Tim Hoare has died. I re-read his Turing acceptance speech. Following paragraph felt poignant. “….At first I hoped that such a technically unsound project would collapse but I soon realized it was doomed to success. Almost anything in software can be implemented, sold, and even used given enough determination. There is nothing a mere scientist can say that will stand against the flood of a hundred million dollars. But there is one quality that cannot be purchased in this way– and that is reliability. The price of reliability is the pursuit of the utmost simplicity. It is a price which the very rich find most hard to pay.”
I had less than ideal on-boarding at new job. I was reminded some aspects of “Indian Workspace” I often hear people complaining on Reddit. Most of the things are fine but folks don’t care about notification sound being loud, talking next to you or having long and loud meetings. Moreover, everything lives in people head, not in documents. You must have meetings for doting ‘i’ and crossing ‘t’. Daily standup can last one hour!
Bengaluru has flower season. Its a pity that garbage on the road kills the view that could be spectacular. The GKVK campus road is blossoming.
Ookie can easily make 3-5 words phrases like “how about this one”. She is now 25 months old.
Ookie is 1 month old on March 17, 2024. These flowers were collected from a neighboring tree.
It was a pie day this week and I didn’t do anything. Not a single friend left in Bengaluru who reminded me of or would get excited about it. Last year, we had apple pies at 3:14pm.
I guess, from now on, I am writing weekly notes every weekend. I learnt about weekly notes from Thej many years ago.
Currently, I am at a early stage startup. I joined them early this year after quitting my startup Subconscious Compute (more on it some other day). I’ve been building them an EHR platform to collect responses and related APIs though I was hired to do something totally different. First, a summary of what I’ve been doing here.
I started with Vue3 and fastapi and learnt Typescript along the way. It started off well. I managed to launch a demo version in a month. Most of its users are not technical and this was the first time I built a web-system for non-developers. And quickly realized why there is so much fuss about designing UI for non-tech users.
If you are a solo developer or a very small team, DO NOT split your frontend and backend — it creates more than 2x work. For a non-technical leadership (which might think they understand tech), it is a simple ask for adding or changing something trivial at UI, but for you it is migrating your schema, APIs and frontend models. And what is worse, you will make mistakes. You should only change things in one place. DRY and ensuring Single Source of Truth (SSoT).
So I bit the bullet and rewrote it in PHP8 & Codeigniter4. DX is now much better. First, I don’t have to switch between Python and Typescript/Javascript. Second, the system now crashes if someone submit invalid value rather than accepting wrong/empty values. The database schema validates the value. Perhaps I’ll add validator in the form/UI using </> htmx – high power tools for html.
This week
I explored a few server side qr code scanners. The most commonly used one is mchehab/zbar which doesn’t work well when image is tilted or rotated. Another tool rxing-core/rxing: cRustacean Crossing did a better job (it is in Rust). For example, in the following image, zbar detected no qr-code while rxing was able to detect two. Usually folks will do the qr code scanning using browser or camera at phone. There are some use cases where image needs to uploaded to server for QR scanning.
I wrote a Gitlab job to create backup of PostgreSQL server. It runs every 4 hours, uses pg_dump to create a dump, compress it and then Use curl to upload files to S3 bucket.
