//TODO

Hustle Culture

2022-01-26T00:00:00+05:30

The last few years I have been at the intersection of tech, content, hustle culture, startups, creator economy and the move towards more indepent work.

A thread about the current state and the road ahead. 🧵👇🏼

(Might as well add a dystopian prophecy trigger warning)

Today if you look around people are making a lot of noise about a few things

remote work, freelancing, independent work
side hustles, personal growth, financial advice
creator economy, social media, YT/Insta growth

Seems doing all this is both sexy + essential to survive

Here’s what I want to break it down at - it is sexy because some people you have come to like are constantly hammering that thought down your head.

Reality is, it is becoming a way of life, and that is making surviving in the modern world an increasingly uphill battle.

Let’s take an example of D2C brands. Making small crafts/utility/food products, selling to people.

A lot of people are shouting from the roofs that D2C is bringing the power back to small makers, mom & pop business, and is a radical/liberal takeback from BigTech. Ok, but wait.

Go to D2C subreddits, forums, telegram groups, discord servers or clubhouse rooms and try to find out what it takes to be D2C and a smol maker.

Everyone invariably says - make an insta account, make catchy reels, get distribution.

This starts to break apart the initial core argument that we are taking back control from big tech. Just because you don’t want to sell on Amazon, you now have to sell on Facebook (Instagram).

Also everyone says how you can open up your own cute little store with Shopify

Shopify, to be very honest, isn’t any flagbearer of small business. They are a $300B dollar company first of all. Second, they are closing the loop on the consumer end of it via shop.app.

Shopify + Shop.app = Amazon pretty much. Fuck D2C.

Let’s go back to another track of things - the hustle culture.

Everyone’s saying “make side projects”, “open an YouTube channel”, “build in open”.

Sounds nice. There are a lot of success stories too. (You can include me in that).

But can everyone afford to do all that?

2 years back, in my webdev classroom program, a young guy joined. He was exactly my age (25 then). A few years of work-ex, in a govt of India department working on IT support. He wanted to break into big tech or product companies. Sounded pretty normal to me.

But whenever my 5-8pm classes would stretch a little longer, he’d ask to be excused early and leave. After a couple of times, he told me that he needs to go pick his wife (who is also working), and back home there is a 2 yr old kid.

Suddenly I felt my stomach is missing.

Like holy fucking crap. Here I am advertising side projects and staying up at night to build your own Tinder clone to get ahead in life. There’s someone responsible for a 2 year old kid.

Easy to blame that on bad life decisions. But point is privileges exist. Admit it.

So yeah, it is easy to showcase a coupe of poster kids of hustle culture, who got a little successful with their YouTube live streams and positivity rants on Insta reels, and never had any financial/social burden to look back upon and proclaim that independent work is on the rise

The reality is the median got shifted up. The day-and-night horns of hustle culture blaring makes us all think that is normal, and that leaves those without the privilege to hustle quite high and dry. Their normal (by last decade’s standards) lifestyle is now deprecated.

Like look at the world around for a second and honestly ask yourself if we really are not in an episode of Black Mirror.

To be able to knit some sweaters and sell, you need to go and dance on TikTok and hope enough creepy people find it sexy and hit like and share.

To be able to stay relevant in the job market, so that if you ever want to switch jobs you can easily - you now have to, after working 8 hours at your workplace, also work 8 more on side projects, which there is no guarantee of working.

At work you might be working on only tech, or product, or marketing.

For side projects, you have to come up with an idea, develop it, market it, and pray there are users who like it. Might need to do some ‘thought leadership’ threads on Twitter to drum up attention too.

When did the world suddenly turn into this nightmare where everyone needs to have business-running skills, company-creating skills, just to be able to survive and life a life that matches up to the expectations and norms being advertised as bare minimum in the media.

The pandemic has pushed the agenda forward. Those who are lockstep in with this newly changing ecosystem, and have the privilege to adapt to it, are drumming up the fervor for it.

“2020s is creator economy” they shout with glee. “content is king” they proclaim. hurrah.

Today for a mid sized company to just barely survive - they are told - they need to spew out an article everyday. “You can’t not have a newsletter bro!”. Who will write it though ? You don’t have the time to. So you hire a ‘writer’. They are a college kid with a blog.

They don’t know jackshit about your business. But they got their first job at your place. They could’ve been so much happier writing what they love to write. But they need to survive too, so they take the job. Now they’re churning an article a day. Abt something they DON’T KNOW

The articles are trash, adds no value to anyone, but out here in the internet with 3 billion brain dead pair of hands holding a glowing rectangular slab - whatever you push out in sufficient ‘volume’, gets this golden currency called ‘traction’. It works! Yay. Sales pour in.

When David Graeber talked about bullshit jobs - even he probably never imagined what the world post 2020 will look like.

But my oh my oh my. Have we created an economy actually solely around bullshit jobs.

vox.com/2018/5/8/17308…

Have you talked to any friends recently who have one of those dead Instagram accounts ? 5 posts, 10 followers. And no Twitter account. Not even an Alt. Have left using Facebook too. And a LinkedIn which just has work-ex details filled, but not a single post.

What do you think of them? Not up to much in life right ? Come on. If they were hitting some home runs at work, they would describe their ‘winning mantra’ on LinkedIn right ? If they had some hot takes on current geopolitical atmosphere, they’d tweet right ?

If they were really enjoying life, travelling places, or cooking good food with their significant other, they must have posted photos on Instagram. Right ?

What a sad life they must be having.

I don’t know what’s sadder. That we think this way, or that IT IS ACTUALLY TRUE!

What do I mean by it being actually true? Well, if you are not beating up your resume drum night and day on LinkedIn, you’ll statistically have less success in switching jobs. If you’re not sharing hot takes on Twitter and dumping pics on Instagram - how’ll you make friends ?

Hell how’ll you even date? It is not like 90’s American sitcoms that you walk into a bar, order your whisky sour in sexy voice sitting beside someone from the other gender, and then end the night in bed with them, and 5 years later married to them.

Everyone’s drumming up remote work too a lot. Nice I get that. But countless young folks are getting swept by that same wave into a ‘remote life’ too.

Sitting in dark rooms they prefer to call studios, living out a virtual life, powered by dopamine blasts…

… every time someone is watching their sad life on Twitch or YouTube.

Some even break through. The rate 0.1% are able to do orbit-shifting maneovres, end up with millions of followers, actually mint some money, and win in this Black Mirror episode.

But go look at Twitch and YouTube stats. How many are making hours and hours of videos from their sunlight-less rooms, which are watched by almost none. This despondency creates mental health problems, not to mention scurvy and weak bones due to siting in a prison cell all day

Read this 2018 article Verge did about thousands of Twitch streamers whom no one watches

theverge.com/2018/7/16/1756…

I cannot fathom so many things.

why did they initially want to stream ? inspired by other streamers ? but what end goal ?
what they feel when no one watches ?

