Writings

Last week, I had the privilege of attending a leadership meetup in Dallas organized by This Dot Labs and to be on the panel discussing the “Impact of AI on Organizations”. I was lucky enough to be in the same room with some seriously brilliant people. The discussions we had were refreshing and a big learning experience for me. What got me fascinated was the kind of applications where AI is being put to use. While I cannot disclose the specific applications discussed, the common thread was on leveraging AI to analyze and interpret vast quantities of data. ...

Recently I read an article about how Stripe built one of the best engineering teams. I have used their products and I have to admit that it’s just well built. Clean, precise and easy to use. Love their documentation too. When i came across this article I wanted to know how they built their team. What stood out for me was the section about “The Sunday Test”. The Sunday Test While other sections about treating recruiting as marketing, valuing rejection experiences, and leveraging existing engineers for talent sourcing were valuable, The Sunday Test was different. ...

Speech-to-text models are the magic behind converting spoken language into written text. From dictating documents and emails to transcribing meetings, their applications are vast. Personally, I rely on this feature to send hands-free messages and control my smart home devices. While those everyday uses are great, I recently discovered an even more powerful application for speech-to-text. When you combine speech recognition with the power of LLMs, things get really interesting. We’re talking Q&A documents, meeting summaries, and even enhancing RAG models. ...

(Yikes! broken image) Yay! figured out how to enable global images. This is my third attempt to get a website built. Tried Ghost, then Substack and then Wordpress. Nothing seems to be working. Let’s see where this goes. May be it’s not the platform. May be it’s me stuck in a writer’s block. TODO I’m yet to figure out load images on this website. For some reason referring to the images in the assests folder is not working. I have to figure that out. (3rd SEP 2024) Tags Categories Google analytics ./J

For my next project I wanted to build something that I have been planning to do for a long time. I love solving sudoku and I was really good at it. Yup, I was good. That was three years ago. By the time I got good at solving sudoku, it started to get boring for me and I decided to write my first sudoku solver – goSudoku. CLI Solution goSudoku is written in Go. The goal was to make a fast sudoku solver by improving on the basic back-tracking algorithm. (More on that below) ...

I’m no expert in AI/ML. I’m trying to self-learn and haven’t built anything significant, until now! To learn something, I need a problem to apply and practice what we learned. I was missing that. I didn’t have a use case for anything related to AI/ML and I wanted a pet project for AI/ML. The beginnings Yeah! Let’s talk about that. I started with this – Basic classification: Classify images of clothing. Yeah, why not. Jump into the deep end and figure out the basics as you progress. That has been my way of learning new things. This time, it did not work. My effort to learn ML and build a basic classification system spans 2-3 years 🤷🏾‍♂️. At the pace at which technology progresses, that’s a lifetime. ...

Take a look at the photo 🌌. It almost looks like a photo taken by an amateur stargazer. Grainy streaks of sunlight. But this photo was taken in 1990 and was not taken from Earth. A machine took it, the right technical term being space probe. It was called Voyager 1, and it was launched in 1977. Voyager 1 traveled 13 years and 6 billion kilometers into deep space, very, very far from home, to take that photo using instruments that were cutting-edge in 1977. ...

Comprehension is the understanding and interpretation of what is read. Documents at work are rarely 140 characters or 140 words or even a single-page document. Whoever wrote that document has put their thoughts into words. It would have been peer-reviewed. Revisions made and approved for general consumption. It might not be the best-written technical document or the best way to string words together, but it nevertheless captures an idea. ...

Part 1 of this series examined how handling date and time presents a slightly different challenge than other data types. Part 2 focused on design-time considerations, including schema, validation, and operation definitions. In Part 3, we will look at some of the implementation aspects, and I will use javascript as the language here. Accepting date-time If you are building an API, enforce a standard format. I generally use ISO 8601 for date, time, and timestamps. ...

Part 1 highlighted the complexity of handling date and time. Part 2 focuses on design-time considerations, including schema, validation, and defining operations. I have been part of multiple teams where we had to design data schemas. When it came to storing date and time, we just slapped on the ISO 8601 format (which, if you ask me, is the only format you would ever need). ISO 8601 format has date, time, and timezone information. Most programming languages also have good support for this format. ...