Technology, Insights, Travel and Philosophy
Lets start somewhere. 11,000 years ago. The Ice Age has long gone, humans have started hunting and gathering in groups. We have not yet invented agriculture. To the West, the first stone walls of Jericho are being stacked, and in Turkey, the hunters of Göbekli Tepe are carving massive predatory totems (Schmidt, 2000).
“The things you used to own, now they own you.”
– Chuck Palahniuk
Perhaps the hardest thing I have ever done is quit sugar.
I won’t pull you into a drawn-out hospitalization sob story. Here’s the blunt version: a lower spine injury put me flat on my back. It took a couple of steroid shots just to get me standing again.
We are currently in a massive boom and crack cycle. Companies are scaling LLM usage at an unsustainable rate, only to realise that every token has a literal cost that product margins were never designed to absorb.
There has never – literally never been a better time to build software as an individual developer.
Not during the open-source boom.
Not during the mobile app gold rush.
Not even during the early cloud era.
I sat through a design review for one of my apps recently. The app itself is simple: a FastApi endpoint that searches a FAISS index of Jira and Zendesk tickets, and another endpoint that summarizes results using a locally hosted Ollama model. That’s it. It solves a clear, narrow problem for our L3 support engineers.
I am often faced with the question of what makes a good technical candidate. Many companies require an engineering degree in their job descriptions. Many high-functioning delivery teams consist of qualified engineers working on real-world problems, and I have learned a great deal from such engineers, who were at the peak of their powers.
I remember seeing an Atari 2600 clone, an NES clone and a PlayStation in the late 90s and was mind blown by those consoles. I mostly saw them at my friend’s place, and although I got to play very little of it, I became a gamer in my mind just watching others play. Pac-Man, Super Mario and a whole collection of games.
Many startups or small companies have very small teams developing big enterprise products, while there are larger companies having multiple people developing and managing the products. A basic enterprise software has the following functions:
Some of these activities can be performed by people having more than one responsibility. For example, a Program Manager might have a dual role of performing Project Management. Or a Lead Developer can take up the role of a project manager besides leading the team.
Like many of us, I had lived a life of belligerence – opinionated, intoxicated, hustled and travelled. I never sat home for a minute. The only time I would find myself at home is to sleep at night. Just couple of weeks before covid hit the world, I was doing a road trip across the winter of Iceland braving snow storms and staying in beautiful scenic Airbnb’s in temperatures way below zero throughout my two week trip.
I always wanted to have a workspace that could replace many a tool I use as a paid alternative or tools hosted in the cloud. Specially now, when most of the time I spend at home working, I have a need to manage my productivity. It uses docker for easy siloed management and it does not require any complicated system changes that break one app or the other. Additionally Dockerhub is a treasure of images that can be run very easily and can be leveraged.
Flagship phones are premium phones that identify the brand of the company selling it. They are usually built with best-in-class hardware and software. They are also the costliest phones in the market just because they have cutting edge hardware and software which gives them unique features.
Recently I gave a presentation on learning multiple programming languages quickly. The idea of the presentation was to quickly start coding in multiple languages and learn the toughest or the unique parts as we go along practising.
The technique is just common sense though, and has mostly worked for me in my career where I have used it to learn multiple programming languages – Java, JavaScript, Python, Go and Rust to name a few. I intend this article for anybody with interest to learn new languages.
The Space Traffic Control Officer came to her desk. She had her usual cup of coffee and a tablet which she put in the dock. She was about to go to the restroom when the radio next to her lit up.
“I am KingOfChaos. Over.” Said a voice from the other side of the radio.
He put the helmet,
Started the key,
Held the handle,
And imagined himself,
Riding free.
Riding the Enfield,
He looked imposing,
On the gear, rested his sandal.
Suddenly, it all went grim,
The traffic ahead, decomposing.
He cut through
Walkers with disdain,
Gullies and potholes,
Cars and crammed buses,
Only to be stuck again.
He abused a few,
Rode over the footpath,
And honked the trolls,
Avoiding the crashes,
He rushed with wrath.
A song finds me,
It makes me stop,
Listen to in repeat,
Than I move on.
Another shakes free,
Its rhythm makes me hop,
I ping and share the beat,
And then it is gone.
You choose to slumber and dream,
See things wonderful and bizarre.
When I sleep, I wake and scream,
Reality is like a dream and sleep, a scar.
In the dead of night, the un-dead awakes.
Are they really dead, or are they just asleep?
In the dead of night, the living sleeps,
Are they really asleep, or are they dead?
In the dead of night, the blind awakes.
He is not even sure if its night or day.
A fruit, any fruit,
Is either eaten ripe,
Or it withers away.
Some things, many things,
Are like such a fruit,
Eaten ripe or withered one day.
I am waiting on the shore,
With my black hair braided straight,
Intricately weaved; my plait,
For you, my love – to adore.
I stand here in the twilight,
Dark silhouette of me,
Shadow of my hale body,
Hiding my flimsy naked sight,
Stare into my big blue eyes,
Tell me you love me crazy,
Show me your love – you lazy,
Embrace me into you, your ties.
Kiss my supple, pink-red lips,
Hold my body in your arms,
Give in to my girlish charms,
Your soul I will take as tips.
I will remove things from you,
Things that you really loved and cared,
Things you had happily shared,
Tear them away to a coup.
What else is there to love,
Other than me, why else?
Tell me; I am your pulse,
Tell them; we fit like a glove.
In the grey of the evening,
I walked the dirty black street,
Tired and drenched in the pouring rain,
I felt cold, lonely, deplete.
As I looked up into the sky,
The drops felt like artillery shells,
Dropped by bombers above and high,
It hurt a lot but I couldn’t yell!
Experience the cold,
Experience the rain,
Experience the bold,
And experience pain.
Experience the jungles,
Experience the snow,
Experience bundles,
Dance your feet to the flow.
Experience people,
Experience troubles,
Take the happiness pill,
Or break some bubbles.
Experience money,
Expense luxury,
Experience the funny,
Or throw a fit in a fury.
Experience sleep,
Experience fear,
We learn to weep,
For things to clear.
If you ever wondered about the gift you would give a young nurturing mind, look no further than the Raspberry Pi.
The Pi as it is commonly called what is a Single Board Computer. They are fully functional computers having the processor, I/O, memory in the same board. For all that, they have a very small form factor. They are powerful enough to automate stuff, create robots, build internet of things or like me build retro consoles or simply be used as desktops.
I have lived in a tropical country, India, all my life. A little rain and some excruciating sun nearly render me immobile. And also if you live in a city, which is perpetually blocked because of traffic, you are like me – a tropical couch warmer.
We are killing ourselves and our children. We have about twenty years. Climate change is real.
There are so many mobile companies in India cashing in on the mobile craze. There are at least 500 million users in India and it is only growing. It is at least less than half of India’s population.