This fascination with ‘independent work life’ at the top financial/social strata is interesting in the sense that people from the top most strata are seemingly unable to look at and learn from the same cycle that played out for the strata just beneath them - the “GIG ECONOMY”.

Today the “CREATOR ECONOMY” is where the “GIG ECONOMY” was 10-15 years ago.

A certain social strata considered that as the holy grail of lifestyle shift, the golden ticket for upwards mobility.

And for a few lucky + privileged + early adopters, it happened too.

There are stories of cab drivers who turned millionaires.

But there are chilling stories like this of a gig economy worker whose DoorDash van was stolen with his 2 kids inside it

wired.com/story/gig-econ…

Want a jolt of reality? Read it.

Hustle Culture was originally published by Arnav Gupta at //TODO on January 26, 2022.

Delhi to Bangalore Road Trip

2022-01-22T00:00:00+05:30

Arnav Gupta 😷 💉🟢 💉🟢 (@championswimmer)

So I recently moved from #Delhi to #Bangalore and the easiest and fastest way I could move my work desk setup (monitors, PC, gaming chair) and my car was to stuff all that into the 🚗 and drive it all the way down.

So here’s a smol thread 🧵 on a DEL-BLR road trip. pic.twitter.com/CHIU2Ey63o

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Arnav Gupta 😷 💉🟢 💉🟢 (@championswimmer)

Day 1 was planned to be #Delhi to #Gwalior . But that would have left a very long 2nd day, so we planned to go a little further to Jhansi.

A complete chance browsing through @bookingcom led us to discover this beautiful Bundelkhand Riverside Resort at Orchcha to stay. pic.twitter.com/kKYFpbGAn1

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Arnav Gupta 😷 💉🟢 💉🟢 (@championswimmer)

Day 1 was 425 km. Total drive time was 10hrs+, because we stopped at Agra to visit @TajMahal too.

Booked Hotel Atulyaa Taaj (apart from Oberoi Amarvilas, this is the nearest hotel to Taj) simply as an expensive parking spot 😅 as the car was loaded with stuff. pic.twitter.com/vXZs8kooRh

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Arnav Gupta 😷 💉🟢 💉🟢 (@championswimmer)

The Bundelkhand Riverside Resort is the haveli of the erstwhile Raja of Orchcha, and imho, the best possible place one can do a highway stop on the first leg of this trip. Highly recommended! pic.twitter.com/T4QaGiyTAh

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Arnav Gupta 😷 💉🟢 💉🟢 (@championswimmer)

Next day we went from Orchcha (Jhansi) to Nagpur.

In terms of road quality, we faced the worst stretches on this leg. Places where the highway goes through a city and is pretty much a city road. Places under construction/repair.

90% of it is still 100kmph level good. pic.twitter.com/0QznI2K5iF

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Arnav Gupta 😷 💉🟢 💉🟢 (@championswimmer)

Day 2 was 550 kms of driving. And thus again 10hrs on the road.

We stopped just a little before Nagpur inside the @PenchMP Tiger Reserve 🐯 to check out the resorts.

Sadly post COVID, all are at very low/nil occupancy. But worth staying if you have 2 spare days in the trip. pic.twitter.com/VxfRPe1LbW

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Arnav Gupta 😷 💉🟢 💉🟢 (@championswimmer)

There’s a lot of stretch of the National Highway that cuts through the tiger reserve. Despite tall barricades along the roads, monkeys on the road are a common feature.

We had to get out of Pench post sundown and it was spine-chillingly eerie to drive through the unlit jungle. pic.twitter.com/ABd5ufNLyG

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Arnav Gupta 😷 💉🟢 💉🟢 (@championswimmer)

Next day we drove down to #Hyderabad

This was quite a beauty of a drive. The amount of greenery, hills, valleys, small river crossings we saw around will be unparalleled. Great roads too, the whole stretch. pic.twitter.com/mJBq3ACbvn

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Arnav Gupta 😷 💉🟢 💉🟢 (@championswimmer)

Not gonna lie, Hyderabad stop was all about @IKEA pilgrimage.

First time visit to IKEA, and totalllly worth it! Bought a bunch of things, and noted down a bunch more to order.

Protip: Good place to take out someone too 😅, won’t run out of conversation starters. pic.twitter.com/YVQwbPsTxr

![31453522535434231809](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FCvzC32VIAEv6z.jpg)

Tweet link

Arnav Gupta 😷 💉🟢 💉🟢 (@championswimmer)

Day 3 was 500km, and we didn’t stop at all (had to hurry to reach before IKEA closes) so covered it all in 8 hrs.

The last 50km stretch, the bypass around Hyderabad and the road to HiTech city were just 👨‍🍳🤌

Easily 150kph capable roads, 4 lanes throughout, well maintained! pic.twitter.com/FRoxTIBlH6

Tweet link

Arnav Gupta 😷 💉🟢 💉🟢 (@championswimmer)

At every stop I tried to stay at a good hotel, primarily because I wanted the car, laden to the brim with my stuff, to be parked properly.

@Westin at Hyderabad has one of the best breakfast buffet spreads, I figured, as a result. Definitely recommended just for the breakfast. pic.twitter.com/FejoZzqVZR

Tweet link

Arnav Gupta 😷 💉🟢 💉🟢 (@championswimmer)

Final leg - home run. Compared to the last 2 legs, where there would often be 30-40 min stretches of driving through literally middle of nowhere (no dhabas, no small towns, no civilisation), this whole leg is through quite populated areas. Not a single deserted stretch. pic.twitter.com/hVO6mXmAFa

Tweet link

Arnav Gupta 😷 💉🟢 💉🟢 (@championswimmer)

Day 4: Another 525 km.

Stopped at IKEA again in the morning 😅 Also stopped at @Lenskart_com as driving with the sun in the eye was starting to get to me. Buying shades helped a lot, albeit only on the last day.

Reached @peakbengaluru quite late into the night. pic.twitter.com/84jquNrgbM

Tweet link

Arnav Gupta 😷 💉🟢 💉🟢 (@championswimmer)

Thankfully journey ended at Indiranagar and didn’t need to go upto @SonyWorldJn, or else would have had taken another 4 days to cross the stretch of deleted road at Koramangala😅😅

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Delhi to Bangalore Road Trip was originally published by Arnav Gupta at //TODO on January 22, 2022.

Nativescript-Vue: Native Mobile Apps in Javascript without the Hard Parts™

2018-08-23T00:00:00+05:30

A promising alternative to React Native

Why Vue ? Why Nativescript ? Why Nativescript-Vue?

I am a fan of Vue. It is the easiest “framework” to grasp for people who just have bare minimum knowledge of vanilla HTML, CSS and Javascript. And then gives them so much power to build components, complex state management and the blazing fast speed of virtual DOM diffing.

