Rahul gives unsolicited advice

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...

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...

In December 2022, I was on the All Things Policy podcast to talk about  An Open Tech Strategy for India  with Bharath. Bharath is the Programme Manager of the Graduate Certificate in Public Policy (GCPP), Technology and Policy programme at Takshashila. at the Takshashila Institution. You can listen to the podcast at the link above. I was a nervous wreck before the podcast but it was a lot of fun. We recorded the podcast right as I was finishing the GCPP Tech & Policy programme and I tried using as much of what I had learnt in the course in crafting what an Open Tech policy would look like. You might have noticed from my recent blogposts that I'm getting involved in Tech Policy circles. Over the next year or two, I hope to get enough exposure to decide whether or not I can do this for the rest of my life, maybe even in a professional capacity.

On Friday, Arun and I talked mostly about two things - documentation and processes. Arun is working on documentation and he was wondering whether or not he should document the failure modes of an external tool that is used as part of a process. This gave way to a broader discussion on what should be documented and when. In this particular instance, I talked about how documenting the failures of an external tool internally feels unnecessary unless the external tool has no documentation to speak of. There can be a basic expectation from the developer that they can look up the tools' documentation if and when necessary. In general, we talked about deciding whether or not to document something depending on how much time it can save a person/company. If it can save a person one or more hours per week, the savings can add up to thousands of dollars per years. If the documentation can only save a few hours an year, then it might not be worth spending time working on that piece of document...

After an unscripted talk on the Digital Personal Data Protection Bill 2022 at the Jan 2023 meetup of Bengaluru FOSS , I decided to refine it. I ended up presenting the same talk, sort of, at the MumbaiFOSS meetup in March 2023 . I just realized today that I have been speaking publicly on and off since 2009 but this is the first time one of my talks was recorded. As far as I can know. In college, I was part of the Astronomy club and we used to conduct talks, workshops and night time observation sessions on the college campus. After I started working, I mostly talked about Python and the Scientific Python ecosystem. I haven't done much public speaking in 2020/2021/2022 but I think 2023 is going to be good. At the Feb 2023 meetup of Bengaluru FOSS, I was part of a Panel discussion on the "State of FOSS" and at the March 2023 meetup, I gave a short lightning talk on what could be in the upcoming Digital India Act 2023. I can't wait for April. I'm hoping to propose a P...

On a bet with my wife, I tried to read 12 books between February 6, 2023 and March 10, 2023. I ended up reading 14 . For most books, I linked earlier blogposts where I wrote about them. Open Circuits by Eric Schlaepfer, Windell H. Oskay  (Highly recommended for kids) Richest Man in Babylon by George S. Clason The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch with Jeffrey Zaslow Free Voice by Ravish Kumar Undocumented by Rejimon Kuttappan The Twits by Roald Dahl  (audiobook) The Book That No One Wanted to Read by Richard Ayoade  (audiobook) Animal Farm by George Orwell  (audiobook) The Reason I Jump by Naoki Higashida  (audiobook) The Impatient Woman's Guide to Getting Pregnant by Jean M. Twenge PhD  (Highly recommended for people who intend to get pregnant) Pregnancy Notes by Rujuta Diwekar Radioactive by Lauren Redniss  (Highly recommended for people who love Graphic Novels) River of Stories by Orijit Sen  (Highly recommended for Indian audience) The Wi...

I read  The Impatient Woman's Guide to Getting Pregnant by Jean M. Twenge PhD  and  Pregnancy Notes by Rujuta Diwekar  this week. Pregnancy Notes, by "India's top health expert", is a book that talks about before, during and after pregnancy. Mostly, the book deals with diet before pregnancy, during each of the trimesters and after delivery. One of the recurring themes in the book is the need unearth Indian recipes and customs meant for pregnant women that are commonly practiced in various parts of the country. The author talks about how western science is catching up to the benefits of food items that are part of various traditional Indian cuisines. I broadly agree with the sentiment because I have seen the impactful work that People's Archive of Rural India does. The problem is that the author goes further and flirts with pseudo science. For example, The moon represents the water element in our body and if you follow the moon closely, you would notice fluctuatio...

Words aren't always enough. I was trying to digest the  Keycloak documentation on securing applications  and after spending eight hours on that page, I finally realized that I was trying to construct diagrams in my head using the words. I was trying to construct the control flow in my head using the words on that page. And that is almost always a lossy transmission of information. I believe that a few sequence diagrams ( uml , mermaid ) can do wonders in that documentation, helping both people who need words and those who need images. And the verbal people can communicate with the visual people using the images and the text! There's a dearth of diagrams in software project documentation. You could respond by telling me that most software projects don't even have documentation so expecting diagrams is a stretch. To that, I say that accepting diagrams as documentation might help address the issue. Contributors might not implicitly know that diagrams are acceptable contributio...

