Ideas & field notes

Writing archive

Essays on AI, systems, and engineering

Sep 18, 2017·5 min read

How to put that GPU to good use with Python

Graphics chip manufacturers such as NVIDIA and AMD have been seeing a surge in sales of their graphics processors thanks mostly to cryptocurrency miners and machine learning applications that have found uses for these graphics processors outside of gaming and simulations.

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Jul 22, 2017·5 min read

Dissecting Bitcoin, Part 1 — The Technology

Recently, I decided to pull up Satoshi Nakamoto's paper with the hope of getting a deeper appreciation for Bitcoin and the machinations of a protocol that's driving speculators insane watching a candlestick chart. In the paper, Satoshi puts forward a solution to an old problem in distributed computing circles using Cryptography.

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May 7, 2017·4 min read

For the love of chess

Nearly twenty years to this day, in May 1997, a machine that IBM built challenged then world chess champion Garry Kasparov to a six game match, and won. An year earlier, in 1996, a similar match between the IBM built Deep Blue and Garry Kasparov ended with Kasparov winning the series comfortably.

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Apr 15, 2017·6 min read

Machine learning for fun and profit

Machine learning and artificial intelligence has been going through a phase of democratization to the point that in recent years the barrier to entry for technologies that can be used to build intelligent and self learning applications is at an all time low. I will show just how easy it is to get started with machine learning by walking you through building a simple classifier using open source technologies.

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Apr 10, 2017·2 min read

Bootstrapping Go

Over the weekend, I came across a couple of videos on how the Go compiler was migrated from C to Go. The Go compiler was originally written in C and after it reached a certain level of maturity, the creators were looking at how to bootstrap the compiler in Go so that the language can inherit some of the benefits of Go.

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Mar 11, 2017·4 min read

Coaching software engineers 101

Software engineers are a breed apart and coaching them to bring out their best has almost been a passion for me. I've had the pleasure of working with really good software engineers and watching them climb the ranks and achieve their career objectives has been especially fulfilling over the years.

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Jul 8, 2016·4 min read

Stop worrying, and just get things done

Two years ago, I pulled out my dusty copy of David Allen's Getting Things Done and decided to do a another skim through. Things were getting out of hand and I really needed to get my act together in managing the daily barrage of endless activity.

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May 15, 2016·7 min read

Building Android from source

Building Android from source seems like a daunting task at first, but it's really not that hard. I'll walk through the steps as simply as possible to get your first AOSP build running on your handset.

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Oct 3, 2015·5 min read

Getting setup with the Intel Edison

Intel Edison is an adorable little system on a chip packed with all the wireless and processing capabilities to build wearables and smart things. It features a dual-core Intel Atom processor at 500 MHz, integrated Bluetooth 4 and wifi, USB controllers, 1GB of RAM and 4GB of eMMC flash memory, all in a tiny package.

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Jan 11, 2015·4 min read

On key signing and trust

Key signing is a hallowed tradition in the open source world with a very specific protocol for validating and confirming an identity before accepting someone to the web of trust.

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Jun 2, 2014·3 min read

On Perl and Poetry

I first learnt of Perl in the late 90's. Sometime around '98 or '99. Fresh on the heels of BASIC, I was yearning to try out something new when I heard of Perl.

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Sep 22, 2013·2 min read

Software Freedom Day 2013 @ Virtusa

This last week, the fine folk at the Virtusa Open Source SIG organized an event to celebrate the Software Freedom Day where my good friends Mifan and Suchetha made keynotes.

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