While the world lapped up React like it is the new jQuery (and I get it’s many advantages, I really do), I could never get myself to commit to it. Sure making some fast updates on the page, use React over jQuery - yeah ok. But buy into the ecosystem? That’s where I take my leave - because nothing is opinionated in React - you have 10 different blog posts by 10 different React veterans telling 10 completely different best practices. State management? Redux is what everyone uses. MobX is what everyone recommends. Even basic setup of project is done by create-react-app, which strictly speaking is not made or maintained by the core team. And finally, there are advantages of JSX and CSS-in-JS, but there’s a reason markup languages have existed, and it is this - people just find it easy to read declarative markups instead of figuring out how higher-order-functions are recursed to form a view. Vue lets you write familiar HTML and before you fire your project up, it turns it into React-like render function. And that is what a great framework should do - abstract the hard work away from you, not make you write functional view composing functions.

Anyway, my little React rant is here because I want to preface why we are talking about Nativescript today, and not React Native (the most popular way to write cross-platform Javascript mobile apps today). I have used React Native, and I must say it is a great effort. *I have spent 8 years of my life developing native Android apps using Java, more recently Kotlin, and even a bit of C++. *To get things like animated views and smoothly working lists, simply by throwing an array at a template is not easy in mobile. And writing it in Javascript and expecting the underlying framework to translate it to actual native widgets, while keeping the best performance practices in place is quite a big ask, and React Native delivers. But there are niggles and quirks.

The first thing I hate is broken promises. And just after you cross the basic todolist type of apps, React breaks the promise of building the entire project in Javascript. Now I am no stranger to native codebases, but when I am promised pure Javascript, and then for every little task I have to write bridges and end up with a codebase having 5 languages (JS, Swift, ObjC, Java, Kotlin), or 6 if you count JSX 😅
The concept of running React Native code in a thread that is **not **the UI thread is actually bad for mobile development. The web is different. You need to keep everything async. But on mobile, if you do have 2 different threads - then you come around to the biggest problem of animating items on screen. The function that calculates the position of a view 60 times a second (in the JS interpreter) and the function that sets the position of the view actually on the screen (in Java/Swift realm) are on two separate threads. And there goes 60 fps flying out of the window. *Note: Some of the bridging problems are going to get sorted as there is an upcoming change in their architecture - *http://facebook.github.io/react-native/blog/2018/06/14/state-of-react-native-2018
It isn’t really write once. As has been described in AirBnB’s extremely detailed, well written and balanced series on medium - https://medium.com/airbnb-engineering/sunsetting-react-native-1868ba28e30a You do end up maintaing 3 apps. The actual view layer, and two entire projects consisting of iOS and Android bridges respectively. Even the UI layer is not 100% common code as many components exist only in iOS or only in Android.

The reason I am really excited about Nativescript-Vue is the same as the inherent weaknesses I see in React as a framework and React Native as a platform. What I like about Nativescript is unlike React Native - which was an effort to take a web framework into mobile, they created an extremely generic solution as to how Javascript can be executed on mobiles, how native Java or Objective-C classes can be instantiated from exactly equivalent Javascript code, and how native widgets can be constructed from Javascript. Since this solution is generic, accessing native parts from your Javascript does not require special bridges - because a generic bridge already exists and available at runtime - it is synchronous. Your code runs on the UI thread just like native mobile apps traditionally do (with the ability to break out into threads for things like File operations or Network operations). Performance benchmarks (synthetic ones, and a bit old, but current numbers are similar) show this difference - NativeScript has overhead of starting up, but once started, the marshalling of data from Javascript to native and back takes much less time compared to other solutions.

How Nativescript works

The Layouts

Nativescript has in-built layout systems that map pretty much to similar layouts that exist in the Android and iOS world.

The GridLayout is a very powerful layout style, not easy to achievevia XMLs in Android or NIBs in iOS easily too‌‌StackLayouts lay out items linearly in horizontal or vertical manner

Working with the Native Ecosystem

You can extend your project via other native libraries (i.e. Gradle/Maven dependencies for Android and Cocoapods for iOS), and you can also add NPM modules to your project. You need to be careful about NPM modules. Those that have C++ bindings are not straightforward to get to work. Also those that depend on NodeJS features that are not present in Nativescript will not work either. My experience with Nativescript has been that most things we require while building a mobile app will usually work out of the box.

Nativescript uses JavaScriptCore (as it is practically the only option) for iOS and it uses V8 for Android. This has some performance gains over React Native using JavaScriptCore on Android, because V8 is better optimised for Android due to the billions Google invests into Chrome for Android. The most beautiful part **Nativescript is that you can access Android SDK’s Java classes and iOS SDK’s Obj-C classes directly from Javascript. In case of Java - whose syntax is similar to Javascript - **it literally is copying Java code, pasting it into Javascript file and voila!! it works. There is a fantastic blog post by T J VanToll that describes how this mind-bending trick works under the hood - https://developer.telerik.com/featured/nativescript-works/

The App architecture and using Frameworks

Nativescript is two things.

Executing Javascript on mobile
A set of prebuilt views (or widgets) that are basically translated into native iOS/Android widgets at runtime. So a “Button” is com.android.widgets.Button on Android and UIButton on iOS.

Apart from that, Nativescript does not depend on being written in any particular way, or using any particulay framework. The creators heavily recommend Typescript, but that’s because you get 100% type definition support, and errors are found out at compile stage, that could have creeped into runtime.

Basically there are many ways you can use NativeScript -

Without Framework
Only JS files - construct views with functions and constructors
JS for logic + XML for template - XML is transpiled into render functions when bundling, or interpreted at runtime
TS for Logic + XML for templates - brings type-safety in. Also recommended in most guides
With Framework
Angular with Typescript - most common way, starter kit does this
Vue - Nativescript-Vue, still beta, but everything mostly works

The fun part here is, when using Vue, you can use JS, TS, Coffeescript for logic. You can use HTML, Pug, EJS for templates. CSS/SASS/Less/Stylus for styling

Right now there are two common ways to work with Nativescript-Vue, using the vue-cli-template **or via **nativescript-vue-template. **When version 2.0 comes out, **vue-cli-template will be the common one using benefits from both sides (single build step = fast reloads, also .vue single file components). As of version 1.3 you have to chose between fast builds or single file components.

Things to take care of . . .

When building mobile apps with web frameworks, one most important thing is to keep in mind it is not the web DOM we are targeting. Things specific to the DOM like event capturing and bubbling aren’t similar here.

Also do **not ** use http and fs APIs from DOM or NodeJS. You need to use Nativescript’s own implementation of File and Network APIs. And finally, yes, before you start off using NativeScript, you need to prepare your development machine for compiling and debugging native apps. Setting up the Android SDK is pretty easy these days. And the iOS side of things work only on a Mac. On MacOS setting up XCode and iOS SDK is also 2-3 click affair.

Run tns doctor via the Nativescript CLI to make sure all is up and running before you start creating your first app.

. . . and you are ?

