Can I Micro service?

Microservices are all the rage these days.
The advent of Cloud and Containerization has made switching to Microservices a lot easier. It works perfectly for geographically distributed teams and also enables polyglot development allowing developers to build using the latest and not be tied down to a specific version.

But as with all things shiny and new its worth taking a step back to see if Microservices really work for your use case. You need to ensure that your organisation is tall enough to use them and also that its not guaranteed to be a free lunch

Perception of reality!!

All problems in life start when perception & reality start to branch out. There are times when we become slaves to what we expect to happen
Kung Fu Panda had a neat quote - "Quite often you meet destiny on that path you take to avoid it". I think that's absolutely true.

Kabini

I had recently visited Kabini River Lodge in Kabini. This trip was special for many reasons, it was my first road trip in my car, the first trip after my wedding & the best part was that I had a Canon D500 with 105-500 mm lens, which a friend was kind enough to lend.

We started early on a Friday. The road was amazing all they till the Rajiv Gandhi National park after which it gets very uneven. But that stretch is just about 10KM (the total distance from Bangalore is about 220KM) so no complaints. Driving out of Bangalore is just awesome, the traffic reduces & you can happily coast without having to change gears often. We reached Kabini in time for lunch, after which we set of on our first Jeep Safari.

Jungle Lodges operates two safaris a day, you can choose between the jeep safari or the boat safari. Since we were staying there for two nights we had a total of four safaris. We went on three jeep safaris & one boat safari.

The drive into the forest is very special, the anticipation of catching a glimpse of a tiger or leopard keeps you on your toes. In the first three safaris we saw herds of elephants, gaur & deer. The final safari was very different however. We had a jeep to ourselves & got to see two peacocks dancing right in front of the jeep. A young bull elephant mock charged as & just as we were planning to head back, our driver got a call about a tiger sighting. We rushed to the spot & parked along with many other jeeps. As luck would have it, a beautiful tiger ran right across our jeep. I was even able to get a few half decent shots. The final safari was absolutely great & we ended the trip on a high. As I mentioned earlier I was using the Canon D500. Since I didn't have a tripod, handling the lens was quite a task, but the pictures were amazing. Having the 105-500 mm lens made a huge difference, hopefully I will be able to buy the same for my Nikon D90 some time soon.

Kabini

Popped Corn

Why is popcorn called popcorn? Shouldn't it be called poppedcorn??

Improvement

At what point do we stop developing in terms of intellect ? I am sure there are studies abound on this subject, but for some reason this caught my fancy today. The average human life span is around 70 years, which means our abilities peak at around 35 years, after which there is a probably a general degradation.
Well leaves me with 9 years to do some serious catching up, now if only more productive things caught my fancy!!

Reality Bites

There are just those times in life when reality, quite really bites. I had one such last week when I was visiting my neighbor. This neighbor runs a crèche and just as I was entering her house a fresh faced kid ran over and shouted: “So whose father are you?” Father??? Forget marriage, I look like I have a kid??? I retorted to this effect (with all the histrionics) and that poor soul looked rather flummoxed. Well he will probably understand how I felt when he turns 25.
This incident however did get me thinking about life, where it is heading and other such heady stuff. It’s all nice and fine up to the point of college when responsibility is still something of the future but now you are supposed to be living it. (Well, atleast in this department I am no better of than I was 5 years back). The way people look at you, their expectations all change. You are expected to have a plan for everything – a plan for a house, one for marriage, for kids & their education & I don’t know what else.
As I was treading this endless path I was reminded of the lyrics of famous Buz Luhrmann song Sunscreen -
“Don’t feel guilty if you don’t know what you want to do with your life…the
most interesting people I know didn’t know at 22 what they wanted to do with
their lives, some of the most interesting 40 year olds I know still don’t.”
This more or less settled it for me and I decided that I am going to go on as usual. But one thing is for sure - the next time some kid comes up and asks “Whose grandfather are you?” I am going to be prepared.

Emotional Choice

I recently stumbled upon a rather unique site called MovieProfiler. This site allows the user to select movies based on the eight primary emotions propounded by Robert Plutchik in his Psychoevolutionary Theory.
This seems to be a very novel way of choosing a movie rather than going by a review or suggestions. The user interface is very simple and the results seemed to be on the money (this is based on my knowledge/interpretation).
The glossary of Movie terminology is also an interesting feature. So the next time you decide to watch a movie, pick one based on your emotinal state.

The Inspiration

Traffic Theory

I had recently attended a talk on Game Theory by Robert J Aumann, Nobel Prize Recipient for Economics 2005.
For the uninitiated, Game Theory revolves around the Dynamics of Decision making in a group, particularly how human beings tend to behave in the face of personal gains as compared to gains for all.
My interest in Game Theory began after watching the movie "A Beautiful Mind" based on the story of John Nash and since then have been hooked to this subject and its practical applications.

The traffic in Bangalore mirrors a very famous game called the "Prisoner's Dilemma". Consider any traffic junction with no signals or a cop, now the personal gain for each person is in clearing the intersection and that's exactly what everyone tries to do resulting in absolute chaos. If vehicles don't clash then some egos definitely will and the result is often a hassled two wheeler blocking traffic and shouting for all he is worth, the end result is that all are stuck in a jam that takes a few hours to untangle.
If the people were however to consider the gain of the group i.e. be patient and possibly wait a few minutes in clearing the intersection in an organized manner there would be no Jam or in other words the gain for the group, while seemingly less than personal gain often yields better results.
Now the interesting part is that this situation occurs every other day in Bangalore (hence it can be classified as a repeating game i.e. one that occurs again and again) and yet always ensues in an ugly jam. Maybe we need to make Game Theory a must read for every Bangalorean and hope that the traffic situation gets better.