Mohnish Thallavajhula

Alan Perlis

Fools ignore complexity. Pragmatists suffer it. Some can avoid it. Geniuses remove it.
Alan Perlis

Today, I sat down with the intention of designing a logo for myself. I needed one for my upcoming projects. I didn’t know where to start. So, I made the following list of things I wanted in the logo –

My initials, MT
Some sort of association with Taurus

I wanted to come up with a few ideas and got busy drawing. Here’re a few drafts –

The very first draft

I wanted to use the eyes and the jawline of the bull as “M” and the horns and the upper part of the skull as the “T”. With that vision, I started working on more drafts.

Iterations

I considered the following rules during my design process –

It needs to be legible at 16×16
It should be scalable (should be a vector graphic)
It should handle monochrome and colors as well

The obvious tool of choice was Adobe Illustrator. I started working on converting my hand drawn drafts in to something more nicer. I came up with the following designs –

Although these expressed my vision, I wasn’t happy with the design. For starters, the combination of curves and sharp edges, felt a bit odd and disconnected. Also, these designs were not legible at 16×16. So, I started working on another design with the goal to have softer edges for the bull’s face and more curves to the bull’s horns. After 12 iterations, I was able to get to the design that I liked. Here it is –

The bull’s jawline along with the eyes make up the “M” and the horns with the top part of the skull make up the “T”. It took me roughly 10 hours from the idea inception to completion. Overall, I’m pretty satisfied with the outcome.

Happy New Year 2021

Last year, when I wrote the “Happy New Year 2020” post, COVID-19 had just begun its course. Very few people in the world were aware of the full glory of the havoc it was about to wreck on the world. Looking back at that post, I just smile at how oblivious I was to what was brewing in December 2019.

2020 was brutal. My heart goes out to all families that have lost family members due to COVID-19, directly or indirectly. There have been a lot of cases where people couldn’t even stay with their families to say final goodbyes to their loved ones. Just thinking about all of it, saddens me.

In 2020, I’ve learned a lot about many things in life such as passion, being grateful, the kind of person I am, etc. On March 11th, when WHO declared the COVID-19 outbreak as a global pandemic, most companies let their employees Work From Home (WFH). Very soon, I got frustrated being cooped up in the house all day.

One afternoon, around mid-May, I received a marketing phone call from my bank. The bank employee asked me how I was doing, to which, I answered – “Not so great”. I said so because I was just frustrated staying home all day. He asked me if I was sick. I said, “No”. He then asked me if I had lost my job. I said, “No”. That was it. Those two questions just changed my perspective of the whole situation. I realized how grateful I was.

2020 in review

January: Most of January, I was in India with my Dad. I had a great time in Hyderabad and I am grateful for the trip. Celebrated Sankranthi at home. Also, started growing my hair long

February: Watched Super Bowl with friends. Had a lovely Valentine’s day dinner with my wife. Attended Vir Das’s stand up with friends, in San Francisco

March: Started WFH

April: Washed my hands so much that my skin started peeling off. Learned to make Hakka Noodles

May, June: Sindhu made me a homemade cake for my birthday. It was awesome. Played a lot of board games. Sindhu even wrote a post about it here

July: Visited my cute little nieces. Decided to improve my health and stay fit. Started running and functional training

August, September, October: Comparing the health data from my previous years, these were the months that I had exercised the most. Also, experienced the worst wildfire impact in California. The orange pic below is an actual photo I took with no filter

November: Went hiking at Lands End. Moved to a new apartment. Celebrated Diwali

December: My sister and her family came to visit and I had a lovely time with my nieces. Celebrated my 5th wedding anniversary

Resolutions

Last year, I didn’t really have any resolutions. However, this year, I’m working on a few resolutions that I will share over the coming few months.

Hope

Everyone is hopeful that the world will be back to normal with the vaccines being out. From what I have read, it looks like the world might return to normalcy by summer. Hopefully, that’s the case.

To all the essential and healthcare workers – Thank you!!

