scribbles_

Year in review - 2023

Here are a few things I did this year and some goals for the coming year. ## Work With continued tough times at Bolt, morale was understandably low, and I was feeling burnt out. The tech job market has continued its slump this year, and I was nervous about the risk [...]

A week in Rio de Janeiro

For the engineering offsite, the entire team went down to Rio de Janeiro for a week. It was great to meet everyone and put an actual face to the Slack profiles and the Zoom windows I'm used to interacting with on a daily basis. Besides work, a few days were [...]

Rhymes with 'rush'

"Yash" is one of the most common names in India in my generation. "Agrawal" is a fairly common last name as well. In fact, I personally know two other people who share the same first and last name as me. More explicitly, if you run a quick search on any [...]

Vim macros

Whether it's fixing a CSV file or refactoring code, I often encounter situations that require repetitive text manipulation. If the task is relatively small, I simply handle it manually. However, there are times when manual execution becomes impractical. In those instances, I've found vim macros to be an amazing tool! Vim [...]

Portugal

First thing I noticed when I got to Lisbon is the ubiquitous presence of blue tiles. These blue tiles, or "Azulejos" as they are known locally, derive their name from the Arabic word for "polished stone". They were intended to protect the walls from heat and moisture but soon became [...]

Trip to Mexico

To celebrate the new year, I took a weeklong vacation to Mexico. The first thing I did was go on a guided food tour. The tour guide provided a lot of interesting facts about the city as I devoured some delicious tacos. An obvious observation as you move around the [...]

Year in review - 2022

Here are a few things I did this year and some goals for the coming year. My most significant change was moving from San Francisco, CA, to New York, NY. New York is an amazing city to live in, but it is wasted on a homebody like myself. Apart from the [...]

Maine Lobsters

This past weekend, I visited Portland, Maine, for the fall foliage. While the orange hues were beautiful, I particularly enjoyed learning about lobsters. Any menu across the continental United States with lobster on it would likely have 'Maine' preceding it, and there is a reason for that. According to the [...]

Git aliases

If you use git in any capacity, you must have observed that a few commands are used more frequently than others. Similarly, for some commands that have many options associated with them, you would more often than not use the same options for your workflow. Typing the entire thing out [...]

Intro to Olympus DAO

Olympus DAO, according to their website, is a "Decentralized Reserve Currency". They are trying to build a "community-owned decentralized financial infrastructure to bring more stability and transparency for the world." In this post, I'll try to break down what that actually means in the context of Olympus DAO and how [...]

Building my first Web3 application

> **Update**: Rinkeby testnet has been deprecated. I have not ported this application to the new testnet, so it no longer functions. GM! I've been interacting with the crypto space for a few months as a consumer, and with this project, I wanted to experience the creator side of things. This [...]

A primer on Ethereum gas fee

Ethereum is the second largest cryptocurrency by market cap today and with the introduction of smart contracts, it is regarded as a generation 2 cryptocurrency which allows a lot more utility than just a way to send and receive currency. To oversimplify, Ethereum introduced two different types of accounts — [...]

Year in review - 2021

Here are a few things I did this year and some goals for the coming year. ## Work This year, I had a few big changes from the work standpoint. I got promoted to senior software engineer at Braintree and soon after that, I started my new job at Bolt. The promotion [...]

How secure is a Bitcoin private key?

To secure an online account, the most popular choice is to use a password and username combo. The service where the account is hosted maintains all the username/password combinations in a database and serves as a central authority to allow or deny access. In the context of Bitcoin (or cryptocurrencies [...]

Notes on ACH

A month ago, I left my job at Braintree on the bank payments team. After spending over a couple of years building and maintaining the system, I believe I have a decent understanding of how the 'Automated Clearing House' or ACH system works in the United States. This post aims [...]

tmux 101: supercharging the terminal

When I worked at Braintree, I pair-programmed full-time. Braintree had developed custom tooling that was tailored for a hassle-free pair-programming experience. The basic setup was vim as a text editor running inside tmux with custom key bindings and aliases. Developers were expected to work in this setup. I joined as [...]

