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ashishb.net

ashishb.net

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Posts
483 from 31 May 2010 to 17 Oct 2026
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weekly (35 in the last year)
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personal blog
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2026 28

  1. Enable Spotlight Indexing for Google Drive on Mac
  2. Misleading food labels can make bad food look healthy
  3. A day in Salzburg, Austria
  4. What to buy during your baby's first year
  5. Indirect distillation among LLMs
  6. A short trip to Liechtenstein
  7. Why and how to get OCI card for your child
  8. The retroflex L sound in Indic languages
  9. Two days in Munich, Germany
  10. Find What SaaS Tools Competitors Use via Sub-Processors
  11. Two days in Interlaken, Switzerland
  12. EMF and kids
  13. Summary: Breakneck - China's Quest To Engineer The Future
  14. Why I don't recommend Zurich for travelers
  15. Vegetarian Kids and Height
  16. A day in Luxembourg - the richest country in the world
  17. I was asked to install malware during a fake interview
  18. Book summary: How to Teach Your Baby to Read
  19. Book Summary: The Discontented Little Baby Book
  20. Amazing Sandbox - run third-party tools & AI agents safely
  21. Why software outsourcing gets a bad reputation?
  22. Book summary: The Natural Baby Sleep Solution
  23. A day in Antwerp, Belgium
  24. Journey of online influencers
  25. Two days in Brussels, Belgium
  26. Shortcuts - when we love them and when we don't
  27. A visit to Rakhigarhi
  28. Three days in overhyped Paris

2025 42

  1. Empty Japan, crowded Tokyo
  2. The real lock-in in GitHub is not the code, but the stars
  3. 11-day Norwegian Breakaway East Caribbean cruise
  4. Sanskrit and Sri Lankan Air Force
  5. Use REST with Open API
  6. The Achilles heel of American capitalism
  7. Costa Rica in 4 days
  8. At a juice stall in Sri Lanka
  9. A short stay at Warsaw, Poland
  10. Best practices for using Python & uv inside Docker
  11. Two days in Vilnius, Lithuania
  12. How IntelliJ IDEs waste disk space
  13. Pregnancy
  14. Why there aren't many digital nomads from India
  15. Two days in Riga, Latvia
  16. Run third-party tools inside Docker to stay secure
  17. Family Ties in DNA: Some relatives are closer than others
  18. Doctors per capita
  19. Two days in Tallinn, Estonia
  20. Ship tools as standalone static binaries
  21. Made in America
  22. Two days in Helsinki, Finland
  23. Maintaining an Android app is a lot of work
  24. The land of good deals
  25. Two days in Oslo, Norway
  26. FastAPI vs Flask performance comparison
  27. Google Search is losing to Perplexity
  28. How to run Python in production
  29. Two days in Dublin, Ireland
  30. Continuous integration ≠ Continuous delivery
  31. World's simplest project success heuristic
  32. London in 5 days
  33. It is hard to recommend Python in production
  34. Inflation, IRS, Credit cards, and Vendors
  35. Temu and the Chinese approach
  36. Things to do in Miami Florida
  37. Revenue vs Cost Axis
  38. Language learning as an adult
  39. The unanchored babies of the green card limbo
  40. Price variance in the United States
  41. A day in Louisville, Kentucky
  42. A surprisingly positive experience with Air India

2024 49

  1. Unhospitable Airports
  2. Android: Don't use stale views
  3. USA = Union of Sales and Advertisement
  4. A day in Nashville, Tennessee
  5. Minimize Javascript in your codebase
  6. A day in Birmingham, Alabama
  7. In defense of ad-supported products
  8. Real vs artificial world
  9. The science behind Punjabi singers
  10. Hiking Mt. Fuji
  11. The Indian startup bubble is insane
  12. Repairing database on the fly for millions of users
  13. Book Summary: One up on Wall Street by Peter Lynch
  14. It is hard to recommend Google Cloud
  15. At the Prague airport
  16. Kyoto in three days
  17. Migrating from WordPress to Hugo
  18. Book summary: Sick Societies by Robert B. Edgerton
  19. Statistical outcomes require statistical games
  20. Illegal immigrants to Europe via Cairo
  21. Tokyo in three days
  22. Mobs are Status Games
  23. Writing Script matters as much as the spoken language
  24. Sri Lanka in 5 days
  25. LLMs: great for business but bad business
  26. Book Summary: Safe Haven by Mark Spitznagel
  27. Mac shortcut for typing Avagraha symbol
  28. On a bus with an asylum seeker
  29. Nicaragua in 5 days
  30. When to commit Generated code to version control
  31. Why I always buy a local SIM in a foreign country
  32. Use Makefile for Android
  33. Four days in Guadalajara, Mexico
  34. Android Navigation: Up vs Back
  35. Hotels vs Airbnb vs Hostels
  36. Currency issues in Argentina
  37. Abstractions should be deep not wide
  38. Some data on podcasting
  39. Always support compressed response in an API service
  40. A day in El Calafate - Patagonia, Argentina
  41. Hermetic Docker images with Hugging Face ML models
  42. American Elections
  43. The sound of "ch"
  44. API services should always have usage Limits
  45. Hiking in El Chaltén - trekking capital of Argentina
  46. Natural Laws vs Man-made Laws
  47. Status Symbol
  48. Best practices for using Python & Poetry inside Docker
  49. Ultimate guide to traveling in Ushuaia, Argentina

