Rahul gives unsolicited advice

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...