Remember Kottu? Those were the days. Anyway, Kottu has always been a totally open-source project, and theoretically it is as easy as cloning the git repo and... jumping a few hoops to set it up on your own local machine or VPS. Except... the loops are tedious and there’s a bunch of things that could go wrong. There must be ...
Attā hi attanō nāthō Credits to the incredible Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and William Anders I recently read an article about Hard Determinism, the theory that there is no free will, and that given the initial values of things like the physical constants (the speed of light, the gravitational constant G etc), a universe would evolve, and of it ...
Or rather: a history of what I’ve worked on over the years through the music I was listening to at the time. 2011: Live Forever — Oasis These were the heady days of youthful exuberance, when any idea seemed like it was worth pursuing — all the world’s problems could be solved with code, y’know? — and the internet was new, exciting, and as yet ...
As some of you might know, I started my career as the first developer at a startup, way back in 2012. It was a challenging but rewarding experience, and I got to learn a lot and explore the full breadth of the software stack. The following are some learnings that I wish I could tell my younger self. Prototype ...
Media coverage of ISIS tends to veer from the utilitarian (covering attacks and the daily body-counts of ongoing operations against them) to the absurd, like the story of how a "smart but naive" FBI translator fell in love with a German rapper turned ISIS leader she was supposed to be investigating, and flew over to Syria to marry him (wtaf?!) ...
There was a really interesting YC blog post titled "Ask a Female Engineer: How Can Managers Help Retain Technical Women on Their Team?", which asks a panel of female technical employees on reasons they left jobs or in some cases even change their career paths. I believe it has some really important takeaways not just for managers of technical teams, ...
Thimal is making me read Richard de Zoysa's work. Back when the dictator in chief cared about what was written in English about the government, and dissent was treated with abduction, torture and a gunshot to the back of the head (if you were lucky), de Zoysa stood for, and died for, his convictions. Typeset in LaTeX. I wanted ...
It takes ages to run, isn't optimized at all (bad by even my standards - it queries sqlite for the same value over and over again in a single loop), runs off basic TF-IDF and nothing fancier, and fails to make obvious connections (as the screenshot below illustrates). I feel nervous even posting about it because who knows how it'll ...
Patrio Posts about links are the last refuge of a scoundrel. Before we get underway, a status update: The number of lines of code I've written in the last 26 days (since I stopped going to work) is 0, not counting some late night shenanigans where I thought typing some Pandas code into a terminal was going to solve ...
So this is February And what have you done? Another year's started No strategic planning was begun Is that how the song goes? I finally left my job of a few months over four years and am currently in the twilight zone (?) or whatever they call it. I also did something very uncharacteristic and went out and bought myself ...
2016 has been... an interesting year. I've made friends, and I've lost some. I got a lot of time to sit down and reflect, and I grow thankful every day for the people who choose to stand by me despite all my shortcomings. In the spirit of 2016, let me turn the things that made me happy this year into ...
With any sufficiently complex system, a major overhaul always creates more problems than it solves; there's enough and more "case studies" of the type you read about in Software Engineering to back it up. Things that were fixed over years and countless late night hacking sessions and painstaking iterations break and you have to fix them again. The wisest programmer ...
![Life is a [WIP]](https://kottu.org/img/?q=85&src=https://janithl.github.io/images/earthrise.jpg)
