Life & Thoughts of Hariharan Anantharaman

My transition from memory loss to a super organiser

Year of 2023 ended with a good note for me. One of the things that made 2023 special was a consistent feedback from peers and manager that I am highly organized in my work and I bring the things to closure. I am elated with the feedback as till a couple of years back, quality of my work suffered due to lack of planning. Infact, even now i used to forget things. Funnily, today i forgot my lunch bag in the food court and retrieved it from lost and found when i left for the day.

cross posted here

Step 1 : Identifying what is important and what is not

Eisenhower Matrix is a good starting point.

The challenge comes when everything is asked to you as a critical or urgent item. What is important is to identify them in specific bucket using

Asking proper questions
Using your own thoughts

Below are the key productivity tools I use

Memo
Microsoft One Note
Google Calendar
Confluence

Lifecycle

When any work comes, it could be a outcome of a email with specific action item on me or my team, or a slack discussion which needs further exploration or a specific things that needs to be worked out and mentioned in a meeting, or a random thought occurring me, below is what I do

Make a entry on a note sticker in Memo desktop app. If it is really critical, I make sure to mark it as Bold. I add any reference like Jira ID etc if needed. I also make a note of to whom I should delegate or follow up.
I have multiple Memo’s (similar to sticky notes). I add the activities/or what i need to do in the respective. For e.g i have below notes
- My task list
- Things i should discuss when i discuss with my peer or team mate A (e.g John)
- Things i should discuss when i discuss with my peer or team mate B (e.g Ravi)
- Trainings to do
- Blog posts to write on
- ….
  And the list continues
  I look at the things based on the type and edit/remove them. AT regular intervals, i also delete the unwanted note category
If i have a note to follow up or delegate to someone a task, I ask them to do in slack or call. After that I have a task in Google calendar to follow up with the specific member. If it is a long running task on initiative, i set up a recurring call or task based.
If there is any Jira ticket or a similar ticket in any project management tool, i subscribe/watch to the specific
If some thought needs explanation, I detail them out in a confluence page. I tag and comment the relevant people to add thoughts on the same or ask for their review.
While slacking or emailing any people beyond the office hours, I also make sure to delay the delivery (unless I am sure that the recipients are working at the time and my communication is expected) so that it reaches them at a time which ensure their attention.

Effective use of OneNote

I use OneNote effectively to capture the knowledge or notes which are worth saving for a lot of time. E.g Decisions taken, key workshop notes, training notes etc. Generally on all these things, there is also a need to save any multimedia content (Images, video link) and also elaborate with my thoughts.

The hierarchical nature of OneNote helps me to maintain and organise the contents in a logical manned.

I have following NoteBooks in One Note

Personal (used to takes notes on personal activities, trainings etc)
Employer (Used to store organization related training notes,decisions etc)
Project/Customer specific notes

Each note book has various section based on the category and each section has various pages. Below is the snapshot from my personal note book

Why I do not use a personal trello board

I like trello boards, but I do not use them for my work tracking as it is a over engineered solution for my current needs. Below are the things

I like to track and make a note of even small things. This would mean lot of of records.
Benefit of trello board comes when you create multiple swimlanes. Given i have various types of tasks and each type has different stages, the board might look very cluttered.
Trello or any equivalent gives a maximum value when lot of people collaborate and contribute.
I can use the same toolset for my personal tasks too. For e.g I have a recurring task for every night to soak Chia seeds, Sabja seeds, start fermentation milk to curd, call a specific person with agenda etc

Life with Entry level smartwatches

Smart watches have become one of the popular and must have gadget and accessory. While the famous and premium brands like Garmin, Apple Watch , Galaxy watch provides a lot of convenince, how is the experience with entry level or budget smart watches ( less than 5000 INR or $75). While it is imperative that they will not give the same experience as the premium brands, the question is, what do you miss out on?

This blog is based on my experience is using Noise fit (from 2021-2023) and Fireboltt (2023) . Please note that I have not used any premium smart watches. So, I am not comparing apples with oranges, but just elaborating on my experiences with them.

Location access

Most of the watches in this price range do not have in-built independent location access. While a few can give location when paired with a mobile phone, watches alone do not have it. This is relevant when planning to go for a long run or cycling, and you do not want to take your phone with you. While the distance will be measured and given, the actual geographical location might not be given.

Accuracy of values

In my experience the distance values given by the watchs are not same as the one given by my phone. For the same running, Strava measures a distance of 4 Kilometres, watches give a different value and they differ by a huge margin. Noise fit gave 4.8 Kilometers and Bolut give me 3.2 kilometres. Sleep duration is also not accurate and completely off.For workouts like Yoga, weight lifting etc the calorie values apper very less and same irrespective of the intensity of the workout. I would not bet on these watches to monitor my temperature or heart beat and alert or notify me.

