Tech - Swaroop CH

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

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

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

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+

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

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

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

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”

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

India

Inspired by companies incubated at RTBI, IIT Madras

I am here at IITM, Chennai to help out NextDrop in some technology discussions, and have been blown away by the kinds of companies incubated at the Rural Technology Business Incubation facility (RTBI). For example, consider Stellapps which is developing an automated cow milking system! To get a taste of

Business

Statistics to wow non-techies about digital future

A common question I get from non-techies is “Is ecommerce for real? Do people really buy online?” My line of argument is that the future is digital, and hence buying online is a natural consequence of that. However, just saying that was not convincing enough. So I gathered some statistics

Books

Passionate Programmer book review

Every once in a while I get an email like this: Sir, I am a beginner to python and programming. I started with the C++ and found it hard so one day via google I found your perfect tutorial “A byte of Python”. I read the whole tutorial in one

Tech

Programming Language Adoption

55 people have asked me to write about: Indian companies just don’t take Python seriously, not as much as Perl. Why is that? 28 people have asked me to write about: Most companies opting for Ruby as their programming language of choice instead of Python 51 people have asked

Tech

Cyber Celebrity?

Deccan Chronicle article says: In the blogosphere, technology rules supreme as some of the most popular bloggers, Prashanth HN (techbangalore.com), Swaroop C H (swaroopch.com) and Vikas S N (techknots.com) all blog about it.

Tech

isbn.net.in open-sourced

I have been getting many emails regarding isbn.net.in since I put it out 9 months ago. For example: Hi Swaroop, I am following your blog for last year. I have visited and used ur isbn.net.in service. It is a good idea. To easy of mobile phone

A Byte of Vim

My Bash and Vim setups

I find it surprising on how little time coders spend on their development environment (the “dev env”). And especially, I find it amusing that I can find, refactor and test code way faster than the Netbeans IDE users in my office, with just a shell and Vim setup. So why

Tech

PESIT Offer to Startups: Mentor Students, Get Office Space

My alma mater, PESIT (in Bangalore), has an interesting proposition for startups – mentor students and get office space in return. The background is that they are working to improve the quality of education in the IS / CS departments. One of the ideas they identified was to work with in-industry programmers