This has been a long week. I had a deadline for a product demo, and I pulled an all-nighter for it, the first one since I graduated 5 years ago. It's nice to see I still have that kind of juice in the tank. Anyhow, onto what I learned.

Something I learned

  1. Since the last two weeks started with a technical one, tradition dictates this one does, too. This week, I learned the hard way, thus the all-nighter, Lambdas in a VPC, take 10-20 minutes to delete through CloudFormation, but why?

    Lambdas under the hood are deployed in containers. In a VPC, these containers get attached to a networking interface with an IP address. Each container can house multiple lambdas, meaning that a lambda executes then die but its hosting environment stays up. This makes sense since another lambda triggered shortly after could reuse the environment; it would be a waste to delete them immediately.

    From what I understand, this is mainly because of the networking interface since it needs an IP allocation. Bringing everything up from scratch every time a cold lambda executes would be a waste of resources and time. So when CloudFormation deletes a lambda, the lambda dies, but its container environment could take up to 10-20 minutes to delete.
  2. Growing up, I dealt with my fair share of anxiety, especially the social kind. It stems from my family and seeing how they went about their social life. While I've gotten better at handling it as I got older, it was a source of a lot of negative cognition back then.

    I remember feeling so depressed and wishing I wasn't as aware of my emotions. I hated how heightened my sense of self or reality was; I envied people who made it look easy. I wrongfully assumed, or not, that they're oblivious to what I'm feeling; they must have less awareness than I do. I never got validation to this line of thought till I learned this: the rate of depression on average is about 9.5% in people, while the top 2% of IQ average about 36.6%.

    Now, I'm by no means claiming that I'm that smart or smarter than the people I envied. All I'm saying is that there is validation to the idea that awareness comes at a cost. That heightened sense of self comes with diminishing returns.

Gratitude 

This week, my partner and I had what we called a house-shawarming party. In case they read this,  my friend's wife came up with the idea and couldn't do it since they hadn't moved in years. So yeah, as the title suggests, we invited a bunch of our friends to eat shawarma and party, and it was great. I thought I'd cook for 25+ people for a split second but quickly realized it'd be such a time sink, so we catered the shawarma from our favorite place here in Oakland, Shawarmaji.

Anyhow, the party was a good time; many of the people I became friends with recently showed up. In the past three months or so, I made it a point to become intentional about my social interactions with the goal of making friends. By being in the Bay Area and building a startup, I attend many startup events and meet many people. So, I'm grateful that I can execute this plan and for the new friendships I made. Hopefully, they will last the test of time.