ashishb.net
A collection of selected posts
- Posts
- 483 from 31 May 2010 to 17 Oct 2026
- Posting
- weekly (35 in the last year)
- Kind
- personal blog
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- https://ashishb.net/atom.xml
2026 28
- Enable Spotlight Indexing for Google Drive on Mac
- Misleading food labels can make bad food look healthy
- A day in Salzburg, Austria
- What to buy during your baby's first year
- Indirect distillation among LLMs
- A short trip to Liechtenstein
- Why and how to get OCI card for your child
- The retroflex L sound in Indic languages
- Two days in Munich, Germany
- Find What SaaS Tools Competitors Use via Sub-Processors
- Two days in Interlaken, Switzerland
- EMF and kids
- Summary: Breakneck - China's Quest To Engineer The Future
- Why I don't recommend Zurich for travelers
- Vegetarian Kids and Height
- A day in Luxembourg - the richest country in the world
- I was asked to install malware during a fake interview
- Book summary: How to Teach Your Baby to Read
- Book Summary: The Discontented Little Baby Book
- Amazing Sandbox - run third-party tools & AI agents safely
- Why software outsourcing gets a bad reputation?
- Book summary: The Natural Baby Sleep Solution
- A day in Antwerp, Belgium
- Journey of online influencers
- Two days in Brussels, Belgium
- Shortcuts - when we love them and when we don't
- A visit to Rakhigarhi
- Three days in overhyped Paris
2025 42
- Empty Japan, crowded Tokyo
- The real lock-in in GitHub is not the code, but the stars
- 11-day Norwegian Breakaway East Caribbean cruise
- Sanskrit and Sri Lankan Air Force
- Use REST with Open API
- The Achilles heel of American capitalism
- Costa Rica in 4 days
- At a juice stall in Sri Lanka
- A short stay at Warsaw, Poland
- Best practices for using Python & uv inside Docker
- Two days in Vilnius, Lithuania
- How IntelliJ IDEs waste disk space
- Pregnancy
- Why there aren't many digital nomads from India
- Two days in Riga, Latvia
- Run third-party tools inside Docker to stay secure
- Family Ties in DNA: Some relatives are closer than others
- Doctors per capita
- Two days in Tallinn, Estonia
- Ship tools as standalone static binaries
- Made in America
- Two days in Helsinki, Finland
- Maintaining an Android app is a lot of work
- The land of good deals
- Two days in Oslo, Norway
- FastAPI vs Flask performance comparison
- Google Search is losing to Perplexity
- How to run Python in production
- Two days in Dublin, Ireland
- Continuous integration ≠ Continuous delivery
- World's simplest project success heuristic
- London in 5 days
- It is hard to recommend Python in production
- Inflation, IRS, Credit cards, and Vendors
- Temu and the Chinese approach
- Things to do in Miami Florida
- Revenue vs Cost Axis
- Language learning as an adult
- The unanchored babies of the green card limbo
- Price variance in the United States
- A day in Louisville, Kentucky
- A surprisingly positive experience with Air India
2024 49
- Unhospitable Airports
- Android: Don't use stale views
- USA = Union of Sales and Advertisement
- A day in Nashville, Tennessee
- Minimize Javascript in your codebase
- A day in Birmingham, Alabama
- In defense of ad-supported products
- Real vs artificial world
- The science behind Punjabi singers
- Hiking Mt. Fuji
- The Indian startup bubble is insane
- Repairing database on the fly for millions of users
- Book Summary: One up on Wall Street by Peter Lynch
- It is hard to recommend Google Cloud
- At the Prague airport
- Kyoto in three days
- Migrating from WordPress to Hugo
- Book summary: Sick Societies by Robert B. Edgerton
