Notes on seeking wisdom and crafting software
The news of agentic productivity is all over the place. There’s an explosion of side projects ( 1 ↗ , 2 ↗ ), may be large enough to say creating something new has lost its unique value. There’s the other rumour that the perennial build-vs-buy software debate is now tilting in favor of build . AI Agents have shortened the idea-to-product pipeline. Everyone and their dog ↗ is on Claude Code,…
Our studies require editing Sanskrit text in Devanāgarī (देवनागरी) and the IAST ↗ scripts. Below is a cheatsheet to help with this. Concepts Conceptually there are two mechanisms to input text. Use a keyboard layout . All of us are familiar with this. Default keyboard layout (US international or similar) corresponds to the keys in the physical keyboard. You could use a keyboard layout and map the…
Coding agents are now a part of my daily workflow both at home and work. I’m beginning to see a trade-off between building a lot of features, shipping them faster, and the quality or craftsmanship. Let’s consider two scenarios. At home, I recently purchased a developer subscription for an open-weights LLM. They provide Claude and OpenAI compatible API endpoints and nicely integrate with Claude…
It was a week long journey to migrate my lab from Ubuntu 20.04 (end of life in May 2025) to Ubuntu 24.04 and run everything in Podman. Ubuntu upgrade was forced because Podman requires kernel 5.x. This note is a summary of pain points and how I’d approach this today :) Mental model We run 12 selfhosted services on an Odroid M1 4GB model. There are three variations: Two services require Host…
We released xmf ↗ today. xmf can track stocks and mutual fund portfolios using the command line terminal. As usual the tool is free, open source and completely private. Summary of an example profile with three portfolios and USD currency. A short list of features Create multiple profiles, each profile can have multiple portfolios. A portfolio can track stocks, mutual funds (India) and fixed…
A few weeks back I setup a pomodoro workflow on my primary desktop running i3 ↗ , polybar ↗ and Archlinux ↗ . The flow and scripts are built around the uair ↗ pomodoro app. The user controls pomodoro using hotkeys bound in i3wm config. Polybar uses a custom module to read the state. uair is the pomodoro timer CLI app. We defined two types of sessions in uair config ↗ . Both are hooked to a shell…
Picking the most interesting problems is top of mind for many of us riding the AI hype cycle. I’ve quoted this correspondence between Richard Feynman and a former student (Koichi Mano) several times this week. Here are some additional notes to self. What Problems to Solve ↗ - a letter by Richard Feynman, 1966. Chasing the grand problems More often than not we get into a creator’s block followed by…
In the beginning there was a machine that could talk like most of us. Maybe not as smart yet coherent enough. We realized it needs to do more. As good computer scientists, we know Garbage In, Garbage Out; we need to feed this talking machine interesting context for it to be smarter. RAG came up - we were able to push relevant data the machine could spew out in a coherent and convincing packing.…
This is our yearly review for 2024. Previous editions: 2023 , 2022 . Scorecard Here is a snapshot of the last year. Lessons are in the next section. Reading: a handful of papers, 9 books (goal: 24 books) Writing: 8 posts (goal: 24 posts) Work Like last year, the focus this year was on AI. Shipped two AI productivity projects for enterprises. Six prototypes. 5 for AI and one for a large engineering…
A usual release of the spekt/testlogger ↗ project involves going through all the commits and meticulously crafting the CHANGELOG ↗ . It takes about half an hour and is boring enough to keep postponing the releases 🤭 We set out to automate this one. Fortunately, Google’s release-please ↗ automates generating changelogs, creating release tags and GitHub releases. It’s supposed to be just adding a…