Pratyush Mittal

Fri, 23 Apr 2021 09:38:21 +0530

Web Interface Handbook | Typography | Spacing

This is a beautiful (and free) book on web interfaces.

I loved the chapters on Typography. It is full of examples. Examples comparing the common (lazy) design vs thoughtful improvements.

Will retouch some of my CSS stylesheets based on this.

Thu, 15 Apr 2021 20:37:34 +0530

Open Source is not Freemium

This is pretty fabulous take from team ERPNext.

They suggest that instead of charging for “hosting” the open-source software, charge for “services” around it.

If you are a company that publishes open source tools, the question to ask yourself is, do you want to make money from your product (rent) or from services around it. Rent is exactly how proprietary products make money.

You can’t compete with your own free offering. There are billions of dollars flowing into proprietary platforms that should be the target.

This last part is pretty fabulous. Don’t “compete with your own free offering”. Your open source software replaces a proprietary software. Charge for services around “integration” and “installation”. Places where companies are already spending huge money - be a replacement for that.

The trouble happens when someone else just wraps our free open source software as a paid service. Like AWS did with ElasticSearch. It feels “unfair”. But the way they reframe it is amazing.

But as we became more mature, we started seeing how open source is truly different. We ourselves were users of many open source tools like CentOS, MariaDB, Python to name a few but were neither contributors nor did we buy any services from these companies.

Fabulous essay! Taught me a lot about how to think about going open-source.

How to learn coding?

Sun, 11 Apr 2021 21:49:00 +0530

A monologue I was having when someone asked, “how do I learn coding?”

——

I don’t think coding can be learnt. It is about having a problem to solve and then solving it using a mix of tools. If we are able to solve it using any tool whatsoever, then it is coding.

There are over 100,000 (actually 800k+) computer engineers trained every year in India. Yet, the creators are handful. Most of these creators don’t have a background in coding.

——

Learning coding

The first step to learn coding is to have a small problem. A tiny little problem that makes no sense otherwise:
- see all images on the page
- see all links on a page
- get that table from PDF to excel

These problems have a very specific output. Having that clearly defined output does half the work.

In other words, ask yourself: “What is the required output?”

Examples of what is the required output:
- get the mean of few numbers
- get the last trade price of any stock symbol
- get the text for any audio
- get the audio of any text
- get a picture for any word

The pattern is to have a clear defined output and a clearly defined input. These kinds of problems are the best problems to start learning coding.

——

Learning the language

Once you have a problem, it is then about finding the shortest way around it.

There are usually some tools available around your problem - but they require some setup. Most of the coding is learning that language of setup.
- Want to Tweet anything I post on Instagram: Setting up IFTTT hooks
- Want to apply 5 Photoshop filter each time: Writing Photoshop actions
- Avoiding writing same emails each time: Writing canned responses in Gmail
- Removing tons of emails from banks: Writing search filters in Gmail
- Avoiding writing same thing (url, command, text input) each time: Alfred scripts, AutoHotKey
- Fetching data of stocks: Google Sheet formula eg =Googlefinance
- Formatting Excel data each time: recording macros in VBA
- Doing some stuff in Excel each time: writing macros in VBA
- Getting stuff from a web-page: writing Javascript bookmarklets
- Generating powerful graphs: importing CSVs in Tablue
- Creating custom dashboards: writing SQL in Metabase
- Creating databases (complex Excel sheets): creating tables in Airflow
- Sending emails and notifications: setting up hooks in Zappier

You see? Learning the language is not about learning Python or Java. It is about learning the language of the software that gets it done.

Creating a solution for all

Extensive coding is only required when we want to distribute our creation with others. This stuff is hard.

We need to have an installer (app, website, exe). And we need to have a UI that is easy to use. These things often require more code than the code for problem itself.

But the good thing is that you will automatically start figuring these things out. How? Because now you know the art of solving the problems - the coding!

Thanks to Aniruddha for listening to this monologue.

Fri, 09 Apr 2021 16:37:00 +0530

How to Make Your Friendships Deeper - The Atlantic

A beautiful essay on the idea of friendship. How many friends do we have with whom we can “hang-out” with?

The average adult has roughly 16 people they would classify as friends. Of these, about three are “friends for life,” and five are people they really like. The other eight are not people they would hang out with one-on-one.

