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A gripping tale of an entire valley that covers the lives and thoughts of 3 generations. In under 700 pages, Steinbeck has managed to capture the imagination with characters so real and flushed out that you see a part of yourself in everyone. He has masterfully woven a story that sucks you in from the very beginning, where the characters seem real to the point where you get emotionally invested in them. For me, this was a masterclass in the study on human character, particularly how we deal with feelings of virtue and guilt. ...

Background Work always manages to throw interesting problems my way and this one was particularly interesting. Our telephone server infrastructure and the associated cloud services were spread across two AWS regions - Singapore & Mumbai. This was primarily done to comply with Indian Data Protection Laws which mandated that customer data associated with some critical areas of business must stay within the country. We had run these two regions as independent entities, with code changes being deployed uniformly across them. ...

I regret not picking this up sooner. This book represents the epitome of what a good story is for me - lovable characters, a very human story arc, lots of snide humor and an ending that leaves me in tears. 5/5! Would recommend it to everyone!

This book had been on my TO-READ list for a long time. It came up again while I was perusing Dan Luu’s Programming book list. I’ve always wanted to look behind the curtains and see how the magic worked, so I finally bought it. I used bootlin to read through Linux 5.7.2 source. They provide a really good search system and linked definitions. The book describes kernel version 2.6. You might want to keep this site open to see how things have changed since then. ...

This book was a parting gift and I was eager to devour it as soon as I got it. Through it’s elegantly typeset pages sprinkled with an assortment of pictures, it details the story of Jonathan Livingston, a seagull who finds flying to be more than a means to an end. The story follows the predictable arc wherein the rookie who finds an inalienable truth gets ostracized and excommunicated for it. Later, after traveling wide and far and having reached uber level greatness, he returns to extol his wisdom to the blind masses in a more digestible form, enlightening them about the possibilities that lie beyond. ...