Recent content on unsungNovelty
This is the initial draft for uNUX (unsungNovelty user experience) design system. This has been an idea that’s been in my head for a while. The below page as of now is just theoretical version of what I want to achieve with this design system and the whys and hows. Obviously, there are gaping holes in it currently. That’s cos there are known unknowns and then there are some unknown…
Contrary to the belief of people, a fire alarm’s purpose is not just to let you know that there is fire. But also to let you know that it is safe to react or panic about the fire. Bystander effect experiment by Latane and Darley in 1968 states that you are more likely to be inactive or not help when you are in a group of people than when you’re alone. This also means you are more…
My first computer was a Desktop with AMD Sempron processor which used to run at 1.6GHz. It was blazing fast! (Atleast until my neighbour got a better one.). It came with Windows XP and 512GB HDD. I learned all my computer black magic with it. I got my first Ubuntu CD mailed to me (from London!) when I had this computer. It came installed with GTA2. I played GTA3, Vice City, Thing 2, Age of Empire,…
Open Source Software(OSS) has gone through a lot of battles over the years. The recent two of ’em has been from source available software licenses and Large Language Models (LLMs). Source available predates the LLM/AI trend (in it’s current form). And source available software has a renewed interest. So many think Source Available Software (SAS) is the answer. The next step for OSS…
Ike Pro was the first app that I bought with my own money from android play store. It was a to-do list app which introduced me to Eisenhower Matrix . This has been my favourite way to prioritise tasks ever since. Coming from a Linux / OSS environment (and being naive and young), paying for an app was way too new to me. But the price was justified and the quality of the app was good. I used it for…
At Mapbox, we used to have catchups with other colleagues. Just check with them and see if they are free. If yes, drop an invite and they will come out of their busy schedule and spend some time with you. Some of them was monthly. Some happened every once in a while. But it was one of the best thing I got out of that place. Getting to know a lot of cool people. So during such a catchup, I walked…
I created my website and started blogging in 2019. The decision to create a website was inspired by 2 posts - Why I Have a Website and You Should Too by Jamie Tanna and Writing HTML in HTML by John Ankarström . While I haven’t gotten to writing HTML in HTML as mentioned in John’s post, I have been thinking about incorporating the end results in Hugo. This was 5 years ago. So is bloggin…
“Which Linux distro should I use?” Is a recurring question people ask without an end in sight. I have been hearing this for more than a decade at this point. So I decided to share my framework/checklist for choosing a Linux distro along with my recommendations. This way, even if my recommendation doesn’t fit someone’s needs, they still can find one that suits them. The…
OpenStreetMap (OSM) is fun and fantastic for so many reasons. One being able to roam around the world from the comfort of your chair. I started mapping on OpenStreetMap in 2015 by coincidence through a friend. And OSM later became part of my work at Mapbox. Where I went through out the world as an armchair mapper. I used to maintain a list of interesting places as I encountered them. Then map it…
Among the things AI has become capable of, is writing well, detailed articles. Articles which can be written in different styles for different moods. As long as you prompt it appropriately. Under an year, you will start seeing visibly high output of articles which are published this way. There will be a high output of marketing and sales articles. Not to mention fake news and propaganda. It will…
The operational and legal side of open source software (OSS) projects are always boring to us programmers and end users in general. Which is why there is a lot misunderstanding on the expectations from the non-profit foundations which runs these OSS projects. Just like OSS licenses, the foundations which runs these projects are often misunderstood. Today I will be talking about two most common…
If you are one of those people who are extremely stressed with the current state of things, hopefully this post can help you a bit. Politics, war, tech industries, LLM’s, covid and climate change are topics that are everywhere. These things makes us feel like we are screwed. Just know that the news makes money on negative interactions. Just know that whatever happens to climate change and…
Last couple of years saw a huge rise in productivity apps and people talking about it. If the marketing is to be believed, it feels like we always need an app for productivity. Which is why you usually see people talk about productivity by using a fancy new app. But here are my 3 picks for producitity that you can try out NOW without the need for any apps. I consider these as the foundations of my…