Integration with third party apps

These watches do not offer integration with external fitness apps like Strava or Adidas training. I track my running and cycling in strava. I would have loved if these watches can share data with Strava. Due to this, I am not able to share my workout details with my trainer, fans and friends from a single consolidates location.

App Capabilities

App interface and experience are sufficient and satisfactory. A major complaint is that the apps of these devices consume/drain a lot of battey from the phone. Even if the watch is not paired and connected, the apps continue to run and drain the battery of the phone. The apps also miss the capability to compare various workout sessions.

Battery life

One thing that impresses me significantly is the battery life of the watches. It takes aroun 8 to 9 days to go from 100 to 15%, which I find is good.

Verdict

So, are the entry level smart watches worth it. For people who are not very heatlh conscious and who are not driven by fitness statisctics, these watches will suffice and offer a great value. They measure a lot of attributes. Even with a debatable accuracy %, they can be used to comapre the trend and consistency. If you are planning to use this to flaunt your workout and measure your progress in a objecive manner, investing a bit more on premium watches helps you to meet those objectives.

2023 – A Recap

2023 was an interesting year for me. How do i feel, if i look back at it. Continue reading to know more.

What I am Proud of

Below are a few things that happened in 2023, about which I am proud of

Able to control my screen time. I was never addicted to instagram , tiktok etc. So naturally i was able to aovid Instagram reels, youtube shorts etc. Most of the working days, Economic times was the first app i open (not FB or twitter). However, on weekends, my social media time is high. I need to restrict it.
Minimise OTT consumption.
Able to dedicate time for spirtual improvement. Able to do Sandhyavandhanam atleast 4-5 times a week and read “Deivathin Kural” everyday.
Able to workout consistently whenever possible.
Able to maintain work life balance and spend quality time with family.

Trips

Trips

I made a total of 10 business trips this year. Below are the cities covered

Pune
Mumbai
Bangalore ( 5 trips)
Singapore
Bangkok
Ahmedabad

Below are the cities covered for family funtions
Coimbatore
Erode (Bhavani)

Below are the cities covered as part of spritual trip/road trips

Shirdi
Bhadrachalam
To sum it up, 2023 was an eventful year in terms of travel.

Learning

This is where i fell short. I started to learn Angular but could not complete it. Lot of breaks and after sometime Udemy did not load the contents properly. One reason being that I am not able to reduce my sleeping time to 5 hours. I slept an average of 6 to 7 hours, which is very high.

Work

Work was ok. Usual delays and escalations. But what is more worrying is that the challenges that were present during the beginning of the year still remain (Deployment and infrastructure issues. Still people dependent). While I was able to have a say and manage to give a workable plan, i feel that it fell short. I was also not able to influence and get started on performance initiatives.
It is always an reactive way and not a proactive one.

Sum it up

To sum it up, 2023 has been an underwhelming year. It is a year where processes are set in place. Needs a re-alignment of priorities to achieve more. I need to make an effort to reduce my sleeping time.

Goals for 2024

Use GenAI to solve documentation and deployment issues.
Resolve deployment problems by more automation.
Contribute to at least one open-source initiative.

Transferring Data between AWS Elastic cache clusters on isolated networks (without using Redis cli and dump import)

Problem Statement

How would you transfer data between different clusters when

Both the clusters do not share the same network
Networks that both the clusters reside are not connected (and cannot be connected)
The cloud infrastructure team does not allow the upload of Redis dumps to S3. Hence, we cannot import using the same.

This post is cross posted in This medium article by me

Context and Background

In our digital transformation program, the development and lower environment testing happens in the partner companies’ networks. Then, the application (docker images) is shipped to the customer-secured environment, where the UAT users will test it. The developers add new entries every sprint and change frequently. Assume that the release happens every month and every sprint is 2 weeks.
To give a background, below are the constraints. Please note that we use AWS-managed Redis (AWS Elastic cache)

AWS elastic cache by design is not discoverable outside of the VPC network. Exposing via proxy using a VM is a security vulnerability (and rightly reported by AWS)
The lower environments and the UAT and other environments are in different networks in cloud and managed by different teams. Application teams have only limited access and cannot change networking rules.
The destination network (UAT and higher) does not allow outbound internet connection.
We cannot use redis import from dumps as the cloud security team in customers network does not allow import of external content to S3. For the redis clusters within the customers network, we were able to export from one cluster to a S3 bucket and import into another cluster.

The customer being a bank, high security restrictions are expected and getting exceptions usually take a long cycle. Any request and recommendation leading to a security risk is not approved.

As the application development happened, within a couple of releases we realised that transferring data between two clusters is a challange. The below sections describes how we achieved a balance which ensure

Developer productivity is high
Deployment time is high

The diagram below represents our deployment flow. Due to the network restrictions, options like riot did not solve our needs.