Here’s to a new year filled with hope, good health, happiness, and positivity! Cheers! 🎉

reMarkable 2

I am a big fan of handwritten notes. I write down a lot while reading, brain-storming ideas, working on code, working on side projects etc. Naturally, I end up going over a lot of notebooks. I have some at work and some at home. To give you an idea, at work, it takes me around 1.5-2 months to finish an entire notebook. At home, it is usually around 3-4 months. That’s approximately 8-10 notebooks per year.

My biggest problem is storage. I am not a fan of storing these notes long term, since most of the notes are only useful at the time of my brain-storming. I usually store just the pages with notes I like to hang on to and throw away the notebook. I’ve always hated doing that.

I digitize my handwritten notes every now and then to store them permanently. This system has been working out ok for me so far. I was hoping to improve this process.

reMarkable 2

In order to solve this problem, I got the new reMarkable 2. I pre-ordered it in early March and after a lot of waiting, got it mid-October. After using it for two months, here are my thoughts.

What I like

I primarily use if for reading pdfs (love the highlighting and notes feature) and writing notes. What I like about it is that it has a distraction-free setup. The limited browsing access is something I really like. The display is great and the writing experience is just enjoyable. The sound that the marker makes while writing emulates the feel of writing on paper. The marker’s writing latency is just too good. It almost matches the Apple Pencil 2.

Writing experience on reMarkable 2

Also, the fact that it’s just a linux box open with the SSH interface, makes it more appealing to me.

The handwritten notes to text conversion feature in the reMarkable 2 tablet works well. I do have to make some changes to the final text, but that’s more easier than writing everything down again from the scratch.

What I don’t like

The price point of $399 (+ $49 for the pencil) seems high for what it offers and might not be right for everyone. I wish it was around $199. I do feel the marker is a bit heavy, but, it doesn’t bother me too much.

Its feature set is perfect for my usage and that was exactly what I was looking for.

Final Thoughts

I think the reMarkable 2 is a fantastic device and I like it. But, I don’t think it is meant for everyone. If you are like me who likes to write a ton, then it might for the right device for you. If you don’t care about the writing experience or are not bothered by the distractions an iPad ships with, then getting an iPad might be a better option.

10,000 Active Users

My Google Chrome extension, Rearrange Tabs, hit the major milestone of 10,000 active users! I never expected this to happen and it goes without saying that I am elated.

WOOT! 10,000 active users for my "Rearrange Tabs" Google Chrome extension! 9k to 10k in less than 3 months. This is awesome 🎉 Thanks to everyone who has contributed to the open source project: https://t.co/2NTU43UcE7 https://t.co/tDbRyRkKX0 https://t.co/UoZnlzaeTk pic.twitter.com/n2uJ74EFDW
— MOHNISH (@thallavajhula) November 20, 2020

I started the project so that I could move tabs around in the browser without having to use my mouse and to satiate my obsessive compulsiveness to arrange my tabs in a particular order. I decided to open source the code so that other users would benefit from it and maybe even build something better. To my surprise, I saw users contributing back to the project and adding new features, which was really cool. That’s the beauty of Open Source.

5.5 years later, the extension has now reached 10,000 active users. The fact that so many users actively use it and like it, makes me feel good.

Thanks to all the contributors of the project. Cheers to all of you and the extension’s userbase! 🥳 🎉

PIT Score

Starting a new project and not finishing it can be quite a discouraging experience. If it ends up becoming something you tend to do often, you lose the motivation to pursue new ideas and that can be bad.

How many times have you started a project and felt like you should’ve picked another one? What if you have a technique to figure out which idea/project to pick next? You should pick the one that you’re more inclined towards. But, how do you get clarity around this inclination?

It’s extremely important to have clarity on why you want to work on a project, how interested you are, and which technology you want to use. I’ve come up with a technique that I use myself for getting this clarity. It’s simple really.

PIT Score

PIT stands for Purpose Interest Technology. I consider these three as the key factors that provide clarity on which idea to pick next. I’ve tried this technique with a few ideas/projects now and I’m pleased to inform you that it has worked really well.

Who is it for?

