Rahul gives unsolicited advice

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...