- Statistical outcomes require statistical games
- Illegal immigrants to Europe via Cairo
- Tokyo in three days
- Mobs are Status Games
- Writing Script matters as much as the spoken language
- Sri Lanka in 5 days
- LLMs: great for business but bad business
- Book Summary: Safe Haven by Mark Spitznagel
- Mac shortcut for typing Avagraha symbol
- On a bus with an asylum seeker
- Nicaragua in 5 days
- When to commit Generated code to version control
- Why I always buy a local SIM in a foreign country
- Use Makefile for Android
- Four days in Guadalajara, Mexico
- Android Navigation: Up vs Back
- Hotels vs Airbnb vs Hostels
- Currency issues in Argentina
- Abstractions should be deep not wide
- Some data on podcasting
- Always support compressed response in an API service
- A day in El Calafate - Patagonia, Argentina
- Hermetic Docker images with Hugging Face ML models
- American Elections
- The sound of "ch"
- API services should always have usage Limits
- Hiking in El Chaltén - trekking capital of Argentina
- Natural Laws vs Man-made Laws
- Status Symbol
- Best practices for using Python & Poetry inside Docker
- Ultimate guide to traveling in Ushuaia, Argentina
2023 51
- The English ɛ - a popular vowel missing in Indic languages
- Notable quotes from "How to Live" by Derek Sivers
- How to add a new formula to homebrew package manager
- Ultimate guide to exploring Buenos Aires
- Overnight bus journeys
- Timing
- Mini Trip to Panama
- How to setup Go packages under monorepo
- Authentically American
- Android: Always show toasts on the background thread
- Musings of transliteration: Tharman Shanmugaratnam's name
- Mini Trip to Trinidad and Tobago
- Book Summary: What I Learned Losing a Million Dollars
- Real vs Theoretical Engineering Productivity
- Monolingualism
- How to deploy Docker images on Microsoft Azure
- Singapore in 4 days
- Book Summary: Thinking In Bets by Annie Duke
- Hindi-English phonemes that are similar but distinct
- Royal Caribbean cruise in Singapore
- End-to-end testing of mobile apps
- Play-to-earn games
- Book Summary: The half-life of Facts by Samuel Arbesman
- Four days in Santiago, Chile
- Too much documentation is harmful
- Book summary: The New Confessions of an Economic Hit Man
- API backend should use dataloaders
- Two days in Stockholm, Sweden
- Engineering stack
- Nillion
- Spicy vs Chilli
- Book Summary: The Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick
- Engineering Guardrails
- Sometimes the middle ground is most empowering
- Copenhagen
- VCs are anti-personas for a B2C startup
- Book Summary: Staff Engineer by Will Larson
- Generics in Go
- Book Summary: Woke, Inc. by Vivek Ramaswamy
- Common pitfalls of GitHub Actions
- A day at Joshua Tree National Park
- Inheritance in Go language
- A week in Kenya
- Bad and good ways to test code
- GraphQL vs gRPC
- The different layers of a web applications
- The biggest impact of ChatGPT
- Malta in winters
- How do businesses make money
- Selected quotes from "How I Invest My Money" by Joshua Brown
- Indians and food
2022 33
- Book Summary: One Man's View of the World by Lee Kuan Yew
- Freedom
- Málaga in 3 days
- Social media and burglar bars
- Four days in Lisbon, Portugal
- German Pronunciations for Hindi speakers
- Guatemala in 8 days
- Book summary of Sum: Forty Tales From The Afterlives
- Driving from Albuquerque to Phoenix
- Virgin Mojito (हिंदी)
- Android uncaught exception handler and ANR
- Book summary - Magicians of the God by Graham Hancock
- 5 reasons package.json doesn't scale
- Driving from Santa Fe to Albuquerque in New Mexico
- Souvenir Clothing
- Crowded or Popular? Exclusive or deserted?
