Weak notes - II

Work was pretty hectic this week, and I almost would have ended up sleeping the entire weekend away if not for an unexpected invitation for playing badminton. I somehow still misjudge the height of the shuttle, whenever it is floated up, eventhough in the other phases of the game, I am playing pretty well.

This week I ran into some very useful tools during work. Some of them were new and some of them were new use cases for tools I was already using. I feel like I should dedicate this post to my lord and saviour, jq. Every now and then, I am surprised how many things it can do. This is one of those tools which actually make a huge difference to a developer like me. Recently I realized that for all the bash function I write to automate stuff in my machines, I can actually start returning json return values instead of printing random stuff. This way, I can just parse whatever I want from the caller, and discard the useless stuff. No more tedious reformations of folder path etc.

Another tool is m4. I am still learning how to use this, but I am making do with the basic string replacement it provides me. One could argue, I could have used `sed` instead of a specialized tool for this, but somehow I feel I wont regret investing my time on m4. All templating languages are tied to languages or libraries, but m4 provides me a way to do it through a command line tool.

Another find of this week is shuf. Reading about this lead me into a rabbit hole into coreutils, and I was shocked to see so many unexplored tools like tsort etc. This is going to be a fun week.

Olympics has wrapped up this week. I learnt 2 days back, that "Breaking" has been added as a sport in this olympics. Breaking as in break dancing.! How ridiculous.! But then, what can or cannot be a sport can't be decided by random people like me. My issue is, why is something so subjective considered a sport? I know gymanstics, diving and all those sports are based on subjective scoring, but this one for some reason breaks all reason for me.

Track of the week

I have been a huge fan of Lena raine, mainly because of Celeste. But the minecraft ones just sound very special to me, as the contrast is very apparent. Also, eventhough she is an established artist, I somehow feel happy my niche favourtie artist, makes a mark in a established game.

Video of the week

https://www.instagram.com/p/C-JsBt6p2IM/

I can't embed instagram videos here ! Starts a planned obsolescence explainer and quickly shifts to a surprisingly insightful video about death and its importance in evolution, but near the end quickly shifts to tomfoolery back again. So much within so little time.

Honourable mention: https://www.instagram.com/p/C-Qh9cWScIc/

Weak notes - I

 I closely follow this blog for tech content. He regularly posts weekly notes and encourages others to do so. I have found a lot of those weekly notes useful. Most of those notes are personal updates, but some of them are tech suggestions and lists, which I have saved up.

For long, I have been longing to post significant events in my life in my blog. But I could never really convince myself that any of those events are significant enough to warrant a public blog post. This time though, I am going to throw caution into the wind, and document my weeks on here. Nobody anyway reads these, so it should be safe I guess.

The title isn't a mistake. I read somewhere that 'Weak notes' meant that I don't have to commit myself strictly to post this weekly, and can skip certain weeks if there isn't enough content to post. Well I am not good with commitments, so here we go.

Song/Music/Track of the week

Last week, I accidentally ran into this beautiful piece of music.

It sounds so familiar to me, for some reason. Especially the part around 1:20. It is mostly just nostalgia, I must have heard it somewhere in DD Podhigai.

Another one I got through a playlist was the one below

Interviews

This week I got the opportunity to conduct some C++ interviews for a Senior role. It made me re-evaluate how much of my knowledge I have been taking for granted. Both the interviewees, stumbled on very basic questions about dynamic memory allocation in C++. The questions was "What is the need for a `malloc` and `new` operator, if all they do is, allocate dynamic memory?". Ofcourse, some people might not know this straightaway, so I thought I can ask them to execute some sample code using both of them, and have them figure out the difference. But to my shock, both didn't know how to use a dynamically allocated vector ( which I was using as a way to demonstrate the difference ). Does this question deserve to be pushed up the difficulty bucket ? Currently, it is at Easy !

ACX Meetup

Went to my third ACX meetup last week ( Sunday ). Finally I managed to shut my mouth up for the majority of the time, and let intelligent people talk. This time, the controversial topic was about Discrimination laws, Reservation, quotas etc.