Rahul gives unsolicited advice

I started college in 2009, when I was 17 years old. Thanks to a good enough laptop, free college internet, and an intranet that was chock full of pop culture, I consumed information like there was no tomorrow. And I'm trying to pull myself out of that mindset after 15 years. That's not to say that I haven't created anything. I started this blog when I was in college. I used to organize sessions on popular astronomy as part of the student astronomy club. Towards the latter half of my college years, I wrote small snippets of code to simulate toy physics problems. In my final year, I publicly shared the code used for my thesis work. After graduating, for the past eight years, I have been contributing to the Free & Open Source Software (FOSS) ecosystem. I've fixed bugs, I've added features, I've helped with house-keeping. I've written marketing content for a product that I was working on. I've given talks on Python and the Python ecosystem. But if I have

I am putting together a talk on FOSS Policy in India. I started DuckDuckGo-ing today morning for the relevant information and I came across a blogpost by the Open Source Observatory on the Indian Government and Open Source . Within that post, I came across the Open Source Software Country Intelligence Report on India published by the EU in 2021. I have been going through the links highlighted in that document, and the links I discovered within those links, and I swear that half of the pages are dead. Either the domains don't exist today (19 May 2024), the domains don't support HTTPS, or the pages don't exist leading to 404. The internet is dying. And I don't know what to do about it. Well, I know one thing that we can do. Especially in the case where internet links are being used in Policy Papers. Use the Wayback Machine and, if possible, financially support the Internet Archive . The Wayback Machine enables you to "save" a website in it's current state

I started my professional career at Enthought , at the Pune office in India, on Feb 29, 2016. Over the course of eight long years, I spent time at the Austin office in the US, the Cambridge office in the UK, and I worked remotely from India. I was let go on March 27, 2024 . I had an unbelievably great time. I had three amazing mentors - Pankaj Pandey, Senganal Thirunavukkarasu, and Mark Dickinson. Pankaj mentored me in my first year at Enthought. I started paying attention to the craft of software after working with him. Senganal started mentoring me in my second year at Enthought, and continues to mentor me, even after the both of us have moved on from Enthought. He instilled professionalism in me, ensuring that the code I wrote produced precise scientific results, and that I tackled the known unknown aspects of a project first, to ensure timely communication about project progress. I was eager to manage people at the time and Senganal made me realize that I didn't want to manage

The Principal Scientific Advisor to the Government of India published a draft policy to support and nurtue the unique requirements of Deep Tech startups in India. I just finished reading it and put together a few comments in a FOSS United forum thread . I will probably read it again a week or so later and try to update my comments on the thread with any new insights/thoughts I have.

In the first few years of college, I was heavily involved in organising student communities. I helped organize the Astronomy Club at IIT Madras for the first four years of my college life, among other communities that I was a part of. But I stopped after my fourth year. After graduating, I got interested in being a part of software communities in the cities I was working out of but I never helped organize the communities. Pune, Chennai, Austin, Cambridge. Local meetups, PyCon India, SciPy India. I attended a few meetups at each of these places, maybe gave a talk or two, but I never helped organize the actual communities. I briefly volunteered to help organize a few meetups but I soon realized the additional work and my effort trailed off pretty quickly. Things finally changed. I helped organize the HydFOSS software conference at T-Hub on Saturday (29 July, 2023) and I am incredibly proud of what we have been able to achieve. 150+ people attended the conference. We invited 3 speakers f

I read Bea Wolf  yesterday. It is written by Zach Weinersmith, the creator of the  Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereals internet comic  and drawn by Boulet . I've been a fan of their work for over a decade now, since I was in college. From the Bea Wolf book website - A modern middle-grade graphic novel retelling of Beowulf, featuring a gang of troublemaking kids who must defend their tree house from a fun-hating adult who can instantly turn children into grown-ups. I was smiling the entire time I was reading the graphic novel and I was laughing out loud multiple times. I hope the story continues and they come out with a Volume 2 of Bea Wolfs adventures. Listen! Hear a tale of mallow-munchers and warriors who answer candy’s clarion call! Somewhere in a generic suburb stands Treeheart, a kid-forged sanctuary where generations of tireless tykes have spent their youths making merry, spilling soda, and staving off the shadow of adulthood. One day, these brave warriors find their fun cut s

From todays edition  of Matt Levines' Bloomberg Opinion column Congress passed legislation intended to make life better for people allergic to sesame seeds. Instead, it made things worse.  The bill, passed with overwhelming bipartisan support and signed into law by President Biden in 2021, requires manufacturers to label sesame on their products starting this year.  In response, some companies began adding sesame to products that hadn’t included it in the past—saying it was safer to add sesame and label it, rather than certify they had eliminated all traces of it. People with sesame allergies say the result is fewer sesame-free food options, as well as new and unexpected risks from sesame in foods they used to eat without worry.  What do you think is the lesson here? In one of my earlier blogposts , I outlined the "8 things a government can do" framework of thinking about public policy. Regulating an industry to place allergen labels feels like "Drastically change in

I wouldn't be where I am today if not for Astronomy and Astrophysics. I failed my Computer Science 101 course in my first year of college because I could not comprehend how the variables, conditionals and loops could ever help me with my Physics degree. I stayed as far away from programming as possible until the summer of my fourth year. I had an internship where I was tasked with processing astronomical data. The professor I was working with that summer told me that I could use any programming language I wanted to process the data and for reasons that I don't remember now, I chose Python. And I absolutely fell in love. Not with the programming language itself but with the fact that I now had access to a tool that helped me with Astronomy and Astrophysics. I graduated and I got a job as a Scientific Software Developer, not too far away from Science but far enough that I don't get to work directly on anything even remotely related to Astronomy and Astrophysics. I've foll

https://spacetraders.io/  popped up on Hacker News a while back. It is marketed as a "A unique multiplayer game built on a free Web API" I recently started working on a project that uses web technologies at work and we're still trying to figure out the lay of the land. One of the things that I started looking into this week is what the best practices for REST API design are and when discussing this with a colleague, Space Traders popped into my head. Yes, there are popular public APIs that I can use for learning like the APIs offered by GitHub and Slack but space traders should be more fun. I initially was considering learning a new language ( Elm ) while also learning web technologies but that might just be too much for now. So, for now, I will stick to writing code in Python and playing with the Space Traders API over the weekend. Let's see what comes of it.

For most of my life, I've lived in small towns or cities. Over the past year, I've spent most of my time in Anantapur, Chandigarh and Solan, all of which are mostly small towns. Chandigarh is the biggest of them all but I could still drive from the northern end to the southern end within 30 minutes. At most of these places, I could get groceries within a 10 minute drive, good places to eat within 20. The air was clean because I stayed away from the town centers. I didn't have to deal with the sounds of traffic and construction that most cities have. Before this year, I stayed in Ongole for roughly an year and Cambridge, UK for more than an year. Again, I could run out and come back within 15 minutes if I needed to get groceries at the last minute, if I needed to find a pharmacy at an odd hour or run odd errands. The biggest places I stayed in were Chennai and Pune but even there, those cities feel like small towns stitched together. I didn't have to venture out of Magar