- Why I prefer Obsidian for taking notes
- A day at Santa Fe
- A day visit to Las cruces and El Paso
- Infinite network timeouts in Java and Go
- The five different ways to pronounce the name "Chavez"
- Duolingo is a waste of Time
- Visiting Shakespeare Ghost town in Lordsburg New Mexico
- The Bed of Procrustes by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
- A day in Phoenix Arizona
- Book Summary: A Philosophy of Software Design
- Why Indian Passport remains weak
- Low code
- A visit to Carlsbad Cavern
- Don't buy Google FI SIM with a phone
- 5 days in Gorkhaland (West Bengal) and Sikkim
- The Terrible Economics of running a Restaurant
- Double-negative jobs
2021 19
- Fundraising rounds then and now
- Where to go on your first Caribbean trip
- Spanish Pronunciations for Hindi speakers
- Dominican Republic in 5 days
- Cave Exploration at Lava Beds National Monument
- Go Language concurrency and an easy pitfall
- Test changes to CircleCI config locally
- Book Summary: Red Notice by Bill Browder
- Book summary: The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel
- Book summary: Antifragile by Nassim Nicolas Taleb
- When can you count on public transport while traveling?
- Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport
- Indian accent
- Things to do in Aruba
- MusicSync: Best Alternative to Google Play Music & Podcasts
- React Native
- Android: Catching NDK crashes
- Hindi: The missing "v" sound
- Egypt in 8 days
2020 26
- Docker: Be careful about the scratch image
- Glacier National Park in 4 days
- Indeterminate Progress bar is an inferior UX design
- Things to do in Dominica - nature island of the Caribbean
- How many source-code repositories should a startup have
- Celsius vs Fahrenheit
- I’m looking for financial partners and would like to connect...
- Three days in Cancun, Mexico
- Book Summary - Everybody Lies
- The two-step approach to big code modifications
- In a remote village in Thailand...
- Four days in Kerala - Munnar, Thekkady, and Alleppey
- Dealing with phone numbers in contact book
- Things to do in Cusco, Peru
- Incremental testing: save time and money on CI for monorepo
- Book Summary: The Black Swan by Nassim Nicolas Taleb
- How to deploy side projects as web services for free
- Docker 101: A basic web-server displaying hello world
- Hiking in Lassen Volcanic National Park, California
- Consoles by Google
- Things to do in Yosemite National Park
- Fix Android Emulator: Process Finished With Exit Code 1
- Two days in Minneapolis, Minnesota
- Android: Run Die With Me App Without Draining Battery
- The first two statements of your BASH script should be...
- Two days in Barcelona, Spain
2019 47
- Punjabi (Gurmukhi) primer for Hindi (Devanagari) speakers
- Two days in Madrid, Spain
- Keep your dotfiles bug-free with Continuous Integration
- Why not abolish employer-provided health insurance?
- Three days in Rome, Italy
- Programmable Money and value capture
- A day in Venice, Italy
- Circle CI vs Travis CI
- Croatia in Four Days
- Angel investing for Software Engineers
- Don't leave Android WebView debugging enabled in production
- Two days in Budapest, Hungary
- A short guide for MBAs looking for a job in the tech world
- Two days in Vienna
- Cryptocurrency trading
- Diet action plan from "How not to die" book
- Book Summary: How not to die by Dr. Michael Greger
- Prague in Two Days
- This website was compromised
- Nationality
- Stanford CS251: Cryptocurrencies & Smart Contracts
- Stanford CS251: Lecture 19
- Stanford CS251: Lecture 18
- Stanford CS251: Lecture 16
- Stanford CS251: Lecture 15
- Stanford CS251: Lecture 13
- Stanford CS251: Lecture 14
- Stanford CS251: Lecture 12
- Stanford CS251: Lecture 11
- Stanford CS251: Lecture 10
- Stanford CS251: Lecture 9
- Stanford CS251: Lecture 8
- Stanford CS251: Lecture 7
- Stanford CS251: Lecture 6
- Stanford CS251: Lecture 5
- Stanford CS251: Lecture 4
- Stanford CS251: Lecture 3
- Stanford CS251: Lecture 2
- Stanford CS251: Lecture 1
- Four days in Maui, Hawaii
