‘AIM Behind The Code’ With Adobe Developer- Sathyajith Bhat

In our series- Behind The Code, we reach out to the developers from the community to gain insights on how their journey started in the field of emerging technologies, the tools and skills they use and what they think essential for their day-to-day operations. For this week’s column, Analytics India Magazine caught up with Sathyajith Bhat, a Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) at Adobe. Bhat has been working at Adobe for a few years now and currently working as an SRE for Adobe I/O with the API Platform team.  As one of the AWS Community Heroes, Bhat will also be talking about Fargate at this year’s AWS re:Invent.

The Journey of Sathyajith Bhat From Adobe

At the start of this journey, Bhat faced some initial challenges while trying to understand and apply some classical algorithms. Working harder than ever, Bhat has been successful in overcoming the challenges and add feathers to his hat. Recently, he has been titled as one of the AWS Community Heroes and he is also the author of Practical Docker With Python. His interest lies in finding solutions to problems rather than creating new software led him to focus more on the system-admin side.  

Bhat’s Code, Toolkit & Skillsets At Adobe

Bhat and his team follow the Kanban approach with Sprint planning based on priorities and requirements. Typically, the work involves improving the performance and reliability of the clusters and automating traditional operational tasks such as deploys, achieving compliance goals which can be anything- from research/POCs on things to programming for automation. 

Bhat mostly prefers dynamically typed, interpreted languages as they are faster in prototype and iterate. He prefers programming languages Python and Ruby equally and he also believes that he has been witnessing a significant upward trend in JavaScript & Go adoption on the server-side. Bhat is an OS-agnostic person who runs Windows at home, use macOS on his work laptop and run Linux on almost all the servers. On Windows, he prefers using cmder as he finds the default terminal inadequate.   

He is a huge fan of Docker and is quite flexible when it comes to the toolset and mostly uses Visual Studio Code as the editor on a desktop and Vim on the server. He added, “I spend a significant amount of time on the terminal with zsh as my shell customized with Prezto and have been discovering how awesome fzf is.” Most of the time the programming and scripting are done with Python with virtualenv for handling dependencies, he said.

Talking about AI and ML, Bhat replied that these technologies are still in their infancy stage and there will be a lot of iterations before they can be completely usable. For a lot of things, for example, search, photos, language translations ML is at a fair advanced stage but there are some things – such as nuances, subtleties, sarcasm – for example, which are difficult to pick up by humans, let alone AI/ML. 

His Learning Resources

Being a hands-on person, Bhat usually prefers doing some small projects/POCs based on the project’s documentation or source code. He is a huge fan of Kelsey Hightower’s talks as his talks need to be thorough with what one knows, which can be achieved only by practice. Currently, Bhat has been focusing on improving the Kubernetes concepts as well as in languages like Python and Go. 

Plans For The Next Few Years

As a developer, Bhat wants to restart his blogging habits on Linux tips and tricks at sathyasays.com as well as focus more on Cloud, Automation, Infrastructure as Code tips. Bhat will also be focusing on becoming a Cloud Architect in the coming years.

A Piece of Advice 

“I see a lot of people running behind the latest fad to pump up their CVs – it’s nice to keep up with the newest stuff but I’d say focus on the basics and understand them before running after buzzwords”

Sathyajith Bhat, Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) at Adobe