Game of Thrones

Game of Thrones
Image from the iconic Game of Thrones title sequence

I just finished watching the series finale of Game of Thrones (GoT) and it feels like the end of an era.

I grew up watching the show these past 8 years. I still remember the day my ex-roommate, Gopi, suggested it to me for the very first time. I had just graduated and was actively looking for jobs at the time and wanted to start watching something to take my mind off of my job hunt.

I watched the very first episode of the show and immediately got hooked. It was extremely captivating. It wasn’t like anything I had seen before on TV. The quality of the show was unprecedented.

I started watching the show knowing nothing about the books. I loved it. It instantly became my favorite TV series. I binge-watched the rest of the episodes of the first season and waited for the season finale and watched it with even more excitement. Ever since the first season, whenever the show aired, I waited every Sunday eagerly for HBO to drop a new GoT episode and watched it immediately to avoid the risk of spoilers all over the internet.

I, like many of the others who watched the show, rooted for all the main characters, not knowing their fate. I felt bad every time a character that I rooted for died. I obsessively followed all the fan theories on Reddit and many other sources. This was the first time I had seen such a response to a TV show.

I do agree that there has been a quality drop since the part where the story from the books ended, nevertheless, it’s a great TV show.

George R. R. Martin (GRRM) is a genius for coming up with such great content and HBO did a great job by turning it into a TV series.

Thank you, GRRM & HBO for such a brilliant experience.

Gutenberg

The UX around composing a blog post has changed significantly over the years. It has moved from pure text based posts to having image embeds, galleries, videos and cards from various websites such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube etc. The text editors are responsible for good UX and it’s great that they are evolving. This evolution lets users focus on the content and makes it really easy for them to express their ideas.

Medium’s Text Editor

Over the past few years, one of the biggest innovations around text editing has been Medium’s Text Editor. It’s a wonderful editor that looks great. Here’s a couple of screenshots of the editor while editing a story on Medium.com:

Medium’s Text Editor showing text styling options
Medium’s Text Editor showing media embedding options

As you can see, the UI looks clean, minimalistic, beautiful and lets the user focus on what’s truly important – Content.

Now, all of this is great, but, there’s one key thing missing here – Extensibility. Being able to extend the functionality of this editor using plugins makes it so much more powerful.

Gutenberg

WordPress’s new text editor is called Gutenberg. It is fantastic. Imagine having the beauty and functionality of Medium’s text editor, along with support for plugins. That’s Gutenberg.

First off, Gutenberg’s UI/UX is amazing. Composing a blog post in Gutenberg feels really fun. It makes you want to write more. It uses this concept of Blocks. Each Block can be an entity in your content. This basically means that a paragraph, image, image gallery, embedded video, embedded audio etc are all Blocks. Here’s how editing a Block looks like in Gutenberg:

Composing this blog post in Gutenberg

The UI looks great and editing Blocks is really simple. Also, the editor comes with a handy shortcut to insert new Blocks. This is activated by typing in “/” anywhere in the compose region of the editor. Here’s how it looks like:

Gutenberg’s shortcut to access various Blocks

The default editor ships with a lot of Blocks. But, there’s a huge community of developers building awesome new Blocks that can be integrated into the editor by installing them as WordPress plugins.

Conclusion

I’m very satisfied with WordPress’s direction to improve the compose experience. I think this is only going to get better and I can’t wait to see what the community comes up with. If you want to give Gutenberg a try, here’s the live link: https://wordpress.org/gutenberg/

The Reverse Switch

After 7 years, I’m back on WordPress. Lot of things have changed in 7 years. For starters, the prices have significantly gone down for hosting your server. Also, the UX of the WP mobile app is now so much better. The new blocks based text editor is very interesting.

One of the primary reasons for me to switch back to WP from Jekyll is to be able to compose blog posts even from my phone.

Lately, my workflow for blogging has been something like the following:

  1. Compose an initial draft in the Notes.app
  2. Once the draft is 80-90% done, convert it to Markdown and iterate over the draft until I find the content satisfactory
  3. Push to GitHub to publish the post

As you can see, steps 2 and 3 require me to be on the computer. Those steps can’t really be done from my phone in a simple way. As a result, I’ve seen myself slacking away from finalizing posts more often.

This switch back to WP should make it more easier for me to post more often. I already notice the difference, since, I’m composing this post on my phone. Now, I can focus on writing more and write more.

