Rahul gives unsolicited advice

The title is chock full of jargon. Let me break it down. API stands for Application Programming Interface. An API is the user-facing part of a software package. For example, if you use the "numpy" package, "numpy.array" is an API. And APIs need to be documented. A single API can produce different results depending on the inputs so documenting the full capabilities of an API is important. Jupyter Book  is a new tool in the Scientific Python community to create and upload documentation easily. The community as a whole seems to be working towards better documenting their projects and some have chosen to go with Jupyter Book instead of relying on Sphinx. I personally don't know why the community felt the need to move away from vanilla rst ( reStructureText ) and Sphinx . One of the advantages of Sphinx is the fact that API documentation for the package can be created automatically (using sphinx-apidoc ) and the API docs can be included in the user-facing documentati...

I got lucky in March 2022. I happened to be in Bhopal for two weeks. Specifically, I was at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER) Bhopal with my wife. She was wrapping up some work at the TrEE lab in the Biology department. She successfully defended her PhD thesis in 2021 but she needed to go back to wrap up some loose ends. I went along with her and I got to meet her labmates. That's how I came across Improbable destinies by Jonathan Losos . As far as I can remember, it's the first biology/ecology book that I have read. It's technically a popular science book but it's not something that a school student can read and understand. But, it's damn good. I would definitely recommend it to biology and science undergraduates who are yet to understand and decide where their interests lie in. Preeti likes the fact that I can atleast know of and can use some of the vocabulary she works with on a day-to-day basis. The book introduces the reader to con...

I am currently living in Ongole, Andhra Pradesh (AP), India. The nearest airport is outside Vijayawada, AP. It takes me 2:30 hrs to get there - 2 hours to get to Vijayawada on a good day and 30 mins to get to the airport on the other side. I was traveling last weekend and I needed to figure out how to get there and back - can I park the car overnight at the Vijayawada airport or do I park the car at a relatives' place in Vijayawada and catch a cab to/from the airport? The Vijayawada airport website was of no use. I tried calling a bunch of phone numbers listed on the website and none of them worked. And there was no conclusive answer on the internet as to whether or not overnight parking was available. The only hope I had was this article from Jan 2020 which stated how much it would cost to park overnight. So, for the next person who is searching on the internet, trying to figure out if overnight parking is available at the Vijayawada aiport, I hope this helps. As of October 2021...

I realised yesterday that this blog has been active (well, active by my standards) for over 10 years now. I started posting in July 2011. I'm not entirely sure why but that made me happy. Very happy. There have been ups and downs and I don't post regularly. I don't know what I was on in 2015 but I posted 113 times that year, the most in an year so far and this year was by far the worst, with only 5 posts. What can I say, there are times when I feel like I have a lot to say and times when I don't. I've changed how this blog looks a number of times and I decided to use the Wayback Machine to look at how this blog has looked over the past decade. Here's how it looked in April of 2013. I was, and still am, a big fan of Batman and the background image is by Yale Stewart who created the JL8 comic strip. The "title" or name of the blog has also changed over the decade and I guess I called it "The Nameless Journal" in 2013, for whatever reason. Not...

 The books on my bookshelf that I haven't touched yet, some of which I bought 2 or 3 years ago. Showa : A History of Japan - 1926-1939 Bottle of Lies : Ranbaxy and the dark side of Indian pharma Big Billion Startup - The untold Flipkart story I do what I do Extraordinary popular delusions and the madness of crowds Everybody loves a good draught. I've read this twice but I need to read it again this year. Vagina problems - Endometriosis, painful sex and other taboo topics The impatient woman's guide to getting pregnant The 7 habits of highly effective people On Writing by Stephen King . It improved my writing the first time I read it and that was a while back so I need to read it again. Good Strategy, Bad Strategy Being mortal The inner game of Tennis . This too I've read once but I don't remember much of it now. You can be rich too The invisible man The body The making of the Atomic Bomb The hour between dog and wolf The once and future king . This was a gift. As y...

 I just finished listening to this amazing special series produced by the folks at HBR IdeaCast podcast on "The Rise and Fall of Carlos Ghosn". If you didn't know, Carlos Ghosn was the CEO of three automotive giants at one time - Renault + Nissan + Mitsubishi. This was before he was jailed for hiding his income from the Japanese authorities. He subsequently escaped from Japan in a crate meant for musical equipment in a private plane to a country which doesn't have an extradition treaty with Japan. Here are the 4 parts to the special series - Part 1 , Part 2 , Part 3 and Part 4 . Fun-fact : I met Carlos Ghosn. Seriously. Back in college, I was part of the Extra Mural Lecture team at my alma mater, Indian Institute of Technology Madras (IIT Madras) and one of the speakers who we invited was Mr. Carlos Ghosn. Here's a blogpost by students at the Department of Management Studies (DoMS) at IIT Madras from that day. I can't find better resources at the moment.

For those of you who don't already know, I'm a big fan of the podcast Planet Money by NPR. I haven't listened to them in a while now because I wasn't making time in my daily routine - until a couple of days back. And today, I came across this gem of an episode. Oh, by the way. I've also become a big fan of the US Television Show Jeopardy over the past year. I hope that helps you understand why I loved this episode.

I've been thinking about Product Management in FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) for a while now and I just spent most of my morning reading up on it. Here are a few good articles I came across :  Why Product Management is Open Source’s Fatal Flaw - An interesting article (from 2008!) that used an example from the Pidgin FOSS IM Client (I've heard about this in college) to discuss where Product Managers fit into FOSS projects and why there is a need for more Product Management in FOSS. No Such a Thing as Open Source Product Manager - Here's an article from 2005 that questions whether or not Product Managers add value to the underlying product. The anecdote about a FOSS competitor beating out software from Microsoft (where Product/Project Managers are involved) feels like an outlier rather than the norm. Rules for product managers at open source companies - Here is a more recent article from 2020 that tries to layout exactly where Product Management can help an open s...

At work, I am part of a team which maintains the Enthought Tool Suite (ETS). ETS includes a number of open source Python packages which are the foundation of the desktop applications we build at work. One of those packages is enable , a 2D drawing library. Yesterday, I came across this issue on enable regarding a python module ( kiva.fonttools.sstruct ) which wasn't used anywhere in the enable codebase at the moment. "... at the moment" is important here because the enable GitHub repository has been evolving for over 10 years now and we don't know if at some point in the past, kiva.fonttools.sstruct was used somewhere in enable. Before we decide on removing the python module from the codebase, we need to understand when it was added, who was using it and how and when the dependency on enable.fonttools.struct got removed from enable. Only then can we confidently remove the module without worrying about unexpected repurcussions. So, I started digging. The first thing ...

It's a good thing I didn't just blindly close the hundreds of tabs that I have open because I just read this beautiful, amazing and thought-provoking piece by Esquire (which has some amazing long reads BTW) on a wall street hedge fund betting that american shopping malls were going towards a crash . It was amazing and fun to read but at the same time there's a deeper and sadder issue of the impact this has on the people. I'm not talking about the people impact of the bet itself but the fact that a bet can be made in the first place. Two paragraphs nicely sum up the issue. “A well-documented historical pattern is that fraud thrives in boom periods and is revealed in busts,” the university researchers wrote, adding that end investors were unaware of this hidden risk, a deception akin to buying a Ferrari secretly outfitted with a rusted-out Kia engine. It could be argued that CMBS had been a magic trick all along, with big banks one step ahead, luring investors to pick a c...