Improving My Coding Skills

I recently finished a course on Coursera. Machine Learning from Andrew Ng. Its been on my radar for the longest time and after several false starts, I finally completed mid last month. But along the way I learnt two things: I still relish math like I always did. I understood the concepts pretty well and am able to come up with correct solutions. I am somewhat terrible at coding them up....

<span title='2020-12-19 02:08:00 +0000 UTC'>December 19, 2020</span>&nbsp;·&nbsp;4 min&nbsp;·&nbsp;abishek

Modern Algebra

Twelfth standard math was hard. We didn’t have a stable teacher all through eleven and for beginning terms of twelve. Whoever took over math usually left within the year, although for no particular reason. Most of the class went to external tuitions for math. It was all the more critical because we had to clear a separate competitive examination for engineering admissions. Aral Mani’s near my house was the most famous of all....

<span title='2020-01-19 01:29:24 +0000 UTC'>January 19, 2020</span>&nbsp;·&nbsp;3 min&nbsp;·&nbsp;abishek

On Being Paranoid

I am a paranoid guy. But my paranoia borders on a potential disorder. I am paranoid about things that might not even happen. For example, I always worry that I cannot do great work. My fear is not about failing, though. My concern is that someone will dig up something I said on my twitter feed that I can’t entirely agree with today. Is that rational? But when has fear been reasonable?...

<span title='2020-01-14 06:06:33 +0000 UTC'>January 14, 2020</span>&nbsp;·&nbsp;3 min&nbsp;·&nbsp;abishek

Developing for the web

I have been writing web applications for quite a while now. For a more significant part of this experience, I had been developing on top of an existing CMS type environment; moodle, drupal, WordPress, or the like. Very few of these are web applications written from scratch. I typically used PHP when I write for the web because it has the lowest barrier of entry. You can write HTML and then insert your PHP wherever you need dynamic content....

<span title='2020-01-05 03:43:39 +0000 UTC'>January 5, 2020</span>&nbsp;·&nbsp;3 min&nbsp;·&nbsp;abishek

On Learning

I can vividly remember the setting. It was only the two of us in the classroom. Right after a lecture on Spread Spectrum Modulation (and the associated theory). This friend of mine, B, had a few questions on the lecture but wouldn’t ask the lecturer. For some reason, he believed I might be able to help. In college, I was pretty egoistic. So clearly, I would help. I sat there explaining the theory to him, explaining the math as I understood it....

<span title='2017-05-19 16:20:54 +0000 UTC'>May 19, 2017</span>&nbsp;·&nbsp;6 min&nbsp;·&nbsp;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....

<span title='2015-09-19 05:23:03 +0000 UTC'>September 19, 2015</span>&nbsp;·&nbsp;4 min&nbsp;·&nbsp;abishek