I just read a reddit post. It was about someone’s colleague who writes complex code over simple code. Unnecessarily I should add. At least as per the post. But that is when it struck me. The reason for writing simple code is the same as it is for simple writing. One of the best advices I got about writing was to write simple. You write simple and consumable sentences instead of using fancy…
Just like spaces and tabs, we have dark mode vs light mode. Dark mode is definitely the cooler and popular one right now. I don’t even remember seeing Spotify out of dark mode now that I think about it. So is dark mode better than light mode? Dark mode is good for your eyes Dark mode helps you focus Dark mode is good for battery These are some of the promises from dark modes. For me , in my…
Abstraction layers are very subjective based on what, when and how you want things. This post is based on my experience with Tailwind CSS 3. It is also about my what, when and how. In computing, an abstraction layer or abstraction level is a way of hiding the working details of a subsystem. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstraction_layer Abstraction layers are supposed to be a more accessible…
The tic tac toe game developed in plain javascript. It was particularly tricky for me to implement the validation of immediately displaying whether a player won the game or not. At the time I thought this was the most good looking project I have built yet. It was minimal and clean looking with a good UX This was created as a part of The Odin Project curriculum. Tech used HTML5 CSS Plain JavaScript…
A simple rock paper scissors game developed in plain javascript. This was my first project. It taught me about DOM manipulation and other basic web development skills. This was created as a part of The Odin Project curriculum. Tech used HTML5 CSS Plain JavaScript
A browser version of something between a sketchpad and an Etch-A-Sketch. Did this project to sharpen DOM manipulation skills as a part of The Odin Project curriculum. The grid creation felt like the hardest part when I did this project. Very basic with an eraser in it but nothing else. Goal Improve DOM manipulation skills Tech used HTML5 CSS JavaScript Screenshots Screenshot of etch a sketch which…
Brahma is a Hugo static site generator theme. The goal of the theme is to accomodate my blogging needs and to provide a platform to share my work and thoughts. It is build to be fast, simple and accessible. Technologies used HTML5 Tailwind CSS Hugo Design decisions Build for the long term. Aesthetics over over-engineering. Functionality over aesthetics Avoid unnecessary dependencies. Lighthouse…
I am a productivity enthusiast and a perfectionist. As a developer or not, we all have things we want to do. And we all have flaws or issues which prevents us from achieving them. Mine is - being a perfectionist. My productivity wins used to be cancelled out by me being a perfectionist. What helps me is a rule - Doing what you can NOW . It might sound simple but it isn’t in practice. Fixing…
I use Hugo for my personal website - https://www.unsungnovelty.org . At present I use Bulma CSS for it. But I am working on a redesign with Tailwind CSS . During my search, I found articles on how to add Tailwind CSS to Hugo confusing. And at times bloated. So here is an attempt to tell you how to add Tailwind CSS to Hugo in the most minimal way. The goal is a simple and straight forward setup for…
I have done a similar post in 2019 called 9 Productivity & personal growth rules made from my 2019 . I couldn’t do one in 2020 because of covid. So here it is. I am productivity nerd. What that means is I am trying to do things in a better way than yesterday. The word “trying” is important. Because you won’t always be productive as much as you want to be. But you still try…
When I learnt about promises and asynchronous coding. The biggest time consumer was when I tried calling an asynchronous function inside a normal function (synchronous code). I was hoping to use the asynchronous function to get the promises which had the values I was looking for. But what I got was [object Promise] . The asynchronous function was working fine. But when I called the async function…
I see a lot of dislike towards new year resolutions. There is a assumption that new year resolutions is bad and ineffective. Atleast some people think new year resolutions as a finalised plan. It is not. It is just a rough script for how you want your new year to go. You need to be working on it everyday. Trim it down or expand as necessary. You don’t have to hit it all. In fact, most people won’t…
License: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 _International Public License (CC BY-NC-ND _4.0) We all want to solve issues/problems for ourselves, for others or for the world. But if the solution depends on doing more than two things, it could mean that we are not even going to start working on them. Let alone solving it. We even use the most difficult action we can take…
