News flash: We finally took the leap and got a car. A Maruti Suzuki S-Presso. We got a pre-loved one from spinny.com. It was delivered a month back. And after spending couple of weeks to gain some confidence driving around, we decided to go for a long-ish trip.
Few months back we went to this place called Gulakamale Lake that’s in between Banerghatta Road and Kanakpura Road. And we really loved the road leading to it from Banerghatta Road. The road goes through the Kaggalipura- Bannerghatta Forest. And it’s really nice if the weather is good.
Late update. I’ve joined NUITEQ as a Senior Software Engineer at the beginning of this month.
20th June was my last day of work at Hasgeek. And it was a bit emotional to attend the standup that day.
I’ve known of and been around Hasgeek since the beginning of my career. A lot of the people I know today so well, I know them through Hasgeek. And similarly, a lot of what I am today is because of the people I met through Hasgeek.
A friend suggested this book called “Elements of Programming Interviews in Python” to me. Interviews have always been a weak spot for me, and I am not particularly bright when it comes to hardcore coding assignments. So I took this book as an opportunity to improve myself a bit.
The book has a section called “Design Problems” where there are few systems that you have to design as an exercise. First of them is a spelling checker. I took it up and read the clues provided by them, and thought, let’s try to build one as an exercise.
Couple of weeks back I woke up to this prompt by WhatsApp first thing in the morning -
Not my screenshot. I forgot to take one. This is off the internet, from an iOS device.
TL;DR - WhatsApp is updating their privacy policy, and they’re going to start sharing even more data with Facebook, it’s parent company, and if I don’t agree to it by February 8th, WhatsApp will delete my account.
We traveled to Kolkata in December 2020 to be around our families. And since arriving, don’t know how a whole month got spent. Then finally got a chance to explore the city, and with a couple of friends who haven’t explored the city much. So that got me even more excited.
On the first round, we visited and walked around Vidyasagar Setu, Princep Ghat, Babu Ghat and then stopped at Esplanade for breakfast with Hing-er Kochuri, with Alu tarkari and pickled green chili.
December is here. 2020 has been a wild ride and looks like it’ll overflow into most of 2021 as well. This year, if nothing else, has been an eye-opener on what the most important things in our lives are.
As we live in the constant fear of death, we can’t help but cherish those who give us happiness and appreciate the people around us for what they are. Even though mortality rates are pretty low, the uncertainty of all of it is what affects us most. We’re all doing what we can to stay safe, but nothing is still certain. It’s a cat and mouse game where we are the mouse, and the cats are invisible.
I was going through the top 250 movies on IMDB and had a sudden craving to know whether movies from any certain period got better rating or not. So I got to work with the list. I wanted to make some interactive charts, and after trying few things, found plotly to be exactly what I needed. You can use pandas dataframe with it and can even export the interactive chart as HTML to be hosted somewhere. This works.
This involves 2 pieces of h/w.
The HAT is primarily for a Pi Zero, but it works with any Raspberry Pi with 40 GPIO pins, hence my Pi 1 B+ qualifies.
I’ve had this Pi for years now and it was gathering dust. So recently decided to pick it up and do something with it. First I set up a Pi-hole instance on it and then a Telegraf+Influxdb+Grafana instance to monitor my home Internet connection. Then found that I also had a BBC Micro:bit lying around and it comes with a bunch of sensors built in. So thought if I could connect the Micro:bit with the RPi, then I could use the sensors to monitor my home temperature real time for example. The other option is to get a temperature sensor for the Pi. But let’s call that plan B.
