Prometheus and Grafana

The SRE Book I just got my copy of Google’s new Site Reliability Engineering book. I’m only a couple chapters and I’m already so happy that we’ve made so much of what we do internally public. Reading through the thought that went into the decisions made early on in the company’s life that so dramatically affects day-to-day operations, norms, and practices brings back the same fascination I had when I first started there. Read On →

From Wordpress to Hugo

I’ve recently got interested in static site generators as a consequence of continously hearing about Wordpress hacks and continuous security updates. I’ve gotten tired of figuring out how to deal with spam comments and having to think about caching site contents (though this isn’t a big site anyway so that isn’t a huge concern). I’ve also become tired of dealing with databases and PHP and updating plugins and dealing with admin 2-factor authentication and everything else. Read On →

Chromecast, Nexus 7, and Android 4.3

Today, Google introduced some pretty sweet new hardware and software. I’m most excited about Chromecast and Android 4.3. I’d be way more excited about the new Nexus 7 if I were to be purchasing one, but given that I have the older one already, I probably won’t. Chromecast is especially nice because it’s a huge upgrade from what the Nexus Q would have been at a fraction of the cost. I think this is a pretty big step forward for connecting different Google services and devices seamlessly. Read On →

Four Years Done!

Four years of my undergraduate college experience are coming to a close. I’ll be graduating in about a week and a half with a Bachelor’s of Science and Engineering in Computer Science from Princeton. Pretty exciting! It’s been quite a solid four years and a hugely rewarding experience. I learned way more than I could have hoped for and I think I got out all what I wanted from an undergraduate degree. Read On →

RIP Google Reader

Yesterday, we all heard the unexpected news that Google Reader would be shutting down on July 1 of this year. While this probably should not have been too much of a surprise given how little attention it was receiving, it was still a huge shock to me nonetheless. I’ve used Google Reader nearly every day for the last four years and at this point have read over 245,000 articles on there. Read On →

Python Annotations

One of the most annoying (lack-of, in my opinion) features of Python is it’s dynamic typing. While this is wonderful for quick and dirty things that you don’t want to write lots of code for, it fails pretty much horrifically for large, production-scale code. As I had the opportunity to experience during the summer, when dealing with a project of several thousand interleaving lines of Python, no one can help you figure out what the arguments to a function should actually be (except for docstrings and humans, mostly yourself). Read On →

Android Feedly App Leaking Pocket Password

I had posted a few weeks ago on Reddit that the Feedly application on Android was displaying the user’s Pocket username and password in plaintext on LogCat. This is a problem on devices running any version of Android before 4.1, which according to the latest Dashboards refresh is about 92% of devices. This is because any user-level application on pre-Jellybean devices can access the main LogCat stream and read it. In fact, I was able to verify that, without giving root privileges, I could see my Pocket password within the aLogCat application on an Android 2. Read On →

One Semester Left!

This week is the last week of my last fall semester in my undergraduate career. That’s pretty exciting. I took a bunch of really neat classes - including a very neat one on functional programming. I’ve been interested in FP for quite a while since I quite like the mathematical elegance of it applied to a now-quite-different field of software engineering. The language for the course was OCaml, which is something I wanted to learn anyway. Read On →

Google NYC

I have successfully converted from an intern to a full-time employee and will be joining Google, Inc. next year! My role will be as a site reliability engineer (SRE) on the build systems. Super excited and looking forward to it!

First Week of Work

Man, I loved my first week. These past five days marked the first of my 13-week internship at Google. I had the option between a host in Mountain View or a host in NYC, and I chose the latter this time. The team that I’m working on is a part of the Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) team here at Google, although I can’t say much more about the details of my specific project. Read On →