These other 8 are “deal-friends”. Friends with whom we have kind of professional relationship.

You don’t need to have dozens of friends to be happy, and, in fact, people tend to get more selective about their friends as they age. But the number needs to be more than zero, and more than just your spouse or partner.

The essay also provides ways to ways to find friends who are not for any purpose. Friends who friends just because we care for each other.

It simply requires showing up in places that are unrelated to your worldly ambitions. Whether it is a house of worship, a bowling league, or a charitable cause unrelated to your work, these are the places where you meet people who might be capable of sharing your loves, but without advancing your career. When you meet someone you like, don’t overthink it: Invite them over.

Thu, 08 Apr 2021 10:24:00 +0530

(Thanks to @Sbikh for sharing the pic.)

To have a unicorn or to be a cockroach?

As a founder, I think, it is much more important to be a cockroach. To survive. To keep innovating. To stay relevant.

Unicorn is just a number. A number not given by our customers but by our peers.

To have a unicorn requires raising a million dollars at a billion dollar valuation.

To be a cockroach requires creating something. Everyday! For years!!

As @Sbikh says, “business is an effort of lifetime.”

Isn’t that more fun?

Sat, 03 Apr 2021 23:37:00 +0530

Skribbl | Free, Hand-Drawn Illustrations

Wow! Skribbl provides abstract illustrations. For free. And no attribution required.

Thu, 01 Apr 2021 15:37:38 +0530

Design as (un)ethical illusion

Beautiful article about interfaces. One of the lines that stuck was:

All maps are lies. Useful lies, but lies all the same. They don’t tell you everything about the territory. If they did, they’d be totally useless and impossible to read. Maps show you a highly simplified model of the territory—an incomplete version of the truth based on your goals, context, zoom level, location, etc. They’re helpful because they leave stuff out.

That is so much true about applications. Good applications are like maps. “They’re helpful because the leave stuff out.” They make things simple.

Wed, 31 Mar 2021 00:37:15 +0530

Acorn: Remove a Background

Acorn is a basic image editing software of MacOS. It is not a Photoshop - but who needs a photoshop all time.

What I loved about it was their brilliant documentation with lots of video tutorials.

Fri, 26 Mar 2021 13:37:42 +0530

Building a full-text search engine in 150 lines of Python code · Bart de Goede

This is pretty interesting post. It uses lots of small algorithms and provide simple code-snippets for them:

tokenzing
stemming
boolean search
term frequency
inverse document frequency

All in just 150 lines of code.

Fri, 19 Mar 2021 14:37:28 +0530

In Praise of the Unambiguous Click Menu | CSS-Tricks

The article suggests that the modern trend in menus is to use click menus instead of hover menus.

Click menus behave same on mobiles and desktop.
They don’t create flicker when the mouse moves a few pixels
Click menus are based on “intent”
Must use dropdown cursor when using click menus.

Interesting.

Wed, 17 Mar 2021 13:37:13 +0530

Tax Calculator for Resident Individuals

While most tax calculators ask lots of questions, this one provides a very simple quick calculation of tax based on slab rates.

Comes handy in these days of March.

Wed, 17 Mar 2021 09:37:00 +0530

Uberspace - Shared web hosting

I love Uberspace for hosting websites on a shared server.

While I use VPS (AWS, Linode or DigitalOcean) for larger projects, I still love shared hosting because they are batteries included. They are pre-configured with firewalls, databases, nginx, apache, memcache and SSL.

Shared servers also have much more (shared) CPU resources than a fixed CPU capacity in a VPS. My earlier websites on Webfaction.com (1GB ram - shared cpu - $5/month) performed much better than on DigitalOcean (2GB ram - 2CPU - $10/month). Primary reason was that though the CPU on Webfaction was shared with neighbours, it was of much much larger capacity.

Thus it all boils down to how a shared hosting provider allocates the neighbours. UberSpace rocks at this.

I didn’t find the resource allocation part on UberSpace website. Here are the details of that: https://uberspace.de/en/

Disk space: 10 GB (can be expanded) RAM: 1.5 GB CPU: Shared as available. But restricted to 6 (https://manual.uberspace.de/changelog/#v7-10-0-short)

On pricing: they provide a pay what you want model :)

Lazy functions in Django [Functional programming]

Wed, 10 Mar 2021 16:19:00 +0530

I love to write functions instead of classes. However, Django does not allow us to call functions inside templates.

