Swaroop CH

General

Automatic launched this week

The startup that I’ve been part of for more than a year has launched this week : Automatic – Your Smart Driving Assistant. It’s a hardware device + mobile app + cloud combination that helps you save money by helping you drive in a more fuel-efficient way, monitor your car engine’s

Self Improvement

60/40 rule

From Lessons on Leading by Jessica Steel : Leaders recognize that we should feel 60% mastery and 40% stretch in our jobs at any given time. We draw our confidence from the 60% we know we’re nailing, and we grow from the challenge of the 40% that is new and

India

Micro targeting

Recently the Obama re-election campaign employed similar population-wide behavioral analytics to micro-target voters to ensure his re-election. There is no reason why we in India must not look to technology to devise ingenious methods for near real time data collection and population-wide analytics of social performance. This will not only

Tech

Review: Big Data Book by Nathan Marz

Recently, I finished reading the latest “early access” version of the Big Data Book by Nathan Marz. What is Big Data Let’s look up Wikipedia: In information technology, big data is a collection of data sets so large and complex that it becomes difficult to process using on-hand database

Tech

Wrote an EDN format reader and writer in Python

I was reading about the EDN format over the weekend. EDN (pronounced like in “eden garden”) is a data format in the same league as JSON but is supposed to have some nifty features such as sets, keywords, date-time type, custom types, and also being a proper subset of Clojure.

A Byte of Python

Created an app for live preview of Pandoc

When my wife was editing my books, she used Mou.app for live preview of the text so that she knows what the output is going to be like. The caveat was that Mou.app does plain Markdown and not Pandoc format which would mean the preview would be screwed

Travel

Delhi By Cycle

I had an interesting morning today cycling around Old Delhi guided by Arkash of Delhi by Cycle tour. Seeing a city by cycle was a great incentive by itself and was fun. But I ended up with a case of the Paris Shock Syndrome because of the state of filth

Travel

Taj Mahal

No matter how many times I have heard about Taj Mahal, it’s startling how big it really is. It’s amazing that it is built on top of water wells and special wood because the wet wood makes it resistant to vibrations and hence earthquake-resistant. Of course, Shah Jahan

Travel

Flying Fox in Jodhpur

After our previous flying fox / zipline experience, we were looking forward to the 6-zipline Flying Fox experience in the Mehrangarh Fort at Jodhpur and we were not disappointed, it was a picturesque location and the exciting ziplines went over water, fort walls and across the blue city scenery, ranging from

Travel

Camel Safari in Thar Desert

We had an interesting camel ride and fantastic night in the Thar Desert, thanks to Trotters, Jaisalmer, Rajasthan.

Books

Nostalgia in a startup vs. Anu Aunty book

In a long bus ride, I read How I braved Anu Aunty and made a million-dollar company and I loved the book. The stories in the book are especially familiar to those who have faced the ire of family and sometimes friends at wanting to do a startup. In the

General

What I learned in gamification class

For 2-3 weeks after Prof. Kevin Werbach’s Gamification course ended, I literally felt my weekends were dull without listening to him! And I’m not the only course attendee who felt that way. The best part about the course for me was how engaging and interesting the topics were

Books

Review of Cal Newport’s So Good book

Last weekend, I read Cal Newport’s latest book – “So Good They Can’t Ignore  You” and was very happy that I read it – it was just the sort of book that helps a person who is a few years into his/her career and is beginning to question many

General

Exploratory Cycling

I recently got my cycle fixed up at Rider Owned Bikes (ironically, despite the grumpy owner of that shop). I hadn’t done that good a job at reassembling the bike gears after I had taken apart the wheels and put them all in the back-seat of the car when

Travel

Doing the Flying-Fox at Vihi-Kasara

I came to know there was a water rappelling event organized by VRangers this weekend via the Mumbai Hikers blog. We booked it and only realized later that it was 220+ km away and we’ll have to be there by 10am. Ouch. We inquired for stays in Igatpuri so

General

Learning Gamification by attending a MOOC

I remember when @Ravi_Mohan kept talking about MOOCs and how excited he is by it, I didn’t pay attention to it at the time. A few weeks ago, I watched Daphne Koller’s TED talk and was blown away. I ended up signing up for one of the

Travel

Holiday at The Machan

My wife and myself recently had a great time at The Machan in Lonavala, Maharashtra, India. It’s perfect for nature lovers who want a weekend (or in our case, weekday) getaway and be amidst greenery and silence. It is certainly not the place if you’re looking for “activities

General

Life without a TV

During our stay in Pune, in the first apartment we stayed, the owner had provided a TV. We had to soon move out because the apartment was in the topmost floor which translated to unbearable heat in the summer. In the second (and current) apartment, the owner did not provide

Books

Book review: Thoughts from Jaya, a retelling of Mahabharata

The world around me is very unsettling. First, we have the incompetence of the governments of the day, and then the startling realities highlighted by Satyamev Jayate show, even if it is not the whole truth, and so on. And these strange behavior of man to hurt and not help

Tech

Learning Clojure

I once happened to attend a RubyConfIndia talk by C42’s Steven Deobald who said: data > functions > macros > compilers That kind of stuck in my head even though I didn’t know what it meant at that time. I understood it only after learning Clojure and “The Clojure / Lisp way”

Travel

Paragliding in Kamshet

The Sunday before last, we went paragliding in a beautiful place called Pawananagar Dam, near Kamshet in Maharashtra: The idea was to go on “tandem flights” where a qualified instructor will take you as a passenger in one of these parachute gliders: When I experienced my turn, I realized that

Self Improvement

Freewriting – Review of the Accidental Genius book

Semi-regularly, I’ve been doing something I called “Paper Therapy.” The idea was simple: “Write on paper till your brain has nothing left in it.” This stupidly simple idea has often been miraculous in helping me clear my mind and think of ideas or options that I was unable to

Books

Book Review : Focus Manifesto

I was struggling with focus in the past week, and I needed a refresher of the basics. So I was looking for reading a new book that I haven’t read before, and luckily there was a free one – the Focus Manifesto by Leo Babauta of ZenHabits.com fame. The

Tech

Two nuggets from Coders at Work book

I’ve been reading Coders at Work on and off, and it is a good read for coders who want to learn how coders, who they admire, think and approach programming. Two favorite nuggets of mine so far are from JWZ and Brad Fitzpatrick who are definitely two of my

Books

Book Review : Start-up Nation (story of Israel)

I read the "Start-up Nation" book last week. This book was so engrossing that I read it within 2 days, keeping aside everything else. After reading this book, I started seeing the patterns about Israel being high tech hotspot, for example consider just two pieces of news in the last