I will email you, but really I don’t know that I can be much help. I did speech lessons as a really little kid, but don’t think they helped much with the lisp. The stutter comes and goes - I will suddenly have a run where it’s happening a lot and then it goes away. Not sure if it is tied to stress or sleep or ?? Started very young but has never been so pronounced that I’ve sought to do anything about it - I generally don’t even think about it, but lately it’s been back again.
Honestly, I just realized that life is short and most people go to their death beds without realizing their full potential because they are occupied with social concerns. Many people drop the quality of their life by living an unhealthy lifestyle that is disconnected from nature.
This all really set in for me after my grandmother, who I was very close to, passed away in December after having a stroke in November. I helped take care of her because she took care of me when I was a boy. Also, my 43-year-old cousin passed away from ovarian cancer in July. Got news of a kid I met only once being murdered during a robbery, he was only 24.
These realizations are put into practice with each breath, thought, word, and deed with the Eightfold Path that Buddha laid out 2,500 years ago. It's as relevant today as it was back then.
People close to me have died, and I found rather than adding desire to realize full potential, it took away my enthusiasm, because it emphasised the pointlessness and futility of everything I could do and might do.
When those you love are gone, the emptiness is so obvious. Even though the trauma and grief gradually heal, any sense of purpose seems like an empty, made up story. You know you'll die at some point too, everything you do will be undone, and the world probably isn't real anyway. Why even live?
It doesn't stop me working on projects. But they do seem relatively pointless in the end.
The one thing that seems to give things I do value, is when others value them. I'm never sure if that's because they see something I don't, or if they are deeper into self-made illusions.
I don't mean trivia like clothes, status, social media. I mean things others really value, like time together, listening, caring, assisting, relief from poverty, their health, happy times, friendship, that sort of thing.
So from that point of view, I think social concerns of a certain variety are to be prized. Maybe they are the only thing that has meaning.
What you are describing is dukkha and it is something we all know deep down. Aging, sickness, and death are facts of life, this is part of samsara.
This can be seen however a person wants to see it. I am ennobled and encouraged by it, I value life more having seen death up close.
There is a balance and everything is interdependent, so nothing exists in isolation. I do my best work and thinking when alone at my desk or out in nature. Time away from society makes me value time with my family more.
I serve others and create value for them through my agency and I serve society at large with the things I am developing, maybe attending YC for. I have always strived to be of value to society, to make something of lasting value. Now I am.
Instead of living from the mind, I now live from the heart. It looks 'dumb' to the intellectuals but the 'simple people' of the world know this to be wisdom.
Amazon Video | Seattle, WA | ONSITE | VISA | Software Engineer
I'm the Hiring Manager for the IPA(a pun on API) team at Amazon Prime Video. After you click the play button in our app, a huge number of services are used to provide the client with streaming video. Our team orchestrates, aggregates, and processes that data to provide the best experience for the customer's particular device.
We are looking for multiple engineers, from recent grad (or equivalent) to senior. Here's why you should consider joining our team!
* Flexibility of a Startup with Benefits of a Large Company
I come from a startup background and value personal responsibility. If you have errands or need to work from home, as long as the work is getting done it won't hurt the team. As a large company, Amazon also has excellent salaries/health insurance, and will provide visa/relocation assistance.
* Learning
I am very focused on my team's personal growth. We have started a library, we have brown bag/lunch & learn sessions, we have incredibly talented engineers who have weekly office hours, but we can always do more. Feel free to make suggestions!
* Scale
Prime Video operates on a tremendous scale - without giving exact numbers, we are responsible for close to 10% of the world's internet traffic! The challenges are vast and require strong design and architectures to scale cost-effectively.
Reach out to me directly with any questions, comments, or if you just want to say hi at `vmangla@amazon.com`!
Hey @manglav,
You might be interested in my profile and experience with APIs. More information about me here: anshulsinghal.me
I also sent out a formal introduction to your email from 1997anshul[at]gmail[dot]com.
Can you point to some resources that teach Java "the right way"? Without the cultural baggage? I need to learn it for a new job and I'm inundated with resources that I can't determine the quality of.
JVM dev here... unfortunately there aren't any great holistic books for modern Java that I can think of. A lot of it is just community learned (e.g. put the XML away, stop making everything a damn GoF design pattern, stop trying to create mega class hierarchies, favor small libraries over mega frameworks).
I will say Joshua Bloch's Effective Java is something ever Java dev should have read at some point.
Why do you think you'd be locked in? To switch from twilio to your own service, it's one LOC client side, and setting up your server. I don't see what would lock you in. If you need to host your own TURN server, you need to host it somewhere where bandwidth is cheap, so NOT aws. You can any lightsail, DO, etc. However, with a VPS, you're subject to instabilities from other users, so you may want to get your own instances from Hetzner/OVH. This is a lot of overhead as you see, so only do it if it's worth it.
That's interesting. I had the same idea at the outset.
We've sort of started working that angle recently with talks, workshops, and 1-on-1's. Having seen a wide range of different hardware projects means there's lots of valuable experience we're able to share this way.
