Thoughts of a software engineer about life, tech and everything in between. A place to put down my thoughts for my own recollection more than anything else. If you like it, be sure to drop me an email!
I stumbled upon an uncomfortable question while working on a demo about property-based testing. For years, I have been an advocate of Jqwik, a remarkable open-sourced library that implements property-based testing in Java. Well before the AI revolution, I had been talking on and off stage about it. Recently, I discovered that Jqwik’s latest version carries an anti-AI clause in its usage policy.
My dad taught me how to program. He taught me how to think about problem solving. One of his key lessons, still with me today after 20 years, was to teach oneself by reading out loud. A lesson, when read out loud, becomes much more understandable, almost magically.
Every time I see people taking photos of an aircraft before boarding, it reminds me of India’s growth story. The fact that there are still people who are taking their first flight means Indian economy has grown to allow this person to take a flight. You hardly ever see this in EU. Doesn’t that make you hopeful for the future in India?
An average child’s greatest obstacle is unawareness. I have never been outstanding at anything. As a child, expecting to find passion in anything was pointless. I was surviving high school from one test to the next - unaware of what I liked or what I wanted to do in life. That’s when a pivot changed my life forever.
With every clikety-clack of the train inching deeper into the mountainous terrain, I felt myself shrinking – a fleeting, precious feeling of insignificance. Engulfed in the colossal landscape, a quiet introspection took hold.
The dawn quietly crept in through the cracked windows. Lazy and exhausted from a week-long trip, I teetered on the precipice of skipping the weekly workout class. My muscles whispered for a softer start to the weekend. Yet, propelled by some unseen force, I went. And there, amidst the prosaic mundanity of a routine class, something profound unravelled.
Inspiration is hard to come by in many fields – but not so in software engineering. When I attended a course on AWS offerings last year, I decided to try it out myself. With a little bit of hard work, the result was a serverless URL shortener built on AWS called shortener called Liliput.
“Accidental quality” — that’s what I call the hidden trap in traditional example-based tests. In my recent talk at Techcamp Hamburg, I spoke about how enumerating test cases creates a dangerous illusion of safety, while the real bugs hide in the blindspots we never think to check. Property-based testing flips the narrative: it searches for bugs instead of just testing for them. If you have 1000…
Back in 2010, I decided to switch from an English Literature degree to a Computer Science Bachelor’s degree – but I never lost touch with writing and today I am still pinching myself to realize that I won the second prize for InfoQ’s writing contest in 2025!
Today I am open-sourcing my quick-meetings repository. It has one aim - to show the importance of property based testing (or generative testing).