10 years

Being busy with travel, work and some other personal things, I totally forgot that on March 20th 2019, my blog completed its 10 years of existence. Personally, that’s a huge milestone for me.

It feels good to have had my blog for 10 years. A lot has changed in the past 10 years and my blog helps me see and understand how I’ve evolved over the past decade. I started my blog as a personal project. It started off as an outlet for my interest in writing about things happening in my life. As I grew older, my interests changed and so did the things I was blogging about. Right now, most of my blog posts I write are technical at some level, which seems obvious given my love for technology.

This isn’t my first blog though. I used to have another blog around 2005, named “Stealth Factory” (cut me some slack, I was a kid ), where I’d blog about “tips & tricks” to improve Windows Operating System. I had the blog till 2008. At some point, I wanted to write about things that were more personal to me and that’s how I started my current blog.

The frequency at which I blog has definitely improved over the years.

I’m planning on revamping my blog to make it more simpler and yet, functional. I plan on redesigning my blog with a huge emphasis on typography this time around.

I have a few ideas that I’d like to implement. I have some topics that I want to write about this year. I have a lot of unorganized writing that I need to organize into proper blog posts. Overall, I’m excited about the future of my blog.

If you’ve been a follower of my blog, then, thanks for being a reader. I hope to write more interesting content in the future.

Here’s to another 10 years!

Happy New Year 2019

Happy New Year! 🎉

2018 has been a great year for me. Both, professionally and personally. I’ve managed to be very productive in 2018 and it has been a very humbling experience.

2017 was a particularly tough year for me. I was really sad, went through a lot and I wanted to pull myself back together. It was a tough phase of my life. I realized that and I wanted to get a hold of myself. I knew that I needed a ton of discipline in order to do that.

I wanted to set some resolutions for myself. Unlike previous years, this time I was serious. I wanted to make sure I stuck to them and so, I came up with a few challenges for myself for 2018. Some are personal to me and I can’t share them. However, the others that I can share publicly are below.

Blogging

I tend to procrastinate a lot when it comes to blogging. I, typically, start of a blog by gathering my thoughts and then organizing them into something that makes sense. This process of organizing is not really complicated. But I make it complicated. I keep trying to achieve perfection around tiny details and I never really end up finish my posts. So, in 2018, I wanted to stop doing that and write 12 blog posts.

I’ve successfully managed to write 9. I don’t see it as me failing to write the remaining 3 posts. Instead, I’m happy knowing the fact that I came up with a framework to stop procrastinating and writing more posts. It is now, a much more streamlined process, allowing me to just focus on the content of the post.

Travel

I travelled a decent amount in 2018. I visited the following places:

  • Virginia
  • Las Vegas
  • Salt Lake City
  • Antelope Canyon
  • Denver
  • Los Angeles
  • Newark
  • New York City
  • Boston

Weight Loss

After almost a decade of being overweight, I finally chose to prioritize my health. I’ve always had trouble staying disciplined and being consistent with my diet and exercise. I wanted to change that.

I put in a lot of effort and successfully lost weight. I’ve lost 20+ lbs. I’m no longer overweight. My clothes are all now a size smaller. Even though I’ve lost a decent amount of weight, what gives me more happiness is knowing that I’m capable of staying disciplined.

Learning ✨

I learned to swim. I suck at it, but, it counts for something. Also, I learned a new programming language, Go.

Books

I didn’t read many books last year. Here’s my Goodreads for 2018.

Good luck

I haven’t come up with any resolutions for 2019, yet. I’ll probably post about them if I come up with any.

With that being said, I hope you all have a fantastic 2019. All the best with your resolutions and I wish you all a wonderful and prosperous New Year. Cheers! 🍻

Geotagging Blog Posts

I was checking out some photos on my iPhone the other day and I really liked how the Photos app organized my photos by location. It really adds a lot of context to my photos. In the past, I’ve used the map view to see where a particular photo was taken a ton of times, but, I never really appreciated the value of Geotagging the photos.

Context is quite important when you’re trying to express an opinion or trying to state something. I think location adds a little bit of context, if not a lot, to a blog post. I don’t see it being done on any of the personal blogs I follow. I think it’s an interesting piece of information to add to the metadata of a blog post.