2023 51

  1. The English ɛ - a popular vowel missing in Indic languages
  2. Notable quotes from "How to Live" by Derek Sivers
  3. How to add a new formula to homebrew package manager
  4. Ultimate guide to exploring Buenos Aires
  5. Overnight bus journeys
  6. Timing
  7. Mini Trip to Panama
  8. How to setup Go packages under monorepo
  9. Authentically American
  10. Android: Always show toasts on the background thread
  11. Musings of transliteration: Tharman Shanmugaratnam's name
  12. Mini Trip to Trinidad and Tobago
  13. Book Summary: What I Learned Losing a Million Dollars
  14. Real vs Theoretical Engineering Productivity
  15. Monolingualism
  16. How to deploy Docker images on Microsoft Azure
  17. Singapore in 4 days
  18. Book Summary: Thinking In Bets by Annie Duke
  19. Hindi-English phonemes that are similar but distinct
  20. Royal Caribbean cruise in Singapore
  21. End-to-end testing of mobile apps
  22. Play-to-earn games
  23. Book Summary: The half-life of Facts by Samuel Arbesman
  24. Four days in Santiago, Chile
  25. Too much documentation is harmful
  26. Book summary: The New Confessions of an Economic Hit Man
  27. API backend should use dataloaders
  28. Two days in Stockholm, Sweden
  29. Engineering stack
  30. Nillion
  31. Spicy vs Chilli
  32. Book Summary: The Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick
  33. Engineering Guardrails
  34. Sometimes the middle ground is most empowering
  35. Copenhagen
  36. VCs are anti-personas for a B2C startup
  37. Book Summary: Staff Engineer by Will Larson
  38. Generics in Go
  39. Book Summary: Woke, Inc. by Vivek Ramaswamy
  40. Common pitfalls of GitHub Actions
  41. A day at Joshua Tree National Park
  42. Inheritance in Go language
  43. A week in Kenya
  44. Bad and good ways to test code
  45. GraphQL vs gRPC
  46. The different layers of a web applications
  47. The biggest impact of ChatGPT
  48. Malta in winters
  49. How do businesses make money
  50. Selected quotes from "How I Invest My Money" by Joshua Brown
  51. Indians and food

2022 33

  1. Book Summary: One Man's View of the World by Lee Kuan Yew
  2. Freedom
  3. Málaga in 3 days
  4. Social media and burglar bars
  5. Four days in Lisbon, Portugal
  6. German Pronunciations for Hindi speakers
  7. Guatemala in 8 days
  8. Book summary of Sum: Forty Tales From The Afterlives
  9. Driving from Albuquerque to Phoenix
  10. Virgin Mojito (हिंदी)
  11. Android uncaught exception handler and ANR
  12. Book summary - Magicians of the God by Graham Hancock
  13. 5 reasons package.json doesn't scale
  14. Driving from Santa Fe to Albuquerque in New Mexico
  15. Souvenir Clothing
  16. Crowded or Popular? Exclusive or deserted?
  17. Why I prefer Obsidian for taking notes
  18. A day at Santa Fe
  19. A day visit to Las cruces and El Paso
  20. Infinite network timeouts in Java and Go
  21. The five different ways to pronounce the name "Chavez"
  22. Duolingo is a waste of Time
  23. Visiting Shakespeare Ghost town in Lordsburg New Mexico
  24. The Bed of Procrustes by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
  25. A day in Phoenix Arizona
  26. Book Summary: A Philosophy of Software Design
  27. Why Indian Passport remains weak
  28. Low code
  29. A visit to Carlsbad Cavern
  30. Don't buy Google FI SIM with a phone
  31. 5 days in Gorkhaland (West Bengal) and Sikkim
  32. The Terrible Economics of running a Restaurant
  33. Double-negative jobs

