Surya Prakash Jayanti

We saw lot of new years and then there is 2020. Nothing is normal in 2020, it's a thriller movie. As we always say, what you can not measure you can never manage. Let's do the base line comparison against last year. Here is what I have done in 2019  http://jnsuryaprakash.blogspot.com/2019/12/2019-in-review.html Legend: → indicates continued just like last year ↑ upward trend when compared to last year ↓ indicates downward trend when compared to last year ⇪ Indicates new this year Year 2020 in review: (6 downs, 5 keep ups)  → More than 600 miles ran during this year 2020 (Avg 12 miles per week) .  It is equivalent to the distance between Bentonville, AR to Chicago, IL. ↓ More than 20 hours volunteering ↓NO blood donations this year. ↓Read more than 2 books this year. Refer to  ↑More than 44 blogs written refer  http://jnsuryaprakash.blogspot.com/ ↓ Technical presentations →Lost more than 100 UNO, caroms, Colossal crash and chess games with my son. (You know those are rigged game

 47% of Americans are not living in their present / not paying attention to what they are doing, I believe this might have jumped up in year 2020.  People are significantly un-happy when they are NOT paying attention. A wandering mind is un-happy life. We are recently finding huge increase in cases of Attention deficit disorder. Nations are suffering from physical deficit and attention deficit. 76% of middle aged Americans report moderate to high level of loneliness in this world. Mind you, we are living in the most connected world ever existed. Anxiety and loneliness causing more mortality. Negative self-talk and depression is on the rise. In the last 3 years there is 33% increase in depression. Loss of meaning and purpose in life is taking a toll on health. There is connection between psychological well being and healthy life. Four pillars of healthy mind Awareness - resist distraction. Meta awareness is knowing what your mind is doing. Necessary for real transformation to occur. Con

Few things  that sounded interesting from the Inclusive leader training I attended recently. Science has learned more about human brain in the last 10 years than in the entire human history. Leading well isn't easy in 2020. Culture fit is about shared enthusiasm about company's mission and values,  Shared enjoyment activities, Sense of comfort with co-workers Culture add means being inclusive about changes. Focus on outcome, each of the team members should feel valued and f eel empowered to contribute Discretionary effort has 3 things. There are minimum requirements, Have to do, want to do things. Want to do is where miracles happen. Inclusion means they can come to work and show their full self without fear of judgement and doubt. Unconscious bias is the enemy of inclusiveness Learning part of the brain is improved with exposure to vulnerable things Self- awareness is the key Dunning-Kruger effect, the less we know , the less we are self-aware and confident. All humans have im

Stoic philosophy founded by person named Zeon in 3rd century at Athens. Being stoic means being calm and without any emotion. You don't show feelings and you accept what is happening. It's about life and maximizing positive emotions. It doesn't mean being humorless or passion less. It's philosophy of personal ethics as well. Stoicism teaches development of self-control. Let's look at few beliefs and strategies of Stoicism. If you are unhappy its your fault Everything is temporary we are social beings with social duty Freedom and happiness depend on one principle, somethings are in your control and somethings are not. Few strategies to follow for Stoicism: Live simply, have nothing you can not loose Accept what can not be changed. Few main components in the Stoic philosophy as per my understanding are  Logic: A way to determine if your perception of the world is correct or not. Physics: A structure to understand both active and passive world. Ethics: How to live ones

Some random thoughts about connecting to self: In Default mode you are able to reflect freely. Count your successes more than failures. Acknowledge the things you got done every day. At the end of the day pick one thing you got done and proud of. Begin with gratitude everyday. Choose a mantra that helps you find peace Ali baba hired people with high IQ and culture suffered. They started hiring people with more EQ and observed the change. Create empathy and compassion.  You might have met brilliant jerks in your professional life. Pause and reflect before giving feedback. Open your one on one with personal question rather than work related questions. Once a day have a conversation where you mostly listen Micro steps will train your brain to hang on to the path and provide bigger commitment. stop yourself / observe when you are doing negative self talk. Go neutral not personal in your one on one's. There is no Wi-fi in the forest but you will find a better connection.

