Handling DDoS attacks

Handling millions of requests from thousands of IPs is hard! A flood of millions of requests clogs one drain after another.

This is what happened when we had a DDoS attack this week.

First, our hard-disk got filled due to access logs
Then our hard-disk got filled due to too many open files error logs
Various services started hitting file descriptor limits
The system started dropping packets and killing connections as the connections table got full

Is it a DDoS?

The best way to check if it is a DDoS is to run the netstat command

sudo netstat -nta …

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3rd Jan. 2025

Learning = Sweating. Otherwise it's entertainment.

This post by Andrej Karpathy stuck with me.

There are a lot of videos on YouTube/TikTok etc. that give the appearance of education, but if you look closely they are really just entertainment. This is very convenient for everyone involved : the people watching enjoy thinking they are learning (but actually they are just having fun). The people creating this content also enjoy it because fun has a much larger audience, fame and revenue. But as far as learning goes, this is a trap. This content is an epsilon away from watching the Bachelorette. It's like snacking on those "Garden …

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14th Sept. 2024

Neovim Workshop

Flyer for my Neovim Workshop

Last week, I did a workshop on Neovim.

I haven't seen any technical workshops in Lucknow before. I thought of starting one.

I created a standee and placed it right outside the TCS gate.

I didn't expect too many registrations because of the niche topic. I wanted to attract only the nerds-and-geeks for the first event.

I used HasGeek for registrations. HasGeek has pretty good event organisation system:

HasGeek is free.
It automatically sends the reminders for the events.
It allows us to broadcast messages before and after the event. This is …

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11th Sept. 2024

Domain Names Migration to Porkbun

Last week, I transferred my domains from Squarespace to PorkBun. All 12 of them!

CleanShot 2024-09-11 at 12.54.28@2x_3c1785c6524475fefb3275b179378d737758fb5b37a3d38f28fe94093fd49ced.png — Porkbun's Domain Dashboard

Squarespace Billing Nuisance

I was frustrated with the billing page on Squarespace. Their auto-payments didn't work. This was a major risk as I could lose my domains. Part of it was because of RBI regulation in India. But more frustrating part was jumping between the pages finding the "retry" link.

Squarespace doesn't have a single billing page for all your domains. They have a weird concept of "independent billing subscriptions". Each domain has a separate portal for payment. There is no …

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7th Sept. 2024

Remember Github login in CLI

I changed my laptop recently. I was unable access GitHub from command line after that.

I was getting this error.

remote: Support for password authentication was removed on August 13, 2021.
remote: Please see https://docs.github.com/get-started/getting-started-with-git/about-remote-repositories#cloning-with-https-urls for information on currently recommended modes of authentication.
fatal: Authentication failed

Fix

The fix is to install git-credential-manager. This is mentioned by Github but very poorly.

Once the manager is installed, git push works like ever before. We don't need to create new tokens after every few months.

9th March 2024

Implementing OKRs

We recently started using OKRs for our Screener team.

We are a team of 7.

- 4 Developers: 3 local + 1 remote (part-time)

- 3 Support: 1 local + 2 remote

Four of the team members work remotely.

Most of the tasks are picked, planned and prioritised by me. I find it hard to assign tasks, do continuous follow-ups and provide feedbacks. This is specially hard on our remote team.

This centralised thinking makes it difficult for me to distribute the work. I end up picking most of the tasks. And hence the work that gets done is not …

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24th Feb. 2024

Speed Reading by Kam Knight.png — Speed Reading by Kam Knight

I saw this Tweet by Arpit Ranka. I didn't believe it.

Speed Reading sounds like a gimmick to me. I have read a speed reading book before. I have also tried various speed reading tools. They were all placebos and didn't last long.

I was so much in disbelieve that I had to ask Arpit Bhaiya in person when I met him. "Bhaiya, I was surprised to see your Tweet on Speed Reading. Does it really work? What is it about?"

He told me it is a very short and simple book. There are …

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