Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

This Week I Learned - *  RBAC is an authorization system built on Azure Resource Manager that provides fine-grained access management of resources in Azure. *  Hub and spoke is a networking model for more efficient management of common communication or security requirements. It helps avoid Azure subscription limitations, save costs by centralizing services that can be shared by multiple workloads and aids separation of concerns through deployment of individual workloads between central IT teams and workload teams. *  The hub is a virtual network (VNet) in Azure that acts as a central point of connectivity to your on-premises network. The spokes are VNets that peer with the hub, and can be used to isolate workloads. *  A hub-spoke topology can also be used without a gateway, if you don't need connectivity with your on-premises network. *  As a first step toward migrating a datacenter to the cloud, the first services that need to be shared are iden...

This Week I Learned - *  Application security groups enable you to configure network security as a natural extension of an application's structure, allowing you to group virtual machines and define network security policies based on those groups. You can reuse your security policy at scale without manual maintenance of explicit IP addresses. *  The icons we see on apps & websites are called by different names . The vertical stack burger icon signifying navigation drawers provide access to destinations and app functionality, such as switching accounts. The 3 dots ellipsis icon is called kebab menu by some and overflow menu by Google which uses it to represent App & placed on the right side of an app. * Now, not every project needs a framework and not every page of a single-page-application needs to load a framework. In Netflix’s case, "removing React, several libraries and the corresponding app code from the client-side reduced the total amount of JavaScript by ...

This Week I Learned - * A proximity placement group is a logical grouping used to make sure that Azure compute resources are physically located close to each other. Proximity placement groups are useful for workloads where low latency is a requirement. A proximity placement group is a new resource type in Azure. You need to create one before using it with other resources. Once created, it could be used with virtual machines, availability sets, or virtual machine scale sets. *  CPUs usually have between 2 and 8 cores. GPUs usually have at least a few hundred cores, and often more than 1,000 cores. GPUs are built for extreme parallelism . discovered via @addyosmani 's tweet *  LinkedIn Sales Navigator , is meant for sales professionals to discover leads, understand key insights, and engage with personalized outreach. *  Dux-Soup is a lead generation tool for LinkedIn. It is a Google Chrome browser plug-in which works as a virtual assis...

Summary of the HBR article The Art of the Elevator Pitch Hollywood screenwriters typically get three to five minutes to propose an idea, but it takes only around 45 seconds for producers to know if they want to invest. A winning pitch starts with a winning logline Keep it short - “Google organizes the world’s information and makes it universally accessible.” Identify one thing you want your audience to remember - Apple executives repeat a one-sentence description when presenting new products - "iPod allows you to carry 1,000 songs in your pocket.”, "MacBook Air is the world’s thinnest notebook.” Use logline consistently - SanDisk, the flash memory company, had the following product pitch: “In the coming decade, flash will be bigger than you think.”

IMDb is the ultimate fix for movie & data buffs. IMDb was started in 1990 by Colin Needham while he was working as an engineer at Hewlett-Packard (HP). By the summer of 1996, thanks to IMDb's first film-related advertising campaign (for Independence Day), Needham had quit HP to work on IMDb full-time as a paid employee. It was acquired by Amazon in 1998. While I've been using IMDb since a long time to check movie ratings and info since a very long time, I've been discovering the insights it offers after signing-in & rating movies that I've watched. IMDb allows your own ratings to be downloaded along with the movie details. The Export as CSV feature is hidden within the three vertical dotted "kebab" menu. Subsets of IMDb data are also available for access to customers for personal and non-commercial use. IMDb's FAQ section explains other site features providing founder Col Needham's activity page as an example

This Week I Learned - * Some customers are using Availability zones for a combined HA and DR configuration that promises a recovery point objective (RPO) of zero. This means that you shouldn't lose any committed database transactions even in the case of disaster recovery. Microsoft recommends that you use a configuration like this only in certain circumstances . For example, you might use it when data can't leave the Azure region for security or compliance reasons. *  Azure Private Link  (Preview) enables you to access Azure PaaS Services (for example, Azure Storage, Azure Cosmos DB, and SQL Database) and Azure hosted customer/partner services over a Private Endpoint in your virtual network. Traffic between your virtual network and the service traverses over the Microsoft backbone network, eliminating exposure from the public Internet. *  Currently, Azure Site Recovery supports moving VMs from one region to another but doesn't support moving within a region. *...

Summary of the HBR article " How Anxiety Traps Us, and How We Can Break Free " - Source: Roz Chast, New Yorker   When anxious, we tend to get trapped in false or limited ways of thinking. These thought patterns create a debilitating negative spiral that can take over our lives by convincing us of impending doom and further exacerbating our sense of helplessness.  Some traps and thought patterns: >> Catastrophizing : Imagining the worst possible outcome. “I will get fired if the presentation has any glitches.” >>  Mind reading : Imagining what others are thinking. “I know he doesn’t like working with me because he thinks I’m dumb.” >> Fortune telling : Imagining what the future holds, but without data. “They will all hate me in the new group because I’m the only one who isn’t a physicist.” >> Black-and-white thinking : Considering only two possible outcomes. “I’ll either hit a home run or get fired.” >> Overgeneralizing ...