"Sitting beside a young woman who in the dawn seemed so lovely, soothed and spellbound in these magical surroundings—the sea, mountains, clouds, the o"Sitting beside a young woman who in the dawn seemed so lovely, soothed and spellbound in these magical surroundings—the sea, mountains, clouds, the open sky—Gurov thought how in reality everything is beautiful in this world when one reflects: everything except what we think or do ourselves when we forget our human dignity and the higher aims of our existence."
This is a story about two adults' infidelity, glorified. Well, if you ever end up reading a summary nothing much happens in this story, but it is so masterfully written that you really appreciate the writing and you read just for the Chekov's brilliance. It reminds me why I love to read books. ...more
Sad little story about love and the customs of gift giving. A bit profound though the author ends it with a definitive positive outlook. I must have rSad little story about love and the customs of gift giving. A bit profound though the author ends it with a definitive positive outlook. I must have read this before , maybe as part of school curriculum.
"When Della reached home her intoxication gave way a little to prudence and reason. She got out her curling irons and lighted the gas and went to work repairing the ravages made by generosity added to love."...more
The first few pages were interesting. Satirical. Funny.
But post that it was mostly uninteresting, forced comedCame across it, thanks to prime reading.
The first few pages were interesting. Satirical. Funny.
But post that it was mostly uninteresting, forced comedy and mostly irritating.
I loved the absurd comedy in Catch-22, but this is not what reads as entertaining. Mostly feels like havng to expand a page worth of idea into a longer short story. Pass....more
You can say a lot about a person from what they write. This book has some aut0biographical stories / incidents about the author and her interactions wYou can say a lot about a person from what they write. This book has some aut0biographical stories / incidents about the author and her interactions with few people. She is quite a rich person and you can't help but get a judgemental mindset when you start reading.
She appears very humble, talks simply and dresses in ordinary clothes if you see any of her public appearances. So I was expecting the same in the book as well. However, there are some stories where she can't stop being too proud of herself or passing snide remarks on her past. For example, there is a story about an ex-classmate of her who thought of her as a nerd. Sudha talks about visiting her room outside college and being appalled about its state. Probably she should never peek inside a boy's hostel room inside a college. The story ends with her meeting him 15 years later and he saying, "I thought you were nerd, but you were smart".
She talks about how she and her husband didn't have enough for books so they kept a budget of 300 rupees in 1980 (was it?). This is an astronomical amount of money for that time. Sudha thinks of herself as middle class, but may I ask which middle class family child can backpack through US even in 2025 let alone in 1970-80s? There are other contradictions of learning how to help others - she claims to have learnt it from her parents and grandparents, yet there is a story about how it was her daughters' remark that made her open her eyes about it.
I believe the most significant story about her if one is inclined in that judgemental way comes when she visits a temple and takes pity on the 2 people there. They were content with their way of life and she admits she couldn't just understand why they refused her financial help and how it was a wrong decision.
With all that being said, it would take a lot of honesty and lack of vanity to talk about oneself in such a way. Being so transparent. How many of us spend our lives helping others? Don't we have nothing to spare? There are a couple of incidents which show how she was perceived for example because of her plain clothes in a business class queue in an airport. The story about her being a first girl in an engineering college is insightful about her resolve, what a hard thing that would have been! Yet, there are hardly any boastfulness in that recollection. Admirable!
I think that humility, kindness, middle-class, wealth etc - all of these have different meanings for different people. Her meaning of middle-class is definitely different than mine.
Well, there ends me being a judgemental asshole. Coming to the book, Sudha is open about not being an eloquent writer. The stories are short, yet sometimes make an impact. The one about the partition - a foreigner drawing a line and making her friend a foreigner in her own land was touching though predictable. She seems very honest and it comes through. The book itself is short and quick read. I got to read it as it was a corporate gift to someone on women's day....more
This is a short concise introduction to the NoSQL databases. The main concern going into this book was it being dated though the content is rele3.5/5.
This is a short concise introduction to the NoSQL databases. The main concern going into this book was it being dated though the content is relevant still today. I think it serves as good introduction to the four major family of databases.
My impression of Martin Folwer, one of the authors, has been that he is much more interested in formalizing definitions and coining terms. For example, what is a microservice? Or in this book, what is a NoSQL database and how the term evolved? I mostly hate such topics. However, in this book, the terms that are coined, for example, "aggregate oriented" etc are extremely useful. The discussion on CAP theorem and insights into the tradeoff of availability vs latency (not consistency) are extremely insightful and thought provoking.
I am not sure if the authors have coined these terms and the commentary or is it taken from somewhere else. But my rating mostly comes due to these insights and hence subject to revision later. The deep dive into the databases is rather shallow. Having worked and read about the KV stores, document and graph databases, I didn't face any difficulty understanding the content, but since I was not aware of column-family stores, it was hard to get the complete picture. So one's mileage may vary depending on the prior knowledge....more
This is quite a unique book about networking. It covers a great deal of topics mainly from a performance perspective. The authors has put an immense fThis is quite a unique book about networking. It covers a great deal of topics mainly from a performance perspective. The authors has put an immense focus on latency, showing how currently it is the latency that is the bottleneck. The book covers every part of the networking stack - from the physical link layer (ethernet and radio networks) to application and browser, clients to server. It goes into quite a lot of detail, yet remaining accessible.
Even if you are not responsible about owning and maintaining the network part of a website, I think you will gain a lot of insights about the book. It can certainly help you in interviews as you can make tradeoffs about application layer protocols like websockets etc.
With that being said, the book came out in 2014 I think and the content goes back to 2012. So discussion on radio networks stops at 4G and HTTP2.0 was not an official standard so the discussion is not in-depth. That would be the sole reason to take one star out of the rating....more
This is an extremely accessible and readable book on designing scalable web application architectures. The sheer breadth it covers is impressive. WritThis is an extremely accessible and readable book on designing scalable web application architectures. The sheer breadth it covers is impressive. Written in 2014, it also feels a little dated in some areas. It does not become too technical at any point, though therein lies the downside. Some topics do feel superficial like text-based searches.
The second chapter on design principles feels misplaced in the book as it is neither comprehensive and detailed nor it fits well with the theme of the book. I feel that if the focus on the book had been just scalable web application architectures without the startup angle, it would have delivered more value with less text.
With that being said, I think the clarity and organization with which the author has laid out the concepts will certainly help a software engineer. Probably more beneficial for a less tenured engineer to get up to speed from the perspective of approaching system-design problems encountered in their daily job or asked in interviews. However, as I mentioned about the breadth, it might still be beneficial for a more tenured engineer to make sure all bases are covered. This, in particular, is where it helped me. As engineers we rarely get to work on each and every aspect of an application.
Following it up with Designing Data Intensive Applications might be a killer combo but I am yet to go through that one....more
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