Personal on Jaidev's Blog

Learning Tools vs Learning the Craft

Mon, 14 Sep 2026 23:17:22 +0530

This is the second in a series of essays about my experience with the largest data science and programming MOOC in the world—the IIT Madras Degree Programme in Data Science and Applications. The first essay was about learning and practicing programming, and can be read here.

Four years ago, as a part of the data science diploma, I took the Machine Learning Practice course. It had two OPPEs—online proctored programming exams—worth nearly half of the course grade. We were given a list of questions, most of which were numericals, i.e. you needed to type in a number in the answer field. There was a link to a dataset, and a Google colab notebook. While the score depended almost entirely on the answer, the notebook, too, needed to be submitted as a buffer.

Resting on Your Laurels

Mon, 11 May 2026 19:50:12 +0530

He was short and chubby, only 13 or 14 years old. He was preparing tandoori rotis. He’d tear a handful of flour from a large white mass in front of him, and start rolling and pressing it between his palms. After a few seconds of rhythmic kneading, he’d slap the ball of dough on a pan. Then he’d press it flat with his knuckles, roll it up, knead it some more and slap it down again. After doing this a few times, he would put the roti on a cloth pad and stick it to the inside of the tandoor.

Remembering Peru

Fri, 24 Apr 2026 01:49:12 +0530

Knowing as I arrived that this would be the last time I would see her, I had reminded myself that a dying Carmen Callil was still more Carmen Callil than she was dying.

—Julian Barnes, Departure(s)

It is tempting to interpret this deceptively simple sentence as a description of a good death. If dying does not erode your identity, it is perhaps a good death. Barnes’ last (i.e. his latest, and also literally his last) novel constantly circles the themes of identity, memory and death. He keeps saying that memory is identity. And, as with Carmen Callil, he also seems to claim a small victory over death on her behalf—as long as people remember her for who she really was.

Bayesian Storytelling

Tue, 11 Mar 2025 12:12:14 +0530

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. It’s important to remember that this isn’t a work project. It’s meant for a general audience, so there is such a thing as too much detail. For example, detailed handwritten notes on every single table in the HCES isn’t important. You could have dealt with each table independently. Only focusing on the tables needed for the problem in question should have sufficed. On the other hand, cleaning and denormalizing the data and releasing it on GitHub was a good idea; and the tweet announcing this has 10 reposts, 69 likes, 52 bookmarks, and has gained me 12 new followers. This is what Austin Kleon calls “showing your work” (Mahima Vashist says “your journal is your art”). Perhaps one needs to think carefully about what shareable and useful assets can be created in the service of a larger, transcending work.

More Pixels

Fri, 31 Jan 2025 23:23:45 +0530

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. To check if I’ve successfully changed the A/C mode, I either have to wait until I feel the temperature change or I have to take my eyes off the road. And don’t even get me started on the massive ‘infotainment systems’. I don’t understand how we came to a place where more expensive cars meant fewer physical buttons and huge touchscreens.

Beer on the Mekong - Growth, Discovery and Creativity in 2025

Tue, 07 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0530

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.

Do Feed the Trolls

Thu, 10 Oct 2024 15:47:35 +0530

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. It’s about how people have been reacting to the episode.

Open World Games and the Myth of Sisyphus

Sat, 24 Dec 2022 10:04:06 +0530

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). No part of the open world remains unexplored - you have climbed the tallest mountain and dived the deepest sea. All of this, you have done on the highest difficulty level. All the DLC is exhausted, too. The strongest creature in the world is you.

Rabies, Laziness & Privilege

Thu, 13 Dec 2018 14:48:07 +0530

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. I made my way home, humming to myself, thinking about what the elections portended about 2019 - as any dutiful Indian would. (Everyone in India is a political Pundit. Say ‘politics’ to the nearest Indian and you’ll know what I mean.)

How Not to Ask Questions After a Talk

Wed, 22 Nov 2017 10:04:06 +0530

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. The conference itself was driven by a team of about 50 volunteers.

Playing With the Konmari Method

Wed, 03 Aug 2016 13:42:55 +0530

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. I was never accustomed to spaces larger than a single bedroom, so I never cared enough to sort or declutter my space as long as my desk and bed were clean. As for my wife, she never owned too much stuff (between the two of us, I’m the hoarder) and therefore never had to make a chore out of tidying up. Now that I live in a fairly spacious apartment, even a little clutter looks very conspicuous to me. My wife generally agrees with me about tidying up, but she’s not anal about it. I have been having arguments about the clutter in my house with her for a long time now. Since both of us jokingly say that I’m the wife in this relationship (by the way, I would be proud to be one), tidying up and decluttering is often left up to me. I lost no time in buying Marie Kondo’s book and diving right in.

Evangelism in Foss

Tue, 14 Jun 2016 19:54:09 +0530

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. It even makes logical sense. If we want to “promote” Python and related tech, our best market would be the young and unexperienced (and therefore non-opinionated) minds. But note that such audiences are also very fickle. They may not return for the next conference. And since they don’t, we have to count on more fresh entries each year. And in the conference itself, since we’re all acutely aware of the demographic, we spend too many talks pandering to this part of the audience.

Organizing a Bookshelf with Multivariate Analysis

Thu, 27 Aug 2015 00:00:00 +0530

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: