I’ve been thinking about managing a reading list, basically a list of urls or excerpts as I read them or get to know about them. Previously,

I set up Linkwarden for this but didn’t use it much (or at all). Hoping that this rlog (running blog) can substitute that. Hopefully, I’ll keep it updated with everything insteresting I read on day to day basis, but it’ll mostly be media that I’d consume on my workstation (same machine I use to write this blog). Anyways, something is better than nothing. off we go

2024-08

15th August - Independence Day, India

  • medium.com/yandex/good-retry-bad-retry-an-incident-story - Very interesting and fun read. Goes into the details of when and why retries should be used. How simple or simple exponetial backoff retries could be major issue when is system is recovering from downtime. Sugeests to use retries with Retry Budget, Circuit Breaker, Load Shedding, Deadline Propogation etc. Former two are implemented on client whereas later two on servers.
  • isovalent.com/blog/post/demystifying-cni - A short article briefly discusses the container runtime and network interface and goes on to build a CNI plugin using bash. Apparently, you only need two files. A conf file at /etc/cni/net.d/ and a CNI executable at /opt/cni/bin/. CRI loads the first conf file and finds the corresponding executable and then calls the CNI executable as per the CNI spec.
  • CORS is stupid - For the last eight years of my career, this is the only post that made me understand cors and how it affects users.

2025-06

https://tesseral.com/blog/what-a-developer-needs-to-know-about-scim?utm_source=tldrnewsletter - I always thought SCIM was some obtuse spec like SAML, partly because I never invested any time in reading about it. This article puts it very nicely and was a very light read like the SCIM spec.

2025-08

  • engineering-buy-in - You work at a tech company, and have an excellent project idea that you’d like to pursue. How do you convince those around you? The most important tactic: individually talk about it with many relevant people, before you finally pitch it to a decision-making group

2026-01

  • The Buy Vs. Build Dilemma - Discusses on when to vs build. It hinges the decision on two factors. Competative advantage and core competency. If an org gets competative advantage by building, it should invest in building (more so if it has core competency in that field). Otherwise, it’s better to buy the stuff.
  • Thin Desires Are Eating Your Life - Author puts the desires as thick and thin. A thick desire is one that changes you in the process of pursuing it. A thin desire is one that doesn’t.
  • How I influence tech company politics as a staff software engineer - As an engineer you might not have much political capital to get approvals for starting a project. But you can leverage executives’ political power to drive your projects. For ex: If your VP is pushing for more reliability, you can use that opportunity to get approved and start your relaibility related project(s). The post recommends keeping a list of project ideas handy.
  • The Software Essays that Shaped Me - A list of 10 essays including entries from Joel Spolsky, Alexis King.