Scribble Shiva

Read three books, learned so much in managers training, I have so much to say, but I cannot believe I didn't find time to write. Guess I was busy.

It doesn't have to be crazy at work, is the book with that title. The title is almost clickbait, but the gist is printed straight up on the cover of the book; they didn't even wait for the blurb. Jason Fried, the CEO and David Heinemeier Hansson, the CTO of 37Signals (formerly Basecamp) co-authored this book. This book was gifted to me by whom I'd consider to be a mentor because he caught me working "crazy at work", it is rare to see such people who are more inclined to see you as a person instead of a number, he seemed to have taken guidelines from this book to heart, and I'd say it is a good change in this cut-throat corporate. This is yet another book discussion, it is almost as if I am picking books to only learn and not review them; I'm not a reviewer, and I do not have any affiliate account setup that will earn me commission; I'm just going to discuss the ideas that I grasp from the books I read, on to the book The book is about how crazy the wor...

 1. Uber/Ola is costlier than normal auto/car. Eg. Bani Park to Jaipur stn - ₹50 in an electric rickshaw, Ola - ₹100. So see Ola or Uber then negotiate for a good deal. 2. For shuttling between the Hotel and attractions inside the city use Battery battery-powered auto (which I will call a buggy, like a golf cart), which costs less than a Cab or even a normal auto. 3. Going inside Hawa Mahal is underwhelming, I didn't go, if you decide to go anyway first go to Rajvesh Textile , from there you can see that Hawa Mahal is a kind of permanent facade not exactly Mahal. 4. I'd revisit Amber Palace instead of Jaipur City Palace. 5. Club Amber Palace, Nahargarh Fort, and Jaigarh Fort together (1 day). If you have half a day then only Amber Palace. Pick a car, you have to climb hills so I will not recommend an auto. 6. Jal Mahal is a photo point, boating closed almost 20 years ago as per the cab driver I hired. Try to be there by sunset, breezy - you might have to give up the music show ...

This is not a book review, rather a discussion or an elaboration of what I understood from this book. The author, Gurcharan Das starts by claiming that his path to this book was rather unintentional since he was only trying to settle into his " Vanaprastha " life. He discusses the  goals of life and how every stage of life connects with many goals at the same time. Head on from chapter 1, we dive into the core of the book, "Dharma" the main goal of a good life well-lived apart from 'Moksha'. The best thing about the book is that the chapters are arranged such that Mahabharata's chronological narration is undisturbed, chapters are character-centric and thus dharma is approached from various points of view and Mr. Das never stops throwing questions at us and subtly answering them.  This book could not have come to me at a better time, I considered it non-intrusive advice from an elderly vanaprastha. The sub-text gives away the plot, almost, "The subt...

I started my work life in an MNC, Tier 1 IT service provider. I worked with clients directly since I was able to understand and speak their 'accent'. My second employer is an Italian bank where both my Indian and Italian colleagues praised my spoken, never mind that I almost always fail to communicate. It is funny that I picked up the accent from American sitcoms and cartoons and didn't undergo any sort of training.  I can hear you say "stop this nonsense bragging blog", I will after I manage to sell you the idea 'schooling is important, but schools or education boards are not'.  But why now? why not 2011? when I got the job and the girl? Probably that is the highest point in my life why was not be boastful then! why now? - Again I'm not boasting I'm only trying to convince myself and you, of course. This idea had its inception long back, 2007 was my first year of college I was considered to have a fairly high standard of communication skill in c...

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This blog entry is primarily recorded for Dev/Sys/Ops people who have little to no experience with javascript. I have been using different services offered by different cloud providers for some time now. For any cloud provider, the learning curve is linear and the only catch is you should have prior knowledge of the service you are consuming, be it VM, load balancer, database, code repository or container-related services. Just like any random guy in IT, my first cloud experience came with AWS, I deployed some hobby projects to experiments, and I also used the same to deliver some MVP for official work. There was a difference between working as a sole developer utilizing personal account and using IAM under enterprise cloud account but I guess they are all part of the learning curve. The second provider I worked on is Google Cloud, I wanted to evaluate their GKE service. This was about 3 years back, some months ago I came across an offer from Google, the offered an SRE course with a ce...

