Current, 2024

Reading/ Watching

Friday, July 12

July

Three biggest updates:

  1. I got accepted into NYU( New York University ) for Masters in Computer Engineering in the Tandon School of Engineering. I am moving to NYC!
  2. Back to the startup life; building datingai.pro, your perfect wingman. Joined as the founding engineer.
  3. With all good things, comes an end. I am leaving RadiusAI, and India.

I am back to the startup drill. Staying up late, shipping features, building, failing, talking to customers, discussing our GTM strategy, and building the product, have been the highlights of the past month. I am excited to be a part of the founding team at datingai.pro. Including me, there are five of us in the team now.

A sad part of all of this is leaving RadiusAI. I have been with the company for seven months and have loved it here. In the end, difficult decisions have to be taken, and while this was an amazing learning experience and a great place for growth, it’s time for me to leave, take flight, and build my own nest.

I am going to miss my team and the office. The weekend get-togethers at pubs and breweries, and me coaxing everyone to come out for lunch and play carrom have been the highlights of my time here. From GitHub actions deployment failures and optimising memory in my Rust applications to compiling cross-platform binaries and multi-threaded applications and fixing Kafka and RedPanda issues, I have learnt and grown a lot as a software engineer. I will be forever grateful to Rachna and indebted to Ram for getting me into the team and making this happen.

To the team, I will miss you guys, and I hope we cross paths again. Here’s to the good times and the memories we made. 🥂!

The end of June and the beginning of this month was an extremely emotional goodbye. This unfolds in three parts:

  1. I met with my childhood best friends from all phases of my life, toghether, had an amazing weekend in Mumbai, and bid adeiu to them. It was a nostalgia trip, and it felt very content to see them become friends.

    We reminisced about our school days, gossiped about who dated whom, and laughed about the stupid things we and our teachers used to do. We talked about our JEE preparation days, locked our home, unable to fous with all the pressure surmounting us and finally giving up and buying a gaming console instead of shutting down TV. Our college days, and how we used to bunk classes, and go to the beach, and how we used to get drunk and watch movies.

    I have been friends with Ankit since 2012 now, with Vishnu since 2016, and with Abinash since 2019 now. Getting together, drinking and talking about our lives, our dreams, and our future, was an extremely heartfelt and emotional experience. Goodbyes are tough. This is the best farewell gift I could have ever asked for; them, just being there, and being my friends.

  2. I went to Goa with my college friends, Tushar and Mahak, and it was amazing! It was a road trip from Bangalore, and it took us 10-11 hours to reach there. We stayed at a AirBnb, spent three and a half amazing days there before returning back to Bangalore.

    The first day was tiring, we just hung out in the Bnb room, had amazing seafood in a beach shacks and just sat and chilled on the beach. The second day was exploring North, and Old Goa. We webt to forts, beaches, lighthouses, trekked, and found cliffs from where we could see the entire Goa, and in the evening, we explored the old city, monuments and architecture. The third day was spent in South Goa, exploring the rocky beaches, hidden beaches, and the best sunsets. We kayaked on the backwaters, and had lunches in beach shacks.

    The last day was churches, and shopping, and we returned back to Bangalore. We had amazing food, and drinks, and we danced, and sang, and laughed, and had the best time of our lives.

  3. I went on a major road trip with my dad from Bangalore to Bhubaneswar. We travelled through 1500 kms, and it took us a day and a half with a small halt near Nellore. I was shifting, and I returned home with a bunch of stuff that I wanted to keep. The most important on my bucket list was attending Ratha Jaatra before leaving, and I also had to sell my car. I had to meet my family, and friends, and say goodbye to them. I had to pack, and plan, and prepare for the move. I had to get my visa, and my tickets, and my insurance, and my housing, and my bank accounts, and my sim cards, and my luggage, and my documents, and everything.

June and July had me cover entire western to eastern India, from beaches to ghats, the road trips were dreamy, magical, and I would cherish them for a lifetime.

June

May was hectic. I turned 24, went back to home for a week, and spent an amazing time with family and friends. I am back in Bangalore now, and life is busy.

Back in Bangalore, I finally got to building my own budget gaming PC with Akash, a senior from office. Coming from a PS5, a gaming PC did not make sense initially. I wanted to play competitive FPS( first-person shooting ) games with my mates but Valorant and CS2 are not cross-play compatible or present on PS, yet. A minimum budget windows CPU build seemed apt.

I went with the AMD Ryzen 5 3400G with Radeon RX Vega 11 because it has decent benchmarks and has a built in GPU and I did not want to spend on an additional GPU now. This CPU is powered by two 8GB DDR4 RAM and the xmp profile set in BIOS to make them run at 1600 Mhz( max capacity ) each. The build is powered by a Gigabyte B450M DS3H V2 motherboard, without a wireless module, and a MSI cabinet with 6 fans. I am yet to achieve the maximum performance out of this build, and will update here soon.

