Hi there 👋

Made a Key west cake with mango mousse and ginger lime cream yesterday. The frosting is essentially whipped cream. Recipes state that whipped cream will not be stable. I take this to work so that does mean I have to do a quick frosting on Monday morning, rather than taking time with it. Limes I bought had no juice so subbed with lemon juice. And I realized way too late that Key West probably is referring to Key Limes....

I am usually good about adding jitter on retry timers. I think this is necessary so we don’t run into a situation where if server fails due to concurrent clients at one time, we don’t coordinate retries at the same time to exacerbate the problem. But hadn’t thought about it from the context of background threads and process startups. I have usually seen backgrounds threads doing everything from contacting the server to populate some cache, refresh some system token before expiry, cleaning up some cache etc....

I read hacker news and a fairly common upvoted topic is how software engineering interview is really bad. It doesn’t measure anything and everyone knows that performance on leetcode style interview is not an indicator of job performance. I got promoted recently and it is quite possible that in the near future I will be asked to interview candidates. So have been thinking about this. Seems to me that people criticizing are in charge and are still asking the leetcode style questions?...

Made mango mousse/no-bake cheese cake. Mixed two recipes. Sponge cake from https://tatyanaseverydayfood.com/mango-mousse-cake/ and mousse/jelly layer from https://www.recipetineats.com/no-bake-mango-cheesecake/ Ingredients are eggs, sugar, vanilla, flour, baking powder, mango puree, gelatin, cream cheese, caster sugar, heavy cream, and lemon juice. Contains gelatin so not suitable for lacto-ova vegetarians. It does look visually stunning but I am a bad photographer. Check the linked recipe blogs for better pictures. On an unrelated note, make sure to have better lighting when taking food pics....

Recipe from https://butternutbakeryblog.com/cookie-dough-cake/ Baked a cookie dough cake. Wanted to find a recipe that had cookie dough in the cake layers and this seemed to be the only one. As usual, I found the American butter cream to be too sweet and cut the sugar, even after cutting recipe from original to about about 70%. Frosting was somewhat gritty as well. Not sure if my mistake on whipping it for lower time or recipe issue due to addition of flour, maybe I’ll replace it with a cream cheese based one if I ever make this again....

Made blondies from the recipe https://smittenkitchen.com/2006/11/blondies/ Added chocolate chips, dried blueberries and rum. Used the suggestion for adding alcohol, but I didn’t have whisky or bourbon, so added rum. I basically keep a bottle of alcohol for baking projects and didn’t realize that rum would be much stronger than the suggestions so these did taste strongly of that flavor. I really liked them!

Movies Grand Hotel 1932 First multi character film, that wasn’t a war film? It did keep me engaged while watching. All characters were interesting in their own ways. I particularly liked the ending, which surprised me. But it is hard to summarize due to the ensemble cast. Cavalcade 1933 I hated this one. Mostly because of one scene. A newly married woman and man on a ship, talking about their plans for the future....

TLDR If you can avoid code where an if else flag variable differ by a single bit, do it. Or at least make sure that your code is better at error handling. The following is a hypothetical situation that didn’t happen anywhere and caused no live sites. Details The code was similar to if (str[0] == '0') do_part1(str[1:]) else if (str[0] == '1'): do_part2(str[1:]) else: do_error_handling() If you think ‘0’ and ‘1’ are icky, replace it with an enum flag....

I tried to go the soylent route a while back. Not really sure why, except I was probably on a self improvement kick and probably thought of time spent on food as a time waste. I gave up on it pretty quickly as food is much more important to me than just nutrition. But I did find a sort of complete meal banana bread recipe that I still make sometime. The macros are semi decent, IIRC....

I’ll do this weekly from next week onwards, so this is more busy than usual. Some I watched this week, but some was about a month old. I have been trying to watch all best picture Oscar movies. Have only watched a couple till now, because, TBH, they are more in the interesting rather than the the entertaining genre. These are one liner reviews for some of them. Movies Wings 1927 The first picture to win an Oscar....