Onam is not just another festival – it is the heartbeat of Malayali culture. At its core lies the Onam Sadya, the grand vegetarian feast served on a banana leaf, with over 20 traditional dishes that follow a specific sequence. More than just food, Sadya is a celebration of abundance, tradition, and togetherness. Like many Malayalis in Bangalore, I was excited to celebrate Onam this year by enjoying the Sadya at Yumm Keralam. I went with my family and even invited others, believing it would be a special occasion. Sadly, what should have been a day of joy turned into one of the most disappointing Onam dining experiences of my life. Endless Waiting, Followed by Mismanagement We waited for hours to get a table. The expectation was high – after all, Onam comes only once a year. But once seated, it quickly became clear that the restaurant had no system in place. The serving was completely mismanaged. Instead of Malayali servers who understood the dishes, their sequence, and cultural signific...

Bridging Observability Silos: A Custom Metrics Ingestor for Kubernetes & HashiCorp with InfluxDB In many enterprises, a frustrating reality persists: disconnected observability. Teams operating in Kubernetes and HashiCorp environments (e.g., Terraform, Consul, Vault) often use disparate monitoring tools, leading to data silos, duplicated effort, and a significant impediment to gaining holistic insights. This problem is frequently exacerbated by attempts to minimize costs, resulting in a patchwork of tools that, while individually cheaper, create a more expensive problem in terms of time, effort, and missed opportunities for optimization and incident response. The lack of centralized observability becomes a major bottleneck, particularly during incident diagnosis and performance troubleshooting. Sifting through different dashboards, correlating metrics manually, and struggling to piece together the full picture becomes a daily ritual. What's needed is a solution that unifies t...

Every year, India erupts in the spectacle of Ganesh Chaturthi. Streets fill with massive idols, loudspeakers scream bhajans late into the night, people dance in processions, and at the end of it all, tons of plaster-of-Paris statues end up choking our rivers and seas. For many, this is devotion. For me, as an atheist, it feels like an annual reminder of how deeply superstition and blind ritual still govern our society. The Idol Problem We are told that Ganesha is the remover of obstacles, the god of wisdom. Ironically, wisdom is the one thing missing in how this festival is celebrated. Statues of clay or plaster are “brought to life” by a priest chanting mantras, worshipped for a few days, and then dumped into water as though the god somehow swims back to heaven. If that isn’t magical thinking bordering on absurdity, I don’t know what is. If obstacles in life were really removed by offering coconuts and sweets, India would have solved poverty, unemployment, corruption, and inequality d...

The Perils of Short-Sighted Agile: Building for Today, Crumbling Tomorrow Agile methodologies, particularly Scrum, promised a revolution in software development. Faster iteration, increased collaboration, and a greater ability to adapt to changing requirements – the benefits seemed undeniable. However, a concerning trend has emerged: a perversion of agile principles that prioritizes immediate gratification over long-term sustainability, leading to fragile, unmaintainable systems. We’re in danger of building software that crumbles under its own weight. The core problem lies in the misinterpretation of agility as a license for ad-hoc development. Agile is not about throwing design out the window and churning out code as quickly as possible. It's about intelligently applying established software engineering principles – principles learned over years of building robust and scalable systems – within a flexible and iterative framework. Reinventing the wheel with every sprint, or worse,...

Introduction Twenty-five years. A quarter of a century. When you say it out loud, it sounds like a lifetime. And in many ways, it has been. I’ve spent these years immersed in the ever-evolving world of software tech, navigating the complexities of multiple giant firms. The journey has been exhilarating, challenging, and rewarding in equal measure. But now, as I sit here, staring out the window, a question lingers: is it time to press pause? The Pull of Retirement The idea of retirement is both enticing and terrifying. On one hand, there’s the promise of freedom – freedom from early morning alarms, endless meetings, and the relentless pressure to stay ahead of the curve. I can imagine myself spending days doing-nothing, may be traveling, or simply indulging in watching Netflix. The prospect of having unlimited time to pursue personal interests is incredibly appealing. And then there’s the health aspect. The tech industry is notorious for its demanding hours and high-stress environme...

The Unsung Hero of the Hybrid Cloud: Nomad's Quiet Revolution In the ever-evolving world of container orchestration, Kubernetes often dominates the conversation. Its robust ecosystem, fervent community, and backing from major tech players have solidified its position as a leading solution. However, a different orchestrator, one often overshadowed but no less powerful, is quietly carving its own niche: HashiCorp Nomad. While Kubernetes excels in its complexity and feature-richness, Nomad distinguishes itself through its simplicity and flexibility. It operates with a smaller footprint and requires fewer moving parts, making it easier to deploy and manage, especially in resource-constrained environments. This fundamental difference opens doors to use cases where Kubernetes might prove cumbersome or overkill. One of Nomad's strongest suits is its ability to orchestrate workloads beyond just containers. Unlike Kubernetes, which primarily focuses on containerized applications, Nom...