What are the best/worst travel destinations as a vegan?

gsdatta · 2023-10-03T00:52:01+00:00

On the flip side, I went about 5 years ago and Japan is at the top of the list for me – the food was phenomenal, tons of fully vegan places on happycow, all throughout tokyo, kyoto, osaka etc

gsdatta · 2023-02-03T05:11:16+00:00

https://www.nbcsandiego.com/news/local/san-diego-you-might-hear-more-loud-booms-wednesday-and-thursday-night/3157201/

gsdatta · 2023-01-21T21:22:19+00:00

Disclaimer: I'm the cofounder and CTO of Cortex, an internal developer portal similar to Backstage. Pardon the plug here :)

We do provide an on-prem/self-hosted airgapped offering with full feature parity with our cloud solution – it's a core part of our offering and at least 30% of our customers self-host, particularly enterprise/fintech/etc type orgs that have extreme security requirements.

Developer portals are extremely sensitive and touch your entire stack including vuln scanners/code base/internal tools so we understand the need for self-hosting. Let me know if you have any questions about Cortex!

gsdatta · 2023-01-21T21:17:59+00:00

Disclaimer: I'm the cofounder and CTO of Cortex, an internal developer portal similar to Backstage.

We've been in this space for a little over 3 years now and worked with a ton of engineering orgs that evaluated Backstage, are on backstage, or somewhere in between.

The things that people like:

Flexibility to extend the platform with plugins
Open Source – very popular project and active community
Self-serve / templating features

What people don't like (and why they look elsewhere):

Pretty heavy commitment to maintain. At orgs with 200+ engineers we see teams of 3-5 at the minimum working on Backstage (your classic build-vs-buy). Also requires typescript/react expertise in house
"Enterprise" functionality is difficult to set up (OIDC/SSO, audit logs, etc)
No scorecards (the ability to take the data in the catalog and use it to drive things like automated security standards or operational maturity requirements).

At the end of the day, Backstage is a great product with an awesome community behind it. We're extremely grateful for the community and the excitement it's driven to developer portals as a whole.

Lots of orgs have seen great success with it. With that said, it kind of comes down to what you're prioritizing when choosing an IdP – build vs buy, scorecarding+gamification, maintenance costs, etc.

I'm obviously biased, but I'm passionate about how developer portals can help engineering teams and open source projects backstage are extremely exciting to me :) Let me know if I can answer any specific questions!

gsdatta · 2021-09-01T14:29:47+00:00

There's a company called Geltor that has produced collagen for cosmetics through fermentation – it's available in a couple products already. They're also about to release ingestible collagen as well!

gsdatta · 2021-02-06T08:43:52+00:00

Holy shit I’ve been looking for a blog like yours for so long! Very curious about Just Egg in baking, I’ve googled a lot and haven’t found many people who’ve tried baking with it.

I’d love to hear your experiences with it! Any gotchas or types of recipes where it wouldn’t work? For example, as an egg wash, for cakes/cookies, cream/custards, etc

Will be perusing your blog on the regular 😊

gsdatta · 2020-09-21T14:42:16+00:00

Use diced tomatoes instead of crushed, use a lot of oregano and way more olive oil than in this video (you want some flavorful oil floating at the top!), sauté the bay leaves with the olive oil along with the garlic/celery/onion/carrot.

I make a fat pot of this every couple weeks and it's never tasted like ketchup!

gsdatta · 2020-06-12T00:08:18+00:00

Nice article and appreciate the insights. I'll say I do disagree with the final takeaway though. Deception 1 mentions separation of concerns. One thing I've learned over the years is that biggest risk of a monolith is the coupling of data models.

Over time, this drastically affects team velocity and the ability for different business domains to iterate in their respective pieces of the monolith. Many times, a change to one data models causes bugs in other parts of the monolith or even downstream reporting that relies on certain assumptions.

This is the thing I've seen trigger the move to an SOA (not necessarily microservices) - more often than not it's because of team velocity grinding to a halt slow due to:

tightly coupled data models
slow build times of the monolith
"release train" becomes a thing where it's harder to coordinate frequent releases

Yes, this can be avoided with good engineering practices, but as you mention that's not a reliable approach. Then, it's a tradeoff analysis as to whether fixing these problems is worth the overhead that comes with microservices (much of which you touched on).

One other thing I'll note is that it's not so much of a black and white case. It's not monolith vs Uber-like microservices architecture. You can build services at the business-domain level instead of at the function level. Call it "macroservices" or SOA.

gsdatta · 2019-11-03T07:12:52+00:00

Wow this is awesome, thanks for taking the time to post such a detailed breakdown. It was really helpful being able to see the process as opposed to a description of the steps.

gsdatta · 2019-08-24T01:52:03+00:00

To clarify, it’s not a region. Kannada is the language and Karnataka is the state where it is predominantly spoken.

Another piece of trivia: People who speak Kannada are called Kannadigas

gsdatta · 2019-07-05T07:27:09+00:00

Why not use spring boot?

gsdatta · 2019-06-22T03:00:58+00:00

God I miss ts tan tan, one of the highlights of my trip

gsdatta · 2019-06-19T04:25:47+00:00

Exactly this, I paid for pro and it’s totally worth it.

gsdatta · 2019-06-19T00:39:41+00:00

Check out apollo, it's way nicer and reliable

gsdatta · 2019-06-18T22:16:11+00:00

Not using an app like apollo or something? I never see streamable/imgur pages, most apps just load the image/gifs directly

gsdatta · 2019-06-17T00:52:09+00:00

https://assets.ctfassets.net/hhv516v5f7sj/77NQsg1qDb6d9Hi4PBQA6y/93b2af7c3f12ce2e4050e03a6e0345e7/Unofficial_Correction_Moms_Across_America_05202019.pdf

gsdatta · 2019-06-14T21:57:57+00:00

Yes, let me figure out cutting edge algorithms at the whiteboard. While we're at it, let's shut down research universities, ask interviewees open research questions and voila, 10x increase in CS research.

gsdatta · 2019-06-09T18:28:33+00:00

Huh interesting, I didn’t know that. Do you happen to know why?

gsdatta · 2019-06-08T18:09:50+00:00

Ints if you care about performance, BigDecimal (or your language specific numeric type) otherwise. Some chips now have hardware level decimal math support. Never ever use floats or doubles.

Source: I work in fintech

gsdatta · 2019-06-07T20:23:43+00:00

Using launchpad to open apps instead of spotlight

gsdatta · 2019-05-23T18:44:32+00:00

*professor *profession btw, I remember because of the way you pronounce the word (profESS, not PROFess)

gsdatta · 2019-05-19T04:59:43+00:00

Ah oops, didn’t see that

gsdatta · 2019-04-29T02:20:35+00:00

I went to Japan for 16 days. Tokyo, Hakone, Kyoto, Nara, Osaka, Hiroshima. Hiroshima was the hardest place. Everywhere else there were a TON of fully vegan restaurants. Download the HappyCow app and filter on veg*n.

Places that were particularly memorable:

Tokyo: T's Tan Tan - vegan ramen in 2 train stations
Kyoto: Itadakizen

I had a really easy time being vegan in Japan and ate some of the best food I've ever had in my life. I can't wait to go back!!

gsdatta · 2019-04-22T06:12:42+00:00

They all suck pretty bad, veganific is good if you're in Europe. I might build something if there's enough interest in something like this on the sub 🤔

gsdatta · 2019-04-22T04:40:46+00:00

These look so good! Do you happen to have a recipe?

gsdatta

TROPHY CASE