Installing kafka / zookeeper

Its almost a month since I left Google and joined the startup, and its been 30 days of new challenges every day, some I handled beautifully and others strugglingly. Today after a very very long time I got to work with actual linux machine. I had to install Zookeeper and Kafka on 3 AWS EC2 machines. Of course these being well known apache projects had instructions everywhere. But when was the last time open source project instructions worked flawlessly! It was great to finally get the system working, hack away into the /etc/hosts files, try different things.
On to next challenge tomorrow - convert the 3 single-node machines into a single cluster.

This s*** just got real!

If you are into weird hollywood movies, you know what that expression means, and sometimes some expressions no matter how fowl just express a situation well. So this is what happened. I left Google 2 weeks back and joined a startup in Zurich. The decision, last few weeks and then joining new company just passed by with express train speed. I always knew this is where I was headed, like I knew form 6th standard that I will be working at Microsoft in US (ok that did not exactly happen, but Google was close enough), but when where how - I did not know.

When the opportunity to join startup came, right in Zurich all stars seemed to align. I don't have to move, I was in perfect position to try something new - and I took the leap of faith. As Peeyush Ranjan said in his linked in post - Google is like a university, you learn learn learn, but at some point you want to take that learning and do something else with it.

So why it just got real -
http://www.kleinreport.ch/news/softwaredienstleister-mediahead-mit-neuem-cto-81811/

https://www.adzine.de/2015/07/mediahead-verstaerkt-team-mit-ex-google-managerin-tulika-agrawal-adtechnology/