In this article we will be discussing about understanding your stress response, your stress behavior and techniques to break the stress loop. FMRI (functional MRI) is a technique to measure brain activity by detecting blood flow.  Stanford researchers used this technique to look at stress response to brain. Every human hard wired on how they are going to respond to stress. Everybody has stress response. Brain doesn't know the difference between real and imaginary stress. It consists of 100 Billion neurons firing and wiring together forming circuits that form our habits, behaviors, thoughts and emotions. Stress isn't bad. some times we respond better and some times we freak out. O ur brain is battery, keep it charged. Everybody talks about physical exercise but  there are exercises for brain as well.  Make sure you are not accumulating stress.  Your brain FMRI scan will tell you which bio type you are.  Stanford research says there are 8 distinct bio types. Rumination: This bio

           This blog is about the First Presidential debate in 2020. Between Donald Trump and Joe Biden for 90 mins and 6 topics on the table. Joe Biden is coming with 78% stats of winning the debate. These kind of stats proved wrong in 2016. My prediction was Trump will be like Bull in the China shop, will make Biden do at least few forced mistakes. But Biden controlled the debate decently and didnt commit major mistakes. It was interesting to watch the debate after Trump tax returns news from NewYork Times few days back. Chris Wallace from fox was the moderator of the debate.  Supreme Court Nominee: Donald Trump said he won the election and elections have consequences. She is outstanding student and nominee. Joe Biden said American people should have a say, so supreme court nominee should be selected later. Biden thinks Affordable care act might be impacted with this supreme court nominee. Trump started offensively. Biden started assertive, said he is democratic party in one context.

This article is about the TikTok and future of social media. Is the TikTok deal going to be any threat to Facebook group ? Is TikTok going to shape up the social platforms dominance any differently than what it is currently? We will see in below article. Please note we won't discuss the internals of TikTok deal with Oracle/Walmart. Oracle has enough cash and strong desire to grow its cloud business. It can do anything to make Oracle cloud one of the top 3. This deal for Oracle more in terms of cloud and for Walmart it means more in terms of dominating advertisement platforms. TikTok is more or less like Vine. If you don't remember what it is, its short video social media. You can follow friends and celebrities and make your own videos. Vine was doing almost the same thing except it stuck to 6 seconds video for long time before making the duration longer. It came at a time may be people were not into visual. TikTok started getting popular in China around the same time Vine slowe

This blog is about the impossible guy Richard Wright, you can visit him at  https://www.iamrichardwright.com/   He is three time stage 4 cancer survivor and Iron Man finisher.   The reason I am calling him impossible is because of two things. ONE you need to have tough state of mind and positivity to overcome terminal cancer that many times. TWO , Finishing Iron man is an extra ordinary thing for a healthy human being.  It is a triathlon event of completing 2.4 mile swim , 112 mile bicycle ride and 26.1 miles run. All in one day. So you will be working close to 17 hours on that day. This is couple of months exercise  for me in one day. DNA is NOT as important as DNS(Did not start) and DNF( did not finish). Succeeding from failure is learning from it. failing at failure is not learning from it. Preparation is the Key to anything. Nobody can be YOU, nobody replaces you, you just be you. You can't control competitors, external conditions, all you have control over is your thought. You

This article is about Epic Games vs Apple ongoing battle and suing each other. Apple and google are accused of strip mining i.e not having burden of creation and minting profits with commission. Technically you will invent a game and market it , apple store and google play store will make easy 30% on your innovation.  Let's look at the parties involved in this battle and their revenue, valuation and commission charges. Category                                    Epic                               Apple                                 Google Revenue in 2019                     4.2 Billion                    260 billion                          45.8 billion Valuation in 2020                    17 Billion                     2 Trillion                            632 billion Commission                              12%                                 30%                                      30% This is battle of elites, this is not a case of David vs Goliath. Its a common practice since