I am a straight talker, I proudly wear it on my shoulder. I like it when people can trust my words and identifies me as a person who "talk the talk, walk the walk". A year ago someone in my workplace told me that I should work on being diplomatic since direct communication might hurt relationships. As much as I'd like to argue that I'm not looking for long term friendship in office and I'm here to complete my task, as I level up in the ladder, my vantage point changes and so does my perspective about the workplace communication. Now I find myself in a place where I have to communicate more, about the same thing to multiple stakeholders with different level of business and technical knowledge. It is getting increasingly difficult to continue being 'the straight talker', which I regarded highly in the past. Sometimes it is not just about knowledge of the audience, it is more about the style of communication. I'm Indian, and my domicile has not changed si...

I was ecstatic!, the day started, as usual, toast as breakfast, leftover as lunch, and vending machine coffee; in a couple of days we were going to return to India and so it was time for us to shop souvenirs and chocolates. But what excited me most was the restaurants, and for the noblest reason - food. Gli Orsi is the mall of Biella; there are spots in town like Via Italia, and the complex housing Esselunga, then there is also a Saturday market - where we can go and buy many different things in one place, but malls always offer a different experience. Gli Ori has exclusive outlets for chocolates, shoes, electronics, bags, and more, but we usually buy chocolates from Coop, a supermarket similar to Esselunga but offers more discounts. My first dining experience in Italy was at a place that doesn't serve Italian food but western food. I'm from India, Italy is my west 😄but to Italians - America is west, I understood this as soon as we spotted the restaurant. The place was decorat...

There is a tradition in Itay that I found out trying to meet a girl, ok, don't get any ideas. She is pretty I don't deny, but she friendzoned our entire group as soon as we met, no we didn't hit on her, that's how she introduced herself. "Enough of girl" I hear you say, but she introduced me to this awesome thing and how can I not write about the background? We shared the same workplace and that was the reason she came forward and spoke to us on our journey towards Florence, our chatty train journey stopped at Milan and we went our separate ways.  About three months pass and I go to Biella again (possibly for last time, thanks COVID). I have no reason to contact her, but if you are working for the same employer in a small town, chances are you cross paths, and we did so during the last week of my stay. She was unhappy that I didn't let her know I am in town, anyway invited me to a party scheduled for Friday night. But my flight was already scheduled to lea...

Nothing here is a fact, this is only opinion, no just rant of a young adult idiot. Turn around now, if you don't like rant or profanity or profanity-laced rant. When I say love, I strictly mean the romantic form of it; and I hate that I even have to say that, why do people have to add love to everything? parental love, baby love, candy love and so on... that's just plain stupid. Love is problematic not just because some people use it to manipulate others, but because it is a powerful emotion. So how it is problematic for everyone if only some use it to manipulate, the rest plain minded people will be bound by a strong feeling for each other, isn't it good? No, because even though love is strong emotion it starts to wear down after the purpose is fullfiled, and that brings me to the purpose of love. Purpose of love is to pro-create, you can decorate it, put a shiny gown, powder it with glitters, but the truth remains the same, love exists so that we don't become extinct....

I'm going to try and narrate my experience trying to complete the OCI certifications, that I signed up for because of peer pressure. If you are here from the future, China does China eating raw animals and shit, COVID-19 outbreak starts in Wuhan ~ Dec 2019 and is declared a pandemic by March 2020. Countries all over are forced to shut shop and kind of sleep with an empty stomach. Tourism, Aviation, Manufacturing, Automobiles, and their dependant services are worst hit; which includes the IT department from both product and service companies; pink slips starts to shower all over! And everyone is trying to differentiate themselves among thousands in the candidate pool, LinkedIn articles and learning badges becomes the norm. It seems Oracle saw an opportunity to make their new cloud offering familiar with IT community, and they announced that "5 Oracle Cloud Infrastructure certifications are free till May 15, 2020 ", later extends the program by adding 1 more certification  ...

