Dev

Reflecting on 2023

Mon, 01 Jan 2024 01:26:21 +0000

I always love the dawn of a fresh new year; it is a time full of promises, a time to reflect on the good and the bad things from the last year and plan another trip around the sun. Yet, the start of 2023 was pretty miserable for me. It stemmed from a difficult 2022, and it seemed like I was losing a war of attrition on multiple fronts; my research was going nowhere, my friends were moving away, I was lonely, having no meaningful relationships, I was facing another quarter of having to TA to support my PhD, and it seemed only to be a matter of time before I dropped out or was kicked out of the program. I was adrift; worse, I hadn’t processed any of this, opting to not feel anything rather than feel the pain. The only way we can see the outer world is through the electrical signals interpreted by our brain; thus, it is no surprise that our mental state affects how we see things.

Ram Bhakti

Sat, 24 Jun 2023 21:41:53 +0000

Since Ram has been a big topic in Indian circles over the last month, it seems only fitting to talk about the two contrasting views 15th-century bhakti movement poet Kabir has about him:

एक राम दशरथ का बेटा , एक राम घट घट में बैठा ! एक राम का सकल पसारा , एक राम है सबसे न्यारा !

My translation/ interpretation:

The first Ram – entry-level Ram is the son of King Dashrath – the mythological figure in which we get lost in discussing, never transcending, but rising above it; we get the second ‘Ram’ – the one who is present in every being, who we fail to see, rising above that; we get the third ‘Ram’ – the one who makes up the being and the non-being, embodies the chaos of the universe; and the fourth? The fourth is the rarest of them all, this is the Ram we must seek.

Names for mountain lions

Tue, 27 Sep 2022 22:14:44 +0000

Today I learned there are more than 40 English names for the mountain lion, a Guinness world record. Yet I couldn’t quickly find a list of all of them, so I dug them up:

Names for Mountain Lions:

American Lion
American Panther
Bender
Black Puma
Brazilian Cat
Brown Tiger
Catamount
Cat-o-mountain
Cougar
Cougare
California Lion
Deer Cat
Deer-killer
Deer Tiger
Florida Panther
Great Panther
Ghost Cat
Indian Devil
King Cat
Lion
Lyon
Mexican Lion
Mountain Cat
Mountain Demon
Mountain Devil
Mountain Tiger
Mountain Screamer
Painted Cat
Painter
Pampas Cat
Panther
Panthere
Poltroon Tiger
Puma
Purple Panther
Purple Feather
Red Lion
Red Panther
Red Tiger
Rocky Mountain Lion
Silver Lion
Sneak Cat
Swamp Screamer
Tiger
Tyger
Tyger of America
Varmint
Wild Cat

Sources:

Why has Google Search gotten so bad?

Wed, 03 Aug 2022 19:24:59 +0000

Why has Google search gotten so bad?

In this article are will explore why Google search has gotten so bad. When people need to look something up, they use a search engine to look it up. Google was founded in the year 1998. Yet in recent times you may have noticed how top results are low quality articles with a lot of repetition.

Why Google search has gotten so bad: Google search uses its page rank algorithm to rank pages in your searches. That’s why Google has the ability to deliver thousands of results in less than a second.

Technical writing recommendations

Tue, 19 Apr 2022 23:57:32 +0000

“Technical Writing Resources (for Shubham!) (some links may be US specific):

Of course The Chicago Manual of Style https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chicago_Manual_of_Style
Style Guide by the Economist https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/the-economist/style-guide/9781610399869/
Nature: English communication for Scientists https://www.nature.com/scitable/ebooks/english-communication-for-scientists-14053993/contents/
Write the paper first https://www.cs.jhu.edu/~jason/advice/write-the-paper-first.html
Style: Toward Clarity and Grace https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/246853.Style
Even a Geek Can Speak: Low-Tech Presentation Skills for High-Tech People https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/7960467-even-a-geek-can-speak
Influence: Science and Practice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Influence:_Science_and_Practice
Writing for Computer Science https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/117973.Writing_for_Computer_Science
Air & Light & Time & Space: How Successful Academics Write https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/32336647-air-light-time-space

About

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

I work on systems that enable easier host-device coordination for performance and reliability improvements.
My latest project, Shimmer, allows easy shim layers to generate and provide lifetime hints that improve the performance of log-structured systems on top of SSDs with no change to applications or operating systems.
After completing my PhD. in computer science from UC Santa Cruz, I am currently a software engineer at Microsoft, working on Azure storage.

Curriculum vitae

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

This is the full CV, if you are looking for something shorter here is my résumé

Education

University of California Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, CA, USA.

PhD. Computer Science (June ‘24)
Dissertation: Enhancing Flash Storage Performance and Lifetime with Host-Guided Data Placement.
MS Computer Science (2022)

Savitribai Phule Pune University, Pune, India.

BE Computer Engineering (2016)
First Class With Distinction

Professional

Software Engineer II, Azure Storage ◆ Microsoft Corp.

April 2024–present
Helping build next generation object storage solutions optimized across a variety of architectures including DPUs and CPUs Worked on garbage collection, design and implementation of critical recovery modes and over-provisioning logic, tooling for black-box testing and observability on object stores in a cross-platform (posix and windows), cross-architecture (CPU and DPU) environment.