Do you enjoy working on side projects in your spare time?
Do you have a lot of ideas that you want to work on, but never get around to?
Do you have trouble prioritizing your ideas?

If you’ve answered “Yes” to the above questions, this technique is for you. Although, it is not entirely just for people that fall in to this category.

How does it work?

The technique itself is fairly straight forward. You assign a certain inclination value for each of the key factors, for each of your ideas and calculate the PIT score of each idea and sort them by the score. Here’s how it is done.

I’ll be using the following list of ideas to explain and demonstrate the technique:

Learn Machine learning
Build a web UI for a CLI tool
Write a fun new game

Step 0: Define inclination values for each factor and assign scores

Each of the key factors i.e. Purpose, Interest, and Technology, need a pre-defined set of values that denote your inclination towards the corresponding idea.

Even though you can update these later, it will be rare.

For Purpose, your inclination values could be:

Personal use
Learning new technology
Help solve a problem for others

For Interest, your inclination values could be:

Very interested
Interested
May be with some external motivation

For Technology, your inclination values could be:

Very familiar
Sort-of familiar
Unfamiliar

These are some examples that I’ve come up with. They can be customized and changed per your needs.

Assign a score to each of these inclination values. You need to be careful with assigning scores since they make or break this technique. You can set up a scale for yourself and assign a score from that scale. In the current example, I’ve used a scale from 1 to 10.

Some example scores are –

Purpose:

Name	Score
Personal use	10
Acquire new skill	5
Help solve a problem for others	1

Interest:

Name	Score
Very interested	10
Interested	7
May be with some external motivation	2

Technology:

Name	Score
Very familiar	9
Sort-of familiar	6
Unfamiliar	2

These are just values that I’ve come up with. These are extremely subjective. So, you’d have to define these values appropriately, according to you. For instance, the scores you’d assign to “Unfamiliar” technology or “Acquire new skill” purpose, might be completely different from the scores I’d assign myself. As you’ll see, these scores play a crucial role in computing the PIT score.

Step 1: Apply PIT values to your ideas

For each of your idea, populate the Purpose inclination, Interest inclination, and Technology inclination values.

Idea	Purpose	Interest	Technology
Learn Machine learning	Acquire new skill	Interested	Sort-of familiar
Build a web UI for a CLI tool	Help solve a problem for others	Very interested	Unfamiliar
Write a fun new game	Personal use	Interested	Very familiar

Step 2: Calculate

This is by far the easiest part. You substitute the scores for each of the values and calculate the PIT score of each of your ideas using the following formula:

PIT_score = P_score + I_score + T_score

Here’s how the table would look like –

Idea	P score	I score	T score	PIT score
Learn Machine learning	5	7	6	18
Build a web UI for a CLI tool	1	10	2	13
Write a fun new game	10	7	9	26

Step 3: Sort

Sort the ideas by the PIT score in descending order. Voila! Your projects are now sorted by a score that provides clarity on which idea you’re most likely to finish once you start. This is due to the inclination you have towards the project or the idea.

Idea	P score	I score	T score	PIT score
Write a fun new game	10	7	9	26
Learn Machine learning	5	7	6	18
Build a web UI for a CLI tool	1	10	2	13

This sorted list provides clarity around the friction you’d face in order to start a project.

Higher the PIT score, lower the friction.

As you have probably noticed, even though the interest level is “Very interested” for the project “Build a web UI for a CLI tool”, the PIT score ended up being pretty low. This is due to the fact that the technology is “Unfamiliar” and the purpose is “Help solve a problem for others”, the scores of which are pretty low in the given example. Just by looking at the original list and assuming that you would want to start with that project would’ve been a mistake. On the other hand, “Write a fun new game” has the highest PIT score, even though the interest level is only “Interested”.

A spreadsheet can be a convenient option to maintain this list and the scores. Bonus, use spreadsheet functions to automate the calculation and sorting process. This is what I currently do. Building a simple web page to handle this would be really easy, but, it had a very low PIT score 😉 and so I avoided it.

Important

In order for this technique to work, you need to be careful while picking the scores for the inclination values.