2021 19

  1. Fundraising rounds then and now
  2. Where to go on your first Caribbean trip
  3. Spanish Pronunciations for Hindi speakers
  4. Dominican Republic in 5 days
  5. Cave Exploration at Lava Beds National Monument
  6. Go Language concurrency and an easy pitfall
  7. Test changes to CircleCI config locally
  8. Book Summary: Red Notice by Bill Browder
  9. Book summary: The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel
  10. Book summary: Antifragile by Nassim Nicolas Taleb
  11. When can you count on public transport while traveling?
  12. Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport
  13. Indian accent
  14. Things to do in Aruba
  15. MusicSync: Best Alternative to Google Play Music & Podcasts
  16. React Native
  17. Android: Catching NDK crashes
  18. Hindi: The missing "v" sound
  19. Egypt in 8 days

2020 26

  1. Docker: Be careful about the scratch image
  2. Glacier National Park in 4 days
  3. Indeterminate Progress bar is an inferior UX design
  4. Things to do in Dominica - nature island of the Caribbean
  5. How many source-code repositories should a startup have
  6. Celsius vs Fahrenheit
  7. I’m looking for financial partners and would like to connect...
  8. Three days in Cancun, Mexico
  9. Book Summary - Everybody Lies
  10. The two-step approach to big code modifications
  11. In a remote village in Thailand...
  12. Four days in Kerala - Munnar, Thekkady, and Alleppey
  13. Dealing with phone numbers in contact book
  14. Things to do in Cusco, Peru
  15. Incremental testing: save time and money on CI for monorepo
  16. Book Summary: The Black Swan by Nassim Nicolas Taleb
  17. How to deploy side projects as web services for free
  18. Docker 101: A basic web-server displaying hello world
  19. Hiking in Lassen Volcanic National Park, California
  20. Consoles by Google
  21. Things to do in Yosemite National Park
  22. Fix Android Emulator: Process Finished With Exit Code 1
  23. Two days in Minneapolis, Minnesota
  24. Android: Run Die With Me App Without Draining Battery
  25. The first two statements of your BASH script should be...
  26. Two days in Barcelona, Spain

2019 47

  1. Punjabi (Gurmukhi) primer for Hindi (Devanagari) speakers
  2. Two days in Madrid, Spain
  3. Keep your dotfiles bug-free with Continuous Integration
  4. Why not abolish employer-provided health insurance?
  5. Three days in Rome, Italy
  6. Programmable Money and value capture
  7. A day in Venice, Italy
  8. Circle CI vs Travis CI
  9. Croatia in Four Days
  10. Angel investing for Software Engineers
  11. Don't leave Android WebView debugging enabled in production
  12. Two days in Budapest, Hungary
  13. A short guide for MBAs looking for a job in the tech world
  14. Two days in Vienna
  15. Cryptocurrency trading
  16. Diet action plan from "How not to die" book
  17. Book Summary: How not to die by Dr. Michael Greger
  18. Prague in Two Days
  19. This website was compromised
  20. Nationality
  21. Stanford CS251: Cryptocurrencies & Smart Contracts
  22. Stanford CS251: Lecture 19
  23. Stanford CS251: Lecture 18
  24. Stanford CS251: Lecture 16
  25. Stanford CS251: Lecture 15
  26. Stanford CS251: Lecture 13
  27. Stanford CS251: Lecture 14
  28. Stanford CS251: Lecture 12
  29. Stanford CS251: Lecture 11
  30. Stanford CS251: Lecture 10
  31. Stanford CS251: Lecture 9
  32. Stanford CS251: Lecture 8
  33. Stanford CS251: Lecture 7
  34. Stanford CS251: Lecture 6
  35. Stanford CS251: Lecture 5
  36. Stanford CS251: Lecture 4
  37. Stanford CS251: Lecture 3
  38. Stanford CS251: Lecture 2
  39. Stanford CS251: Lecture 1
  40. Four days in Maui, Hawaii
  41. Closeum - closed-source in disguise
  42. Android: Fragment related pitfalls and how to avoid them
  43. Cruising in French Polynesia
  44. French Polynesia - the basics
  45. Android: Handling JPEG images with Exif orientation flags
  46. Hiking Natural Bridges National Monument
  47. Book summary: Why Nations Fail