I’ve spent some time to retroactively add the location tag to all of my previous blog posts too. I will probably add a filter in the archive page later to filter posts by location. I may even add a map view similar to the one found in the Photos app.

Update: Now that I’ve moved to WordPress, I am yet to figure out how to set this up with WordPress Mobile App, since, it doesn’t seem to be possible to location tag from the Web UI.

Wearable Tech

I love Wearable Tech™.

My love for wearable tech started off in May 2012 with the launch of Nike+ Fuel Band. It was an amazing product. I absolutely loved everything about it. The design, the display, the battery, the style and of course, the UX.

The next year, Fitbit came up with a competing product – Fitbit Flex. So, obviously, I bought that too. I really liked it.

A year later, the company that I used to work at, gave all of its employees a brand new Fitbit Charge (the one without the heart-rate sensor), as a holiday gift. I used it for a few months and gave it away to a friend and bought myself the Fitbit Charge HR (the one with the heart-rate sensor). It felt amazing to be able to check my heart-rate without having to wear a chest band.

The next year, I bought Moov. I used it for a very brief period and lost interest in the product due to its minimal feature set. I switched back to using my Fitbit Charge HR.

Soon, Apple entered the game with the launch of the original Apple Watch. I didn’t really like it due to lack of any new features and the unreasonable price.

A couple of years later, in 2016, Apple announced the Apple Watch Series 2. It was water proof and had a built-in GPS. So, I pre-ordered it. The hardware design was fantastic. I loved it and wore it every single day. I used it for two full years.

Apple recently released the Apple Watch Series 4. I really liked the ECG feature and so, I got the new watch. So far, I like it.

A few months ago, a buddy of mine asked me what I use my smart watch for. It was surprising because I couldn’t think of anything other than “checking time”. After giving it a decent amount of thought, I came up with a list of things I typically use my Apple Watch for:

  1. Check time (duh?)
  2. Track my fitness
  3. Keep track of meetings (calendar events)
  4. Create and check reminders
  5. Check notifications
  6. Check Weather and weather conditions
  7. Keep track of UVI & Air Quality (you need to keep track of these especially when you live in the Bay Area)
  8. Check sports scores
  9. Control music
  10. Make payments at stores that support Apple Pay (especially at Gas Stations)
  11. Ignore/Decline calls. I use my phone to answer calls.
  12. Meditate with Breathe

I have seen some video reviews of the Samsung Gear S3 and it seems like a solid watch. There’s no way I am going to switch to it now, but, it’s good that Samsung is working hard to keep Apple on their toes. I would really like to see Google enter the competition with their own hardware.

It Doesn’t Have To Be Crazy At Work

I like David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH) and Jason Fried’s style of writing. It’s very casual and often times funny. In the past, I’ve enjoyed reading their other books such as “Getting Real” and “Rework”. I was never really motivated enough to read their other book “Remote”.

“Getting Real” changed the way I think about projects and even my side projects. I enjoyed reading “Rework” too. It didn’t have a similar impact on me as “Getting Real” had, but it’s still a good book nonetheless. All of these books tend to follow a similar narrative – busting the myths of common work practices.

DHH and Jason recently published their new book called “It Doesn’t Have To Be Crazy At Work”. I immediately pre-ordered the book. I got really excited once I received the book and started reading it.

"It

Here are some of the interesting points from the book:

  • Sustained exhaustion is not a badge of honor
  • Being comfortable in your zone is essential to being calm
  • JOMO (Joy of Missing Out)
  • An hour can be spent with one focused 60 min block or fractured into multiple blocks of 15 min or so on. Achieve for the 60 min block
  • If you want your employees to take a vacation, take one yourself. If you don’t want your employees to come in when they’re sick, stay home when you’re sick. This will help the employees to not feel guilty for doing so
  • Trust Battery
  • Sleep is very important
  • Balance your Work and Personal time
  • No fakecations (fake vacations). Go off the grid when on a vacation
  • Deadlines are fixed. Not the scope
  • Give enough time for an idea to settle in. No knee-jerk reactions
  • “Disagree and commit” can be a thing. Letting the team know you disagree and you are still committing to the idea/project is always better than not letting the team know
  • Spend the first week or two of the project to clarify unknowns and validate assumptions
  • Doing nothing should always be an option in a project
  • Embrace calm

Now, obviously, I didn’t want to steal the essence of the book and so, I am purposefully vague in the above points.

