I attended the AI and Cybersecurity meetup at Adaptavist in Toronto this Wednesday because I am curious how different components of the AI ecosystem can be scaled in a secure manner. I was able to attend 2 presentations.

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LLMs aren’t great at analytics. If we upload structured CSV to Claude and ask it to “count the number of rows in this file”, it’s frequently incorrect. If the CSV is unstructured, the accuracy is even worse as the LLM...

Transitions and career changes can be difficult to traverse. Building new relationships and learning about different domains and technologies requires a lot of time and effort. Additionally there is a limited period of time for a manager to prove themselves...

In the past, I have found it tricky figuring out how to respond when someone who reports to me feels dejected or angry. I want to be careful not to overstep but would love to help if possible. I remember...

Daniel Goleman explains that effective leaders need to be flexible in their leadership approach depending on business needs. He describes 6 approaches based on his research across 3,871 executives and mentions that the best leaders should have mastered at...

I’ve had managers with a large number of reports and found it difficult to receive meaningful feedback to grow my career. When I came across an article about team sizing, I was curious to learn more.

The author (Will...

Will Larson, the current CTO of Carta, did an interview with a VC firm about anti-patterns for engineering leaders. In the article, Will describes that there’s no clear formula for shipping value more quickly as engineering leaders. Additionally, applying...

Wealthsimple is moving away from 2 week sprints to 6 week cycles. This prompted me to learn more about the Shape Up process which is proposed by Basecamp’s founders (a small sized company).

Currently, our process is for a...

Any improvement not made at the constraint is an illusion.

In the past, I worked in an enterprise where our infrastructure was on-premise, we had numerous handoffs to production and monthly deployments for a giant service. I remember...

After reading The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni, I took time to reflect on my own team. While we’re performing well in the many areas such as interpersonal trust, debate-then-commit and being results-driven, I realized that I...

I recently read the Amazon book by Brad Stone and got a glimpse into the mind Jeff Bezos. I’m awestruck by how deeply and ferociously Bezos focuses on the needs of the customer. His openness to risk, innovation and relentless...

Career

In early 2020 I was mulling-over the pain of commuting from my home to Toronto. Having been subjected to a 3hr daily back-and-forth at a previous job, I dreaded the stress of a long trip. My dream of...

• Conways Law - Orgs will produce system designs that are copies of the communication structures of those orgs.
• Org design is about designing for collaborative tech for the voice of the customer.

Part...

I spent the last 5 months implementing the first kafka system at Wealthsimple, rolling it into production and scaling it to many millions of events everyday. Our old system that would update customer balances used a poller and we knew...

My company organized a Coffee Masterclass, hosted by Christian Vasquez. I’m a coffee enthusiast so I was eager to learn more. My preferred preparation is a pour-over coffee. I start by adding a little milk to an empty cup and...

My company had a lecture about Resilience by Dr. Michael Unger, and I have compiled a few of my notes below.

• Resilience - nagivate your world but also negotiate resources around you.
• Resilience is not just about being positive...

Containerization has resulted in a slew of systems the past few years. While it is convenient to be able to create containers that work on any server, managing and deploying these in production has necessitated the need for orchestration systems...

I picked up the book “Founders at work” on the airport bookstore while I was traveling from Bangalore to Toronto and I’m glad I did. The book is a compilation of interviews between Jessica Livingston and the founders from many...

It’s been a wild journey the past year at Ritual and I’m really proud of what I’ve accomplished and things I’ve learnt. In the first half of the year, Ritual responded to competition by deciding to expand internationally. Under tight...

Here is a summary of relevant statements from “Use the index, Luke”, pertaining to database indexing.

Preface

• The separation of concerns—what is needed versus how to get it—works remarkably well in SQL, but it is still not...

My earliest recollection in the cryptocurrency space was a discussion I had with a colleague in 2012, who had described Bitcoin as an anonymous means of buying shady goods and services online (Bitcoin is not truly anonymous). Almost 6 years...

Lately, I’ve felt that I’m spending a lot of time on computer science and software development and not enough time on self-development. This is not aligned with my personal goal of becoming a more well-rounded person. Hence, I decided to...

There was a Postgres User Group meetup at Pivotal Labs today. The talk was about MVCC (Multi version concurrency control) in Postgres and why COUNT queries are slow. It seemed interesting enough, so I made my way towards King and...

The VP of Engineering at Loblaw Digital graciously offered me a corporate ticket to attend Elevate Toronto, a week-long tech conference that celebrates Toronto’s tech ecosystem. I have compiled a short summary of my key takeaways from the various presentations.

With the release of the 3rd Edition of “Effective Java” a few months back, I decided to re-read it and compile a few notes for future reference. These notes only represent points that are specifically useful to my development as...

I spent the past few months diving deep into 11 weeks worth of lectures on “Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies” offered by Princeton University on coursera.com. I have painstakingly compiled a summmary of my learnings from the course.

Table of...

I attended my very first Java User Group meetup today held at Free Times Cafe near College and Spadina. The meetup room was packed, and most of the attendees were senior java devs. The presentation was about bridging the gap...

I’ve compiled a list of my learnings from the book “Intelligent Investor” by Benjamin Graham.

Commentary on the introduction

• Intelligent investor : Being patient, disciplined and eager to learn. Harness your emotions and think for yourself.
• Don’t let the...

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