2018 22

  1. Mac OS: App Translocation and Android Studio updates failure
  2. Cross-language bridge error handling: JS-to-Java Example
  3. Book summary: Made to Stick by Chip Heath and Dan Heath
  4. Testing resumable uploads
  5. Five days in Kauai, Hawaii
  6. A trip to Antelope Canyon
  7. How to speed up HTML5 videos
  8. A vegetarian lunch at French Laundry
  9. Architecting Android apps for emerging markets
  10. Startup founders: How not to write an email
  11. The "key" problem in cryptocurrency
  12. adb-enhanced: A swiss army knife for Android development
  13. Swift, Kotlin, and Go
  14. Server vs mobile development: Where the code runs matter
  15. Google I/O 2018: Android Notes
  16. Android: The right way to pull SQLite database
  17. Book summary: Skin in the game by Nassim Nicolas Taleb
  18. Book summary: How not to be wrong by Jordan Ellenberg
  19. Escaping into Caribbean with Norwegian Escape Cruise
  20. Some tips for the first time cruisers
  21. Binary vs Graded outcomes
  22. Two days at Zion National Park

2017 22

  1. Diagnosing Mac apps which won't open (error -10810)
  2. Rim-2-Rimember: Day hiking through Grand Canyon
  3. Book summary: The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck
  4. Book summary: Fooled by Randomness by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
  5. Java Musings - referencing an uninitialized final variable
  6. 4 days in Mexico City and Valle De Bravo
  7. Book Summary: Sapiens: A brief history of Humankind
  8. Profits with a red ocean strategy
  9. Book summary: Brandwashed by Martin Lindstorm
  10. Five days in Big Island, Hawaii
  11. Bottled water at Tourist places
  12. Google I/O 2017: Android Notes
  13. Apple vs Google: Naming of flagship Android vs iPhone
  14. The Internet and the City Advantage
  15. Detroit in 2 days
  16. Book summary: "Business Adventures" by John Brooks
  17. Learning vs remembering
  18. Death Valley in 3 days
  19. Consumer Internet: why audio can't beat photos or videos
  20. Book summary: "Where good ideas come from" by Steven Johnson
  21. 90% vs 99%
  22. What got you here won't get you there by Marshall Goldsmith

2016 36

  1. Five days in Oahu, Hawaii
  2. The optimal distance
  3. When aggregation works and when it doesn't
  4. 5 things airlines get wrong about leisure travelers
  5. Belize in 4 days
  6. Book Summary: Hard Things about Hard Things by Ben Horowitz
  7. Learning casual swimming
  8. A day at Point Roberts
  9. Speedup vs Slow-down
  10. Demystifying Android rendering: Jank and ANR
  11. Built-in "Developer options" in Android
  12. Book summary: The Lean Startup by Eric Ries
  13. Chicago in 2 Days
  14. The Android-Chrome merger saga
  15. Boston in 2 Days
  16. Ecuador in 4 days
  17. Front of the queue effect
  18. Book summary: Remote - office not required
  19. Seattle in 2 Days
  20. Carrying water during urban travel
  21. Choosing a Travel Backpack
  22. Floating point in user-facing strings
  23. Startup valuations
  24. Voice Interfaces: The Missing User Interaction Element
  25. Cruelty to animals
  26. Tabs vs spaces for code indentation
  27. File size should always be of "long" type
  28. Google I/O 2016: Android notes
  29. Book summary: Great By Choice by Jim Collins
  30. My rm -rf moment
  31. Thailand in 4 Days
  32. Why KBB overprices cars
  33. Rohtak Riots
  34. Philadelphia in 3 days
  35. Standardization
  36. Puerto Rico in 4 days

2015 15

  1. Alaska in 4 days
  2. Book Summary: The Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham
  3. When marketplaces work and when they don't
  4. Wealth destruction is worse than taxes
  5. Traveling on Indian passport
  6. Mac OS X Primer (Part 3) - Window Management
  7. Learnings from IIT Global Leaders Conference (IITGLC) 2015
  8. American vs Indian doctor
  9. Ownership vs Control
  10. The clash of cultural expectations
  11. Hiking Mt. Whitney in winters
  12. Thoughts on Tizen
  13. Book summary: The Science of Happily Ever After
  14. At a local bus stand in Mexico...
  15. Android command-line: gradle and testing