Extensibility

You can extend this technique to add more factors to your ideas, finer-grained inclination values, and better scoring.

Applying this technique to my personal list of projects surfaced a lot more information about my projects. I was happy with the outcome.

Safe way to calculate the mid in a range

Given a range, calculating the mid is a straight forward process.

mid = (low + high) / 2;

But, there’s a problem with this line. Adding two large positive numbers can result in an overflow, if the sum is more than the max positive number.

One way to fix it is to use the following:

mid = low + ((high - low) / 2);

This’ll prevent the expression from overflowing to a negative value. I’ve read this line in random code so many times and wondered why anyone would want to write it this way instead of the simpler and more straight forward way I mentioned in the beginning of this blog. It wasn’t until I read this lovely blog post that I understood the reason behind it.

North

I got an email this morning, with the subject “North + Google” from North. According to the email, Google had acquired them. A quick Google search about the company pleasantly surprised me that it was Thalmic Labs. I didn’t realize Thalmic Labs changed their name to North.

I still remember getting excited when I received one of their very first few devices back when they launched and were still small. It was called Myo armband. It seemed really promising.

Thank you very much @thalmic
you guys are awesome. #TimeToHack pic.twitter.com/ckeKTfwbC7
— MOHNISH (@thallavajhula) March 17, 2014

I played around with it for a few days and wrote a tiny application to track hand gestures and control my OS with the gestures. It was fun. Then, I got busy with other things and completely forgot about the product and the company. I knew they had potential.

I am quite happy for them and believe that Google will use North’s resources wisely. For me, personally, reading the email reminded me of how much I enjoy working on fun side projects. I am glad that hasn’t changed one bit even today!

FUT 20 06/28

The following is my latest squad –

FUT 20 06/01

I’ve decided to move away from a Ligue 1 team and try out Bundesliga players. This was to help me upgrade my weak defense. Here’s my latest updated team –

Here’s my in-game formation –

As you can see, I have a few newcomers.

FUT 20 05/14

Here’s my newly updated team –

FUT 20 05/05

Here’s what my latest team looks like –

Here’s my in-game formation with this team –

FIFA 20

I love Football and I play FIFA 20, especially FIFA Ultimate Team (FUT), a lot. I love the game in spite of the awful patches EA Sports releases to screw up the gameplay often times.

FUT in FIFA is a fun mode where you can build your own club with players from different clubs/nations/leagues. I enjoy curating my team. I tweak around the instructions you can apply to a player and see how the player performs during a match. It’s really fun.

Here’s my current starting XI –

https://www.easports.com/fifa/ultimate-team/web-app/?showoffId=iZTFynS2nTqM1:FFA20PS4

So far, my pack luck has been great this season. I’ve packed Leo (94 rated CL untradable), Cristiano (93 rated CL untradable), Rijkaard (90 tradable Prime Icon) and Kante (89 rated untradable). I’ve managed to pack even Salah (90 rated untradable), Mahrez (89 rated ShapeShifter untradable), Lemar (87 rated FUT Birthday untradable).

Decade In Review (2010 – 2019)

Every year, I write a Happy New Year blog post to recap my previous year. I’ve been doing this every year since the past 10 years. It sort of became a tradition. Now that we’ve entered a new decade, I thought it’d be fun to start writing a blog post to recap my previous decade. This will be my first Decade In Review blog post.

My life completely changed in the past decade. I experienced a lot of ups and downs (I lost my Mom 💔). I learned a lot of valuable life lessons. All the difficulties I faced made me a stronger person. It has been a humbling experience. I feel very fortunate and am grateful for that.

