog will showcase my productivity tips with kubectl . This does not venture into any plugins per se. But only using bash aliases to achieve it. Bash Aliases # k8s alias alias k=kubectl alias kg="kubectl get" alias kgp="kubectl get pods" alias kgs="kubectl get services" alias kge="kubectl get events" alias kgpvc="kubectl get pvc" alias kgpv="kubectl get pv" alias kd="kubectl describe" alias kl="kubectl logs -f" alias kc="kubectl create -f" I have above aliases setup in the ~/.bashrc file. The beauty of the aliases is that you can append more flags and parameters to the existing smaller alias. For, e.g. I have an alias for kubectl get pods as kgp, but if I want to get pods from all the namespaces, I use kgp -A. ...

This blog will show you how to take a backup from a running Prometheus and restore it in some other Prometheus instance. You might ask why would you even want to do something like that? Well, sometimes you want the Prometheus metrics because they were collected for some particular purpose and you want to do some analysis later. Prerequisites/Assumptions This blog assumes that you have a Prometheus running that is deployed using prometheus-operator in monitoring namespace. But even if you have deployed it in some other way modify the commands in few places. ...

Introduction Recently I completed the book called Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-free Productivity by David Allen. I read the book on my kindle e-reader device, and as the name suggests, it is a self-help category book and about three hundred pages long. The book is an extraordinary walkthrough of how to set up a system that will help you navigate your daily tasks without missing any of them. This system then enables you to patch up the crevices of your memory from which day-to-day tasks fall through. ...

I always had a conundrum about how to manage the scripts and binaries downloaded randomly from the internet. One way is to put them in the global PATH directory like /usr/local/bin, but I am sceptical about it. There are a couple of things I wanted to solve. How do you update these scripts and binaries? How to do it consistently across all my machines? How to make it easier to have my setup available on any new Linux machine(or even container) I setup? How to do it without sudo? ...

The book 1984 was written by Geroge Orwell in 1949 as an attempt to demonstrate how democraries can also fall into the trap of totalitarianism. The story in the book showcases a dystopian world in the year 1984, where there are only three countries in the world, and all of them are in a constant power struggle. All three countries have a totalitarian, oligarchic government of their own. But the story in the book is from a country called Oceania, which is ruled by a party called Ingsoc or English Socialism. This blog is about the similarities of the world in the book 1984 and today. There is no exact present-day equivalent of Ingsoc except, to certain extent, the Communist Party of China. ...