Attending meetups in the Delhi

Hello everyone!

I scraped the idea of staying for longer duration at my friend’s place in Gurgoan since I wasn’t able to work properly from there. But I decided to attend tech meetups in Delhi on weekends. This weekend I planned to attend two events which were related to kubernetes and networking.

I reached Delhi at around “10:25AM” (Kalka-Delhi Shatabdi never gets late). I was quite excited about attending Kubernetes Meetup at Grofers since I had been working lately on devops related stuff in LeetCode. But I knew there’s still lot of stuff which I need to learn and grow. After reaching there, I got to know that the meetup had been cancelled at the very last moment due to event place issue. What the heck! I travelled for 6 hours just to find out this ? Meh! I was quite disappointed and opened meetup page. From there I got to know that due to place issue, the organiser decided to organise it at his place. I was bit relieved that I can still meet new people there. I went to his place and there were only two people who came there. Both of them were devops guy having 4-5 years of experience, one from Paytm and other one organiser himself from Grofers. So, it was win situation for me to just converse with them and get to know what they have been working on. We discussed about lot of different stuff.

When we were finished, I got call from good old friend, Abhishek, from high school with whom I wasn’t able to connect from years. He told me that he has been staying in the Delhi. What a coincidence! He was preparing for govt exam there. Yeah, he did engineering in CS which was enforced upon him by his parents. He didn’t enjoy that at all. We decided to catch up and I learnt about what he had been doing all these years. I stayed at his place and the worst happened. There were mosquitos all over his room and somehow mosquitos love my blood a lot. Whole night I spent killing them so that I can get some sleep. I murdered more than 15 of them and still there were more who would just come around my ears and create annoying sound and wouldn’t let me sleep.

Next morning, there was LeetCode contest which I had to monitor to make sure everything was alright and our servers can handle it. Well it went terrible, they couldn’t handle the traffic. Mysql latency skyrocketed due to which all the uwsgi processes were I/O blocked waiting for the response from the mysql. Since uwsgi stopped responding, load balancer’s failover got triggered and it disabled the traffic from one of the kubernetes cluster, resulting in even worse. So, it was kinda deadlock situation. We cleared that manually and site was back to normal after few minutes. Of course we decided to take some steps so that it doesn’t happen again in the future. I might write about it some other time.

After that I left for Gurgaon to get ready for the next meetup in which I just planned to meet new people. I reached there late by around 2 hrs. I already had missed two talks by that time. I got to know the event was running late by 1hr. After few minutes, there was lunch time where I get to know people and have a general talks, stories etc. The event was held at the “Social Cops” working place and I learnt about what that company exactly does.

I found some great posters of commandments there. Well photograph itself came up quite bad, so let me add them here as text:

  1. coder != engineer - Jumping directly to writing code more often than not leads to bad code and bad engineering. Think twice before writing anything.
  2. import lib - Life is too short to reinvent the wheel.
  3. With great power comes greater responsibility - Sometimes the toughest problems have the most simple solutions. No, machine learning is not the answer to everything.
  4. Fail fast and keep learning!
  5. Know thy build - It’s not enough to know what will work and when, also know what will not and when.
  6. #itisnotmagik - Think about what is happening under the hood. “foobar” is not a silver bullet. Everything has its own tradeoffs.
  7. Measure whatever is measurable - Data backed decisions give better results instead of randomly taken ones.
  8. Automate whatever is repetitive - We built machines only for this.
  9. Premature optimisation is root of all evil - Pick the right battles to fight. You can never reach the perfection.
  10. When in doubt, ask! - Be well researched before doing any thing.

I really love these and yeah, these^ are of great importance to become a good engineer.

That’s it for now. Thanks for reading!