about.me and a better LinkedIn concept

Here is my about.me page. I knew this existed for a while but never quite managed to create a page for myself. At last the cat got curious: Last week I went ahead and created one for myself anyhow. Looks quite ok, right? Yeah, I need to invest a little more time to make it look better than that. But I liked how I am able to present a coherent story....

October 28, 2015 · 4 min · abishek

m-Receipts for POS Payments

For a couple of months, we decided to start tracking where our money got spent. We felt the need to see if we could do a little better each month. And maybe if we collected this data for a few months, we may see a spending pattern emerge that would help us budget our expenses way better going forward. There is just one hiccup: data entry. I still went ahead and did this for two months....

October 23, 2015 · 4 min · abishek

100 Posts

This is my hundredth post on the blog. I got here in less than two years, averaging > two posts a week. But the distribution is not that even. Maybe it is time to have this blog more noticed and have people read and give me a piece of their minds. For a start, I’ll publish the links to my first circle of friends. I definitely like to write. But I can’t write on a cue....

September 23, 2015 · 1 min · abishek

For the love of pubsub

I have fancied publish-subscribe middleware(pubsub) architectures for quite sometime. When we were still very new in CTS, I came up with a wild suggestion to try this for getting a data dump from a legacy system into our moodle instance. I was quite clueless about what this would entail in terms of development effort, but I could create a PoC setup within a few days which made me quite confident of being able to pull this off....

September 19, 2015 · 4 min · abishek

Ninaithaale Inikkum

Noni and I spotted this poster on Orchard road. It was an ad for a movie playing – one of the many as part of the SG50 celebrations. Sorry about the bad picture quality, its sort of necessary to make the point. Noni said “wait, doesn’t this guy look a lot like KamalHassan?” I said “yeah! What’s better? The guy next to him looks a lot like Rajini Kanth” They had to be....

September 18, 2015 · 1 min · abishek

Building a Portfolio

I have come to realize that I need a portfolio. A showcase of what I can do. While I can work in multiple disciplines, I only have a resume to say this. And maybe some references. Going forward, neither of this is going to help. At least not much. And when I am trying to get interesting gigs or get an interview or two with some promising startup, I need a portfolio more than ever....

September 17, 2015 · 1 min · abishek

Seth Godin

I sometimes think Seth Godin has a team that just spies on me to give him inputs on what he should write about. Because there are so many instances where his post for the day directly answers something I have been pondering over or ranting about to Noni. Ask her, she’d vouch for this. I find it difficult to accept most of his advice, though. I think I have my feet too deep in staying afloat that I am super scared to change any of that....

September 16, 2015 · 1 min · abishek

A full stack developer

I recently came across someone who called himself a “full stack” developer. By his definition of the term, I am at best a “full queue” developer. In my entire career, I have never written my own stack implementation. But I recently wrote my own working queue. I didn’t have the heart to break his illusion. I know, I should have educated him and become a better person myself. But I also know, from a lot of my students, that am the worst teacher they ever had to learn from....

September 7, 2015 · 2 min · abishek

Exile

I sort of went into an exile since the last post. I think none of this blogging platforms in working for me. I hate to type with my phone, in spite of its bigger screen. I don’t carry my pad everywhere either. Not so much of the mac too. Basically, I travel only with my phone and I don’t want to have to type with the phone. That means, I lose all the brilliant thoughts for a post by the time I get to the mac or to the office laptop that I usually write these posts from....

August 24, 2015 · 3 min · abishek

Mornings without technology

As usual, I have started running another experiment.But this is only two days young. I should wait for another month or so to see if I really hold this up. The routine is the SAVERS routine that I came across in techcrunch or mashable recently. The actual routine is like this: Sit in silence; Meditate Affirmations Visualizations Exercise – my usual yoga Reading – currently “War of the worlds by H....

July 29, 2015 · 2 min · abishek