There are two key problems to solve on the journey to attaining Financial Independence and Retiring Early (FIRE): 1) ensuring you have enough money for the rest of your life and 2) figuring out what to do after retiring. While the latter is critical for a fulfilling retirement, it is also highly personal. However, the path to achieving the former is quite common to most people.
One’s attitude towards money, not their skills, is the largest determinant of their financial success. This post shares some of the resources I found inspiring and useful to calibrate mine. Many of the behaviours encouraged by these apply even if you do not intend to FIRE, but want to maintain a stable financial position throughout your life.
There has been a lot of talk about employee productivity in recent days, with some Indian tech entrepreneurs asking people to work 70 hours a week. Productivity is not the sole purpose of life. Health and relationships that we value are more important and productivity must never come at the cost of these. With that out of the way, here is my view of productivity and ways to improve it as a software engineer working as a full-time employee.
As I mentioned in the post about my backup system, I run restic check
regularly, to test the integrity of my backup. It has never reported any error
in my repository. It performs a quick, shallow check, and does not verify that
all the data is intact. I also restore a random file, whenever I run restic check, to test recoverability.
Shortly after I wrote the previous post, I decided to run restic check --read-data for the first time ever. This reads every file in the repository
and simulates a full restore. To my utter horror, it reported many errors like
these!
Pack ID does not match, want 5e66c2ac, got e80051de
pack d64be86d contains 1 errors: [Blob ID does not match, want 8ebf2c10, got 350f6ba1]
Computing devices and online services can fail catastrophically and take our data with them. It is crucial that we have a robust system to backup and restore our data, to protect against such events. This post details what I wanted from the backup system for my personal data and the tools I use to achieve them. This system has served me well over the last 5 years, across fat-fingerings and disk failures.
At a previous job, we had several instances of Ruby on Rails applications connecting to PostgreSQL through PgBouncer. The services and databases were deployed on bare-metal servers and chugged along fine. We then decided to migrate to AWS. Upon migration, we noticed that PgBouncer started leaking connections to PostgreSQL like a sieve, leading to exhaustion of the maximum number of connections configured in RDS.
Vim offers many ways to use the command-line tools available on your system when editing. You can:
This is third in the series of posts describing how I use GnuCash to manage my finances. In previous posts, I had discussed how I organize my accounts, record transactions and handle taxation in GnuCash. In this post I’ll show how GnuCash can be configured to fetch the current NAV of mutual funds from the Internet.
This is second in the series of posts describing how I use GnuCash to manage my finances. In the previous post I had discussed how I organize my accounts in GnuCash. In this post I’ll describe how I record transactions and use GnuCash to help with computation of taxes and filing of tax returns.
GnuCash is an open-source double-entry bookkeeping software. In a series of posts this week, I will describe how I use GnuCash to manage my finances. The series will be biased towards a portfolio composed primarily of Indian mutual funds. This post describes the chart of accounts involved and the purpose of each account.
For better or worse, passwords are central to the safety of almost all our online accounts. 2-factor authentication systems are meant to protect users from compromise of their passwords. However, not all services support it. Also, several online services (including banks), use OTP sent over SMS as the second factor. This has several vulnerabilities and has been deprecated by NIST. That leaves password as a critical piece of these accounts’ security.
All opinions are my own. Copyright 2005 Chandra Sekar S.