Rahul gives unsolicited advice

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 ...

At some point in November of 2019, I asked a work colleague to be my mentor. He is a CPython core contributor, he has been at Enthought for over a decade and I wanted to learn from him. I don't exactly remember why but we decided that we would start reading a book and discuss it every week. My broad goal was to get better at writing software, which is why I think we chose to read and discuss the book  Clean Architecture by Robert Martin . For those of you who don't know, it's one of the classic texts on software and software architecture. Initially, it was supposed to be just the two of us but others in the office were interested in the book as well so there were three of us when we first met to discuss the book on the 22nd of Nov 2019. We added one more person when we met a week later. I think we discussed a few chapters every week, depending on how big the chapters were or how interesting we felt they were. We didn't have a fixed deadline to finish the book so there w...

I turned 30 this year and until recently, I didn't have the habit of reading a daily newspaper. I think I used to pay for newspapers for an year or so when I was in college but I don't remember reading them. I just remember them being piled up in a corner of my room. I used to get most of my news from Facebook, and then Twitter and then from Reddit. But they're just a news feed and these feeds have been slowly tightening the bubble around me over the past decade. At some point over the past year, I came across The Morning Context . I follow the Zerodha universe  so I came across the fact that Rainmatter Foundation, a non-profit initiative by the people behind Zerodha, funded The Morning Context . I signed up to access the few free articles they have and quickly, decided to become a paid subscriber. It costs around 3,000 Rupees per year (~40 USD). That feels like a lot when compared to the cheapest Netflix subscription that costs 1,788 Rupees per year, the Amazon Prime subsc...

In a previous post , I wrote about 8 things a government can do about FOSS where I talked about categorizing the governments actions in 8 distinct ways. From what I've been reading online, it looks like the Indian Government is already trying to Do-It-Yourself (DIY) FOSS. To recap, DIY-ing is the very last option in the "8 things" and it's risky. Especially in the case of FOSS, DIY is risky. Given the scale of government operations, any DIY solution that the government comes up with gain widespread usage, which can then lead to inertia. Remember that DIY-ing requires not just building expertise in FOSS but also continually maintaining it. If the Indian government doesn't maintain the necessary expertise, it risks the FOSS project falling behind the curve. Let's look at the Samarth eGov project as an example of the Indian government DIY-ing FOSS. Samarth project aims at creating an Open Source, Open Standard enabled Robust, Secure, Scalable and Evolutionary Pr...

According to the 2011 Census of India, the population of India is 1,21,08,54,977 (121 Crore or 1.2 Billion) . In 2021, the US government Census website estimates the population of India to be 1.4 B (140 Crore). For simplicity, let's work with that number for the rest of this article. In the Indian Governments' Ministry of External Affairs' Annual Report 2021-2022 , more than 39.5 lakh (around 4 Million) Overseas Citizen of India cards have been issued since August 2005. (See "Consular, Passport and Visa services"). If we round that up to 40 lakhs, we're looking at roughly 0.3% of the total Indian population. Around 3 Indians in 1000 have an OCI card. In the report 2020-2021, 1.91 lakh (191,000) OCI cards were issued (See "Consular, Passport and Visa services"). In the same section of report, we also see that the Government of India issued more than 57.94 lakh passports (around 5.8 Million) and the Indian Missions/Posts abroad issued 9.94 lakh passp...