I think the book is good. Reading through the first few chapters might feel like the book is challenging reality. The authors talk about the problems in the current work environments and offer solutions to avoid/fix those problems.

My rating of the book: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ (out of 5)

If you’re interested in following the books I read, here’s my goodreads profile.

“Comparison is the death of joy”

Mark Twain

Weight Loss

Up until mid 2008, I had always been underweight. I used to be extremely lean and my focus back then was to gain weight. I wanted to look decent when I wore shirts and not look like someone hung a shirt on a coat hanger. To get a mental picture, I’m a little over 5’9” and weighed 120 lbs. With the focus to get bigger and look more muscular, I joined a gym. I put in my best effort and sincerely exercised every single day leaving the weekends. I knew I had to gain weight and so, I ate a lot of food. I didn’t really care about which foods to eat or if a particular food was healthy or not. My focus was purely on gaining weight and building muscle. Within 6 months, these changes started showing. I gained a decent amount of weight and by August 2009, I weighed 154 lbs. Mission accomplished.

Becoming Overweight

In the Summer of 2010, I decided to look for an internship to get some industry experience. However, I failed to find an internship and so, I spent the entire summer learning iOS application development and built an iOS app. I basically ended up all day staying home, watching football, learning iOS programming and doing nothing else. As a result, I gained a lot of weight due to my sedentary lifestyle. I ended up weighing 174 lbs by the end of that summer. That was the first time I became overweight. The ideal weight for a male of my height lies in the range of 125 lbs to 168 lbs.

Ever since that summer, I stopped caring about my health. Way too many things became higher priority. For a few years, I had “hit the gym regularly and stay healthy” as one of my New Year resolutions. I could never really do it. I hit the gym on and off here and there a few times a year, maybe. I became really lazy. Fast forward to January 2018, I weighed 187 lbs.

Road to Improvement

Upon my wife’s recommendation (and enough motivation), I booked an appointment for my annual physical with my Doctor. On June 8th, as per my doctor’s suggestion, I started using MyFitnessPal and started keeping track of my weight using my Withings Smart Body Analyzer. I’ve used MyFitnessPal in the past, but, never consistently. This time, I knew I would use it religiously since my doctor suggested it. I have my Withings Smart Body Analyzer setup such that it pushes my weight data to MyFitnessPal every time I step on the scale. I cannot recommend this enough! This is such a useful feature.

Current State

As of September 13th, I weigh 165.8 lbs. That means, I’ve lost 21.2 lbs since January 1st and 18.5 lbs since June 8th, the date my doctor suggested that I get my shit together. :tada: This puts me back in the healthy weight range for my height and age. For the first time in a little over 8 years, I am in the healthy weight range.

Here’s an (updated 10/14/18) image showing where I currently stand on the BMI scale:

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How Did I do it?

If you want to lose weight, you need to understand 2 things:

  1. The science behind weight loss
  2. How to keep yourself motivated and maintain consistency

The science behind weight loss

Weight loss ultimately boils down to simple science. At least for the most part.

Caloric Deficit leads to weight loss

You need to burn 3,500 calories in order to burn 1 pound of fat. What it means is that you lose 1 pound of fat over a period of 1 week, by consuming 500 fewer calories than your BMR (Basal Metabolic Rate), everyday.

500 cals (caloric deficit per day) x 7 (days of the week) = 3,500 cals (caloric deficit over a week) = 1 pound (weight lost by the end of the week).

Motivation and Consistency

There’s only so much understanding the science behind weight loss can do to your weight loss journey. Motivation is extremely important. Discipline and Consistency, even more. Staying motivated through out the period is really hard. The following helped me stay motivated throughout the process:

  • Not over-thinking about the process
  • Focussing on the result of no more than 1 week at a time
  • Being sincere and respecting the process, since, perspective drives performance

Every week, I’d check my weight and watching my weight drop really motivated me.

What’s next

I still need to lose some more weight. My goal weight is 163.2 lbs. Here’s a live tracker of the progress of my weight loss.

Update (10/14/18): I’ve hit my goal! and here’s a screenshot of the tracker.

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Conclusion

There’re so many people out there, who’ve lost way more than 20 lbs of weight. I’ve always believed that if they can do it, I can too. Now you just need to believe that if I can do it, you sure can too!

