Lyceum — dev log 55
Lyceum

Internship Finished my internship at SendX on June 15. Had a small farewell, they sent some cake! The first two weeks of June were hectic. Systems started breaking on a microscopic level due to sudden scale. It spiked close to 10 times the average volume over multiple days. Cue hours of debugging and monkeypatching until we figured out the host of minute issues in various sub-systems. I was locked into calls all day long for the most part of the second week, debugging, fixing and monitoring the infrastrucutre. I count myself fortunate though, yes, it was difficult, frustrating and tiring but it was a rare opportunity to experience drastic scale and how teams deal with it, especially so early in my career. As mentioned in previous entries, while I was there, SendX had a single tech team made up of four people, that's it. 1 Person for each Frontend, Backend and Infrastrucutre and a Jack of all trades. At it's peak our infrastrucutre was being bombed with about 50 million requests every 24 hours (yes, all legit). So when systems started breaking, it wasn't a question of 'Can we fix it?' or not, but 'How do we fix it?'. It might seem like a trivial distinction to make but the reason I point it out is because, my reticent Imposter Syndrome never got the opportunity to kick in, it was the team's shared responsibility and whether I was confident in myself or not did not matter, it needed to be fixed. Be had about a half-dozen blog's worth material by the time we fixed most critical problems.

Job I've been exploring Google's Kubernetes Engine and Kubernetes over the last couple of days. They have hands-on tutorials that I've been working through. I had planned on porting Lyceum to Go and adding some features to it, but already having read and learnt about the tech stack I'll be working with at my job is a higher leverage activity than the former. I'm still waiting for the work tech to arrive, it's been stalled due to a lockdown at the office location. Other than that I'm excited to get started with learning and working at Deepsource.

Personally I now use a simple to-do list in a notebook following my post on personal productivity and organization, just note things down, plain and simple. Lets see how long this lasts for.