I love building mobile and web apps. Vue currently is the framework I am in love most (apart from Ember). You can follow @championswimmer on Twitter or Github

Also I am the co-founder of Coding Blocks a software development bootcamp with offline classes in India and online courses for anyone over the globe ! Please check out out online courses at - https://online.codingblocks.com ! A bit about myself

Nativescript-Vue: Native Mobile Apps in Javascript without the Hard Parts™ was originally published by Arnav Gupta at //TODO on August 23, 2018.

Very Strict Sequelize: Into the land of Typescript Overkill

2018-04-06T00:00:00+05:30

Disclaimer: If you believe that Typescript is a conspiracy by Microsoft to turn Javascript into C# and you believe in the religion of monkey-patching objects, then please do not proceed further. This article will burn your soul if you read it

Typescript: Enforce ‘correct’ code

Ever since I have started using Typescript, I cannot imagine writing large projects in plain JS anymore. My relationship to Typescript is best explained by this very nicely articulated piece by Tom Dale

While Typescript can make working with frontend frameworks like Angular and Vue a whole new revelation, using it on backend projects can have equally pleasing results. What I like about Typescript is the strictness can be turned a few notches up or down based on your requirements. And as you keep turning the strictness up by notches, you start seeing Typescripting starting to block off all those cracks and crevices in your code that were sitting there, waiting for you to slip into them at runtime, and cause hard-to-debug errors.

Since Typescript brings in the concept of compilation before running the code, the obvious error-prone code blocks will be straightaway flagged by Typescript, and you’ll have to fix them before you can even get to the running stage

Sequelize: A good target

Here is an example of a run of the mill Sequelize code -

const Sequelize = require('sequelize')
const db = new Sequelize('db', 'user', 'pass', {
	dialect: 'postgres'
})

const User = db.define('users', {
	// line A
	name: Sequelize.STRING,
	age: Sequelize.INTEGER,
	city: Sequelize.STRING,
	isAdmin: {type: Sequelize.BOOLEAN, defaultValue: false}
})

db.sync().then(() => {
	User.create({
		// line B
		name: 'Arnav', age: 23, city: 'Delhi', isAdmin: true
	}).then(user => {
		// line C
		console.log(user.age) // 23
	})
})

Usual points of failure of this code are at:

Line A: What if I miss any keys while defining, or jumble up the properties like type and defaultValue
Line B: What if I miss any keys, or mis-type the key name
Line C: What if I do not use correct key names when fetching data from user

Most IDEs like Webstorm or VS Code will only give rough suggestions, and not very indicative autocompletes either.

When dealing with 15-20 models in your project (usual mid-size node/express projects get there pretty fast), you’d want a little more strictness around your models’ keys and better autocomplete would always be welcome.

Typescript + Sequelize: We’re pretty much in Java/C# land here

To start using Typescript, you’ll need typescript module, and to make better use of types from sequelize you should also get the @types/sequelize module

npm install -D typescript @types/sequelize

You can check out what the entire project structure looks like here, but here is the lowdown -

Here is what my /db/models/Client.ts file looks like -

import {DefineAttributes, Instance, Model} from 'sequelize'
import * as Sequelize from 'sequelize'

// This is signature of my 'Client' objects
// Whenever I create 'Client' rows, the objects will be of this type
export interface ClientAttributes {
    id: number,
    secret: string,
    whitelist_domains: string[],
    whitelist_ips: string[],
    redirect_url: string[]
}

// To define Client in db, the columns must be one of the 
// keys of 'ClientAttributes', hence (( in keyof ClientAttributes )) 
type ClientDefineAttributes = {
    [x in keyof ClientAttributes]: string | DataTypeAbstract | DefineAttributeColumnOptions

}

// When writing this, I cannot stray away from **having to**
// use keys as in 'ClientAttributes'
// In Webstorm/VSCode I get autocomplete too
export const clientAttrs: ClientDefineAttributes = {
    id: {
        type: Sequelize.INTEGER,
        primaryKey: true,
        autoIncrement: true
    },
    secret: Sequelize.STRING(32),
    whitelist_domains: Sequelize.ARRAY(Sequelize.STRING),
    whitelist_ips: Sequelize.ARRAY(Sequelize.STRING),
    redirect_url: Sequelize.STRING
}

export interface ClientInstance extends Instance<ClientAttributes> {
    get(): ClientAttributes
}

export interface Client extends Model<ClientInstance, ClientAttributes> {

}

And then once many such models are defined, my /db/index.ts will look like this -

import * as Sequelize from 'sequelize'
import {DataTypes} from 'sequelize'
import * as config from '../../config'
import {ClientAttributes, clientAttrs, ClientInstance} from './models/Client'
import {ProductCategoryAttributes, productCategoryAttrs, ProductCategoryInstance} from './models/ProductCategory'
import {TaxAttributes, taxAttrs, TaxInstance} from './models/Tax'

const db = new Sequelize(
    config.DB.NAME,
    config.DB.USER,
    config.DB.PASSWORD,
    {
        dialect: 'postgres'
    }
)
export const Clients =
    db.define<ClientInstance, ClientAttributes>('clients', clientAttrs)

export const ProductCategories =
    db.define<ProductCategoryInstance, ProductCategoryAttributes>(
        'product_categories',
        productCategoryAttrs
    )
export const Tax =
    db.define<TaxInstance, TaxAttributes>(
        'tax',
        taxAttrs
    )

Leverage Live Templates: Do not write boilerplate

As long as you’re using a good IDE (or even Vim with the appropriate plugins), you do not need to write those cumbersome boilerplates all over again. We can create Apache Velocity templates for the define statement and the model file.

Here is what my Model file template looks like - NOTE: ${NAME} is file name

#set($fileName = $NAME.substring(0,1).toLowerCase() + $NAME.substring(1))
import {DataTypeAbstract, DefineAttributeColumnOptions, DefineAttributes, Instance, Model} from 'sequelize'
import * as Sequelize from 'sequelize'

export interface ${NAME}Attributes {
    id: number
}

type ${NAME}DefineAttributes = {
    [x in keyof ${NAME}Attributes]: string | DataTypeAbstract | DefineAttributeColumnOptions
}

export const ${fileName}Attrs: ${NAME}DefineAttributes = {
    id: {
        type: Sequelize.INTEGER,
        primaryKey: true,
        autoIncrement: true
    }
}

export interface ${NAME}Instance extends Instance<${NAME}Attributes> {
    get(): ${NAME}Attributes
}

export interface ${NAME} extends Model<${NAME}Instance, ${NAME}Attributes> {

}

So as soon as I generate a file of name MyModel.ts all the scaffolding is already done for me.

