Hey, I missed last week's update. I was travelling to Guwahati.
Spirit of Entrepreneurship in Young India - A panel discussion I was part of a panel discussion at IIT Guwahati. The purpose was to encourage today's youth toward entrepreneurship. I enjoyed the conversations with other panellists and moderator Jay. Wifey, daughter, me, Jay and Jay's Father at Guwahati Biotech Park Fun at Pobitora, Baithalongso and Guwahati After the session, we went off to Pobitora to see some Rhinos.
It was largely a bug-fixing week. Not the best of the weeks.
What's brewing
Got a new coffee-making machine: Mukka Express My brother and I are coffee addicts. Not the "black-coffee" kind, but the "instant coffee" ones who can't work without it.
We have been wanting to get a coffee machine for our office. I researched and came across Bialetti. Their Moka Pot is a traditional kitchen piece of Italy found in every house. But it makes only Espresso - a coffee without milk.
Bialetti also has a Mukka Express. Like Moka Pot, this too works with stove and …
This was a little hobby-works week. I got to play on some new toy projects.
Major Developments
Created a custom Django starter template. Deploying and setting up a new Django project takes 3-4 days. Most of the time I am copying my setup and deployment scripts from other projects. This starter template reduces the setup time to 10 minutes. It mainly splits up the setting and requirements files for different environments, sets-up pre-commit hooks, has a deployment script for Uberspace and set-ups 12-factor authentication (using Django-environ).
It is a wonderful insight into their lives. We get a sneak preview of the things they are working on and how they are thinking.
I too hope to publish updates that often. Kind of an open life journal. Not because I have too many interesting things to share. But because I want to get back to writing.
I love blogging. But it is hard to think of a new topic each time. It also takes a lot of …
We recently added a full-text search feature in Screener. It searches for all the exchange announcements. We initially faced a few issues while implementing it. However, we were easily able to find a way around them by creating a simple query parser.
The problems MySQL offers 2 main types of searches. BOOLEAN and NATURAL MODE. The natural mode is a user-friendly mode. It takes the input and searches it across the database. The users don't need to learn anything new.
On the downside, the NATURAL mode doesn't allow much customisation. We cannot use "OR" in queries. It also doesn't search …
I loved this essay by PG. He explains the concept of "schlep blindness".
It explains the reason why no one solved payments before Stripe. Every coder knew that problem. Every coder wanted a solution. Yet no one solved it! Because everyone thought that it was a hard problem. It will involve making deals with banks. And then take a lot of risks because of the flow of money involved. These are "schleps" that hackers like to avoid.
But there is a fallacy here. ALL businesses involve schleps:
But I soon learned from experience that schleps are not merely inevitable, but …