Highlights 🎉

👨‍🎓Graduated with a Master’s Degree in Computer Science
👨‍💻Became a professional Software Engineer
🤵 💍 👰Got married

Influences & Inspirations 🙏

Here’s a list of people who’ve influenced or inspired me to be a better version of me in the past decade –

Interesting Trends 📈

🏃‍♂️Increased emphasis on health and fitness
👨‍💻Transitioned into the role of a Senior Software Engineer
📚Picked up the habit of reading books
📝Blogged consistently every year for over 10 years
💻Created and contributed to open source software

Honorable Mentions 🎯

(this weirdly makes me sound like WatchMojo)

📱Bought my first smartphone
💻Bought my first pro laptop
🚗Bought my first car
🧳Traveled to a new country

Individual Years 📆

Only the past decade –

Then -> Now 👻

Here’s to taking it as it comes in the next decade, cheers! 🍻

Happy New Year 2020

Happy New Year 2020! 🎉

Holy cow! 2019 went by real quick. The theme I chose to go with for 2019 was Consistency. Whatever I did, I just wanted to do it consistently. Leading a disciplined life has always been something that I strived for, but, I never really put in my effort in the right direction. To lead a disciplined life, consistency is the key. Humility also adds a lot of weight to it.

The way I arrived at this decision was completely unexpected and accidental. In January 2019, I decided to come up with a resolution for the rest of the year. In order to do this, I made a big list of things I wanted to do. Then, I prioritized the list of things to figure out which one meant the most to me. I jotted down all the pros and cons of picking up a particular resolution from the list. I put in a lot of thought into this, since, picking up a resolution meant that I had to follow it through for the rest of the year. After a point, all the things I prioritized bubbled up the fact that I needed to be more disciplined about whatever I did.

I mean, by definition, a New Year’s Resolution means

A firm decision made on New Year’s Eve or New Year’s Day to do or refrain from doing something over the course of the coming year

Thus, I ended up discarding all my specific resolutions and sticking with a high-level resolution of being disciplined.

After carefully assessing my year, I feel like I did a decent job at maintaining consistency. I could’ve done better, but, I’m getting there. I’ve at least got the basics down. So, I can use this experience and knowledge to get better in 2020.

Highlights of 2019

→ Started at Adobe.

→ Went on a 3 day 32 mile backpacking hike/camping trip to Havasupai. Hiked to Havasu falls, Mooney falls & Beaver falls. It was an amazing experience. Highly recommend the hike.

→ Built a few fun open source projects.

→ Achieved my personal best at writing the most number of blog posts in a calendar year.

→ Built a sustenance plan in order to stay fit.

That’s about it. Hope you all have a Wonderful and Happy New Year/Decade.

Whiling away time on an International Flight

Location: 41,000 ft in the air

I’m visiting India after 2 years and my first flight is via Dubai. It’s a 14 hour flight and I’ve decided to try something new this time. I usually like to watch movies during my flight. So, I’ve decided to do just that, except, this time, I’m planning on blogging my reviews of all the movies that I watch during the flight.

Let’s see how this one goes.

Uri: The Surgical Strike

It’s about India’s Surgical Strike. Worth a watch. I liked the screenplay of the movie. I didn’t get bored at any point during the whole movie. On to the next one.

Diego Maradona: A documentary

This is just a documentary about World Champion, Maradona. Even though the documentary felt very long, it was good. Learned a lot more than I knew about Maradona, especially about Napoli, Italy, and Serie A during the late 80s.

Ad Astra

Mostly picked this for Brad Pitt. After watching the trailer it seemed interesting and oh boy, I was so wrong. The movie is about how an astronaut learns that his father, another astronaut, is alive, after decades of believing that he died during one of the space missions to Neptune. Even though the idea of the story was fresh and even interesting, the movie itself was pure torture. Hope the next one is a better one.

Aladdin

As a kid, I grew up watching Disney’s Aladdin cartoon. I liked the movie. Can’t tell if I liked it because it was better than Ad Astra or if I genuinely liked the movie. Either way, I enjoyed it.

At this point, I was really exhausted. I watched way too many movies back-to-back. Thought a little sleep might fix that and did just that. I did watch another movie after waking up.

Angel Has Fallen

I watched Gerard Butler’s Olympus Has Fallen and London Has Fallen movies. So, picking up Angel Has Fallen seemed like a no brainer. It’s about how his character in the movie is set up and how he overcomes it to prove his innocence. It was okay. It definitely wasn’t a great movie.