- Closeum - closed-source in disguise
- Android: Fragment related pitfalls and how to avoid them
- Cruising in French Polynesia
- French Polynesia - the basics
- Android: Handling JPEG images with Exif orientation flags
- Hiking Natural Bridges National Monument
- Book summary: Why Nations Fail
2018 22
- Mac OS: App Translocation and Android Studio updates failure
- Cross-language bridge error handling: JS-to-Java Example
- Book summary: Made to Stick by Chip Heath and Dan Heath
- Testing resumable uploads
- Five days in Kauai, Hawaii
- A trip to Antelope Canyon
- How to speed up HTML5 videos
- A vegetarian lunch at French Laundry
- Architecting Android apps for emerging markets
- Startup founders: How not to write an email
- The "key" problem in cryptocurrency
- adb-enhanced: A swiss army knife for Android development
- Swift, Kotlin, and Go
- Server vs mobile development: Where the code runs matter
- Google I/O 2018: Android Notes
- Android: The right way to pull SQLite database
- Book summary: Skin in the game by Nassim Nicolas Taleb
- Book summary: How not to be wrong by Jordan Ellenberg
- Escaping into Caribbean with Norwegian Escape Cruise
- Some tips for the first time cruisers
- Binary vs Graded outcomes
- Two days at Zion National Park
2017 22
- Diagnosing Mac apps which won't open (error -10810)
- Rim-2-Rimember: Day hiking through Grand Canyon
- Book summary: The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck
- Book summary: Fooled by Randomness by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
- Java Musings - referencing an uninitialized final variable
- 4 days in Mexico City and Valle De Bravo
- Book Summary: Sapiens: A brief history of Humankind
- Profits with a red ocean strategy
- Book summary: Brandwashed by Martin Lindstorm
- Five days in Big Island, Hawaii
- Bottled water at Tourist places
- Google I/O 2017: Android Notes
- Apple vs Google: Naming of flagship Android vs iPhone
- The Internet and the City Advantage
- Detroit in 2 days
- Book summary: "Business Adventures" by John Brooks
- Learning vs remembering
- Death Valley in 3 days
- Consumer Internet: why audio can't beat photos or videos
- Book summary: "Where good ideas come from" by Steven Johnson
- 90% vs 99%
- What got you here won't get you there by Marshall Goldsmith
2016 36
- Five days in Oahu, Hawaii
- The optimal distance
- When aggregation works and when it doesn't
- 5 things airlines get wrong about leisure travelers
- Belize in 4 days
- Book Summary: Hard Things about Hard Things by Ben Horowitz
- Learning casual swimming
- A day at Point Roberts
- Speedup vs Slow-down
- Demystifying Android rendering: Jank and ANR
- Built-in "Developer options" in Android
- Book summary: The Lean Startup by Eric Ries
- Chicago in 2 Days
- The Android-Chrome merger saga
- Boston in 2 Days
- Ecuador in 4 days
- Front of the queue effect
- Book summary: Remote - office not required
- Seattle in 2 Days
- Carrying water during urban travel
- Choosing a Travel Backpack
- Floating point in user-facing strings
- Startup valuations
- Voice Interfaces: The Missing User Interaction Element
- Cruelty to animals
- Tabs vs spaces for code indentation
- File size should always be of "long" type
- Google I/O 2016: Android notes
- Book summary: Great By Choice by Jim Collins
- My rm -rf moment
- Thailand in 4 Days
- Why KBB overprices cars
- Rohtak Riots
- Philadelphia in 3 days
- Standardization
- Puerto Rico in 4 days
2015 15
- Alaska in 4 days
- Book Summary: The Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham
- When marketplaces work and when they don't
- Wealth destruction is worse than taxes
- Traveling on Indian passport
- Mac OS X Primer (Part 3) - Window Management
- Learnings from IIT Global Leaders Conference (IITGLC) 2015
- American vs Indian doctor
- Ownership vs Control
- The clash of cultural expectations
- Hiking Mt. Whitney in winters
- Thoughts on Tizen
- Book summary: The Science of Happily Ever After
- At a local bus stand in Mexico...