I am looking to hire a SE intern at my office, RadiusAI. Feel free to reach out if you are interested.

I have a lot of things on my plate at Work and thus, I am not planning to take up anything new now. The projects on hold are Bee, cbrtl- Starting with SWE, memcached, a distributed file system in Rust, and a content summarization using tokenization, vectorDb and AI tool, codenamed Hoid. I am planning to start working on them once I settle down.

May

I am planning on restarting bee, a light-weight bittorrent client written in TypeScript. A bencode parser, and a torrent file parser have been implemented. There is a list of trackers associated with a torrent file/ magnet link and each tracker gives out a list of peers from which pieces of the file can be downloaded. The next step would be to implement the handshake and the peer wire protocol. There are various strategies to follow here. My aim is to get the fastest peers, and download the rarest pieces first. I am not sure whether I would start seeding the files as soon as they are downloaded since that would be more complicated, but I am interested in implementing that someday later. The DHT protocol also seemed interesting to me. The DHT protocol is a decentralized way of finding peers, and it is used by clients like qBittorrent, and Transmission to find peers for a torrent.

The project is still in its early stages, and I am looking for contributors. If you are interested in contributing, feel free to reach out to me.

I built a dribble portfolio to showcase some of the posters I designed a few years ago. The next would be adding more posters, UI designs, and illustrations here.

Looking forward to an idea that was pitched to me recently, I am planning to build a platform that aims at sharing my experience of getting into software engineering. The idea is to craft a self-sustaining curriculum capable of imparting software engineering skills to anyone keen on learning. This became the guiding principle behind restarting cbrtl: a tight-knit coding community that I started in my undergrad.

My family visiting me returned back home. The most dreaded feeling is when you have to say goodbye. I have always been a lot attached, and it was painful. Before leaving, we decided to get matching tattoos! Here are mama and baby dinausors on our wrists.

April

I bid my best friend a final goodbye as he left Bangalore permanently. He decided to quit his job and follow his passion. The current economic climate is not conducive to his interests, and the job market is extremely rough. A sense of this weird melancholy prevails over me. While I applaud his courage, a part of me wants him to stay and hunt for jobs here. I am going to miss our late-night conversations, our shared interests, and our shared dreams. We started off watching stand-up comedy in the first year of college. From college politics and friendships to getting drunk and watching Rockstar. From walking Rio to getting high and watching Batman. From internships and long car rides to getting jobs and going on trips to Mumbai, Mangalore, Pondicherry, and where the hell not. We have been through a lot together. I am going to miss him a lot. Before leaving for the airport we decided to get something together and have one last meal in Bangalore; and so we went into the Apple store to get something together, and for the restaurant I chose KFC considering that he is a vegan xD. We plan on getting the WWE2k24 and playing it together. A blue summer awaits.

April is all about spending time with my family visiting me in Bangalore. We had to visit some collges, thus we had to travel a lot. A fast-paced, exciting adventure to Gujrat and Uttarakhand ends this fortnight.

We went to Ahmedabad, Dwarka, Somnath, Rishikesh, Haridwar, and Dehradun. The trip was a mix of adventure, culture, and spirituality. The best parts were the river rafting, and Ganga Aarti in Rishikesh, and the visit to the old city, Dwarka, the residence of Lord Krishna. Back in bangalore, looking forward to the same old monotony.

I am not planning to build anything new as of yet. Work consumes most of my time. Mostly invested in research, I spend time exploring business, product, and tech ideas. The ultimate goal is to build something bigger, unique, and sell it, or build a company around it. Here’s an amazing article that I recetly came across by Paul Graham about how Reddit got started. He says, “Reddit the site (and now app) is such a fundamentally useful thing that it’s almost unkillable.”. I am looking for something like that. Something that is fundamentally useful, and unkillable.

March

An hectic beginning to the month; I just returned, and had a terrific week back at home. All of my best friends were back, together, and we meandered through familiar haunts, roaming around, exploring places, and restaurants, and talking about our current lives. The weekend after that was spent in Pondicherry, with Abinash. We explore bakeries, french architecture, Auroville, the beach, and the city. After a week-long hiatus with friends and family, and an excruciatingly tiring trip to Pondi, I am back in Bangalore, looking forward to a productive month.

