I have been working at Microsoft for a little less than 3 months. I have joined the PowerBI team and am working on the Excel Integration team. So far things have been good with my teammates and the work in general. There is a lot to learn and I feel that it will be a while before I am fully proficient. I am attempting to improve out documentation and general asynchronous communication models. I have been reading/writing in C# mostly and learning the internal tooling. A lot of low hanging fruit seems to be solved already.

I have thought about going home for july 4th. I might WFH at my parent’s place for a little while.

I have started running 1 mile a day. My total walking has increased to 6-8 miles a day from 4-5. I hate running and I find that a 1 mile limit gives me incentive to run fast and push myself without making me quit. The first day it took me 13 minutes. Now I run around a ~9:30 mile. I think I will continue doing it. Its dropped my resting heart rate from 55bpm to 48bpm.

A long time since I posted anything. The quarantine wrecked havoc on everybody as covid-19 spread. For the month of march it was difficult to maintain any physical fitness. Starting April I had signed up for virtual training. The sessions have been fun and tough. Still I do look forward to when the gyms re-open

So a week has passed since Kobe Bryant has died. The first couple hours after hearing the news was complete shock. I couldn’t actually feel anything at all. But after 4 hours I just broke down especially after learning the death of Gianna. As a southern California kid growing up I always rooted for the lakers, but was never a massive Kobe fan. However as I got older and especially after Kobe retired I gained more and more respect for the man. His dedication, work ethic and sheer determination were all attributes that I really admired. I didn’t realize how much I respected him until he was gone. Kobe can’t die. He is Batman. We are all here to hold onto that mantle and keep working hard and thats how we will honor him. RIP Kobe. Mamba out.

So after coming back to LA I went back to my regular gym and I still didn’t feel any motivation. It was just moping around for 30 minutes. The next day I signed up for a new gym. I am motivated again and working hard.

I have started to walk around my local park (There aren’t many of those in Los Angeles). As someone who does not particularly enjoy cardio it is surprising to me how much I enjoy walking around greenspace. I just walk around listening to music or podcasts. This was one of my favorite activities when visting New York City especially around Central Park.

Last couple of weeks I have had no motivation to go work out. I have been remaining active taking long walks during the day however. I’m going to try out a new gym after the new year and see if I can get a month to month membership

One of the major challenges of working with AWS is working with IAM. Everything is built around IAM and having permission to do whatever technical action. As an engineer the experience of knowing that I need a set of permissions for my role to utilize to do an action like reading from DynamoDB has made my job much easier. For example in a typical cloudformation policy something like ```

• Effect: Allow Action:
  • ‘dynamodb:GetItem’ Resource: ‘arn:aws:dynamodb:us-west-2:${Account}:table/test-table’