I recently finished reading Thanks for the feedback by Douglas Stone and Sheila Heen and I can’t recommend it enough, especially now that it’s performance review season at many companies. I’ve taken many lessons from this book, but I want to focus on something that was super insightful when trying to understand people’s interactions. All of us have blind spots. Things that we don’t see and don’t realize that we don’t see them. One of the causes is that we judge ourselves differently than other people judge us. ...

A new goal: publish a tiny micro post every day I have been meaning to write for a long time. I want to publish updates about what I’ve been learning in real time, but I always want to give beefy, meaningful, and helpful content, and that makes me put things off. So I think that starting now (bad timing, I know, this is not an April Fools’ joke, I promise), I will publish daily: one small thing I have learned. This way I can document my journey and my growth. I promise you this will be my real voice, not a chatbot instructed to give some buzzword-riddled slop. ...

The Problem Containers Solve Docker emerged as a lightweight alternative to virtual machines. VMs consumed significant resources and took 3-5 minutes to boot, making horizontal scaling expensive. Containers package applications with dependencies into images that start in seconds, not minutes. The Networking Challenge Without network connectivity, containers offer limited utility. Running a single container on host networking mode works fine - the process accesses the host machine’s network resources directly. But what happens when you need: ...

Introduction Over the years, I’ve explored a range of books covering artificial intelligence, machine learning, data science, and the broader societal implications of automation. Below is a curated list of some standout reads from my Goodreads library, along with a few thoughts and takeaways. I asked ChatGpt to create a post from my GoodReads reading list 📚 Featured AI & ML Books The Alignment Problem: Machine Learning and Human Values Author: Brian Christian Published: 2020 Average Rating: 4.34 My Rating: — A deep dive into the ethical and philosophical challenges of aligning AI systems with human values. Brian Christian connects cutting-edge research with real-world implications. ...

What goes into a network namespace? What’s a CNI plugin? This blog post explores the contents of a network namespace and then provides links to the open source code that creates and configures namespaces for containarized workloads running on Fargate and ECS Managed Instances. Background and Motivation When you launch a task in ECS Managed Instances you can pick two network modes, awsvpc and host. In this series of post I want to explain the role in the CNI plugins have in creating and setting up network namespaces for customer tasks. In awsvpc each task receives its own elastic network interface (ENI) and private IPv4 address. Under the hood the code that creates and manages network namespaces (netns) for Fargate also handles Managed Instances. The plugins that handles this setup are open source but they are somewhat hidden behind the netlib platform API (as they should) so the typical dataplane engineer does not see the plugin code on day-to-day therefore i’s’ kind of a black box to most folks in my team, but it doesn’t have to be. ...

What is the one metric for sucess in your career? Lately I’ve been thinking about what it means to grow in my career. Like, How do I know I am doing a good job? Is there a metric I can track? It turns out there’s people way smarter than me that have already thought about that and written about it. Tanya Reilly wrote an excellent book on that subject The Staff Engineer’s Path which I reference a lot, specially when I try to figure out how I should approach my career path. I am clear in the fact that I want to stay technical, I don’t want to be a manager, not because there’s anything wrong with being a manager. The thing is: I don’t want to stop writing sofware. I want to design, implement, test, deploy, maintain and deprecate software systems. I don’t want to stop doing that, at least, not for now. So anyway, there’s a lot of good advice out there, there’s a lot of things you can optimize for. If you want to go from software engineer to senior you need to know things, you need to be responsible and reliable. If you want to grow in your career then you need to be a leader, a role model, you need to be the glue that facilitates collaboration. Since there’s so much to know, so many different ways to help a team. There are so many rabbit holes one can go down in depth: Business Domains, Customers, new fields developments. There’s so many good people to meet. So, you can’t know and do everyting. You have a limitied amount of time and everything counts. So then, how do you know you are doing a good job? What is the North Star? ...

I’m lucky that I get to work with people who are good at what they do. The corporate-speak term we use at Amazon is the Leadership Principle of “Right A Lot” For me it’s about having a scientific mindset, or more plainly, constantly wondering, “how does this work?” “Why are things working this way, instead of that way?” or my favority “What would happen if I do this” but wondering and inquiring is not the whole thing, is actively working to disconfirm your beliefs. It’s about being open to the possibility that you might be wrong. I love that. ...

Practical Engineering by Peng Zhang I want to give a quick shout out to Peng’s blog peng.fyi Peng works with me writing software for AWS Fargate’s Dataplane. I have been following his posts the last few days and I really like this blog because: Technical topics that apply to most folks in my team His posts are short and to the point. He illustrates his points with code. The code is formatted with beautifcul syntax highlits that makes it easy to read. I get inspired myself to share my insights in writing. Thanks Peng! ...

Book Review I’m almost finished with The Siren’s Call by Chris Hayes and it’s interesting enough to call out here. The book starts with an excellent explanation of what attention is and how it works. Then the book presents two analogies to use when thinking about attention. The first one is to think of Attention as a resource that drives the economy, like labor, it is commodified, it can be monetized, marketed bought and sold. Since information is now pletiful, (there’s too much of it, really) attention is scarce, we have a limit of how much information we consume, how much we can pay attention to. So now market forces, tech companies, politicians they are all competing for our attention. Our attention has value, it yields money, power and fame. ...

This week I had an Eureka moment at work. You see, there are many things I see at work that I would like to improve. Technical debt in our codebase. Inefficient processes. Communication silos across teams. The list of things one can improve never ends, this is true in all software shops. System complixity grows as new functionality gets added, inefficiencies optimized, bugs fixed. Secuirty hardened, etc. How do you increase the quality of your system without interrupting the flow? Well, obviously, you break it up, one tiny thing at time. That’s how. Yeah it’s obvious but (this is embarrasing to admit) I get the urge to make BIG changes, I’d like to rewrite whole chuncks of the codebase, I’d like to build a brand new release pipeline, and we might do that someday, but not today. When you have a team that’s busy doing the work, tidying up gets deprioritized. After all, that bug in prod needs to get fixed yesterday, that new feature needs to ship on time. Oh, by the way, the developer that was working on that thing your system depends on quit last week. ...