Similarly I have created a live template to generate the db.define statements -

export const $NAME$ =
    db.define<$NAME$Instance, $NAME$Attributes>(
        '$SNAKENAME$',
        $SMALLNAME$Attrs
    )

Autocomplete Bliss + No Typo Mayhem in run time

Whenever I want to create objects, I can see the keys and their types in autocomplete

Unless the object I save is exactly right, I get a compile error

And I get similar fluent autocomplete in the query result item as well

And finally I get the same luxury on where queries too

Typescript: Invest in boilerpate for long term safety

A little bit of investment into boilerplate; whether you type manually everytime - which IMHO is a bit cumbersome or you take advantage of your IDE/Editor and create templates; is required when using Typescript, but the advantages we get in terms of code completion and more importantly, compile-time error checking, even before we go into run-time mode, is well worth the time invested.

Could not have written without StackEdit.

Obligatory shameless self-plug :
I am one of the co-founders of Coding Blocks - A Software Programming bootcamp, based out of New Delhi, India. Among other things, we teach Full Stack Web Development using NodeJS, via both classroom programmes, as well as online classes. You can follow our Medium to find more articles on Android and Web development.

Very Strict Sequelize: Into the land of Typescript Overkill was originally published by Arnav Gupta at //TODO on April 06, 2018.

Creating an Ember.js Addon

2018-04-06T00:00:00+05:30

Getting Started

Use ember-cli to create basic structure (like you start with creating an app)

ember addon <addon-name>

This will generate the following directory structure

.
├── addon						# your addon code goes here
├── app							# things you want to inject into consumer apps' namespace 
├── config					
│   ├── ember-try.js			# testing config
│   └── environment.js
├── ember-cli-build.js			# how the dummy test app is built
├── index.js					# how your app is built (read more - https://ember-cli.com/api/classes/Addon.html ) 
├── package-lock.json
├── package.json
├── testem.js
├── tests
│   ├── dummy					# dummy app (for testing) 
│   │   ├── app
│   │   ├── config
│   │   └── public
│   ├── helpers
│   ├── index.html
│   ├── integration				# e2e tests for your addon
│   ├── test-helper.js			# test setup config for your addon
│   └── unit					# unit tests for your addon
└── vendor

Adding an util

ember generate util <util-name>

Using Typescript

`extend` instead of `.create()`

In JS we write

export default Mixin.create({})

We can instead use -

export default class PromiseResolver extends Mixin<PromiseResolver> {}

Written with StackEdit.

Creating an Ember.js Addon was originally published by Arnav Gupta at //TODO on April 06, 2018.

Tech Conferences : A fun place to be

2017-06-29T00:00:00+05:30

So I have had the good fortune to present at quite a few tech conferences. A large number of them have been at HasGeek events. Quick shoutout to Kiran Jonnalagadda, Zainab Bawa, Karthik Balakrishnan, Sandhya Ramesh, Hari (ഹരി) and everyone else on the HasGeek team for the awesome tech conferences they host. It was also an honour to be on the Editoral board a couple of editions of Droidcon too.

Putting those thanks aside right in the beginning, because here is where I start making fun of conferences. :P The HasGeek events are some of the most sorted conferences in India, but I have been to some other ones too, which are not that . . . well put together.

From right to left: Someone taking notes, someone hurriedly fixing bugs in the release they pushed out yesterday or getting ready for their talk up next, someone probably requisitioning nudes on WhatsApp and Kiran having an existential crisis. (credits: nicked it from here https://factordaily.com/profile-kiran-jonnalagadda-zainab-bawa-hasgeek/)

So a lot of funny things happen at conferences. When you haven’t gone to one yet, or have attended maybe just one before, you have this assumption that this is a place full of serious people, who mean business, accumulated here to gain valuable insights from eminent and knowledgeable speakers.

But what tech conferences are, could be wildly different. There’s strictly two specific motivations for attending them. For speakers — you get to travel to a new city for free (if the organisers have managed to get quite a few sponsors on board, you get lodged into a decent hotel too). And for the attendees — you get free lunch, and your company pays for you to attend it. So for one whole day, you don’t need to dredge through your scrum in your gloomy desk, and instead meet new people, have good food and munch on free donuts.

And you also get to take selfies in front of cool wall art like this

Why do companies send their employees to these conferences you wonder? Well isn’t it obvious ? To learn new about the latest and greatest in the software world (read: participate in the hype cycle).
But that doesn’t always work out. Because you see, other than geeky developers, who else goes to tech conferences ? Greasy startup founders and technical recruiters. Who are always lurking to poach employees. So that bright developer you sent to pick up new skills at #AwesomeConf ? Too bad, Pochr.io just nicked him.

The Talks

The Gartner Hype Cycle. I am perennially on the trough of disillusionment, while the rest of the world seems to be constantly on the peak of inflated expectations

Most conferences will divide their talks into 3 categories, based on their difficulty and/or depth —

Beginner — These are on topics which are in the first slope of the hype cycle. Imagine Kotlin in 2016 or TensorFlow in 2015 or React in 2014. And these talks are nothing but the exact content you’ll find on the ‘Getting Started’ page of the respective technology. It’s slightly worse than the Getting Started page, because that page gets updated in the future. This talk will get recorded and uploaded on Youtube as a permanent record of poor topic selection, if the said technology’s hype cycle bursts.
Intermediate — **These are the opinionated as f* talks. This is the category into which every mediocre conference speaker proposes a “Best Practices for Creating a _ project” talk. This is the category into which every judgemental developer proposes a “What not to do when working with __” talk. This is usually going to be about a technology that the whole world is already using, but the ecosystem is not mature, so everyone is figuring shit out on their own, and there are no ‘best practices’ yet, so everyone thinks their variable names, function names, folder structures and file names are the best. Like everyone Javascript conference will have a talk on Vue, and every speaker will have his/her opinion on whether Axios is better or Vue-resource is. Every Android conference is talking about the pros and cons of RxJava.
Advanced — This is where the fun is. Advanced talks will usually be about a technology that is in use since the advent of computers. But it will be about a particular niche which only 8 developers from Valley and 2 from Bangalore are working on. This category is called ‘advanced’ not because the technologies used are complex, but because it deals with something like — ‘When we were scaling up, our NodeJS codebase was so large the number of require() calls hit the Unix process limit of number of open files’ — i.e. the kind of problems engineers at Facebook or Google scale worry about, or people with a funded research on ‘how to screw your computer’ ponder over.

The Speakers

While those were the types of talks. There are also a handful of types of speakers you get at these conferences. Any speaker can be put into one of these categories.