I want to inspire at least a few people and help them achieve their weight loss goals.

Personal Blog

A blog is a great place to post interesting, insightful and fun things. Or even boring things. It doesn’t really matter as long as you like doing it. I really enjoy reading my friends’ blogs. It has a different feel to it as opposed to reading a generalized feed on a social network. Typically, I tend to sift through the updates in my feed. I don’t really pay much attention to the items in my feed. That is not really a great experience. This wouldn’t be the case if everyone had their own personal blog.

The biggest thing that social networks fail to capture is the essence of a person. Even if, say, Facebook, allowed its users to customize their profiles completely, it’d still fail to display a person’s uniqueness, since, they all reside on the same domain.

Several factors such as a domain name, page layout, typography, design etc contribute to portraying the uniqueness of an individual. It’d be amazing if there was a social network that allowed its users to customize their domain names, page layout and design. That would enable the users to show off their unique tastes and creativity. It’d be way more interesting to checkout the “profiles” of your friends then. Currently, WordPress does something like that. As part of their paid subscription, WordPress allows its users to customize their domain name, blog themes etc. But, the problem with WordPress is that it doesn’t really do a good job of providing a decent personalized blog feed. The “My Likes” tab for a logged-in user just doesn’t cut it. Medium has solved the personalized blog feed problem. But, it doesn’t completely allow its users to customize their blogs. It lets you pick from few blog post layouts, but, that’s not enough. In an ideal world, every blogging platform would support feeds from every other blogging platform. This removes the dependency on a particular blogging platform. Currently, no active social network or a blogging platform does that.

I think the following are absolutely necessary for complete user satisfaction:

  1. Ability to customize the user’s blog
  2. Ability to subscribe and read subscribed feed from other platforms
  3. Ability to discover newer blogs that might interest a user based on their current interests

This calls for an Open Standard and would be the ideal direction to head in, if the blogging platforms or the social networks really care about their users. All of this is in an ideal world. For now, in the real world, I strongly suggest every one to start their own personal blog if they don’t already have one, on whichever platform they want. One might immediately come up with the following questions —

Who will read my blog?

When I first started blogging, I did it for myself. I still do. I didn’t expect anyone to actually care about what I write. I just wanted to write about things I thought were interesting or funny and went ahead and wrote about them. I’ve been blogging since the past 9 years now and I get a decent amount of traffic on a monthly
basis. Here’s a screenshot from my Google Analytics dashboard.

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This includes my family, friends, people who use and appreciate (or not) my projects etc. So, don’t worry about who will read your blog. Just start writing and people with similar tastes will find, follow and read your blog.

What do I blog about?

Your blog could be anything. It really depends on you. Personally, I like writing about random things. I have a few posts queued up in my drafts directory, which are highly technical and computer science-y. I write about the projects that I’ve worked on, tools I use, things that I find interesting, ideas and opinions. You could even use your blog as a portfolio to showcase and promote your work.

Where do I start?

There are lots of good blogging applications such as WordPress, Tumblr, Blogger, Medium etc. Each have their own pros and cons. I’ll leave it up to you to pick the one that fits your needs. I use Jekyll for my blog and host it on GitHub Pages. I think the simplest one to get started with, is Tumblr. It’s easy to configure and easy to pick a theme from the huge library of themes available.
It also allows you to customize your domain name for free.

Conclusion

If you think I’ve successfully managed to convince you to start a blog, then let me know via Twitter @thallavajhula. I’d love to read about what you’ve written.

Domain name purchase obsession

I love buying interesting domain names. I do that with the hope that one day, I end up using the domain name for one of my side projects or at least work on a side project after purchasing the domain name. Sometimes, I just think of an idea and come up with a good name for it and immediately buy a domain name for it (I blame domainr.com for making it so simple to lookup domain names). Due to various reasons, I don’t get to most of those projects. I end up hoarding the domain names. On one hand, I don’t let go of them and on the other, I feel guilty paying for the domain names and not even using them.

Realization

I realized that I was spending way too much money on domain name renewals on a yearly basis. It was a lot. I knew that I owned a lot of domain names, but, I didn’t really keep track of them. So, one fine day, 3 years ago, I opened up my domain registrar accounts and checked how many domains I owned. Across 3 different domain registrars, I owned a total of 62 domain names! Some were interesting, funny, creative, while some were stupid and some were just silly. Since, I owned a lot of domain names, I was marked as a VIP member by one of the domain registrars. I’d receive special discounts and offers that non-VIP members wouldn’t.

