Rahul gives unsolicited advice

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote that I'll be giving up to 5% of my annual salary to Free and Open Source Software , and one of the projects that I'm donating to is the Python Software Foundation (PSF) . I joined PSF at the Supportimg Member - Sliding Scale tier at 25 USD membership dues + additional contribution of 25 USD per Annum - roughly 5000 INR. This was prompted by the recent decision by the PSF to pause the grants program . Like my decision to become a member of the  the TeX Users Group  (TUG), the right thing to do now is to check what the PSF doing with my money or what they've done with funds/donations in the past. The PSF announced the 2024 annual report in June of this year  - checkout the annual report itself at psf annual-report/2024 . The PSF gets, and spends, a lot more money than TUG. For instance Annual revenue was a little less than 4.3 Million USD in 2024 and annual expenditure was a little more than 5.7 Million USD The PSF awarded 297K USD ...

Last week, I wrote that I'll be giving up to 5% of my annual salary to Free and Open Source Software , and one of the projects that I'm donating to is the TeX Users Group  (TUG). I joined TUG at the "special individual membership" tier at 50 USD  - roughly 5000 INR - per annum. The right thing to do now is to check what they're doing with my money or what they've done with funds/donations in the past. Lemme rewind a little - TUG came into my radar because I came across the TUG 2025 annual conference . I was surprised and saddened to find that it happened in Trivandrum (Thiruvananthapuram now), Kerala, India because it's an event that we at FOSS United would have loved to support financially. I kept the TUG 2025 tab open for multiple weeks because I wanted to watch a few of the talks . Note to self : Check if anyone from India was a part of the organizing team for TUG 2025, and reach out to them. Maybe we (FOSS United) could support them in future events. ...

Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) has a sustainability problem. For those of you who are a part of the FOSS ecosystem, or are fairly familiar with it, Duh. But here's a short intro for the uninitiated - you are relying on Free and Open Source software when you read this blog post. Most commercial software applications are made up primarily of FOSS. Our digital lives are powered by FOSS. Yet, a majority of the people who create, maintain, and sustain the FOSS projects are underfunded, if not completely unfunded. This isn't really news - for more than a decade now, people in the FOSS community have been complaining about the sustainability problem, and people have come up with varying solutions to the problem. A real solution to the FOSS sustainability problem involves systematic support from for-profit enterprises and Nation-State Governments but for the moment, let's focus on what I can do as an individual. And why am I bringing this up now? Because of what's happene...

I put the "reviews" in quotes because it's less review-y and more comment-y. Writing is my "theme" for Q1 2025 and I'm pretty happy about the fact that I've started a new blog about the childrens' books that our lives revolve around thanks to Luffy - rahulandluffyread.blogspot.com . I've written 20 posts this month - some of the books came into our lives this month and others have been in our lives for more than an year. I realize that I'm happy writing "slice of life"-style posts instead of writing strict review-style posts. For reasons I can't describe, I was interested in writing review-y posts about books in my life but I was never able to do justice to the format. To me, a review needs additional work from me to look into critique of the book, and I barely have time to put together a blogpost, so the posts just stay in the "drafts" folder, never to be published. This is a surprising revelation to me and it only oc...

In an earlier post , I talked about wanting to create more than I consumed. I've already been writing more than I ever have publicly - but all of it has been limited to the FOSS United discourse forum . A couple of things that I am particularly proud of are the Papers We Love (FOSS edition) and the Absurd Software Patent of the Week threads which I started. The thing i'm most proud of though is the draft 2025 strategy document for FOSS United . For the first time in a long time, I'm incredibly proud of what I have been able to create. It has been a roller coaster ride since I joined the FOSS United Foundation in May 2024 and I've taken a "sit back and observe" approach for much of my time so far. I didn't want to be a bull in a china shop and negatively impact initiatives that the Foundation was already doing successfully. I chose to observe, nudge, advice, and guide instead of direct. And thankfully, I've gained sufficient understanding of the bigge...

So far, I've submitted talk proposals for three FOSS conferences. See the list of conferences and my proposals below. I'm expecting to submit a couple of more proposals for PyConf Hyderabad - a talk proposal on the GIL-ectomy (that I presented internally for a client), a talk proposal about the fossunited.org platform that we have been building at FOSS United, and a workshop proposal on the Frappe Framework that powers fossunited.org! Why am I sharing this here? Because not all of my talk proposals get accepted at conferences but that doesn't mean that the ideas or talks are useless. In fact, I've been wondering for a couple of years now that if a talk proposal gets rejected, I should just livestream the talk on my own personal YouTube channel instead of letting the idea die. This post is me taking one step in that direction. PyConf Hyderabad by HydPy community - 22-23 Feb 2025  DEVCONF India by Red Hat India - Feb 28, March 1 2025 FOSSMeet'25 by FOSS Cell NITC -...

I watched the Groundhog Day movie a couple of weeks back with my mother. It is one of my favorite movies and I was trying to get her to appreciate time-travel movies. We had watched the Edge of Tomorrow movie a week earlier and she had come to not hate it at the end. Groundhog day is one of my favorite movies but I don't think I've watched it since I watched it in college, more than a decade ago. I was a different person then and rewatching the movie made me realize something quite profound, at least to my mind. (Spoilers ahead) In the movie, the protagonist relives the same day over and over again. He goes to sleep and he wakes up on the same day instead of the next day. He goes through various stages of grief and eventually accepts his fate. This leads to an interesting transformation where he continues to relive the same day over and over again but works on improving himself. He starts to learn how to play the piano and everyday, he gets a little better. He starts reading...

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...

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...