Initial approach — Hail the scripts

As with any solution designer who started his journey before the container world, we started with shell scripts. Below is the process

Developers do CRUD operations of Redis entries using redis-cli or the APIs we have written to perform the same.
During every release, SREs/developers create and export a Redis export as CSV.
The deployment team in the customer network receives the CSV as an email.
The deployment team copies the CSV file to a EC2 instances in the cluster
Execute redis command to update the redis cluster with content from CSV file.

Pitfalls with the the scripts approach

As you can see from above, it is a bit complicated and lot of human touch points. Below are the few challenges we faced

Data formatting. The contents in our cache will have special values(e.g line breaks). When we created CSV export, and reimport via redis-cli , there were a lot of issues in the imported content. To mitigate it, after creating the export, we need to format the special characters accordingly. This is a time-consuming task and with each release the time taken to perform this increased due to data size increase and dependency on the developer.
With the team size being very high (8 squads with each squad having 6 developers), who will take the ownership was a big question. One squad needs to learn completely what is the correct format for the data required by other squads. Additional step of review consumed lot of time and associated overhead to co-ordinate this entire sequence.
The deployment team needed to be more comfortable executing ad-hoc shell scripts as part of the deployment. If there are any issues running the script, the developers need to be called again.

What worked : K8S jobs

Developers in my team stepped up, understood the problem and designed a solution using K8S jobs. Our data is stored in Redis hash.Below are the steps

For each create hash a seperate CSV file.
Developers make any change (Create or update) to the keys on the file (not using CLI or API)
A java program was written to read the CSV file(s) and update the redis.
The project was extended to support multiple files and the list of files are given as configurable entries
The .docker file was created to execute the java program on the initiation.
The entire repository with the files and java code was packaged as a image.
The image was deployed in K8S.
This image acted as a one-time job which was invoked during the deployment.

Benefits

Formatting issues are taken care by the developer while updating the CSV with their entries.
Developers were freed from deployment support. Given that we have a lot of environments from UAT to production, this was a huge productivity improvement.
No manual intervention by the customers deployment team. The need to execute ad hoc scripts has been eliminated.
In fact, all the challenges caused due to scripting has been addressed with this approach.

Digital Adoption – A Non-Stop Journey

Introduction

2022 has been an important year for me. It was during that year, I completed my PGPX course at UCLA. In one of the classes, one of the alumni, who is running a leading packaging and anti-counterfeit solutions company for FMCG gave a talk about digital transformation in his company. I found the talk to be pretty impressive. He did use the technology effectively for internal business operations (about which he talked in detail) before venturing into new areas (blockchain, analytics, etc).

After the class, while discussing with my cohorts, especially from IT and software industry, they were pretty disappointed with the talk. Having worked on digital transformation projects (or projects labelled as digital transformation), what he did as part of digital transformation does not meet their opinion of what digital transformation meant (or what they thought as meant).

It brings an important question of what digital transformation really is? I started my IT career in 2003 and the word digital transformation has been frequently used from 2010 or so. It got more prominence with the raise of smart phones and connectivity. Over the years different initiatives were tagged under the digital transformation category. To name a few are

Continue Reading here

How was 2022 For me

I am not a person who writes year end notes for things which went well and and which did not. However, this time I am tempted to write it, because

1.I wanted to resume serious content creation

2. 2022 is an year, on which I had more control of my life.

So what happened to me in 2022. Lets check

Completed my UCLA PGPX course. Though it is not a evaluation course, I am happy that I did put in best of my efforts.
Progressed on both material and spiritual growth.
Able to manage my time better.

To give a fact, I was able to consistently dedicate time for workout and daily prayers. Below is my workout schedule

Day 1 : Jogging for 30 minutes
Day2 : High intensity workout for 30 minutes
Day3: Yoga and weightlifting for 30 minutes

And then it repeats. Sometimes I do take rest on 4th day. I had the motivation to do on weekends too. Apart from travelling dates and hospital dates, I was mostly consistent.

Below are the outcomes

Able to consistently wake up at 4.30 to 5 AM every day
Completed reading of Bhagvad Gita. It started two years ago with goal of one sloka per day.
Able to perform Ganesh puja for 10 days following Vinayakar Chathurthi.
Started reading Maha Periyava’s Deivathin Kural. Again couple of pages per day.
Started reading “Presence”
Able to restrict my time spent on Facebook.

On hindsight, i believe that I could have used my personal time much better. Should have spent less time on Office work.

Goals for 2023

Blog more frequently. Atleast one post per two weeks. On Digital transformation

Complete course on DSA, System design

Complete Kubernetes course and certification

Improve on Cognitive thinking.

Reduce time spent on twitter.

IwoJima

Any incident or event has multiple parties and participants involved. Have you noticed a third-party storyteller taking two movies out of the same situation, covering one party and focusing on both sides? That too on an incident like War? And both films are neutral without having any prejudice?