Sometimes we want to postpone the function calls in templates because they might be expensive. Thus we might want to call them inside the template’s cache fragment or inside an if statement.

My way around them is to use a lazy_cache function to postpone and cache a function’s result.

Thus the whole usage is something like this:

import datetime as dt
from utilities.functional import lazy_cached

def expensive_computation(result_date, page_number=1):
    # do some expensive stuff
    return results

def latest_results(request):
    result_date = dt.datetime.today()
    page_number = request.GET.get('page')
    results = lazy_cached(
        expensive_computation,
        result_date,
        page_number=request.GET,
    )

    return render(
        request,
        "latest-results.html",
        {
            "results": results,
            "page_number": page_number,
        },
    )

In templates we can now do:

{% load cache %}

{% block content %}
{% cache 30000 results_page page_number %}
{% for result in results %}
    <div>{ { result.name }}</div>
{% endfor %}
{% endcache %}

My recipe for lazy_cached function is:

def lazy_cached(func, *args, **kwargs):
    state = {"value": None, "realized?": False}

    def wrap():
        if state["realized?"]:
            return state["value"]
        state["value"] = func(*args, **kwargs)
        state["realized?"] = True
        return state["value"]

    return wrap

Thu, 25 Feb 2021 10:37:33 +0530

Showing sender image (logo) in transactional emails - BIMI Implementation

We usually see a sender’s photo in Gmail. Those sender avatars are shown not only for our friends and known contacts, but also for transactional emails.

I often wondered how they are shown. They look good and provide a better clue about the sender.

Turns out there is a “BIMI” (Brand Indicators for Message Identification) spec for that. It requires DMARC compliance and then a DNS record pointing to the SVG image.

Cool!

Sun, 21 Feb 2021 16:37:14 +0530

Buy Mattress Online in India

This looks pretty cool. It is like Casper of India. Reviews are also pretty good: twitter.com/_swanand/…

And they sell not just the mattress but also some furniture. Would love to give it a try.

Sat, 20 Feb 2021 12:37:44 +0530

Problems of being a solo developer

I would describe my work like single-handedly running a restaurant in an old château. It’s cool and fun, and the ambiance is great, but occasionally the soup is served cold or not at all because I have to chase a bunch of bats out of the kitchen, or replace a collapsed beam, while the diners sit and wait. This is no fun for either me or the diners, who rightfully complain that it ruins their dinner. Having more paying users would let me hire some dedicated carpenters and and bat-chasers that would let me focus on the cooking.

Fri, 19 Feb 2021 10:37:00 +0530

Rules of card game Judgement (or President)

My family loves to play this card game. It is much like coat-piece but less dependent on luck. Plus it allows any number of people to play together.

I was not aware of the official rules around scoring. We gave 10 points to everyone with the right prediction. But linking of points to number of hands predicted is an interesting twist.

How to play

Each Player gets 1 card in Level 1, 2 cards in Level 2 and so on

Trump type changes on every level. In rotational order of Spade, Diamond, Club & Heart.

Each Player need to predict wins in the level before first player throws card

Each player throws one card, first player’s card decides the type other players should throw, highest card player wins the round

If player don’t have same type card then Trump type could be thrown and that takes precedence, if player don’t have Trump type card then any card can be thrown

Each player that wins exact same rounds as predicted, wins the level

Every Level winning player will get 10 + predicted win points. eg if predicted win was 2, player gets 10 + 2 = 12 points

Player with the highest total points in the score card wins.

Tue, 16 Feb 2021 20:34:53 +0530

Snippet Creator - Visual Studio Marketplace

This is a handy little plugin to create code snippets from the current code.

Just select the code you want to create snippet for and save it using the menu.

Tue, 16 Feb 2021 09:37:00 +0530

A table with both a sticky header and a sticky first column | CSS-Tricks

This can be useful for Screener.

Fri, 12 Feb 2021 13:29:16 +0530

TIL that CTRL + CMD + SPACE opens emojis keyboard on MacOS.

It works in any text input field 🤩.