I launched a newsletter yesterday. So far, the feedback has been good. A few readers said that they felt drawn in by the writing. In any case, the purpose of the first few posts is simply to get myself warmed up. Any extra flutter the posts generate is a bonus. Amit Varma recommends not looking at the stats for a couple of years. It taught me quite a few things. Particularly that I need to be smart about the data analysis.
Someone must have thought, likely with good reason, that more pixels on larger screens is a good idea. Then, someone else must have thought that if it’s a good idea somewhere, it must be a good idea everywhere. It’s probably for the same reason that I can’t find a new car with tactile switches anymore. Everything’s got touch buttons. In my car, nothing other than the steering wheel has any physical feedback.
It’s easy to dismiss New Year’s Day as just another revolution around the sun - an arbitrary checkpoint which carries no inherent meaning. But then all checkpoints and milestones are arbitrary. Who’s to say that 17 year and 11 months old teenager is significantly less mature than an 18 year-old adult? We have milestones because they’re convenient. So in the spirit of benchmarking convenience, perhaps it is not such a bad idea to stick to resolutions, goals and plans.
I’m trying to build a habit of writing about things that trigger me. For one, I’m sensitive, so there’s an infinite supply of things to write about. Moreover, writing helps clarify what you’re really triggered by. People who have a regular journaling habit say that it’s revelatory and therapeutic. This is about the recent Kamra-Aggarwal debate spat. It’s not about who’s in the wrong - we all know the answer to that.
To the memory of Kevin Conroy. There was only ever one true Batman. You have been playing for months. Slowly and steadily, you have harvested every collectable - making yourself stronger and stronger until you can kill the toughest enemies. Every enemy defeated, every monster slain. No side quest worth doing remains. Those not worth doing are also done because you are a completionist (which is a dignified way of saying that you have no life).
It was the night of the recent 5-state assembly elections. One of my company’s clients is a major news channel, and I was at the studio late into the night, until the election commission announced that they had cancelled their press conference which was supposed to make an announcement about the final vote counts in Madhya Pradesh. A colleague offered to drop me home, and I got off at the gate of my colony, not wanting to subject my colleague to navigating the labyrinth that is any gated colony in South Delhi.
Dedicated to the memory of Mrutyunjay Mishra (M2). He was a torrent of ideas. He encouraged me to write this post because as much as he talked endlessly without pausing to breathe, he hated wasteful discourse. New Delhi, January 2024 PyCon India 2017 ended last weekend in Delhi. The conference escaped the infamous winter smog-storm by a whisker. In the last few years, PyCon India has grown to become the largest PyCon outside of North America, with over a thousand participants attending from all over the country.
I heard about the bestseller The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up at a SciPy talk about deculttering your data science project. The speakers admitted they hadn’t read it - they were simply trying to point out that tidying up your space and tidying up your software project are both similar. I’ve been married and living with my wife for about a year now. After we moved into “our own home” last year, we have both undergone major role reversals when it comes to tidying up.
One of the most dangerous things that can affect any FOSS community is the tendency of evangelism for the sake of evangelism. Promoting the Python stack, expanding the userbase, etc, should come only as a consequence of the content we produce as developers. If evangelism even remotely becomes one of your goals, your quality is sure to suffer. And it’s not just the empirical evidence that prompts me to say this.
I have recently moved from Pune to Delhi. I had spent only a year in Pune, having moved there from Mumbai, where I lived for three years. Whenever I move, the bulk of my luggage consists of books and clothes. My stay in Pune was just a transition, so I never bothered to unpack and store all my stuff too carefully. Thus, a corner of my bedroom in my Pune apartment always looked like this: The actual volume of books that I carried from Pune to Delhi is about twice of what is seen in the picture.