Work

So I do this peculiar thing, where I prepend the author’s initials to the title of every book I add to Calibre.1 2 And all these years, I’ve just been manually editing the metadata, everytime I added a book, and changing the titles to what I want. It’s not a problem if it’s just one book, but I normally tend to go hogwild with authors, normally buying out / downloading all their work. And now that I’ve learnt the basics of the hammer called regex, I wanted to see, you guessed it, if there was a way to quickly do this using regular expressions in Caliber, which has inbuilt support for regexes. ...

Will update this page whenever I come across something regex, that I love. Damian Conway’s 5 hour, Understanding Regular Expressions series. This one is the bestestest regex resource ever. If you know the basics of programming and then want to pick up Regular Expressions, this is it.1 And Damian is one of the finest, bestestestest teachers around. Damian Conway’s hour long youtube talk and the accompanying slides RegexTip, one of John D Cook’s many twitter accounts. This one specialises in, you guessed it, regex tips Regex cheatsheets? This one, by Damian Conway and this one by Dave Child. Want to keep regex top of mind? Use Anki? This is the deck I love Unnecessary, ars gratia artis like Deep Dive? The Friedl book is it. Also don’t be like me and try to learn Regex first. You’re just making it harder on yourself. It is indeed possible, but nearly every regex resource presumes basic programming knowledge. It does not have to be much. Loops and variables and such, Automate the Boring Stuff is good for that, but I don’t want to digress into Python resources 😂 ↩︎ ...

I’ve been job hunting for nearly a year and I was resigned to the vagaries of the interview process. Close to 16 interviews later, I was inured to every possible rejection note under the sun. We don’t quite know what to do with you. You’re too slow. It’s us, not you. The position just got filled. While we don’t want you, we assure you, someone else will. I understand it’s a process, that everyone goes through, but I somehow still held hope that someone would inject some humanity into what seems to be a pretty inhumane process. And Scrollstack was exactly it. While I still haven’t asked the powers that be, why I got in, their process of treating people humanely is what attracted me to them. They wanted me on, and I’ve joined up as a Software Developer. ...

Am using my rickety old laptop as my daily driver these days, because … reasons. And now, that I run PyCharm alongside Emacs, alongside Chrome in its various incarnations, the poor old thing crashes, freezes and stutters a lot. A cursory inspection told me that while I had plenty of CPU firepower, I was constantly running out of ram (8gb) and swap (1 gb partition). Too broke to add more ram to the system right now (don’t even know if this thing will support 8 gb modules to push it up to 16). So the only way to go, was to somehow increase the swap on my system. This is the checklist for curious / researching Jason in the future. ...

Did I not just write about this, the other day with Emacs? I did, but Pycharm seems to have the same affliction. Pycharm, just like Emacs, stubbornly refuses to accept my Compose key combinations. Which means … you guessed it, no ‘,”,“ or ’ punctuation and all the other affordances, Compose gives me. Considering that I need both, Pycharm as well as Emacs in my life, it behooved me, that I go solve this too. ...

This is a picture of my notes, when I import them in from the Kindle. And every time I have to corral them into some sort of structure or write a blog post, I needed to laboriously get rid of all the Kindle metadata with multiple searches (and replaces.) ...