Running in the rain

A quick search on "running in the rain" yields all sorts of articles on how to take precaution (which is fair) or how to run despite it. That to me is completely strange because running in the rain is one of my absolute favorite things to do. When I don't [...]

Year in review - 2020

Here are a few things I did this year and some goals for the coming year. ## Work This year, like many other software developers, I worked from home. I like working from home and Braintree had plenty of systems already in place to seamlessly allow that. I felt an increase in my [...]

A Chrome extension to track YouTube viewing activity

I am a firm believer in 'Quantified Self' but my motivation behind it isn't just improving myself. It could simply be something interesting about myself that I can find out. I've written about some of the the things I use to track data about myself in this post. I enjoy watching [...]

Lessons from refactoring an old project

About four years ago, I started working on a simple project — a Messenger bot that 'recommends' movies. I called it 'moviebot'. It was written in JavaScript (node) and hosted on Heroku. At the time, Messenger bots seemed like an interesting avenue to explore and I was simply following a [...]

Options

I had been aware of options as a trading instrument for quite some time and it always seemed fascinating. I very recently started trading options on Robinhood (Millennial's 'broker' of choice, despite all of its shortcomings). Robinhood clubs all the option positions together with the equity positions and it becomes [...]

Caching API with Redis and Node

More often than not, your backend server needs to talk to downstream services, third party APIs and the database. These calls are expensive both in terms of time and money. Consider for example, your API fetches popular movies from a movie API which charges you based on each call you [...]

South African vacation

I went to South Africa for a week to celebrate my parents' 25th Wedding Anniversary. My flight from San Francisco was delayed because of a technical issue and I had to reschedule my connection to Johannesburg. According to our itinerary, I was supposed to land at 7 in the morning and drive down [...]

Quantified self

There is no denying that data is well on its way to become the most valuable commodity in the history of the world. Big corporations try to capture, even buy as much data on their users as possible. The simple reason behind that is - it lets them gauge their audience's interests. It [...]

Year in review - 2019

Here are a few things I did this year and some goals for the coming year. ## Work This year has been significantly different than any other in all of the 23 I've had so far. I started my first full-time job this February after graduating college. Working full-time is a very different experience [...]

Defining functions in JavaScript

Generally, a function is a sequence of instructions or a 'subprogram' that can be invoked by the code that is external (or internal) to that function. In essence, functions 'encapsulate' a particular task. Functions are one of the fundamental building blocks in JavaScript and _really_ understanding functions can help tackle some [...]

Dark mode in React using SCSS

In this article I have tried to explain my method of adding dark mode to a react app created using `create-react-app` and SCSS. This is my method and by no means do I claim it to be the best possible way of adding dark-mode to your react app. The end goal is to add [...]

How to use the JavaScript console

One of the easiest ways to debug anything in JavaScript is by logging stuff using `console.log`. But there are a lot of other methods provided by the console that can help you debug better. Let’s get started. The very basic use case is to log a string or a bunch of JavaScript objects. Quite simply, ```js console.log("Is [...]

Solo-trip to Tokyo

After graduating from college and before starting work full-time I decided to travel a bit. On my way to San Francisco to start the job, I decided to take a layover in Tokyo for a few days. This was my first ever experience traveling alone. The very first night, I decided [...]

Year in review - 2018

Here are a few things I did this year and some goals for the coming year. ## Work I interned at Braintree Payments in San Francisco over the summer. It was an amazing experience and I'll be starting full time in February next year. I learnt a lot of new things in my internship [...]

Layover in Istanbul

After I graduated from college, I decided to take a 3-day layover in Istanbul before I headed home. I landed at the airport and went straight to the hotel I was staying in. It was pretty cold and dark and I was tired of all the traveling so I called [...]

Ballot

This was a project for a course I took in college in the Fall of 2018 -- CS 411 (Database Systems) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. I wrote this report as part of the submission. The idea behind this project was to create a portal that allowed users to [...]

Short trip to Italy

After Stockholm, I flew to Rome. Getting to the Airbnb was a little more hectic than I would have liked. As soon as I landed, I realized that my phone plan wasn't working. I got a new one as quickly as I could find because I had to run and [...]

