Recent content on Declarative
Why do we love to do moonshot projects, despite knowing that the odds are not exactly in your favor? There’s a very narrow line of difference between a “hobby project”, and a “moonshot project”. A hobby project does not demand anything, and nothing much is expected out of it. If it helps someone out in the wild, that is beautiful. Sometimes hobby projects become…
Disclaimer: This article uses an example transcript from a simulated call with dummy data. No confidential data with regards to any institution or lab is included in this writeup. This project was done with the author’s personal devices, on their personal time. Quick General WWDC 2026 Thoughts It’s no secret: I absolutely love the Macintosh ! In my eyes, it’s an almost perfect blend of…
Disclaimer: Mesh networks over LoRa as described here (MeshCore/Meshtastic) do not require a license in the US, since they operate on the unlicensed & public domain 915 MHz ISM band under FCC Part 15 . However, check your local regulations — ISM band rules vary by country. More on this at the end. This post is almost about 3 months late, but I just joined the Greater Boston Mesh network and have…
I do a lot of projects, which can range a lot between what they achieve and the context they were created in. Most of my projects were created in UMass Amherst during my undergrad, but I also have created many personal projects. These projects range from Systems Developer tools for my specialization/research, to fun web apps and mobile apps that either solve a very specific need I had, or ones…
A quick blog post encompassing everything that I have been up to. Joined CactiLab and working on some cool stuff that I hope I can show something for soon. Participated in the 2026 MITRE eCTF . Here’s a quick picture of everyone who participated along with me, I plan to write more about this once the repo is made public. Still proud of our design, especially given how many people learnt from…
I’m Kushagra Srivastava , a CS Masters student at Northeastern University specializing in operating systems and compilers. I build systems-level software and care deeply about how computers actually work. Prefer my Resume? Want to see what I have worked on? What I Work On My focus is low-level systems programming—the kind of work where you’re thinking about memory layouts, build…
I got an Xbox 360 Kinect for $3 at a thrift store. Great find, except I do not have an Xbox 360 around. There are two ways to write about projects like this. One is: here is a demo, here is a screenshot, here is the repository. The other — which I find more useful — is to explain why the demo exists at all, what signal it is using, what the failure modes are, and why the implementation looks the…
Following Scott Shambaugh’s Personal Blog : I’m a volunteer maintainer for matplotlib, python’s go-to plotting library. At ~130 million downloads each month it’s some of the most widely used software in the world. We, like many other open source projects, are dealing with a surge in low quality contributions enabled by coding agents. This strains maintainers’ abilities to keep up with code…
This is going to be a pretty short and compact note, but I wanted to put it out in the open that I now have the Scratch Lifetime Membership. For a program that I used way back in 2011, Scratch felt incredibly instrumental in my growth and development. This donation to the Scratch Foundation is just my token of thanks to the community. Some Background I’ve written before about how I got into…
Last week(ish), I spent about $40 (including shipping) on two Texas Instruments development boards: an MSP-EXP430FR4133 , and an LP-MSPM0L1306 for general tinkering. Until now, I’ve mostly used Arduino boards for embedded projects. However, having some experience with TI’s toolchain from MITRE’s eCTF competition made me curious about trying something different. Obvious disclaimer…
Update: splatr has a Website!! splatr.skushagra.com GitHub Link for splatr I built a paint program. In 2026. On purpose. Not because the world desperately needed another image editor, but because I wanted a simple bitmap editor on my Mac that didn’t make me feel like I was committing some kind of cardinal sin against my hardware. The Problem Here’s the thing: macOS doesn’t ship…
For the year of 2026, I will be buying a CD from an upcoming artist I have never even heard of, and writing about them on my blog. What credentials do I have to review music? None. So bear with me a little here as I write my first couple of reviews. I kinda just got the idea for this when I saw an ad on Instagram for this artist Groovy Kaiju—giving away free CDs of his album “Monster Tape…
Watch it in action GitHub gist with the Assembly Every year I try to send a Christmas greeting that’s a little more unhinged than the last. Last year it was ASCII art in Vim on my iPhone. It was ok, and did spark an interest in running Vim on iSH on iOS, but nothing out of the box. This year I wanted to top it, and I figured, why not hide a Christmas tree inside ARM64 assembly and reveal it…
Kushagra Srivastava LinkedIn | GitHub | skushagra.com Prefer a quick read? Want to see what I have worked on? This space is a little outdated, and will be updated if needed. Education Northeastern University — Boston, MA Masters of Science, Computer Science — May 2027 Programming Design Paradigms, Computer Systems. University of Massachusetts Amherst — Amherst, MA Bachelor of Science w/…
SaberStat data collection | November 2023 One of the projects that I have been working on lately has been a Lightsaber battle hit/miss tracker for the Apple Watch. The project originally started in November 2023 , but got shelved for a while as I worked on tra86 and STORMM . I restarted it about 3 weeks ago, with a better understanding of how to build for Apple Platforms and general comfort in…
