Swaroop CH

Why read open source code?

I’ve never been a fan of new year’s resolutions because I feel they are doomed. And yet, the holidays are a good time to take a pause and really reflect. I’m thinking I want to read more open source code… Because accomplished coders did that via a

Leadership

Back to IC

Two and a half years ago, I wrote about Engineering Management : Lessons learned in first year. It’s been more than a year since I have been back to an Individual Contributor (IC) role. So I have been reflecting on that. Why the switch back to IC? So why the

Tech

ML model monitoring

May 20, 2021 Kornel and I wrote about our team’s work on “Maintaining Machine Learning Model Accuracy Through Monitoring” on the DoorDash Engineering blog: Maintaining Machine Learning Model Accuracy Through Monitoring Maintaining-Machine-Learning-Model-Accuracy-Through-Monitoring-_-DoorDash-Engineering-BlogDownload Jul 23, 2021 I presented at Fifth Elephant MLOps conference on behalf of the Machine Learning

Leadership

Interviewed by Managers Club

The interview is posted at https://www.managersclub.com/interview-with-swaroop-c-h-engineering-manager-at-helpshift/ → I talk about my biggest challenges, approach to hiring, advice for new managers, personal habits and that one book recommendation. managers_club_interview_swaroopchDownload

Leadership

Interviewed by dev-to-manager

The interview is at https://devtomanager.com/interviews/swaroop-c-h/ I talk about my recent transition from developer to manager in this written interview. An excerpt: What do you tell developers who are considering making the switch or new to the role? Do not do this if you are not ready

Leadership

Engineering Management : Lessons learned in first year

It’s winter season and am getting close to a year of full-time engineering management. So, I’m listening to some jazz house music and reflecting on what I have learned. While I have done tech lead roles before, this is the first role I’ve been doing people management

Self Improvement

Stoicism

I read The Daily Stoic book by Ryan Holiday around a year ago. It changed my perception of reality with the very first page: Stoicism is an ancient philosophy that focuses on practical life instead of theoretical questions. It is concerned with everyday life and does not concern itself about

General

Exploring blockchain and smart contracts with Ethereum dev bootcamp, [email protected]

Background A few months ago, Mayank convinced me to get some Ether (Ethereum cryptocurrency) because it was going to go on a bull run, thanks to high-profile companies backing Ethereum by joining the Ethereum Enterprise Alliance (EEA). So I did. And that event did happen – including Microsoft, Intel, MasterCard, Cisco,

Tech

My experience with Udacity Deep Learning Foundation course

If you don’t know what is machine learning, just know this from Francois Chollet (creator of Keras)’s “Deep Learning with Python” book : After attending the AI Frontiers conference at the beginning of this year, I was amazed, fascinated and befuddled at what actually is machine learning and deep

General

Automatic acquired by Sirius XM!

NOTE: This story here is my personal perspective, it does not represent the views of my employer. 6 years ago, I worked with Thejo Kote on NextDrop. 5 years ago, I joined Thejo on his (then) next adventure, Automatic which launched 4 years ago, that story is here. The premise

Tech

Notes from AIFrontiers conference

My soothsayer friend BG told me last year that “deep learning is the next big thing”. I didn’t know what that meant. A few days ago, I attended the AIFrontiers conference in Santa Clara, California. Now I have a glimpse of what he meant :-) What is Intelligence? In

Tech

Using Spacemacs

In the past couple of months, I’ve been using and, a first for me, regularly contributing to this open source project called Spacemacs. Spacemacs is a new distribution of Emacs. Think what Ubuntu did for GNU/Linux – Spacemacs is doing the same for GNU Emacs. It combines all the

Tech

Load testing using Tsung

https://medium.com/helpshift-engineering/load-testing-using-tsung-ef26a662929b Load-Testing-using-Tsung-_-by-Helpshift-Engineering-Team-_-helpshift-engineering-_-MediumDownload

Tech

Eight programming lessons learned in 2013

Although it’s not yet the last month of the year, I was in a reflective mood, and jotted down programming lessons I learned this year: 1. Spend time first on what you’re going to do, iterate several times on the “plan”, and when you get to the computer,

General

NH7 Weekender 2013

NH7 Weekender 2013 Pune was fun. Well, I thought it was better music last year, but the festival is definitely worth visiting every year. Nucleya, Madboy/Mink, Ankur Tewari & The Vinyl Records are the new discoveries for me this year. Started downloading some of their albums and playing their songs

General

Learning where to invest money from MoneyLife

Investing in property and gold is the first thing that comes to mind for us Indians when we want to invest money. But somehow I’ve always preferred finding out a more systematic way of figuring out how and when to invest. Bajaj Capital has been my financial advisor for

General

BGs Clojure Course Day 2

1 Pro Tip Pro Tip: Always set this in your REPL to prevent long data structures or infinite loops from hanging your REPL: (set! *print-length* 50) (set! *print-level* 10) 2 Workshop problem Starting the day with this problem: Given a text file, let’s find the n most common and

General

BGs Clojure Course Day 1

Continuing my journey of learning Clojure, I am attending BG’s Clojure Course. Today was Day 1. ~30 people in one room and BG as teacher for the weekend. Of course, I was looking forward to it. Most people in the audience had a background of mixture of C/C+

General

Khadakwasla Dam and Sinhgad Fort

Long ago, friends told us that Sinhgad Fort is a nice weekend getaway from Pune, finally, yesterday (Sunday) morning, we took out our getaway car and visited Khadakwasla dam and the beautiful misty land of Sinhgad. It was totally worth it.

Tech

Revamped isbn.net.in

Because of constant badgering from loyal isbn.net.in users (Navdeep, Chinmay, Hari, Sandip, Vidyaraj, Kartik, Vivek, Arjun, Leo, Ravi and others), I finally had to dedicate a weekend to fixing up isbn.net.in. However, instead of just fixing up the old code base, I rewrote it to use

India

Met Lakshmi Rebecca of “Chai With Lakshmi” fame

Ten months ago, Lakshmi Rebecca emailed me about her online talk show Chai with Lakshmi. I acknowledged her email and gave my standard reply of how this is a personal blog and I don’t do product reviews of any kind. At the same time, I forwarded the website to

Tech

[Tech] Why is “Database Layer as a REST API” not common?

We have “database APIs” such as abstraction layers over multiple SQL databases and ORMs. But why not take it to the next step and make it a REST API like any other network call that we can make? Advantages would be: * The sharing of database ORM models across multiple programming

Travel

[Travel] Hiking around Lake Chabot

Last Sunday, we hiked the 10-mile (15-16 km) Lake Chabot Loop with friends. It was amazing fun because of some new people we met, a beautiful lake and trail and it had been a long time since I had walked so much! (My legs informed me about that the next

Travel

[Travel] Monterey Bay

Last Saturday, we were hanging out with A R Karthick who was gracious to take us exploring the Monterey Bay – the three highlights for the day were: Mystery Spot was interesting and the strange phenomenon there could only be explained by some kind of magnetic force, we would literally stand

Travel

San Francisco

My wife and I are visiting San Francisco (I am here for the launch of Automatic) and in this past month, I have been experiencing San Francisco and the culture here. Obviously, this is all anecdotal but, hey, that’s what experiences are about. The first thing that I’ve