First there will be the geeks with untested demos. These guys do not have slides. They want to give you a tech demo. Of a product that uses the latest, most unstable version of every tool possible, that runs on a prototype kit that they got from their last I/O or WWDC trip. These guys are found fidgeting with their demo 2 minutes before their talk is scheduled in the speakers’ lounge. The demo, will invariably not work. Then they will tell you, in the most unconvincing tone you’ve ever heard, what it would have been like, had the demo worked.
Then there will be the product guys, the marketing heroes hidden under the developers’ capes, the sellers, the smart talkers. They will convince the editorial panel in all ways possible it is not a pitch of their product or a blatant marketing of their ‘all new platform that will make developing a breeze’. (I’ve been on the editorial board. When an interview starts with “I don’t want to promote it in anyway but. . .”, I know exactly where it’s headed). These are the guys who tend to use use phrases like ‘and this is where all the magic happens’. You know when to call bullshit now if you hear this right ?
Some of us are the regular guys. The usual suspects. The weathered speakers. We have spoken at multiple conferences, and we know the feedback and reviews of the conference will depend more on the quality of lunch, than our slides. We know you’re here for a company-paid day off with free food and some . . *ahem . . *networking. We know you’re not really sitting here to understand how important it is to set objects volatile and functions synchronized for error-free multi-threading. We know the true reason you are here — you are here for the memes, the jokes, and the gotchas. And we follow the footsteps of lord Gary Bernhardt and the supreme leader James Mickens. (The liberal use of **we, **if had not clearly pointed out, then yes, this is the category I belong to).

Here you go, meme-ified, on your face facts, about how your Digital money isn’t all that safe

Finally there will be the visionaries. The legends. The torch bearers of technology. The keynote speakers. These will be guys like Ryan Dahl, showcasing his summer project — that eventually turned into NodeJS. Or Phillip Roberts casually telling you about the Event Loop. Or it could be the creator of Wordpress, Socket.IO and Mongoose — Guillermo Rauch (trivia: caught up with him smoking a desi joint an hour before this talk) describing the future of chat. These guys are the reason the handful of serious attendees who have come, are here for. These guys don’t talk code, or 10% performance bumps. These guys talk ideas. But never mind, because you won’t get it now. And when you’ll get it, it’d have been too late to jump onto the hype train.
There is also this one last type of speaker, for whom there is a** special place in hell. The guys who propose “Building for the billions” talks. And there is going to be at least half a dozen such proposals. “*User Experience for the next billion”, “Design for the next billion internet users” *and what not. Here’s the thing — there are only a handful of apps on the play store with more than a billion downloads: **Gmail, Google **Search (because they’re bundled in every Android phone), **Whatsapp **(because it’s the new SMS), **Messenger **(because Mark effin Zuckerberg forced everyone to download it), **Twitter **and **Facebook **(because 1 billion adults are shitposting cat pics on the internet everyday). If you’re not Facebook, Twitter or Google, you need to get your ducks in order and figure out how to **GET AT LEAST 1 BILLION USERS before you can *design better for the next billion. *You know who needs to build for the next billion ? This guy. Your app that solves NP-hard problem ? No one cares.

The Networking

.. or huddling around that one Google employee there, wagging your tails hoping to . . . idk what ? Get a job ?

So networking at tech conference is downright favour currying. You are either recruiting talent for your next ‘1 billion user’ idea (if you’re a CTO). Or you’re trying to appear deeply interested in the conversation one speaker is having with another about a language you first heard 1 hour ago. Or you’re trying to ask intriguing follow up questions to that big-company developer who just spoke in the pre-lunch session, and are only managing to ask the most obvious google-searchable questions.

Then there’s going to be that one huddle of undergrad open source developers (who are on sponsored tickets), gorging on all the available chicken and ice cream, and discussing about the best gaming laptop and having a dick-measuring contest about their Github commit-streak. THAT IS NETWORKING. At least they are having fun doing it.

There’ll be also be some horny fellows in a corner trying to make a pass on one of thinly spread female attendees. Geez. Please don’t. Like everything else in a shitty conference is still fine. But this isn’t. Wondering why there aren’t enough women in tech, this could be one of the reasons </serious note>

The most important part of the pilgrimage to a tech conference, is to visit the shrine of every sponsor. Because the offerings from the the divine sponsors are what keeps us going from one conference to another. Like literally, all 4 years of college, I did not buy a single T-shirt. Whenever I would run out of shirts, I’d turn up at hackathons and tech conferences and grab a dozen new ones.

Some of the upright ones, like Digital Ocean and Facebook would be having an open table of stickers, pens, notepads **and other corporate-marketing-enwrapped **swags. Then there’ll be snide data collectors who’d be like, fill up this form and get a T-Shirt. Like seriously ? You think I’d give up some of my real data for a free T-Shirt ?
Then, there are some who try to gamify the heck out of it. Udacity was making us answer a quiz to give us a mug. I just cheezeballed my way with the lady on the counter to get mine. I am sure so did others. Quiz my ass.

Here’s a golden rule about sponsor kiosks. Don’t go asking about open roles and asking about technology. Like just think it over. These companies, who’d love to make you work on Sundays too, have sent these folks for 3 whole days to stand at kiosks and take selfies with attendees. Guess who these folks are ? Yep the temps, interns and the most dispensable ones. They ain’t giving you any jobs. The know nothing about the next SDK release. Get back to the lunch, or the next talk about the next billion users please.

The best part about a tech conference is that they give you this black side-carry bag, which has this one recyclable pen made of paper pulp, which breaks apart the moment you put some pressure on it to write. There would be a notepad — they’re actually expecting you to take notes. And there’ll be a bunch of marketing material. Now the sponsors are charged extra for their marketing brochures to be put into this bag. The best use, personally, I had of these brochures, was to fan myself when sitting outside the auditorium in of the conferences I attended in hot and humid Chennai. And the cherry on the cake would be that conference T-Shirt, which if you wore, would look like a Formula-1 driver, because of the number of sponsor logs printed on it’s back. It’ll never be a size that fits you. And you cannot give away a T-Shirt with that many sponsor logos to anyone but your younger brother.

Tech conferences are really nice places to pick up new trends, and meet great people. This is a piece of comedy, and mostly everything after the 2nd paragraph is the worst of all conferences I have attended cherry-picked into a single story. Do keep attending conferences. Especially the ones hosted by HasGeek in India are some of the best ones. HasGeek has conferences on Javascript, React and Mobile lined up from 12th to16th September. If you’re coming to any one of them, hit me up on twitter, and we can ‘network’ and go ‘sponsor kiosk’ pilgrimage together ;)

P.S. Thanks to Sahil Dua for pointing out a couple of corrections in this.

Tech Conferences : A fun place to be was originally published by Arnav Gupta at //TODO on June 29, 2017.

Indian Parents : Before and after graduating

2017-06-29T00:00:00+05:30

Indian Parents have no chill

“Indian parents” is the ideal topic to joke on, for Indians. It’s dead straight. You narrate any incident of any interaction, big or small, with your parents, and it’s going to be funny.

For a quick TL;DR, you can hear me narrate this blog post on my SoundCloud

It has been a year I am out of college. So I did engineering. Like every other Indian guy. (Those sissies who didn’t couldn’t handle math and/or physics. Those passion stories are bullshit).

And I got ‘placed’ into a few software firms like Zomato and Facebook. Just like any other Indian guy. (You see I didn’t even mention my majors. It wasn’t Computer Science. But that’s besides the point).

