Weekly Notes

I love to read weekly notes of some of my favourite techies:
- Simon Willison
- Chir.ag
- Monica
- Dejal

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 …

Read full post

24th Jan. 2022

Extending full-text search in MySQL

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 …

Read full post

24th Dec. 2021

Schlep Blindness

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 …

Read full post

24th Dec. 2021

Using 2 lines of CSS for implementing tabs

This is such a cool CSS trick. Cross-browser. No JS.

The tabs are implemented as different sections with different ids. Then the tab contents are hidden using:

section { display: none; }

The CSS which toggles them is:

section:target { display: block; }

Noice!

12th Dec. 2021

Fixing MySQL disk-space

We saw a sudden increase in disk usage last month.

We store all persistent data on /data-volume. I checked what is using the space using:

sudo du -h --max-depth 1 /data-volume | sort -h

It showed MySQL folder was using around 150 GB. It was huge. Last week it was ~120 GB.

I was very concerned about this increase and dug more into it. I thought it was because of the full-text search index. But I wanted to be sure.

I was searching for a way to get stats around what is using space inside MySQL. Interestingly, the easiest …

Read full post

24th Nov. 2021

Is It Worth the Time? [xkcd]

I loved this chart.

How much time can we spend in automating it?

I have often wasted hours on automating tiny things. And sometimes never even used those scripts again.

This chart should come handy next time.

9th Nov. 2021

A.R Rahman's shares his thoughts on creativity

I loved this interview of AR Rahman. The piece that I loved the most was where he explains how he thinks about creativity [10.06].

I think it is a constant seeking. When we try 500 things out of which 5 become amazing; I think it's a blessing. We can try 1000 years and still not crack something. But if you get 1 line that lingers on in your heart, in people's hearts, I think that's a blessing. Because somewhere deep there's a soul which is actually connecting to all other souls

And for that, you have to constantly …

Read full post