Continue to Write Well — Never Mind the AI Detectors
Don’t break your own natural writing style just because of the fear of an AI Detector bot alleging plagiarism.
Manas Tungare
Software Engineer @ Google • UberTL for Gmail Productivity • Ph.D. Computer Science • Love to code @chimbori.com.
Latest posts
Vibe Coding for Engineers: The Good Parts (continued)
From an AI skeptic turned cautiously-optimistic vibe-coding engineer, here’s how you can get started with LLM-assisted engineering.
Vibe Coding for Engineers: The Good Parts
From an AI skeptic turned cautiously-optimistic vibe-coding engineer, here’s how you can get started with LLM-assisted engineering.
How to NOT get Promoted
A Googler’s perspective on why so many promotion attempts fail, and what you can do about it.
Make new features discoverable without annoying your users
Developers are faced with a choice: we need to make our users aware of new features that have been built since the last release. But we don’t want to get in the way of users trying to use our apps, so it has to be done without breaking their flow.
Manage your Android app’s versionCode & versionName with Gradle
Don’t repeat yourself — specify app version metadata just once. Gradle, which is now Android Studio’s default and recommended build system, can help you automate many tasks that other developers might be doing manually.
Implement Free & Paid Apps with in-app purchases instead of as two apps
Offering paid upgrades to users of a free app can be implemented either as two separate apps (Free and Paid), or within a single app that is free to download with in-app upgrades for the premium features. I have found and heard from fellow developers that a single app with in-app purchases offers multiple advantages over the two-app approach, for both developers and users.
It’s neither possible nor desirable for changelogs to be bland lists of features
Changelogs can be straightforward for simple apps that have no server-side component, but for those where most features are turned on/off or tweaked heavily server-side, publishing a client app’s changelog will be either incorrect, or useless, or both.
Geotagging photos from an SLR using a second camera’s GPS logger
Every place has its memories, and every memory its place. Having information about places embedded in photos and videos serves to link the two. We’re in an age where capturing every bit of metadata is certain to lead to interesting applications in the future. Here’s a set of tips and links to software that allows embedding geographic information into photos.
URL Design Sins: 16 things that don’t belong in URLs
Much has been said for a long time about making your URLs easy to use, remember, type, hack, and spread virally. There is still no dearth of ugly URLs all over the Web. A few very popular content management systems also engage in dirty URL practices, and it’s a shame. To aid you in cleaning up your URLs, here’s a list of specific things that do not belong in a URL.