2014 31

  1. Book summary: Bogleheads guide to investing
  2. Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Cialdini
  3. "Material design" and Google's strategy
  4. Book Summary: Think Like a Freak by Levitt & Dubner
  5. Start Android locale settings activity from command-line
  6. Book summary: The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch
  7. Android, Gradle and compile-time only dependencies
  8. A walk in San Francisco
  9. Book summary: Only The Paranoid Survives by Andrew Grove
  10. A visit to Gadar Memorial in San Francisco
  11. Book Summary: So good they can't ignore you by Cal Newport
  12. Book Summary: The Innovator's Dilemma
  13. Thoughts on Bitcoin (part 2)
  14. Book summary: The Education of Millionaires
  15. Thoughts on Bureaucrats, Technocrats and Politicians
  16. Book summary: How to create a mind by Ray Kurzweil
  17. Advent of snap judgement and Internet's permanence
  18. Thoughts on fixing tech recruiting
  19. How to Fail at Almost Everything by Scott Adams
  20. Book Summary: Art of War by Sun Tzu
  21. Mac OS X Primer Part 2: Linux to Mac for Engineers
  22. How to compile android emulator on ubuntu 13.10
  23. Why Nokia's (rumored) Android phone is doomed
  24. Send HTML emails using Amazon SES in Python
  25. Book Summary: The score takes care of itself
  26. Intel will lose server market even faster than consumer
  27. Book Summary: Man's search for meaning
  28. Random Thoughts: Android launchers (home screens)
  29. Thoughts on Bitcoin
  30. Thoughts on Snapchat's snafu
  31. Winners Take All - 9 fundamental rules of high tech strategy

2013 23

  1. Github 101 for hackathons
  2. Mac OS X Primer: GNU/Linux -> Mac for software engineers
  3. Bloody Banana Bread
  4. Finance 101: Credit Cards
  5. How to upgrade Nexus 4 to Android 4.4 Kitkat
  6. Finance 101: A basic plan
  7. Finance 101: Cheatsheet
  8. Finance 101: References
  9. Finance 101: Table of contents
  10. Finance 101: Type of money holding accounts
  11. Finance 101: Terminology
  12. Tech world's love for letter "X"
  13. Relocating to California for internationals - Part 3
  14. Relocating to California for internationals - Part 2
  15. Relocating to California for internationals - Part 1
  16. Personal Finance: Thoughts on peer to peer lending
  17. Malkiel's Timeless lessons for Investors
  18. The Missing Linux Laptop
  19. Book Summary: The Power of Less by Leo Babuta
  20. Android Security related tools
  21. Book Summary: The Start-Up of You
  22. Vivek Wadhwa: "The next Trillion Dollar Opportunities"
  23. Beyond Numbers: Dealing with terrorism in India

2012 9

  1. Random Thoughts: Rape and The Indian Blame Game
  2. Book Summary: Breakout Nations by Ruchir Sharma
  3. Book Review: The Tangled web
  4. Book Review: Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson
  5. Book Summary: In the Plex by Steven Levy
  6. All
  7. Female Foeticide
  8. Is there any USP of Toyota Prius?
  9. Book Summary: Imagining India by Nandan Nilekani

2011 14

  1. Towards a broken future of Internet
  2. Questioning Aakash - Indian Government tablet initiative
  3. Analysis of Facebook clickjacking attack "Chica Sexy"
  4. Summary: The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
  5. Book summary: Built to Last by Collins & Porras
  6. Random thoughts: goals and company types in tech world
  7. Understanding Corruption: A talk by Subramanian Swamy
  8. Book summary: India Unbound by Gurcharan Das
  9. Summary: "Difficulty of being good: Subtle art of Dharma"
  10. How do you store my password?
  11. Analysis of Facebook clickjacking - aprilfoolsprank
  12. EA Sports vs Zynga : the battle for games in smartphone era
  13. Career Destination of IITians: USA vs India
  14. FOSS (Free and Open Source Code) Licensing FAQ

2010 16

  1. Cablegate and the aftermath: a few observations
  2. Analysis of Facebook Rotating Images worm
  3. Nokia and the smartphone era
  4. EVM controversy in India
  5. How Indian Government deals with Technology
  6. Decline of Microsoft and Intel in smartphone+Internet era
  7. Cyber Security in India : Role of CERT-In
  8. Understanding HTTPS warnings and error messages
  9. A preliminary analysis of “Bom Sabado” orkut worm
  10. Is HTTPS secure?
  11. BlackBerry Controversy in India
  12. Understanding Directory Permissions on Linux
  13. Animation in diagrams (presentations in Latex)
  14. Basic GDB Tutorial
  15. Programming in Linux for newbies
  16. GCC Hacks