November 2025, DevOps and Yellowface

2 Jan 2026 by nsd

Reading

The Alloy of Law

The Alloy of Law, book one of Mistborn era two. This book couldn’t land the ending for me. The gun fights towards the end of the book were boring.

I like that the stakes of this book were more grounded compared to era one books. I personally feel that MCU movies failed to lower its stakes, after The Endgame, making fans lose interest on them.

Reddit comment about Alloy of Law

Me and Darshan had a good laugh out of this reddit comment on The Alloy of Law.

Yellowface

R F Kuang’s writing style on Yellowface was interesting. Her vocabulary was a step up compared to all the other books that I read this year. The book follows a character who is borderline psychopathic. She is addicted to external validation, which is a very socially relevant topic in 2025.

This book also failed to land the ending for me.

Shadows of Self

Shadows of self has a mosaic narrative style. I usually like this narrative when I am able to follow all the plot lines (unlike The Stormlight archive, where I usually need Darshan or a youtuber to explain all the plot points that I missed). The scenes in this book reminded me of the heist scenes from The Final Empire.

Book 2 of era 2 has more world altering plot points compared to book 1. The section where harmony directly talks to wax was a high point for me. I am yet to finish this book.

Work

I had an ITG this month, meeting with colleagues was quite nice. ITGs really help in improving the team moral. The hang out sessions in the Paul’s hotel felt like support group meetings. 5 stars for the Paul’s hospitality team for hosting us.

The new atlassian banglore office has some really nice spots. This is the reading area—my personal favorite spot—near a silent work space. I discovered Yellowface from this library.

I cant get enough of these salted caramel cookies from the office cafeteria. Even though I am trying to be in a calorie deficit, I eat multiple of these whenever I visit the cafeteria. They are too good to resist.

Personal

I setup an uptime monitoring bot for this website. It gives me a peace of mind to know that the website is up.

I had an outage on December 19th when my server’s ISP’s power backup decided to bail on them. I have setup a deployment using cloudflare pages now.

While I was in Bangalore this month for ITG I noticed a few really nice routines that my friends followed—going out for a walk after every meal, working on side projects—I wish to incorporate a few of them into my life.

“When you have something that looks like a good idea, give it your best shot” – Woody Bledsoe