License: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 _International Public License (CC BY-NC-ND _4.0) We all have goals and we all ask questions. Like everybody, I have a ton of goals that needs to be finished. Things I want to achieve or finish. I use todo list items to describes a goal. But when you start working on a todo list item, the thing you will have in your head…
License: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 _International Public License (CC BY-NC-ND _4.0) Most of us are addicted to consumption in this modern digital era. Or, Information Age . Information is available in abundance now. The amount which was never accessible for us humans ever since the dawn of time. We watch documentaries about planets, listen to podcasts on varied…
License: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 _International Public License (CC BY-NC-ND _4.0) Conversations are important to learn and understand things better. It is one of the fundamental ways we learn and grow. It helps us to reach conclusions and validates our thoughts/ideas on what is “right” and what is “wrong”. But if you have observed, we…
When you start your programming journey, you ask for recommendations from friends, colleagues or anybody who knows how to program. Either that or you just search online on how to learn programming. The recommendations would be something which you are blindly jumping into with no idea what to expect, in the hope that it will just “click”. This does work, sometimes. Especially if you have a mentor…
License: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 _International Public License (CC BY-NC-ND _4.0) This article doesn’t have to be read from start to finish for understanding. Just use the “Table of contents” to go through questions you want to read and if you have any questions, DM me on Twitter @unsungnovelty . TLDR; Stop using Whatsapp and use Signal if you…
License: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 _International Public License (CC BY-NC-ND _4.0) Notes are a great way to write things down. But as you start writing more notes, the number obviously keeps increasing. This leads to having a large number of notes which are outdated or forgotten. This is mainly because these are seperate notes and not connected with the other…
If statement is one of the conditional statements in JavaScript. But if is not the most commonly used conditional statement, at least not when you are new to JavaScript. That would be the if-else or nested if else statement. As a person who is new to JS, the learning materials or the execrises never teach you the real world use cases of an if statement. It is always a basic explanation with a…
I am gonna start writing about my experiences of learning JavaScript. Most of the topics/posts are going to be super basic but what I would like to focus is the interesting connections or point of view I learnt. And yes, thought I would categorise the series as “InitLogs” since these are the initial code/logs a lot of us will be learning and also because it will make it easy for people…
License: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 _International Public License (CC BY-NC-ND _4.0) We all are trying to do things in a better way everyday and improving is something we all strive towards. Let me share what I have learned from my experiences in 2019 for better productivity and personal growth. Hope this becomes useful to you like it is to me. Rules are mutable,…
License: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 _International Public License (CC BY-NC-ND _4.0) Hosting a website is not expensive or complicated as it was once before. It is easier than ever to build a website. You have platforms and technologies like GitHub Pages , GitLab Pages , Netlify , Let’s encrypt and many more to make it really easy and cheap. All you have to…
Logo ©Nikhil( unsungNovelty ). Logo was envisioned and conceptualised by me and brought to life by Ark Arjun ! And I agree now, the negative space “N” looks cool indeed! Thanks da! \o/ Contents / arts unless specified ©Nikhil( unsungNovelty ) NOTE: If you have any questions regarding the license or anything related to how to use any of the contents, drop an email at “nikhil at…
This NOW page is about what I’m focused/thinking currently. Inspired from now page by Derek Sivers . Projects / Current activities Catching up on my writing backlog Learning Svelte Books Currently reading - The Eagle has Landed by Jack Higgins Career For my professional status and experience, read about page . Quotes “Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but…
Nikhil I am a developer with interests in information security, web development, data analysis, unix systems and open source software. Currently creating experiences as a Web Experience Specialist at Salesforce India . Before that I was working as a full stack developer at HMI Tech . And before HMI Tech, I was taking care of security and IT operations at Mapbox for 7 different time zones from…