Internship

Nothing done at the internship during the past week. Our tech team is only 4 people and two members are unavailable due to family tragedies. The current priority is to ensure the system is stable and handle any alerts that pop up. No major tech pieces being developed/deployed. The company has been extremely supportive in these trying times, encouraging us to take time off and help others in the community if we can. We've also been sent various Covid related supplies like masks, face shields, PP Kits etc. and even though I'm still an intern we've gotten health insurace for Covid setup. I'm incredibly thankful to be part of this team.

Google's SRE Book

I've started reading the "bible" of SRE books, Google's Site Reliability Engineering and am taking notes for it in Obsidian.md. It took some hours for me to make Obsidian comfortable to use, but boy am I enjoying it. The notes[1] are public and available on Github.

I previously thought about using GitBook, but it's cloud-based and doesn't let you export data to md or txt, which basically means my notes are at their mercy. While Obsidian is non-free and proprietary, it has a fantastic UI, data is stored locally with an active community ended up being my pick. Here's what the setup currently looks like:

Yes, the theme is based on Discord[2], I don't like Discord a lot, but their UI is quite nice, and I did not like the other existing community dark themes. This strikes a nice balance between 8 bit and Material themes for me.

Personally

As mentioned previously, two members of the team are going through family tragedies of different magnitudes. I'm going to be ambiguous on purpose here because I don't want to be disrespectful. I woke up and saw a slack message that informed me about what had happened and I did not know the right way to respond. As I mentioned in the previous log, I was made aware of how bad things were in India, but I couldn't empathize with those suffering, because I hadn't directly experienced the situation. This made it real. It took me a couple of days to feel normal but I'd dip into periods of grief and depression occasionally. Some days later another slack message and that left me numb for some more days. It's been a difficult week mentally and emotionally. I don't expect it to get better anytime soon.

[1]: Notes repository on GitHub

[2]: Discordian: Obsidian dark theme inspired by Discord