Personal

This post was first sent to my newsletter on May 21st, 2021. You really ought to subscribe :) Welcome to another edition of the work letter :) Let’s just dive into it. Click the headers to wander off to the original articles. OS X Reviewed Sometime earlier this year, the operating system known as Mac OS X aka OS X aka macOS, stepped into its 21st year of existence, marking two decades of steady iterative movement. That its underpinnings are older, by at least another decade, is story for some other time. I put this in here, not for the OS itself but for the reviews of the OS, by John Siracusa. From it’s fledgling days, through the first ten releases upto 10.10, John covered it all. In painstaking detail. Other folks wrote reviews. John wrote introductory books to each new OS. Every other line was linked someplace I could learn more. It meant that everytime, I sat to read and learn from a John Siracusa review, I would have to set aside a couple of days to finish it. ...

This post was first sent to my newsletter on May 2nd, 2021. You really ought to subscribe :) New month, new newsletter! :) Let’s get right into it, shall we? An informed look on the why of the farmers agitation. Vivek Kaul’s post on how Bihar fared when they did away with APMCs in 2006, shows why the farmers are up in arms. Read them here, part 1, part 2, & part 3 ...

Enough learning. I now have to drill what I’ve learnt over the past few weeks and months by writing lots of code. Been noodling around with what that might look like in my head. Here’s what I got. After tentatively coding up stuff in a couple of domains and after a short chat with a friend, I realise I love writing code for the web. I love reading. I love to write on my blog. I love that with just a few keypresses, my words can be read by anyone on the web, no gatekeeper required. I would love to write code to enable this for more people. I would love to play and tinker and push at the boundaries of this domain. This intersection of all this is web development. Ergo, I want to become a web developer. ...

Updated version of the post. I seem to have somehow, mangled the old one. I’ll just blame it on the gremlins in the cloud. I’ve been “soft” looking for a job, since the end of last year when I learnt the basics of Python. (Want me to come work with you as a junior developer? Here’s my resume!) And I’ve had rejection after rejection after rejection. I apparently am good. I have skills. I could be an asset for companies. But I am not “quite” what folks are looking for, not quite right for them. I am not quite what it is, folks are looking for, to take chance on. I am a square peg … ...

This post was first sent to my newsletter on April 4th, 2021. You really ought to subscribe :) A tiny bit of houskeeping before we begin. I used to track how many people read the newsletter, partly out of morbit curiosity and partly because Sendy, the software I use to write and schedule these letters, did not have an option to turn it off globally. I would have to turn it it off every single time, I wrote a letter and well, my life is too short to be doing all that. However with the latest version of Sendy all that has changed. And I have turned off all tracking! Yippee! Talk about the importance of sane defaults!) And now, on to the letter … ...

Despite financial troubles there’s a sense in which my childhood was immensely privileged — a pauper in the material world, I was a sultan in the world of ideas. — Erik Hoel I started by wanting to share that quote and link on my microblog and then my thoughts turned into a blog post sized comment. I decided to post it here too, then. ...