Month: August 2020

Microsoft’s Distributed Application Runtime (Dapr)

We are living in a world where every other day we see a new technical innovation. For most of us mere mortal it is not easy to quickly figure out if the technology is worth our time. Making sense of new technical innovations is one of the core aspects of my current role so by taking the pain of writing this series I will help myself as well.

In this post, I will cover Dapr. Dapr stands for distributed application runtime.

What does distributed application runtime means?

These days most of us are developing distributed systems. If you are building an application that uses Microservices architecture then you are building a distributed system.

A distributed system is a collection of autonomous computing elements that appears to its users as a single coherent system.

Distributed application runtime provides you the facilities that you can use to build distributed systems. These facilities include:

  1. State management. Most applications need to talk to a datastore to store state. Common examples like PostgreSQL, Redis, etc.
  2. Pub/sub. For communication between different components and services.
  3. Service to service communication. This also includes retries, circuit breaking.
  4. Observability. To bring visibility into systems.
  5. Secret management. For storing password and keys.
  6. Many other

One important thing to note is that these are application level concerns. Distributed application runtime does not concern itself with infrastructure or network level concerns.

Continue reading “Microsoft’s Distributed Application Runtime (Dapr)”

Present vs Future Focussed People

The below is the text from Hell Yeah or No book. It gives a good mental model to reason how one live their life. I don’t think one has to entirely in one list or the other. You will be more aligned to one list than the other. Also, I don’t think one is better than the other.

Present-focused people

  • Pursue pleasure, excitement, and novelty
  • Focus on immediate gratification
  • Especially appreciate life, nature, and the people around them
  • Are playful, impulsive, and sensual
  • Avoid anything boring, difficult, or repetitive
  • Get fully immersed in the moment and lose track of time
  • Are more likely to use drugs and alcohol
  • Are better at helping others than helping themselves

Future-focused people

  • Delay gratification
  • Are driven with self-discipline because they vividly see their future goals
  • Tend to live in their minds, picturing other selves, scenarios, and possible futures
  • Especially love their work
  • Exercise, invest, and go for preventative health exams
  • Are better at helping themselves, but worse at helping others
  • Are more likely to be successful in their careers, but often at the expense of personal relationships, which require a present focus