Few quotes from Tipping point and winner takes it all books. Craig Shapiro: Very interesting thought for the all the entrepreneurs.  When people are in group, the responsibility for acting is diffused. Every person has inner and outer personality. Inner personality is the real one. Plutocrats: whose power comes from his wealth. If we want things to stay as they are, then things have to change. The only better thing than being fox is being fox asked to watch over hen. Philanthorcapitalists: Entrepreneurs like Bill Gates, who derived money from capitalism and using it on philanthropy in their later days. Entrepreneurs are problem solvers at heart, so they use their money on philanthropy much better than people who gained their wealth through generations. World continue to innovate and remain short on progress.  Everybody should be able to work wherever they want whenever they want not because they need to. For corporates its not enough to be in market they want to dominate it, its not en

We all know chess improves critical thinking. In my personal experience it brings your logical ability before your emotional response, this is going to help you a lot with daily life. Apart from developing creativity and improving confidence, it works both sides of the brain. You are NOT preparing for competition and you are NOT planning on becoming grand master. Just by simply playing one game of chess every day either with computer or individuals, will help you a lot in decision making process. If you don't have time for a complete game you can try puzzles. If you register in chess.com, they have daily free puzzles you can solve. Just solve puzzles and play a game if you have time. They also have weekly free learning videos, if you are interested in improving the game. I slap my hand whenever I am not able to think beyond 2-3 moves. Sometimes I feel like "why you are not able to think about this simple thing". That will keep your brain challenged.  Lot of incidents in y

When I say symmetric multi-cloud deployment strategy I mean you are deploying the same workload in two or more public cloud providers and on to your private data center at the same time with the same CICD. In this case life will always be easy, if you are dealing with IaaS or K8's clusters. PaaS may not be ideal as most of the time it will be purpose built platform. I am not even talking about SaaS. Why do you need symmetric multi-cloud model Bursting: Private data centers first and cloud to burst is the best use case for leveraging any public cloud vendor, that way still the keys to kingdom will be in your hand. Price negotiation: You can confidently negotiate the price with public cloud vendors and it doesn't  take lot of time to switch in worst case scenario. Do nothing cost: Lets say in case of situations like COVID you can quickly ramp down all the public cloud billing and stick to your private data centers. Imagine you are Uber and COVID hit your trends, if majority of yo

Lot of companies are forced to allow work from home due to COVID situation. Many of these companies are the one's hesitating employees going away from offices. Some of these lessons learned by companies/employees will definitely shape up the future behaviors differently. Lets look at some stats about working from home: We have around 12 million tech employees in US, they can easily work from home. As per 2020 stats, 5 million employees are permanently Working From Home. That is 3.6% of entire US workforce. There is a possibility 43% employees can work from home in the total US workforce There are at least 10 states in US that already have around 5% population working from home like California, Texas, Washington,  New York, Virginia, Florida etc., Twitter, Square, Facebook (50%), Walmart Tech etc., are taking big strides towards work from home FOREVER. There are legal, compliance, tax and immigration implications for any work from home decision. We know rules will always evolve afte

I have been listening to Puri Musings, as a fan of that Telugu director I really liked most of his podcasts. One thing I like more about it is, its runtime. Each musings are less than 3 minutes mostly. I highly recommend these podcasts for his different thought process. I may not agree with everything he says, but most of his ideas are worth listening and the way he narrates. https://youtu.be/UdySpwc90z0 I like about his thoughts on #3 Hunting, #6 Trash bag, #8 complaints. Few quotes I liked are. There is NO perfect Husband. Even if you get god as your husband you will still cry, because Lord Rama's wife is the most cried wife. Quote from another episode, The man on the peak should be light weight. Unhappiness is only option for humans, trees and animals doesn't have that option. #14 some people are searching soul and some people trying to reach Mars. #17 I can't name the episode but its worth listening :-) #18 Lakdi ka pool: Don't care about society/prestige , just sol