Insomnia is the most common sleep disorder that most people think of when someone says they have trouble sleeping, pop culture has put such spin on it. But there are other disorders too like sleep deprivation (not enough sleep), sleep apnea (snoring/breathing trouble while sleeping, caused by reduced oxygen level); there are also other terrors like acting out dreams in the physical world, awake but muscles are paralysed, teeth grinding and shouting out dreams. But, I'm suffering from the most common form of sleep disorder of the 21st century; I always wake up tired, no it is not hypersomnia. This post is going to be sort of self-shaming one, in order to change my habit. Confession: I'm a big YouTube consumer, I consume too much to even remember them all the next day even though I follow quality contents still they are useless if I forget them all. Almost all of the channels I follow hosts, education, science, history, general health, environment, computer and related stuff; my ...

Lunch is considered the biggest/proper meal of the day in Italy, as I have already mentioned , a cup of coffee and a bun is all you get as breakfast in Italy (However, this is stereotypical and mythical as I have mentioned in the same write-up, I'm going to still use the myth to boost my biggest meal theory). Most of my Italian colleagues preferred to eat outside, this makes me believe that Italians has a strong culture of eating lunch outside. So many restaurants in such a small town of Biella adds substance to my theory.  We have a small canteen and also on/off lunch only food truck inside our office, in-spite of this there are 6 restaurants within walking distance from our entrance, serving Japanese sushi, Mexican empanadas, Substandard grab and go pizza. And my favourite La Locanda (fondly known to us as Thatha Kadai )- the pasta land that I love  😋  and the old man's warm welcome will be with me for life. These are mostly for people who walk or use pu...

Breakfast is the first meal of the day and it will help you power through the day, don't skip it. Or at least that is what is widely told and believed, and now I realize this is a very strange way to open, yet I did and I'm going to carry on with it. If I have not made myself clear yet, I have been to Italy and I tried to learn their lifestyle and this is my documentation. Spread across three years, I spent a total of 3 months there, enough time to know enough but not all, and it is worth mentioning that I spent all my time in North Italy, after all, I didn't go there for vacation; since my office is headquartered in Piedmont region I stayed there and spent above 95% time there. Oh, I forgot about breakfast! During my first time my manager took me out for breakfast and it was a cup of coffee and brioche. What is brioche you ask, it is a croissant, sometimes bigger, sometimes flavoured, sometimes stuffed; but yeah that is what all you get in the morning, not once I saw ...

Workload, work pressure, workplace stress might sound similar and people use them interchangeably, but I'm here to argue that it should not be done.  TL;DR  usually more workload leads to work pressure, high work pressure leads to workplace stress, and chronic stress creates a relationship and even health problems. The workload is the only neutral word here, what is 'neutral' about it? Unless you explicit qualify it like "I have high workload" or "I am getting so much free time these days since my  workload has been reduced "; you can't tell for sure if it demands increased effort from the employee.  Let's discuss work pressure; a short burst of high workload, work that is out of your comfort zone, or time-bound steep targets - all defines work pressure. If it is rare and rewarding it tends to put the career on fast-track, and this is what we usually hear from talent managers. Often work pressure is continuous and the deadline is almost a...

To say, "Espresso runs through the veins of Italians" is an understatement. Regarding hot drink espresso is the first choice; it is part of breakfast and afternoon break. Espresso  Let's start with the basic, the espresso. Caffe espresso is the most regular drink, it is synonym to Caffe; when in Italy, it is enough to say Caffe to order an espresso - I guess it is called espresso because it can be finished swiftly like an express.  It is undiluted decoction that comes out when hot water is forced through coffee power, voila! add sugar as much as you prefer and sip it once and relish; don't go for the second sip, it won't be there ;) such small cup and low content. If you want a long hard punch, go for Caffe Lungo - espresso but more content. Cappuccino  My friend cappuccino, 1/3 espresso 1/3 milk 1/3 foam. That is the standard definition of Cappuccino, and it was my go-to drink in Italy. It is very usual to find people having espresso and brioche as t...