That wraps up my first flight. I’ll try to watch the El Classico on my next flight.

I am on my connecting flight now. I guess I have time for another movie.

The Hustle

I felt like watching a comedy movie and picked The Hustle. It’s about how two con artists meet each other and run a long con. Sadly, the movie was disappointing.

And just as I was done, I landed in Hyderabad!

The most critical feature of Instagram

Instagram is a simple and fun application. The simplicity of the application is what led to its success. It is extremely addictive.

However, its most important feature or lack thereof, is the regram functionality. Instagram doesn’t allow users to just repost the same image from another user natively. The absence of this functionality is just wonderful. Users can definitely install third party apps that support this functionality, but, Instagram doesn’t support it natively.

As a user, your feed is usually pretty clean. There’re no non-sensical memes or random images showing up in your feed. You definitely can subscribe to them, but, you don’t see them unless you specifically subscribe to them.

Personally, I think this is great. It keeps the app very focused and clean.

Dashboard

A while ago, I wanted to build a data aggregation service that’d allow its users to fetch data from a set of data sources defined by them. I wanted to allow the users to configure the data fetch interval for each source. This led to the birth of the Dashboard project.

Dashboard is a data aggregating web application that provides a way to customize and display the aggregated data. It’s an open source project. The code is hosted on GitHub.

Features

Webhook support to receive data
Fetch data from various sources at different intervals
Plugin support to enable extensibility

Use Cases

Dashboard can be used to display any arbitrary updates from various sources. Some specific use cases of Dashboard can be –

Keeping track of health of endpoints
Display data received from Git hooks
Monitor blogs for updates

The possibilities are endless.

Stack

The application backend is written in Go. For this use case, Go fits perfectly well and I really like Go. The current implementation of frontend is in vanilla JS (I feel primitive just saying that 😜). However, I do plan on using Vue or Preact.

For details regarding the future of the project and more, please check out the README file of the project.

Focus

Before I started working on this project, I made sure I focused on 3 things:

Simplicity
Extensibility
Data parsing/display

Every time I took a decision around a particular feature implementation, I went through this list to ensure none of these aspects were sacrificed.

Simplicity: I wanted to make the app very simple to setup, configure, and use. I put in a lot of emphasis on the simplicity of the application. There is no database. The installation is pretty straight forward. Just download the binary file and run it. Thank you, Go!

Extensibility: I made sure to allow users to write their own plugins. These plugins are shareable. Users can display data from whichever source they want to via these plugins.

Data parsing/display: Once we fetch the data from a source, we need to have control over which parts of it we want to display in the UI. The user should be able to display only the data that matters. Right now, this is static. But, I’m working on a solution to allow users to map data.

Development

The project is under development and is still in Alpha stage. I plan on working on it in my free time. Any contribution to the project is welcome.

License

As always, I’ve open sourced the project under the standard MIT license. GitHub: https://github.com/mohnish/dashboard.

Hope you like my project. Feel free to contribute to the project. Cheers! 🍺

WordPress 5.3

After, what seemed like a long wait, WordPress 5.3 is finally here. Right on time. Congratulations to the WordPress team. I just finished upgrading my blog to the latest version of WordPress. I’ve been waiting to try out the final version of the brand new TwentyTwenty theme that ships with the latest version of WordPress.

My blog is currently running the TwentyTwenty theme. There are a few noticeable UI glitches, but, I’m OK with them. I definitely don’t want to switch back to the old theme because of these bugs. I’m sure these will be fixed soon. I haven’t investigated these bugs yet. These could even be caused by any of the plugins I’m using.

Apple Watch Series 5

Before continuing to read this post, I would like to clarify that this is not an in-depth review of the Series 5 (S5) nor is an actual comparison of Series 5 against a Series 4 (S4). This is more of an observation based on the specs mentioned on Apple Watch’s website.

Most of Apple’s products are amazing. I love my Apple Watch. I watch all of Apple’s product announcements with a great deal of enthusiasm. Naturally, I was really looking forward to yesterday’s Apple event. The introduction video is really impressive.