Newsletter | Sunday Bytes
Sunday Bytes #2: Load Balancers, CSS Animations, Highlight Tasks
Comprehensive guides on load balancers, proxies, and CSS animations, sprinkled with some productivity and travel tips.
🌈 Quote of the Week
It is quite a revelation to discover that the place you wanted to escape to is the exact same place you escaped from. That the prison wasn’t the place, but the perspective.
🧑💻 Programming
- CSS Transitions and Hover Animations — A great read about different CSS transitions as well as animation performance and optimizations.
- Modern Network Load Balancing and Proxying — A comprehensive guide about different load balancing architectures with their pros and cons. The post also talks about service discovery, health checks, and other features that are critical to the functioning of a micro service architecture.
- How to Build Your Own Reddit API — A personalized Reddit API created using browser-based web scraping tools, such as Puppeteer, and NoSQL databases, such as DynamoDB.
🚀 Productivity
I adopted one technique from the book Make Time that have greatly improved my productivity over the past few months.
Here’s how it goes:
- At the start of the day, pick ONE thing you MUST accomplish. We will call it your day’s highlight task.
- Make sure the highlight task sticks out in your task manager or planner
- Digital task manager — Use tags
- Physical task list — Use a highlighter or colored pens
3. Time block your calendar with the highlight task
4. Preferably, align the timing of the work with your highest energy time of the day
5. Allocate ample buffer to complete the task. Don’t schedule any other back to back tasks around your highlight.
6. Be satisfied with your day, as long as you complete your highlight task.
💖 Weekly Favorites
- Being Mortal by Atul Gawande — After a slow start, the pace of the book picked up drastically. It’s a thought-provoking book on mortality, medicine, and end-of-life treatment options.
- Capital One Venture X — A great one-credit-card setup when traveling internationally. I have been visiting Bangladesh for over 2 weeks now. Shops in this country are not correctly coded — say a Restaurant actually codes as Grocery, an auto shop as merchandise store. With Venture X, I could blindly use it everywhere and confidently get 2X rewards (plus: no foreign transaction fee).
📚 What I Wrote Recently
Most of my recent blog posts have been focused on travel, credit cards, 2023 reviews, and planning for the next year.
If any of those topics interest you, feel free to check out some of these.
💌 Share With a Friend
That’s a wrap for the 1st edition of Sunday Bytes.
If you are still reading, I hope you found at least one valuable thing.
Please share with someone in your life who you think might benefit from this newsletter.
If you have any comments, thoughts, or suggestions, please share them with me.