And I didn’t join either. Here’s where the regular Indian Guy story goes off the plot. I joined a startup called Coding Blocks as one of the founding members. We teach Indian college students (who, as you by now know are all engineering undergrads, unless they can’t math) to develop software. Because the engineering colleges don’t. So that they can get ‘placed’ into companies like Zomato and Facebook. I can hear you sigh at the irony, but wait, the actual joke hasn’t even begun.

So, now, my parents are in a very uneasy situation. For 22 years, they have been building the muscle memory of asking “Why aren’t you studying?”, every time they had eye contact with me.

Reading a novel : Why aren’t you studying ?

*Taking too long to eat *: Why aren’t you studying ?

Constipation: Why don’t you take a book inside ?

Looking at the stars and figuring out the answer to life universe and everything : Son, it’s 42. Now please get back to your studies.

And on those rare occasions when I was found performing unspeakable acts that do not befit a hard working student — like playing FIFA, or watching a series — basically almost any activity involving my laptop, I have this massive guilt trip. You can’t look your parents in the eye for a week. You will be doing the dishes, turning off the fan diligently, putting the water bottle in the fridge, and other acts of an *adarsh baalak *(ideal son) and fervently wishing you get back into the good books as soon as possible.

That’s because for all these years, the only constant in my life was an upcoming exam. Midterm, Sessional, Half-yearly, FA, SA, IITJEE, AIEEE, AISSCE, Olympiad — they come in various names. (No, the only constant in life is not change. If you are above 22, the only certain thing is death and taxes. If you’re below 22, the only certain thing is exams and parent’s telling you to study).

**But now, there are no more exams to study for. School is over. College is over. **This is such a deal breaker for your parents.

Now I can play FIFA on my PS4, that I bought with my own fucking money (we’re not getting into details like how it cost me a month’s salary), on the TV in the living room, on full volume.

Now I can stay on my bed for the entire long weekend. With 3 canisters of overpriced Pringles (another month’s). And binge watch Last Week Tonight on loop. Without the headphones.

AND I CAN LOOK THEM IN THE EYE WHILE DOING ALL THIS.

This is something they can’t stand now. You can see them squirm every passing second your nose is not in between the pages a thick academic material. They are not used to this new reality — the cannot imagine a world where their son doesn’t have an upcoming exam to study for.

They develop this midlife crisis. This existential gloom clouds over them. Their only purpose in life when they are at home — of telling me to study, is now snatched away from them. And a man without purpose is a man lost.

So now they have other questions. Like what am I going to do in life. Yeah **‘what am I going to do in life’. **I am part of a team running a profitable company which grew 5x and opened 3 new offices in the last year. But . . . WHAT AM I GOING TO DO IN LIFE.

Aren’t you going to apply to Google or something ?

Will you try to appear for UPSC ?

Do you have plans for MBA ?

What have you considered about MS ?

Do you see a pattern there ? These are all indirect questions about when is the next time in life I have to appear for an exam ?. When will they, again in life, get the chance to ask me ‘WHY ARE YOU NOT STUDYING?’.

And when I am able to successfully evade such questions with the perfectly logical answer — “Coding Blocks is working out well, can you just let me concentrate on that” — I get threatened by the eternal nightmare of Indians in their 20’s — the ‘marriage’ question.

Now, the fact of the matter is, they know my girlfriend (who is completing her MBBS — yep doctor ❤ engineer == bells whistles, cliche Indian perfect couple), and they know very well her and my plans for the coming few years. And thus the marriage question is not a real question — but just a the sword hanging over my head, to force me to answer the most important question — ‘When can you get the opportunity to force you to study, and give you guilt trips for enjoying your life again’.

Here’s hoping I do not have to go for MS to Trump’s USA. Here’s hoping I do not have to go for MBA and take a bank job. Here’s hoping I do not need to clear UPSC and become a corrupt bureaucrat. And here’s hoping I do not have to brush up my data structures and algorithms for a Google interview.

Since there were some people on whom the sarcasm was lost : No, not being an engineer is perfectly fine (if not by your parents and Indian society, but by the world it is). Those who can’t math aren’t lesser human beings. Please do follow your passion. Don’t be cliched Indian people who figure out what to do in life after engineering. Ye bik gyi hai engineering. Kuch ni rakha hai isme. Ye sab engineering colleges aur parents milke humko pagal bana rahe hai. :)

Indian Parents : Before and after graduating was originally published by Arnav Gupta at //TODO on June 29, 2017.

Don't jump onto the Firebase bandwagon yet

2016-10-24T00:00:00+05:30

Firebase is the rage. It’s the talk of the town, and every frontend conference, be it Web or Mobile can’t stop talking about Firebase.

But hold your horses a bit out there. Now I am not saying that do not use Firebase. I use Firebase extensively. At CodingBlocks I make it a point to teach using Firebase to the students of the Android programme. But all said and done, Firebase has a specific use case. And we cannot overlook that.

Firebase came about to be used as a realtime, object storage system. Both the terms realtime and object storage are important. For one, being realtime is not something we always need. For a chat app yes, for a CRM, probably not needed at all. Secondly the data format of Firebase is very dubious. It is an object store meaning, it resembles no-SQL databases like MongoDB and DocumentStore more than it does RDBMS like MySQL or Oracle. NoSQL is also something the cool kids have been harping on since 2010, but is again, useful for specific cases.

Now where my criticism of Firebase stems from are two easily overlooked points -

The “object storage” uses a Database that is not transparent. We do not actually know if it used MongoDB on the backend or some other kind of database. And being proprietary, we do not actually know the availability/consistency tradeoffs, have any perf benchmarks etc of the underlying datastore that powers Firebase.
The issue with realtime is, it’s too good to be true. And it is. Since more than 7 or 8 cases out of 10, you do not actually need something really realtime (as in making a WebSocket connection and doing live 2-way updates), just getting realtime for the lulz is not a good idea. It will be resource intensive, expend more internet bandwidth on your client and devices, and most important of all is a pricey business.

Let us expand on these points.

The data storage problem

What the Firebase data model looks like is somewhat this (taking a blog) -

root
	- posts  
	    	- K1mn3b4m1n3
	        	- title: ""
	            - content: ""
	            - author
	    	- K2m3n4h2mn3
	        	- title: ""
	            - content: ""
	            - author
	    	- K3mn45b3mm3
	        	- title: ""
	            - content: ""
	            - author
	- comments  
	    	- K2m34nb2m
	        	- post : K1mn3b4m1n3
	            - title: ""
	            - content
	        - K62mn22m
	        	- post : K2m3n4h2mn3
	            - title: ""
	            - author: ""

There is a single node called root which is the entire DB of your app. Inside that there are refs like posts and comments which are mostly analogous to Collection of MongoDB. Firstly, I just feel uneasy at the sight of the DB that looks like a single huge JSON file. I am extremely skeptical of how well it would scale when you put thousands of entries into each ref, and then create multiple relations between them like - post has auther=userid and comment has post = postid and author = userid and so on.