Visit to Stockholm

Stockholm, Sweden is one of the most beautiful cities on this planet but doesn't necessarily come up on top of the list of places to visit in Europe. After my internship at Braintree, I was planning on a short trip to a couple of places in Europe with my friends. [...]

Encryptr

I was always fascinated by encryption and I wanted to know more about it so I decided to make a web application which would allow encryption and decryption with a key. It is written in node.js and uses ejs templating and css for frontend. Mostly, this was for me to [...]

Runistics

I like running but I'm not too motivated to do it everyday. I thought it would be a great idea to bet with people for a fixed duration of time. Whoever runs the most wins. Very simple concept and could have easily been done by straight up just keeping track [...]

Year in review - 2017

Here are a few things I did this year and some goals for the coming year. ## Work I interned at Mastercard over the summer. It was my first experience as an intern working full-time. The team I was on focused on automating tasks that would drain resources internally. It was mostly [...]

IDN homograph detector

I was taking a database class in the Fall of 2017 and as part of the course I had to work in a group of 4 on a database related project. A team-member introduced me to the problems with IDN homographs. So what exactly is the issue with IDN homographs? [...]

Viva Colombia

I flew to Bogotá, Colombia from Peru. I got into an Uber and headed to the Airbnb. It was really cheap, had great reviews and seemed to be located at the center of the city. The uber driver asked me if I was sure if the airbnb was legit because according to him [...]

Trip to Peru

After my internship at Mastercard ended, I had a couple weeks before my fall semester started. I had always wanted to go to South America and this seemed like the perfect time for the first trip to this continent. The plan was to go to Bolivia, Peru and Colombia. On 12th of August, I [...]

Parameters & arguments in JavaScript

Javascript is a functional language meaning that functions are the primary modular units of execution. Functions are obviously very important in Javascript. When talking about functions, the terms parameters and arguments are often interchangeably used as if it were one and the same thing but there is a very subtle difference. - Parameters [...]

Generators in JavaScript

Generators are a cutting edge addition to ES6 JavaScript. Async code is harder to manage with JavaScript’s single threaded execution model and Generators and Promises are welcome inclusions in the JS arsenal. Let’s explore Generators in detail in this article. ## Generators Generators are special types of functions in the sense that unlike a traditional function [...]

Task

Whenever I had a few chapters to read, I used to draw circles on a piece of paper and cross them out as I finished each chapter. Just something that got me to work and I used to do it every time. I thought of making it into a web [...]

Leapflix

LeapFlix was designed to be a Chrome Extension which would skip through intros of popular TV shows on Netflix. Some shows have a cold opening and some have terribly long intros. House of cards has a 90 second video of time lapses from Washington which gets a little old after [...]

Declaring variables in ES6 JavaScript

Before ES6, `var` was the only keyword used to declare variables in JavaScript. Unlike other languages like C, variables do not need to use different keywords based on their type. For example in C, integers undergo a different treatment as compared to strings but in JS we don’t need to specify the type [...]

Hoisting in JavaScript

The term _Hoisting_ is used in a lot of JavaScript blogs to explain identifier resolution. Using the literal meaning of the word as a metaphor, hoisting is employed to explain how Variables and Function declarations are ‘lifted’ to the top of a function or a global scope. While this does provide a basic understanding [...]

10 day UI challenge

The Daily UI challenge, as the name suggests, is a 100 day long user interface design challenge. Each day, a new prompt is sent to be designed so as to challenge, motivate and inspire. I'm very interested in User Interface Interaction. I've already taken CS 465 - UI Design and I'm [...]

Musify

This is a project that me and a couple other people worked on at WildHacks 2016 hosted at Northwestern University. We decided to go for the 'best use of Clarifai's API' prize and went through a few ideas before finalizing one. The basic idea of our project was to provide [...]

Moviebot

I love watching movies. I have watched most of the IMDb top 250 and many of the popular ones, so it became really hard to find a new movie to watch. I hate to waste my time on an uninteresting movie and also despise trying to search for a good [...]

My experience as a research intern

During the summer of 2015, I worked as a research assistant with the Biophotinics Imaging Laboratory. I received the opportunity to stay back over the summer and work as a research intern because of a class I took -- ENG 198 JS2 'Introduction to Research'. From the choices I had [...]