I am trying to address when companies should orchestrate cloud providers offerings as managed service in their IT portfolio. This article doesn't take a stance of cloud providers. First thing first, size of the enterprise matters. If it is small or medium, it doesn't make lot of sense to form a big division to make managed offerings for cloud. If IT spend is small (< 5Million) or medium (< 100 million), it makes sense to use cloud provider services with some governance and without any orchestration layers. Remember more than 20% of your IT budget might be in Shadow IT. If you are a big enterprise and you are going to play a lot in the technology field based on your customer base, then it makes sense to have your own Center of Excellence with Governance and also with orchestration. Manufacturing, transportation and some services may NOT always need lot of spend on IT. On the other hand Financial services, Retail, Restaurant  and Healthcare might need lot of IT spend due to

Invest in yourself, you will never be disappointed. I want to share my story of strong morning routine. I have been a morning runner since Sep 2018. Few things got added since the pandemic began in March. Increased my run a little bit more every day. Now I am running 2.5 Miles @ 6.2 MPH. From Sep 2018 to now I completed close to 43 accumulated marathon miles. Here is a screen shot, I lost 12 of my marathons to previous phone change, thats why you only see 31. I added daily routine as shown in picture below after Work From Home started around March. Roughly in a week I complete 300 crunches, 200 pushups and 100 biceps and 15 miles with a fasting day. Continuing reading books, writing articles and learning new topics on cloud, teaching chess to my son. I do few minutes of meditation every morning and play a game of chess/puzzles every evening right after I close my work for the day. Few things I may not be doing right... Hooked up with few Netflix series like "Better Call Saul"

Once upon a time there was a big forest named Chugach, coyotes used to be the king of the jungle. As the forest is too big , some Bisons came crossing the river and started settling there. Slowly over the years Bisons started killing coyotes and took over the Chugach forest. Bison is the new leader of the forest now. That forest has lot of green pasture and beautiful landscape. This forest has lot of empty land, so the Bison invited animals from other forests  to come and co-live with it. The animals struggling for survival in other forests became interested. Peacocks living in Chandak jungle , bears living in Spruce forest, Dogs living in Lacandon jungle heard about this new forest and started moving one by one. In the early days Bison wants to build eco system and encouraged animals from other forests. Time passed by, Bison felt there are enough animals now, so started saying NO to new animals. The dogs that can't fit the rules started sneaking in. Slowly bisons started feel

Be like postage stamp, stick to one thing until you get there. Every great thing start like falling dominoes. Find the lead domino. We are bombarded with more information and choices in a day than our ancestors in their life time. It ain't what you don't know thats gets you in trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so. Life is too short to chase unicorns and its too precious to rely on rabbit foot. Things which matter most can not be at the mercy of things matter least. The question is what are we busy about. Achievers do sooner what others plan to do later. on an average we get new thought every 14 seconds and with an average of 4,000 thoughts a day. Multi tasking is also known as monkey mind. we are driving ourselves bananas. A juggler will have one ball in one hand at any given point of time. What he is doing is task switching not multi-tasking. Success is about doing the right thing, not about doing everything right. Michael Phelps has ADHD, if he was

Here are some of the quotes from the books I read. Most of the quotes are from the book Range - David Epstein. If I had to single out one element in my life that has made a difference for me, it would be a passion to compete.  Sam Walton  Every human is work in progress claiming to be complete. Test and learn can be better strategy than plan and implement.  I know who I am when I see what I do. Virtually every good thing can be traced back to a misfortune. Hunger is more savage than sword. If you want to be a director of films, take a camera and shoot. - James Cameroon Continuous improvement is better than delayed perfection. You need not be engineer, you need to be producer. Producer should know what problems semi conductor can solve, need not be expert on semi conductor engineering.  It's difficult to make a prediction especially about the future. Experts are roughly as accurate as a dart throwing chimpanzee.  Best forecasters are genuinely curious about everything. Dragon fly ey

