We’re gonna try avoiding the “C” , “P” and “L” words in this, okay? Okay.
What can I say about 2020 that hasn’t already been said before? An unprecedented (ugh) year, a year like no other, a year where the word “normal” lost its meaning entirely.
Sitting here writing my yearly reflection piece (a practice I started last year), it’s hard to even recall everything this year threw at us. It’s safe to assume that humanity is going to be processing 2020 and dealing with its far reaching ramifications for the foreseeable future.
I’ve officially taken the next step in my career. I’ll soon be working at Fueled as an Android Engineer! I’m so excited for this next chapter and wanted to write a quick post talking about my thought process behind this change. My hope is to provide a little look into how I’ve come to think of career decisions for those who might be curious about this stuff.
Before we jump into the thought process, I’d like to take a slight detour and talk about how I think about careers in general. Most of these ideas are things I’ve learned about…
31st July, 2020 was my last day at Meraki. My first job, first team. My first product(s) launched, first crashes in production. And most importantly, my first lives impacted.
The word bittersweet keeps coming to my mind while thinking of the current transitional period I’m in. Bitter because it is extremely hard to leave something you’ve spent 3 years of your life working on and sweet because of all the life experiences that lie ahead.
I started working at Meraki as a tech+design volunteer when I was still in college and eventually joined full-time as a Software Developer once I…
A few years ago, I was showing code I’d written to a friend in order to get feedback and one of the things he pointed out to me was that a function I’d written had side effects.This was the first time I’d heard this term.
After the call with my friend, I googled around to try and understand what he had meant. I started with the Wikipedia page and followed that up with a few blog posts. Everything I read wasn’t really helpful in clearly explaining what side effects in programming were.
Last year while reading Will Kurt’s Get Programming…
Functional Programming (FP) is often described using a lot of jargon. A lot of fluff and no substance. I struggled with understanding FP for quite some time because of this. Even after understanding the concepts and principles involved in FP, I never really knew what FP was.
What is the philosophy behind FP? How does thinking functionally differ from thinking in an OO-way? These are the questions I struggled with often.
Only recently, I came across a section in Will Kurt’s Get Programming with Haskell that finally made everything click for me. He used the following example to clear up…
I’ve never been a new year resolutions kinda guy. I’ve always believed that you don’t have to wait for a certain day of the year to make a change in your life. But, 2019 was different. 2019 was the first time I made resolutions for myself and I don’t see myself stopping with the practice anytime soon.
Why the change?
The change had multiple reasons, I think. Primarily, I would say it was a combination of where I was in life (a…
Google’s Android 10 dropped recently and I’ve been using it for the last two days on my primary phone. One of the features I was excited about with this release was the updated gesture navigation. I had my fingers crossed for Google to finally get this right.
So, did they? In my opinion, yes, they did!
However, while using my phone over the last two days, I found an annoying this Google Keyboard (GBoard) is doing as a result of using the new navigation system.
The Annoyance
Look at the image below, specifically at the highlighted buttons…
My name is Ratik and I am Software Developer working at the intersection of design, technology and social impact.
I’ve been a creative individual interested in technology for as far as I can remember. In fact, the reason I taught myself how to write code was to build out ideas that came to me.
These days, I am working at Meraki, a non-profit working to solve India’s growing education crisis with the unique lens of parent empowerment.
Through my work at Meraki and my growing interest in using technology for good, I have transitioned from someone who dreamed of working…
Running scripts on your computer is great. Running them automatically is even better
Automatic running can be achieved on macOS (and Linux) by creating cron jobs! Let’s make an example job.
Suppose you want to run a script called work.sh which does some work for you — doesn’t really matter what the work is. You want to do this “work” every fifteenth minute of every hour, every day.
Here’s what I would do to achieve this.
Step 1
Make sure work.sh works properly and is in a place where you keep your helper scripts. For me, they’re usually in ~/.scripts.
Step 2
Next, fire up the terminal and run crontab -e. This should open up a file…
On the 29th of September, 2016, I launched a product I had been working on for over six months: Uttam. Uttam is an Android app that gently refreshes your home screen each day with perfectly crafted wallpapers.
Here’s how I built and launched my most ambitious project till date.
As a creator, I like to make things I want to exist in the world. These are things I personally want to use. Uttam is exactly that.
Looking back, there were two main reasons behind me wanting to make Uttam. First, my frustration with another one of my apps: Wallsies, a…