I love the Macintosh. A lot. Even though I wasn’t really exposed to these computers until 2015 when my dad bought a MacBook Air, my appreciation for them runs deep. It’s why in middle school I rocked a 5th generation iPod nano - the only Apple product I could really afford at the time beg for as a birthday gift. My path to computing started elsewhere, though. My first computer was a…
This post is half sysadmin note, half personal reminder. Every so often, Ubuntu’s desktop GUI based update process (Update Manager) will hang mid-upgrade -> the GNOME session stops responding, the display freezes, and it looks like a hard crash. But in reality, the underlying system is fine. You know this because the fans are spinning on full speed, the cursor is active, you can still SSH in (or…
Transformer Lab Server and STORMM Compilation all running on the CUDA laptop, with the Mac as a frontend (Terminal, TL frontend, and BBEdit). The two computers connect across a LAN using 1 direct Ethernet cable, and SSH. Quick guide for setting up a direct Ethernet link between my Mac mini and Asus gaming laptop so I can SSH into the Asus from the Mac. Both machines stay connected to WiFi for…
In the world of developers and engineers, a spirited debate often rages over which operating system reigns supreme. You’ll hear Mac users praise macOS, Windows loyalists defend their OS, and Linux aficionados swear by their distro, convinced it’s the one true way. I believe this passion stems from two core ideas: Group Identity: We’re wired to identify with a group. Mac users see…
The STORMM Landing Page Writing this as a quick update: but I have been honored and excited to contribute to the release of STORMM alpha v0.2.0. STORMM is a molecular mechanics package– currently developed by Psivant Therapeutics – that utilizes GPU Compute to conduct multiple molecular mechanics simulations in parallel. You can read all about this update under the release page , as…
** ** **Check out the GitHub repository , where the project is better contained. ** This is just to serve as an intro to the project + some thoughts. I’m excited to share Automator , an open-source Android app that transforms natural language commands into actions. It leverages the power of Google’s Gemini LLM to understand your intentions and translate them into executable YAML…
Mini update to mention I am officially a volunteer contributor to ravynOS , as part of a larger project to try to bring Swift to FreeBSD. This is mainly for my learning and contribution purposes, without any compensation. Cover Image: Boston Seaport, Winter 2024
It’s software spring once again: the couple of months that almost every tech company announces new software and services. We are currently a week out from seeing Apple’s WWDC (with a rumored OS redesign, and AI enhancements), and I also just attended my fourth Google I/O a couple of weeks ago. For a couple of years now: Google has kept an equal footing between their multiple products:…
Apart from the editor of your choice, one of the most common debates in CS circles almost always revolves around the programming language of one’s choice. While the pragmatic (read: correct) answer to this question is to use the one that gets the job done most efficiently, a lot of online posts revolve around creating brute force methods to stress-test each language’s efficiency and…
Update: Automator, the codebase I started making here, now has a public dev repo. I’ll be working more on it and update it on this Blog + a couple other forums as determined. Check it out! As a developer, I would like to showcase herein how to best use AI to help teach yourself development for a platform you have never laid your hands on . I do compilers and low level systems; in this…
As part of my current job, I have needed to do OS reinstalls on a frequent basis. Given that my work revolves around CUDA, here are some of the steps I follow in my workflow to get Nvidia drivers playing well in Linux. **Disclaimer: *I take no responsibility if your system breaks or crashes. This is purely for learning and informational purposes. Please back your files up. The steps herein are not…
I love seeing the Boston Dynamics Spot cameo in unexpected places. Over here, Chip is used for QC purposes. I recently attended a livestream event from Intel Foundry (think Intel’s hardware R&D + Manufacturing wing which partners with other companies and manufactures processors), and as someone who spends a good chunk of time buried in low-level systems – delving into OSes and how compilers…
I am revamping the website under this domain for the fourth time in its lifespan since 2017. The website naturally goes over an update every 3-ish years, but I have my reasons to pivot it solely to a blog, and not necessarily into a portfolio + blog as it was before. Posts before this specific posts have been ported from the previous instance, but run the risk of having broken links and outdated…
The following is one of possibly many posts I’ll be using to consolidate contributions to LinkedIn’s Quora-esque collaborative articles wherein contributors can answer questions and respond to/upvote other answers. I really like the feature, especially the fact that each contribution is capped to 750 characters (so no redundancy). For some questions, I have added footnotes that go beyond my 750…