There's a lot to unpack in the title. Let's start with FOSS United . FOSS United is an Indian non-profit "dedicated to the cause of building Free and Open Source (FOSS) projects and communities in India". As part of building FOSS communities in India, they host a monthly meetup in Bengaluru  which I started attending in December 2022. In the January 2023 meetup, I gave a talk on the Digital Personal Data Protection Bill 2022 . For the February 2023 meetup, I proposed a talk on Scientific computing because everyone I met in the Dec 2022 and Jan 2023 meetups didn't know what a "Scientific Software Developer" does. The proposal was rejected but the organizers reached out to me and asked me if I was interested in being part of a panel discussion on "The State of FOSS" in India. I enthusiastically agreed, the panel had an internal meeting to prep for the discussion and the moderator came up with a set of questions. The panel discussion happened thi...

There has been a lot of interest in audio books but I had never listened to one. Not until Saturday that is. I needed to drive to and from Banglore this weekend and it takes 4+ hours each way, not taking into account potential traffic within the city itself. Usually, i'm on the phone or i'm listening to podcasts. But, given the bet I have with Preeti this month, I thought listening to audio books would be a better use of my time. So I went through the entire catalogue of ebooks available on the Library app and picked five, four of which I ended up actually listening to. The first was The Twits by Roald Dahl , narrated by Richard Ayoade , who you might know from the IT Crowd. It was short and hilarious. Richard Ayoade does an amazing job with the narration. I was smiling practically the entire time I was listening to the audio book. It was roughly an hour long so not a big audio book. In a few years time, when my son starts reading books, I'm definitely buying all of Roald D...

Arun talked about how he found the Radical Candor talk ( see the previous blogpost ) very useful and how he had his first short radical candor talk with a junior at his work place. He mentioned that he found it useful to understand the other persons perspective and he mentioned how the other person pointed out things that could have helped them. I then asked Arun if he could improve the onboarding document that their company has for new employees based on their discussion. When a discussion has meaningful outcomes, especially outcomes that can be applied to an entire group of people, it's a good idea to document them instead of letting the information sit in peoples' heads. He then mentioned that he found the Randall Koutnik talk ( see the previous blogpost ), specifically that it helped him understand how to break down work before delegating it and how he could take the capabilities of a younger employee into consideration when breaking down the work for them. If you haven...

Open Circuits by Eric Schlaepfer, Windell H. Oskay I think I heard about Open Circuits on Hacker News three or four months back. I found it very interesting and I eventually gifted it to my sister-in-law and her husband, both of who are electronics engineers and run a small hardware consulting firm. Their first reaction was that they wished they had this book when they were younger. I read this book early this week while I visited them and I felt the same. The book is more of a coffee table book in my opinion with large pictures of the inside of various electrical and electronic components with brief explanation on the components themselves. This would have been a great book to start exploring the field of electronics as a young kid, potentially leading to a ton of questions on the various components in the book. One constant question I had throughout the entire book was regarding the manufacturing process of these intricate electronic components. This is high on my list of books that...

I had my second mentoring session with Arun yesterday. We first talked about People Management and how to have potentially awkward conversations with co-workers on topics ranging from company culture to internal mentoring and work expectations. I pointed Arun to No Rules Rules , especially the parts of the book that talk about company culture and how it is important for everyone to feel like they are working with the best people. I feel incredibly lucky working at Enthought because I'm surrounded by people smarter than me every single day and I learn a ton from them. I discussed this book with my co-workers at our internal reading group and found it to be very stimulating. This felt especially important given that Arun is working at a very small startup and it isn't inconceivable that he will see the company grow 10x. When it comes to awkward conversations around internal mentoring, I pointed him to Radical Candor , another book that I had discussed with my co-workers at our i...

I first blogged on 24 July 2011 and I've been blogging on and off for the past decade. There were a few years when I felt bad about not writing more than a few times. I also felt great when old friends or new acquaintances told me they liked a few of my blog posts. When I ask myself now why I wrote what I wrote in the past, I realize that I don't have a concrete answer. Mostly, I wrote about information that I had just gained that I found interesting. Once or twice I wrote because I thought it would help my professional career. Over the past 3 months, I wrote because it was part of my course work. Briefly, I wrote because I felt a need to explain complicated scientific concepts to the general public. In 2023, I'm trying to be mindful about what I do and consciously ask myself why I do what I do. And I write because it helps me think. It is incredibly helpful to me to occupy myself for a meaningful amount of time with a piece of information, digest it, put it into words and ...