The Fix

The fix was simple really (unlike the realization). I could either sell all my domain names, which is a tedious process and requires a lot of patience or I could let them expire. The latter seemed more appealing to me and so, I let my domain names expire, one by one. Most of them are now registered to other owners. Also, I decided to only buy a domain name after I finish implementing the idea. I did that with my Money app and it worked really well for me. I still do hit domainr.com up, every now and then, but, I don’t buy domain names if I haven’t already worked on the idea. As a result of this approach, after 3 years, I, now, own only 8 domain names and I use them all.

Learning Go

I first learned Go in 2014. I didn’t do anything with it after I learned the basics. After all the years, I even forgot the syntax and the basic concepts. This time, however, I wanted to make sure I properly learned Go and implemented something useful in Go.

I’ve now been programming in Golang since a few weeks and I’m absolutely in love with the language. I enjoy writing code in Go, especially, as someone who has been programming in Ruby for a while now. The language has an amazing design with some really cool features. It’s amazing how simple it is to use Goroutines with Channels. Go removes the apprehension from dealing with concurrent programming.

It’s been a while since I’ve dabbled around a new programming language. A few years ago, I learned Swift and I liked the expressiveness of the language. I had previously written code in Objective-C, the syntax of which (IMHO) is absolute garbage and made me not want to code in it…ever. Anyway, I’m not going to get into how much I dislike Objective-C. To sum it up, I liked learning and coding in Swift. I haven’t really built anything substantial in Swift yet.

So far, programming in Go seems really fresh. I’m super pumped about Goroutines, Channels and the ability to achieve concurrency in Go. It is simple and the concepts are straight forward.

Features I like

  • Use of structs and how one can define methods on these structs
  • Goroutines and channels are fucking amazing. Dealing with concurrency is usually a pain in the ass in other programming languages. Go takes away that pain and makes it simple. It almost seems pretty basic writing goroutines in Go
  • Error handling. I know most people are going to disagree with me on this one, but, I think the approach to error handling in Go is fresh and nice.

Getting Started

Go has fantastic documentation online. The community is great too. But, before attempting to learn the language, I strongly recommend reading this: https://blog.golang.org/gos-declaration-syntax. The blog post sets the tone of the language. This changes the way you think in terms of Go and makes it easy to pick up the language and get better at it.

Next step is to refer to Golang’s Getting Started guide. It’s pretty good. The Go tour is a great place to practice programming in Go.

Resources

If you’re the kind of person that likes to learn a new programming language by watching video tutorials, check out Go Essential Training on Lynda.com.

Here’re some of the videos that I found interesting on YouTube:

There’re tons of other YouTube videos that help you understand Golang better. I’m not going to link them all here. You should be able to find them fairly easily as needed.

Hack

I love building things for fun and lately I’ve been thinking about building a text editor. I’ve used a lot of text editors and IDEs in the past. Here’s the list in a chronological order:

  • vi/vim: my very first code editor. Used it back in my earlier C/C++/Java days
  • Dreamweaver: started using it once I moved to web development for HTML, CSS & JS
  • Eclipse: IDE of choice for Java development later
  • Netbeans: switched to it when Eclipse started becoming a memory hog
  • Visual Studio: used it whenever I wrote C# code
  • Emacs: php/javascript development back in school
  • TextMate: started using it after moving to Ruby
  • Sublime Text: absolutely loved the perf, extensibility (plugins) and liked it better than TextMate. I even bought a license 🙂
  • Atom: liked the idea of an open source text editor built in JS/CS

Atom

Currently, I use Atom on a daily basis. I’ve been using it since the day GitHub started distributing it in invite-only private beta (before open souring it) mode. After 3+ years, I think I am done with Atom. I am tired of using an editor that feels slow even when typing. Since, Atom is an open source project, I can’t really complain. It’s a wonderful initiative and I really appreciate the idea and motivation behind the project. For now, I will switch to Sublime Text. If my text editor proves to be better than Sublime Text, I will switch to using my text editor full time.

Hacking on Hack

I am going to start working on a text editor and I’m calling it Hack 🎉.