Not planning on taking up much work, I have thought of taking an hour of my day to figure out where this is all going. March is supposed to be an interlude, a time to reflect and recharge. I have long-term goals, and to be able to accomplish them, I need to be more disciplined and focused. The path must be streamlined. This daily routine will help me to stay on track and keep my goals in sight. This month would be spent planning out the next four odd years. My short-term goals would be to focus on my fitness journey and improve my writing. Writing has always been a passion of mine, serving as a conduit for connecting with others and sharing my insights. Lately, I’ve been particularly prolific, and I have been writing a lot.

March ends exciting. I finished up with NiceDear, a dynamic open-source avatar generator that crafts unique avatars based on user input. Looking to upgrade my desk setup, I finally made the switch to a fully customisable mechanical keyboard, and an ergonomic mouse. I initially planned on going with linear switches, but I ended up with tactile ones. They are pre-lubed, and the PCB is covered with a layer of foam. I am using the fully hot-swapable Keychron K2 Pro, with banana switches, aluminium casing, south-facing RGB lights, and a custom keycap set. The mouse is the Logitech MX Master 3s Mac, white. It has an 8,000 DPI optical sensor that can track on virtually any surface, including glass. I have mapped the horizontal scroll-wheel, and the back, and forward buttons to custom schortcuts. The next step would be upgrading my desk mat.

Feb

I went on a trip to Mangalore with Abinash for a night. I had been occupied with a lot of things lately and this was a much-needed escape. Back in Bangalore life is slow and boring. A few friends came over on the weekend and we had a ton of fun. This new place at HSR Layout, Plan B, is my go-to hangout destination. They serve the best damn chicken wings in town. Looking towards to chilling out with my friends and family, back home this last week.

Here’s how Dough is shaping up:

introduction

Here’s everything about Dough

If you’re eager to dive into the world of Rust and looking for a project to contribute to, Dough presents an exciting opportunity. Here’s a breakdown of what’s currently not working and areas that could benefit from your expertise:

  • Fix scrolling issue in highlight mode:
    • bug Over Scroll in infinite scrolling
    • feat Skip empty lines in highlight mode
  • bug custom aligner adds empty lines after text-block alignment
  • feat. Hot Module Reload
  • feat. Add support for the maximum width and height of the terminal. (Write a word wrapper)
  • feat. Add comprehensive support for common Markdown elements.
    • feat. Enhance rendering for complex markdown elements like links within headings or lists, blockquotes, and tables.

I am looking for contributions from peers regarding the pending issues, making this a more robust open-source project.

At Radius AI I am involved in building an async uptime monitoring service using Rust, and also a concurrent heartbeat service in Python. I will update this page with more details soon.

Got a new idea about content summarization and accessibility (codenamed ‘Hoid’). We are still in the early stages of the idea. I might share more details soon. Hoid has a lot of moving parts. Currently, I am focused on the market research. I believe that tech has become a commodity. There isn’t anything that you cannot build using tech anymore. Money is in solving the right set of problems.

A sneak peek into Hoid:

  • content aggregation; recommendation engine
  • search engine
  • bookmarks, and TL;DR, summarization

Meanwhile, I am exploring esoteric programming languages and also planning to build a distributed file systemin Rust.

Jan

Happy New Year, muchachos! I hope you had a good one. I just returned to Bangalore after a much-needed break in my hometown. Leaving home and returning to the city was a bit of a bummer, but such is life! The dreaded omicron variant is wreaking havoc in the city. I am starting a new career at RadiusAI as a Software Engineer, and I am pretty stoked :D

Here’s an improved version of Llama Index’s sub-querying engine used to generate SQL from Natural Language: Neak.

Coming onto Dough: a rich, modular, and customisable content generator, crafted in Rust, here’s everything you need to know. This is a breakdown of the tasks I was working on:

v2:

  • Improving the rendering engine:
    • Add a refresh feature while rendering slides
      • Hot Module Reload( FIX )
    • Add support for rendering nested syntax
    • Add support for the maximum width and height of the terminal. Write a word wrapper.
    • Address the color storage issue for multiline elements, ensuring ANSI escape sequences are properly stripped: Refine color correction post-alignment
    • Enhance rendering for complex markdown elements like links within headings or lists.
      • lists.
      • blockquotes.
    • Provide comprehensive support for common Markdown elements.
      • Improve the rendering of thematic breaks
    • Improve the design language.
    • Image support for terminals with image capabilities is pending. (Kitty, iTerm2, etc.)
  • Syntax Highlighting in code blocks
    • Improve the performance of syntax highlighting. The current implementation is CPU intensive. Use a different library for syntax highlighting, or parallel threads to improve performance.
  • Custom text alignment: A regex match for individual text alignment
    • Improve the alignment of segments of text.
  • Implement running code blocks on separate threads and displaying results in the current console.

I stumbled upon Substack, a platform for independent writers. I will be writing on substack as well. This does not change the fact that this will still be my primary blog.

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The past year