Here are few quotes from the books I read recently. You can find the collection of books I ready here  https://jnsuryaprakash.blogspot.com/2009/03/books-i-read.html .  Lord, protect me from my friends, I can take care of my enemies. Gratitude is a burden, revenge is a pleasure. Dead people receive more flower than the living ones because regret is stronger than gratitude. Never grab a sword by blade, always on the handle side. A wise man profits from enemies better than a fool from his friends. Thomas Alva Edison declined to share Nobel prize with Tesla in 1915, because he don't want Tesla to get recognition. Fools learn from their mistakes, greats learn from others mistakes. Changing the job is more like buying a house rather than buying a dress. Too many give up because there is too much give up around them. Think if it is positive humor or negative humor. You can do anything you want, but you have to believe yourself first. Hyper competitive - win all the times.  Self

The wiki definition for Technical debt says  "Implied cost of additional rework caused by choosing an easy solution". No body ever plans to add technical debt , it gets added as part of the culture of the organization. In the present world of speed to market teams are working under huge pressure of timelines and this is causing people to take short cuts to deliver in time. Thats why I like the motto "you own your ops". That way we will be more focused on self-service,  monitoring and self-healing aspects instead of dev teams throwing over fence to the operational side of the IT. Through every phase of software development life cycle we are adding technical debts. while developing stories we may not have time to investigate all possible scenarios. We are not able to invest enough time analyzing all data decisions. So, we might have taken 80/20 approach and ended up with 20 % technical debt right off the bat. Then during design we don't have time to develop API b

I took a resolution NOT to be controversial after getting harassed socially few years back because of my views about M.F. Hussain. Since then I tried to stay within boundaries and avoid controversies. More than dozen blog posts I still kept as draft is the witness to that resolution. Now I think I am breaking that promise (in views of few people). But I want to speak about it, express my thoughts on Black Lives Matter. If you are saying all lives matter then you are treating vulnerable and less vulnerable same way. We as humans developed a social system to prioritize Children, elderly, disabled, women in case of emergencies. That shows the culture of humans and how we are different than the animals in the wild. From time to time we prioritize and re-adjust to the circumstances of the society. We as society grown from NO voting right to Women, NO voting right to Afro-Americans to a society of equal rights. We are NOT living in the best society every lived on earth, we are in the pursuit

First rule for success is there are no rules and second rule is there are no formulas. Don't be mislead by the title, this is one person's interpretation with his level of (im)maturity. Now you read the statutory warning, let's dive into the details. We will be talking about three things that make success possible in anyone's life. Timing, Leverage and Discipline in the same order.  Timing, you can also call it fate. Life is not fair to everybody, suck it up. Some people are given fair shot than others at success. Some are lucky enough to be groomed towards it. This factor defines whether you will be born in  antilla  or Dharavi.   There is no bargain here, life hands it out to you and you have to live with it. We have seen rags to riches to stories, really great inspiration. But they are more of an exception than norm. Be inspired don't be fooled, just never accept fate's verdict, Keep fighting. Whatever anybody says Fate/Timing can turn your life upside down a

Elasticity will be the new Mantra of corporate  If something this COVID19 taught every corporate it is need for elasticity. It is always there but we never felt pressing need for it. Every company has a fair understanding on how much it costs to scale up X% or scaled down Y%. But no company ever needed to calculate the need for "Do NOTHING". What will be the cost of operation if we are in DO NOTHING mode ? Whether it is small business or big business now there should be a  DO NOTHING (pandemic)   clause. Like the US and China trade agreement have a clause, if there is a pandemic this trade agreement is NULL and VOID. What is the minimum cost you have to bear if there is no revenue source and how long you can sustain. Every financial adviser tells you to keep 3-6 months expenses in savings. Like that every company should know the DO NOTHING cost and keep that as cash flow. Just like stress test for banks each corporate need to test this new financial standard. In the software