It aims to be:

  • Fast
  • Light Weight
  • Easy to use

I’m going to start working on the project and my goal is to have fun and learn a lot while I hack on Hack 😜. As I progress with the project, I’ll try to talk about interesting aspects/problems that I come across, architectural decisions, design and implementation details.

This will be a very highly experimental project and chances are that Hack is not something for you. If you’re interested in tracking the progress of the project, you can follow along on GitHub at https://github.com/mohnish/hack.

Magic Compiler

Innovation in today’s technology is mostly around Artificial Intelligence (AI) and its sub topics such as Machine Learning (ML) and Natural Language Processing (NLP). There is a primary focus on NLP and ML among all the tech companies. This is for a good reason. Tech companies are using NLP and ML in various aspects of their offerings and trying to stay ahead of their respective competitors.

A Magic Compiler

With all of this going on, I feel like NLP & ML will greatly impact the future of programming and programming languages. It could be possible to create a programming language out of pure English (or any language for that matter) grammar. Alright, stay with me here for a second; the way it could work is:

  • The programmer would write what they want to achieve in EnglishStore user data such as name, age, sex, address and favorites in the database and create an endpoint that exposes this data securely
  • Using NLP, the compiler parses this information and creates or uses the existing User class and stores the user attributes such as name, age, sex, address and favorites
  • The compiler keeps correcting itself over the extended usage of the programming language using ML. The compiler figures out the datatype of the attribute. For ex: name is a String. age is an Integer. Since the attribute is named favorites, it figures that it’s a collection of Strings. Since the programmer instructed the compiler to expose an endpoint with the data securely, we get an https endpoint to access the resource.

The programmer can then do something like –
Every user has many photos. Store those photos in Amazon's S3 (maybe) bucket

A programming language like this could become a reality. Of course, this is a massive over-simplification of things, but, it could be possible. I mean, if human beings are capable of making computers perform intellectual tasks, this could totally be possible.

This can also be taken one step further and use speech to text conversion. Programmers can then just speak what they want to build and have the compiler write the code for them.

The advantage to creating something like this is extensibility. Imagine if every person who can speak a language can write code? Any person that can read/write a language, ends up being able to write plugins/extensions/modules in their language and contribute. There’s a lot of smart people out there and this programming model extends their creativity. Right now, it’s just a missed opportunity. It would be amazing to see what people do with their “newly acquired” skill.

Domain-specific languages (DSL)

Today, one can do something remotely similar by using Domain-specific languages (DSLs). But, DSLs are very restricted and don’t offer much in terms of flexibility in their usage. Hence, a proper implementation to support the above mentioned features would be required.

This would be a very interesting project to work on. I will continue research around this subject and see if I can come up with a trivial implementation of this.

Two Years on Chrome Webstore

Exactly 2 years ago (Mar 22nd, 2015), on a Sunday afternoon, I wrote and open sourced Rearrange Tabs. I use it every single day. I find it pretty useful.

The extension got featured on LifeHacker & Changelog 🎉

Here are a few interesting stats about the project:

  • Active Users: 1000+
  • No. of Reviews on Chrome Webstore: 28
  • Rating on Chrome Wesbtore: 5 stars
  • Stars on GitHub: 39
  • Forks on GitHub: 10

Clearly, these are not mind blowing. But they’re not bad either. Also, this is my first project where the code written by my contributors is more than the code I’d initially written. I hope more people use it and find it useful. :cheers:

Blog Changes

This year, I’ve decided to make a few changes to my blog and following are the changes –

SSL enabled site-wide

As you might’ve already noticed, my blog is now served over SSL. I’ve enabled SSL site wide here (mt.cx) & on my mohni.sh domain. You can too, if you’re using GitHub to host your blog. The whole setup is very simple, quick and free.

URL

My blog URL has also changed. I’ve decided to use https://mt.cx for my blog and https://mohni.sh for my profile page. I’ve used mt.cx as my custom url shortener for the past couple of years.

Update: I’ve updated my blog URL to use https://iam.mt

Redesign

After I moved away from Tumblr, I started using GitHub Pages to host my blog. I found a script online to convert my Tumblr blogs into Jekyll supported markdown files. Once I had my markdown files, it was just a matter of pushing them to my homepage repository on GitHub. Ever since the move, my blog has had the same design. It’s time for a change. Over the coming 3-4 months, I will be updating my blog design in increments. These are some of the changes I’m planning on making to my blog this year.