Location: New Delhi, India

Remote: Yes [Hybrid/WFO if in Delhi/NCR]

Willing to relocate: No, but can travel occassionally

Technologies: Java, Spring Boot, AWS, JPA, Hibernate, MySQL, Elasticsearch, Redis, Docker, Kubernetes, Linux, Team Management, Stakeholder Management, Agile, Writing

Résumé/CV: https://rajat.co/rajatarora_resume_2.0.25.3.pdf

Email: r@rajat.co

I am a Software Engineer and an Engineering Manager with 12+ years of industry experience. My technical stack includes Java, Spring Boot, MySQL, Elasticsearch, AWS, Redis, and related technologies.

I pride myself on writing exceptionally clean code with strong emphasis on quality and maintainability. During my career, I've designed robust event-driven distributed systems capable of processing over 50 million messages daily, have broken monoliths into microservices, and have developed complex systems from scratch. My leadership experience includes managing development teams of up to 15 engineers, and I've recently co-authored a book on Low-Code Development with Appsmith.

Currently seeking full-time Software Engineering, or Engineering Management roles. I prefer remote opportunities, though I'm open to office-based positions within the Delhi/NCR region.

If interested, please reach out at r@rajat.co

Seconded! And I also like how they treat their subscriptions. They reward long-term customers (by giving upto 40% discount on renewals), and even give a fallback license in case you want to stop paying them after a year. Kids do growth hacking, legends do customer retention!

I am a part of one such group! It started as a WhatsApp group for all ex-employees, but has now morphed into a discord server. It's a great way to remain connected to friends you make at work, and recently, it has also become a way to share job openings to your network to help laid-off people.

Anybody have connection to the ex-google one if there is? I just left and didn't see it referenced in any of the leaving guides.

Leaving guides? I imagine a pamphlet.

"We wish you well on your departure; as you embark on new adventures your about to open your eyes for the first time.

This may be a shock to some of you as you may discover that the world is more dystopian than you've may of seen from your altered reality mind-implants.

We would like to thank you for your service as a tool at the corporation."

"Handbook for the Recently Terminated"

As long as it doesn't read like stereo instructions ....

You could rewrite Plato’s Cave for some companies, especially the insular ones where there’s some culture shock when you get into “the real world”.

Plato’s cave needs to be rewritten anyway

time to just acknowledge that its an overly long arduous convoluted setup that can be vastly simplified for the message it creates

if Plato's cave were rewritten today, it would probably be from the perspective of the cave

Tempt me with a good time lmao. "Imagine someone spends their entire life in a dark room with only an ebook reader..."

https://xoogler.co/ has a xoogler slack

There's an Obsidian plugin for Anki -- https://github.com/reuseman/flashcards-obsidian

It connects with your Anki desktop app. You create notes in Obsidian in a specific format, and they get converted to Anki flashcards. This way your flashcard creation process becomes much easier if you already use Obsidian for note-taking.

Unfortunately, while super useful, that plugin is quite out-of-date. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't depending on what Obsidian/Anki version combination you use. If one of them updates, it breaks. I think I had to pin Obsidian to some older version to keep it working.

Yup -- https://apps.apple.com/in/app/ankimobile-flashcards/id373493...

It's expensive, but it's the only paid app by the creator of ankiweb (web, android, and desktop versions made by them are all free).

Your boy is precious! He's on his way to becoming a highly intelligent adult.

I've seen a lot of people going like... why remember stuff when you can easily google it? But it doesn't work that way. The more facts reside in your brain, the more avenues it has to connect them together and generate insights (after all, that thing is the OG "neural network").

I highly admire your parenting in this aspect, and I hope to do the same when I have kids of my own.

Edit: I noticed after publishing my comment that you're Derek Sivers! I've been a long time reader of your blog :)

I think it's even more precious that the boy has learned how to learn and has developed a taste for achievement based on a dopamine loop that doesn't employ sugar or special effects in 4K.

I’ve never remembered anything by memorization. Only at school and university for exams, and only to promptly forget it one week later. The stuff that I have remembered for years I learned organically by using it, as part of some mental process, by embedding it in some larger structure. Be it coding, physics, or history. So I think this is a fairly individual matter

I highly doubt this is an individual matter. Cramming (massing) for exams is literally the antithesis of SRS.

Look into Andy Matuschaks work: [Dwarkesh Podcast](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dmeRQN9z504) [How to write good prompts](https://andymatuschak.org/prompts/)

That's spaced repetition in a nutshell.

Yep! This kid has a super power! I don't understand why this sort of learning to learn isn't taught in schools - I only discovered anki and even spaced repetition at age 35, and I could really have used it at school!

I think the workaround that I came up with myself was to work through a large amount of derivations (maths, physics and chemistry) and try to note the common stuff and prepared shorter and shorter versions of the notes from which I could rapidly reconstruct everything else.

In hindsight, I was training an autoencoder.

Interesting! Why would the airline incur additional cost of shipping your ski equipment to your house, when putting it out to the baggage claim is... free?

Because they make a mistake. They obviously don't intend for that to happen.

Their message in/out limits are not strict. They send a warning if you go over, and allow for some tolerance upto 25% above the plan limit.

https://www.migadu.com/pricing/#what-after-reaching-limits

Can confirm, I've gotten warnings when sending lots of outgoing mail.

Not the parent.

It's likely a safety issue in the case of grid-connected solar installations. These panels are designed to send excess electricity to the grid, and if the grid is down, the utility needs to make sure that busted cables are not carrying electricity... for the safety of the repairmen.

https://www.cnet.com/home/energy-and-utilities/do-blackouts-...

Preventing backfeeding during an outage isn't a hard problem, technically speaking...

It's a default feature in grid tied inverters from what I've been told.

Yes, but the most common way they do this is just by shutting down completely and not accepting any input from the solar panels.

You need to move up to more expensive models that support “islanding” to be able to use solar power while the grid is down. For some reason it appears that this type of inverter isn’t legal in Israel?

But what is stopping them from offering both? You can have the SMS 2FA as the default option, but also offer TOTP for the technically minded.

Generally the justification is "hey, we offer one form of 2FA, that's pretty good. This TOTP thing is for paranoid nerds." Bosses see it as extra work for ~no gain, what's the point? You can explain the technical superiority of the approach until you're blue in the face but they see it as just another way to do what's already implemented.

The technically minded can simply use a strong password.

This! There is no additional security for aware users with MFA. Make MFA turned on by default, ok, but for god's sake if you provide only SMS-based 2FA, allow it to be disabled.