- Android command-line: gradle and testing
2014 31
- Book summary: Bogleheads guide to investing
- Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Cialdini
- "Material design" and Google's strategy
- Book Summary: Think Like a Freak by Levitt & Dubner
- Start Android locale settings activity from command-line
- Book summary: The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch
- Android, Gradle and compile-time only dependencies
- A walk in San Francisco
- Book summary: Only The Paranoid Survives by Andrew Grove
- A visit to Gadar Memorial in San Francisco
- Book Summary: So good they can't ignore you by Cal Newport
- Book Summary: The Innovator's Dilemma
- Thoughts on Bitcoin (part 2)
- Book summary: The Education of Millionaires
- Thoughts on Bureaucrats, Technocrats and Politicians
- Book summary: How to create a mind by Ray Kurzweil
- Advent of snap judgement and Internet's permanence
- Thoughts on fixing tech recruiting
- How to Fail at Almost Everything by Scott Adams
- Book Summary: Art of War by Sun Tzu
- Mac OS X Primer Part 2: Linux to Mac for Engineers
- How to compile android emulator on ubuntu 13.10
- Why Nokia's (rumored) Android phone is doomed
- Send HTML emails using Amazon SES in Python
- Book Summary: The score takes care of itself
- Intel will lose server market even faster than consumer
- Book Summary: Man's search for meaning
- Random Thoughts: Android launchers (home screens)
- Thoughts on Bitcoin
- Thoughts on Snapchat's snafu
- Winners Take All - 9 fundamental rules of high tech strategy
2013 23
- Github 101 for hackathons
- Mac OS X Primer: GNU/Linux -> Mac for software engineers
- Bloody Banana Bread
- Finance 101: Credit Cards
- How to upgrade Nexus 4 to Android 4.4 Kitkat
- Finance 101: A basic plan
- Finance 101: Cheatsheet
- Finance 101: References
- Finance 101: Table of contents
- Finance 101: Type of money holding accounts
- Finance 101: Terminology
- Tech world's love for letter "X"
- Relocating to California for internationals - Part 3
- Relocating to California for internationals - Part 2
- Relocating to California for internationals - Part 1
- Personal Finance: Thoughts on peer to peer lending
- Malkiel's Timeless lessons for Investors
- The Missing Linux Laptop
- Book Summary: The Power of Less by Leo Babuta
- Android Security related tools
- Book Summary: The Start-Up of You
- Vivek Wadhwa: "The next Trillion Dollar Opportunities"
- Beyond Numbers: Dealing with terrorism in India
2012 9
- Random Thoughts: Rape and The Indian Blame Game
- Book Summary: Breakout Nations by Ruchir Sharma
- Book Review: The Tangled web
- Book Review: Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson
- Book Summary: In the Plex by Steven Levy
- All
- Female Foeticide
- Is there any USP of Toyota Prius?
- Book Summary: Imagining India by Nandan Nilekani
2011 14
- Towards a broken future of Internet
- Questioning Aakash - Indian Government tablet initiative
- Analysis of Facebook clickjacking attack "Chica Sexy"
- Summary: The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
- Book summary: Built to Last by Collins & Porras
- Random thoughts: goals and company types in tech world
- Understanding Corruption: A talk by Subramanian Swamy
- Book summary: India Unbound by Gurcharan Das
- Summary: "Difficulty of being good: Subtle art of Dharma"
- How do you store my password?
- Analysis of Facebook clickjacking - aprilfoolsprank
- EA Sports vs Zynga : the battle for games in smartphone era
- Career Destination of IITians: USA vs India
- FOSS (Free and Open Source Code) Licensing FAQ
2010 16
- Cablegate and the aftermath: a few observations
- Analysis of Facebook Rotating Images worm
- Nokia and the smartphone era
- EVM controversy in India
- How Indian Government deals with Technology
- Decline of Microsoft and Intel in smartphone+Internet era
- Cyber Security in India : Role of CERT-In
- Understanding HTTPS warnings and error messages
- A preliminary analysis of “Bom Sabado” orkut worm
- Is HTTPS secure?
- BlackBerry Controversy in India
- Understanding Directory Permissions on Linux
- Animation in diagrams (presentations in Latex)
- Basic GDB Tutorial
- Programming in Linux for newbies
- GCC Hacks