Recently I got a chance to watch two movies, “Letters From Iwo Jima” and “Flag of Our Fathers”, back to back on a long-haul flight. Of all the options, why did I choose these two movies? There is an interesting backstory to it. I watched “Flag of Our fathers” in the late 2000s in Hyderabad. As a fan of drama genres, I liked it very much. I was looking forward to watching it again.Cut back to 2022; I was delighted to see this movie’s name in the catalogue. I also saw the title “Letters from Iwo Jima”. I thought it would be nice to see both films to get the complete picture.

Both the movies are nicely set drama movies set in the backdrop of war. However, the degree to which it touches the personal side of soldiers differs. In the “Letters from Iwo Jima”, we could visibly see the pain of civilians forced into army platoons. Their dilemma, priorities and how they execute the commands are captured in a heart-touching way. We could see that the Japanese had much to fight for (including Diarrhea) apart from the Americans. The grace in the commander’s face brings a lot of credibility to the narrative.

On the contrary, “Flag of our fathers” shows the guilt of a soldier carrying the pride that deserves another person. How fame is short-lived, and the contacts might not be helping when in need.

Few observations on the war

Both Japanese and American leadership did not support their soldiers. While the Japanese did not provide air force help, American leadership gave only a few days to start with
The Japanese started the battle with low morale. This amplified their self-doubt and fighting attitude.
The Japanese majors did not trust their superiors and did not execute the orders.
Both the army leadership did not care for their soldiers. There is a scene where a soldier jumps from a ship by mistake and is not rescued and is ignored.
The brutal American politician exploiting the sentiment and raising money for war shows the administration’s priorities.
War is won based on mental strength, not just weapons.
The life of an ordinary soldier is the same, whether you are on the winning side or the losing side.

While most movies on soldiers and war have an emotional angle, the interactions between the soldiers are usually high on adrenaline. In both these, I see the emotions to be very subtle along with insecurities a regular human faces.

Last but not least, both of these movies are directed by Clint Eastwood. Do watch them. Further, each of these movies adoption of novels with the same name as the movie titles. Do read them as well.

When Webinar plans gets spoiled

Image credits : https://tinybuddha.com/blog/4-steps-to-deal-with-disappointment/

Few weeks back, I was excited when I came across the video of Amazon Astro. Though it is not production ready, it triggered my imagination and product designer avatar. I was thinking of possible challenges they would have experienced and possible ways to solve it. I needed a product designer who has expertise in IoT and possibly robotics to discuss about the same.

Continue reading here

Navaratri (Dussehra)Celebrations at Karaikal

Navaratri (Dusshera) is one of the important festivals for Hindus. On these 9 days, Durga maatha and other avatars of Ambaal are worshipped. While in Bengal and in North India, people celebrate by having Pandals and Garba dance, in Tamilnadu, people celebrate it by having Golu at their home and invite neighbours, friends and families to participate. Temples too celebrate it in a grand manner by having Golu at temple premises, “abhishekam” and special “alangaaram” for Amman everyday during this period.

This year(2021), I was fortunate to witness the celebration at Karaikal. Karaikal is home to Karaikal Ammaiyaar, the only women Nayanmaar. This year too, Karaikal Ammiyar temple has setup a large Golu and stalls depicting various “purana” incidents. Not only Karaikal Ammiyar temple, other temples in Karaikal like Kailasanathar Kovil, Perumal Kovil (both of them near by Karaikal Ammaiyaar temple) also celebrate the festival in a grand manner by elaborate alangaaram and abhishekam for Ambaal.

Incase if you are planning to visit Karaikal during the Navaratri period, do not miss to have darshan of Golu and they deity in those temples. Below are few pictures taken yesterday. I was also informed that this years celebrations are subdued due to covid. Else there will be cultural programs everyday during the Navaratri period.

Model Kailasa recreated. People reciting Thiruvaasagam

Nallambal Lake Visit

Nallambal Lake is a reasonably big lake situated west of Thirunallar and on the way from Thirunallaru temple towards Kumbakonam.

We visited the lake last weekend on August 15th. Since this region receives the rainfall mostly from October-December, lake was dry when we visited there. However, there is a small canal and a check dam which was filled with water and water was flowing. Though the canal does not have a proper footsteps to climb down and access the canal, people were still taking bath by using the canal bund. Perhaps the depth in the canal might not be very high.

More than the lack of water, what is more appalling is the lack of maintenance. Roads by the boundary of the lake are in dilapidated condition. Shrubs going everywhere. I could see few people even consuming liquor there. It is not advisable to go there with ladies in odd hours. Size of the lake is similar to the size of lake in Lalbagh, Bangalore. If properly maintained, it could attract visitors coming to Thirunallaru. Unfortunately, this lake has not got the attention of both TN and Pondichery governments.