I recently needed a Virtual Machine to containerize some work. Initially, I was on a Debian VM. However, as much as I love Linux, I ran into a couple of issues there: I use Chrome’s sync features, and there is no chrome on ARM Linux (even though there is Chromium). For 90% of my use cases, I rely on FLOSS software. However, while I identify with the OSS ideology, I do not necessarily agree with…
One of the more infuriariting things I have come across on the GitHub platform is people using bots to mass follow other people, in hopes for a follow back (or more importantly, some stars and forks on their projects). However, when unreciprocated with a follow and some stars, their main goal is to unfollow and refollow, thus coming on the top of my timeline again. They keep this up for a very…
Go out and create something. Put time and effort into it. Sometimes, you may find yourself to be in a rut that is difficult to come out of. But, do create something and put your soul and effort into it. We are finally in a weird late stage capitialism point wherein we have successfully monetized everything, on a rolling basis. Mediocre products are sold at exorbitant pricing, and even our sanity…
The following series (which is separate from my newsletter), is going to be a comprehensive deep dive into programming for Mac OS version 9: the ancient pre-UNIX version of the Operating System which barely has much documentation on the Internet today. This post is mainly initialization, I just got the VM working and a pipeline to install 3rd party (old) software :) I do not exactly have a plan in…
Worked with Prof. Joe Chiu and Prof. Tim Richards from UMass CICS on my Honors Thesis. I have put a short poster on the project hypothesis below, but obviously not all data is recorded because this is an ongoing project. Moreover, the poster is about 6 months old and a lot has changed in the project (focused on Clang, Cargo, and LLVM). Regardless, the poster still gives a good idea of what to…
The Opportunity Project is a unique research endeavour by the Census Open Innovation Labs which prompts different universities to come up with digital tools built with the help of open government data. Students in each team are paired with industry experts, and follow a range of milestones as described here . The final product is digital (website, app, visualizations, etc.) aimed at different…
Side Projects Ad my own thesis wraps up and I get a bit more time to pursue other avenues, I am trying to get into more side projects as well as start some of my own again. I felt that there needed to be a fine balance between my actual academic work, side projects, and other hobbies altogether (like photography) so that I do not burn myself out doing one thing only.
Slightly late blog update this week, owing mainly to the amounts of midterms and the thesis progress that had to be made last week. However, we are back and kicking: and I hope that I will be able to keep this momentum up next week as well. In today’s newsletter, I would love to highlight some fun code I wrote for my Honors Thesis last semester. The banner for this newsletter was taken on my trip…
This newsletter is a special one to me: it is the third week that I am writing something down on this platform without fail, and thus building up the momentum to continue doing the same for a longer period of time. The issues that come with scheduling problems, or a general lack of motivation towards doing something start to dwindle by the time it is the third week of committing to a new habit.
Welcome to the second episode of my Newsletter, accompanied by a gorgeous picture of the UMass Amherst West Experimentation Station. I take a lot of pictures in my daily life, but most do not see the light of day, which is why I am going to attempt to merge my different art forms. The Photography page in the Finechive is still under construction, and hopefully it does not take long.
There have been quite a few times when I have talked about aesthetics, and I still believe that they are the best way to express myself. I have a post here from last year diving into Liminal Spaces , and to this day they capture the feeling of loneliness and eerieness perfectly. A lot of the pictures I take pertain to outdoor Liminal Spaces. It is an interest that started during the Pandemic…
(noun) /dɪˌbʌɡzaɪ.əti/ Definition: The apprehensive and uneasy feeling experienced by a programmer when faced with the prospect of executing or testing code, particularly after investing a significant amount of time in its creation, due to the anticipation of potential errors, bugs, or the need for extensive debugging. Example: Sarah hesitated to run the program she had been tirelessly working on…
The following document compiles some of the tools I use for my LaTeX fender benders adventures. It is a non-exhaustive list, but should cover most things to get started with, and make your LaTeX life easier. Basic Setup Overleaf : An online editor and debugger for LaTeX that works similar to Google Docs. Does not release anything on the Internet unless explicitly specified, and makes it such that…
This is an attempt at documenting what has been long gone by, and yet seems coming right across the horizon. This is a story of a particular phase of my own life, how it has been influenced by my past, and how it delves into one of my favorite aesthetics of all time. This will also be an attempt to capture my version of that aesthetic. The beginning of what would culminate into a series of…
You have found my pictures recreated within 4 years of each other. Here’s me in April 12, 2022 at the iSpace (the iCons lounge) in front of some code that i (possibly?) wrote when I was a sophomore (not sure about code origins there), and here’s me in April 12, 2026 when I visited back to UMass to be a VIP Consultant for the Five Colleges Datafest ; in front of some code that I…