So I have not blogged for the 2-3 months now… That consistently keeps going the other way of my resolution to blog more frequently. Twitter has not helped either – http://twitter.com/arnab_deka

I find that twitter adequately satisfies my urge to burp out bits of info effectively… and thousands of other excuses… So lets stop that thread right there and concentrate on how the year was instead.

At the start of the year, I had just moved into a new city. Another 2000-3000 miles away from home. And at least another 1500 miles away from anyone I could call a friend with an honest face (so that takes out Social Networking Online pals). Agreed I knew Diganta (from college) here – and he was a cool guy to hang with. But he lived in Bellevue (10 miles from Seattle) – I did not have a car and we probably met once in 2 weeks. And he moved back to India in Feb! I had moved from the safety and security of an Indian company into an entirely different kind of organization (I moved from Infosys to Amazon.com in Dec/Jan).

Looking back – it wasn’t a such a bad decision after all -

1) By now I have made a group of good friends – ok – you can’t make college buddies after starting work – but these are a cool bunch of guys. Apart from other things, playing cricket with this lot will be a memory to treasure. The feeling of doing consistently good in a sport is cool (our team, Eagles, finished 3rd in the Cricket league this year – and got promoted to the next division for the next season starting in Feb. And (to a bit of my surprize) I did really well!

2) No regrets about my job – actually with each passing day, I am liking it more and more. I think Amazon and the bunch of incredible enginners have opened me up to a new world. I always knew I loved tech – but not how much. It is definitely an experience to work in such an energetic company and work with such geeky (no offense at all) brilliant people.

3) Got exposed to Ruby! For me, getting exposed to Ruby was by pure chance. The group that I joined was heavily into Ruby and was probably in a handful of Ruby-pro teams in the company at that time. I was open to experiencing a new technology while joining but did not know that it will change how I think about programming. Ruby is now mainstream and by no means I am an early adopter – but I am thankful that I joined the boat early. I was thrilled when I had started to play with Java and all the cool stuff with it (Unit testing, Continous build/integration etc.) – but Ruby has fundamentally changed the way I think about Programming. It is a joy for me now – I think I am a better coder now and I am making the right moves in my career.

4) And most of all – I met this beautiful person – Ujwala. If there is such a thing, she definitely fits me! And the happiness is doubled when she also gives back as much as you do… (We are getting married in summer’09)

I could probably come up with a few other things – but these are the highlights. So, all in all, not a bad year at all. In fact, it could be the turning point of my career/life – time will tell when I revisit this in 5/10/15 years from now!

So -signing off on 2008 for now!

Went to an incredible talk today and was so damn impressed with the presentation and the concepts behind. So wanted to share it with you…

Basically the talk was on Consensus among Distributed Systems. So if you have a Master DB and two Slaves – and if the master dies, how do you choose which Slave to promote, automatically?

Or consider you have some sort of a pool of managers who decide what to do and a bigger pool of workers who do what the managers say. Let’s say a manager dies – how do you choose which worker to promote to a manager? Because all of them might be equally eligible to get promoted (we are talking about systems here not humans).

The simple way is – go for the majority. So every worker votes and one of them is elected. But then take in some factors such as message losses, network disturbance and partial network failure – now your vote might not have been so accurate after all ha?

Good Robust systems built to be successful must be fault-tolerant and self-healing. It has to take care of its own – if some process fails, it has to figure out a way to fix it by itself – no human intervention – coz that takes time and money – which is not always easy or affordable. Now if it’s just one system you could somehow make it think of these situations. But make a distributed system where each worker has its own mind! The group (distributed system) has to come to _correct_ decision somehow right?

To build such (distributed) systems we need to be able to solve this problem of consensus. A few people have started or already have implemented this (including Google Chubby, Microsoft Autopilot, Amazon S3 etc.)

So this talk was about all this – must say it was done in a very lively manner – with a skit showing the different parts of the system, the network (where volunteers passed messages and took parts of the system – some _crashed_ too ). Was fun!

The idea stems from ancient ages and has been modeled to meet the requirements we have today. It’s called Paxos Protocol. Do read up on it – very interesting… You will definitely have nothing but appreciation for the great minds that created the mathematical model in those ancient times and the other great minds who translated it to modern day distributed systems and the other minds who have/are implementing these ideas!

Here are some links:

• The Consensus problem: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consensus_%28computer_science%29
• The algorithm: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paxos_algorithm
• Part-Time Parliament by Leslie Lamport: http://research.microsoft.com/users/lamport/pubs/lamport-paxos.pdf (I highly recommend this one – very interesting read – and begins in an interesting manner)
• Leslie Lamport: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leslie_Lamport

I was not a big fan of online shopping till recently – I needed to see and feel the product before buying it. Then I joined the world’s biggest e-tailer (and I have to say with pride that e-tailing is not the only thing Amazon is doing well – see wikipedia to know what I mean)… and that need to see and feel the products has magically disappeared. Oh, the employee discount helped – and did I mention I am a prime member now? (which means free 2-day shipping)

Anyway. I am moving to my new rented apartment tomorrow and went to Ikea today to get some stuff (Bed frames etc. TV stand, some furniture)… and figured out that it’s a time-consuming clumsily organized (or maybe I don’t have enough interest and/or intellect to SPEND at shopping. No pun intended. Oh, BTW, are you a typical gal? hmmm… I really did not mean any pun).

Another anyway… I am observing that I am digressing too much today (maybe it’s the shopping)… ooh there I go again…

Anyway anyway, so I figured that Ikea will take up-to 2 weeks to deliver the stuff to me. And the bed or the book shelve might be in like, umm, 72 pieces, which I have to install myself… So when Amazon does the same (I mean 72 piec-ed thingys that I have to install myself) why don’t I go for it (with a free 2 day shipping and discounts on everything?)

So yeah I decided to do that – I am like, 10% done now and am tired (I don’t know how you girls do this). So here I am taking a recreational break… Do check out my effort here – mind you, it’s ongoing.

Anyway. ummm I know I have said this enough times now – no more, I promise. So I made a list of things I think I need and started researching for the cheapest and the best (if there ever is such a thing) on Amazon. Of course Amazon’s “People who bought this also bought these…” does make my efforts longer and more interesting. Like I needed up checking at least 57 different types of bathroom floor mats.

(Ok I won’t say any more anyways right). So…
Pretty soon I was checking adding unbelievable things into my shopping list. Like TPs – yes Toilet Papers. Online. One year ago I would not have believed myself.

I know that there are amazingly hilarious things you can buy at Amazon: like, Uranium Ore!!!
But something absolutely made me laugh like mad – Comments about Toilet Papers. Yes people actually write reviews about TPs. Some people actually laugh while writing them (oh is that kinda like me? I am laughing while buying it – just one step away now )

Check out some – you’ll know what I mean… Lemme quote just one line: “Sure, this bath tissue isn’t going to be the softest you’ll ever find–but it does a great job”

Go and read them if you need a good hard laugh!!!