And as is the problem with blindly starting to use noSQL (please do follow the link, you’ll not regret it), you might be using it completely wrong, and/or in a place where traditional Relational SQL solutions would have fit better.

The realtime problem

The second issue is when you are grabbed by your neck and force-herded into a realtime ecosystem, when you did not need it. Now a major portion of Firebase users actually did not need realtime databases. They just started using Firebase because Google made a big pomp and show of it at I/O 2016.

Thing is, pricing is very awkward. Upto 100 DB connections (simultaneous), you are on the free tier, named as Spark. (Trivia: I suggested the name Spark to Firebase founder James Tamplin, and the cool guy he is, he named the plan, earlier known as Hacker to Spark). Beyond this, you do not have a $5 or $10 tier. You need to jump straight to the $25 plan.

Now take a step back and try to understand. 100 connections is entirely different from non-realtime datastores that provide usually 20 req/sec or 30 req/sec (what AWS, Parse, Azure mBaas limits are) on their free tier. Firebase considers a user to be a connection whenever he has his app open and connected to internet. (Side note: on mobile platforms like Android, you can do Firebase.goOnline() and Firebase.goOffline(), recently).

And trust me, if you’re a chatting app, or a content reading app, getting to 100 simultaneous open connections is a very easy to achieve target.

The fact that Firebase is waaay too easy to plug in to your mobile apps (as much as single-line codes to make a ListView in Android connected to a Database Ref on Firebase, and having 2-way updates without any other code written), only makes me conclude that Firebase has got it’s priorities straight up -

Hook in the devs using easy to use libraries
Force them to be realtime
Wait for them to get 100 online users
Make $$$

And while all this makes good business sense for Google, it probably doesn’t for you. So before you jump into the Firebase bandwagon like crazy, do your bit of math.

Don't jump onto the Firebase bandwagon yet was originally published by Arnav Gupta at //TODO on October 24, 2016.

Handling File uploads in HTML5 and Express (with Multer)

2016-06-21T00:00:00+05:30

The Open Event Webapp Generator has a pure HTML front end form, and Express based backend.

We needed an option where users can upload their own JSON files to create a schedule page for it.

On the HTML form that’s easy. As you can see here we simple add input tags with type=”file”

<input type="file" name="sponsorfile" id="sponsorfile">

In our express app, we need to use multer to be able to handle file uploads.

We create a middleware called uploadedFiles, and pass the middleware to the get() block

var express = require('express');
var multer = require('multer');
var app = express();

var upload = multer({dest: 'uploads/'});

var uploadedFiles = upload.fields([
  {name: 'speakerfile', maxCount: 1},
  {name: 'sessionfile', maxCount: 1},
  {name: 'trackfile', maxCount: 1},
  {name: 'sponsorfile', maxCount: 1},
  {name: 'eventfile', maxCount: 1},
  {name: 'locationfile', maxCount: 1}
]);

app.post('/live', uploadedFiles, function(req, res) {
         // req.files has the files
         // req.body has the POST body params
  });
});

Now we can access the files inside req.files (that will have a path to the temporary location of the file, you’ll have to use some filesystem module to read the files), and the POST params in req.body

Handling File uploads in HTML5 and Express (with Multer) was originally published by Arnav Gupta at //TODO on June 21, 2016.

Sending a streaming zip file in node.js

2016-06-19T00:00:00+05:30

The webapp generator that we set up is now up and running on a heroku instance and is working to generate zips of generated websites.

One of the requirements was that when the front-end presses, the “Generate” button, a request is created to the backend node app to start creating the html pages, and pack them into a zip file. Then the said zip file will be made available to download.

I intended for the zip file to become available to download immediately and the server to continuously pack data into the zip, as the user downloads it – a process known as streaming zip serving. (If you might have noticed, Google Drive uses this too. You do not know the final zip size before the download has completed.)

If the server takes time in creating the contents of the zip, this method can help, as it will allow the user to start downloading the file, before all the contents are finalised.

To achieve the mentioned goal, the idea Node.js module to use archiver.

If you look at the app.js code you’ll find on the /generate POST endpoint, we take the ‘req’ params and pass to a pipeToRes() function, which is defined in generator.js

app.post('/generate', uploadedFiles, function(req, res, next) {
  console.log(req.files);
  console.log(req.body);
  res.setHeader('Content-Type', 'application/zip');
  generator.pipeZipToRes(req, res);
});

And in the generator, you can find this block of code that pipes the streaming archive to the response.

      const zipfile = archiver('zip');

      zipfile.on('error', (err) => {
        throw err;
      });

      zipfile.pipe(res);

      zipfile.directory(distHelper.distPath, '/').finalize();
      

We zip the directory defined in distPath and the archiver API has a fluent call to .finalize() that finished the download for the user, when the zip is completed.

Sending a streaming zip file in node.js was originally published by Arnav Gupta at //TODO on June 19, 2016.

Replication to Github Enterprise with Gerrit

2016-02-17T00:00:00+05:30

Even if you are a gerrit/git sysadmin having done a dozen code review setups already, you might get stumped with the ‘reject HostKey’ error when trying to replicate from Gerrit to a Github Enterprise instance.

So this error stems from the following reasons -

Gerrit used Eclipse’s JGit library to implement Git
Github Enterprise enforces ECDSA SSH v2 for SSH connections

Basically this is an issue about JGit not able to parse hashed known_host file lines for ECDSA Protocol 2. But we can neigher change the JCh (as we are using compiled) gerrit, nor can we (or want to) disable ECDSA 2 enforcement in Github Enterprise

So I’ll keep it short and jump to straight to how to solve this.

First we need to set an alias of our Github Enterprise server in ssh config. Edit ~/.ssh/config and add this

Host mygit git.yourserver.com
HostName mygit.yourserver.com
Protocol 2
HostKeyAlgorithms ssh-rsa,ssh-dss

Replace git.yourserver.com with your actual server address. mygit is also upto you. Name it whatever you like

In your $GERRIT_HOME/etc/replication.config in the url fields change references to git@git.yourserver.com to git@mgit

Here is an example from my setup

[remote "internal"]
    url = git@mygit:${name}.git
    projects = yu-aosp-internal/*
    push = +refs/*:refs/*
    timeout = 50
    threads = 4
    replicationDelay = 0
    defaultForceUpdate = true

Purge your ~/.ssh/known_host file. You can just delete the ecdsa lines.

Run ssh -T git@mygit (run it as the same user that runs gerrit - usually it might be user gerrit2 ) to add the ssh remote again.

Now restart gerrit.

Your replications should be working now.

Replication to Github Enterprise with Gerrit was originally published by Arnav Gupta at //TODO on February 17, 2016.

Multibooting Chrome OS on your Laptop

2016-01-09T00:00:00+05:30

Other than the conventionally popular Windows and Mac OS, (and, among developers and geeks, Linux), one of the most popular operating systems for Netbooks and lightweight convertibles today is - Chrome OS. But if you have landed on this page, I am sure you already know that.

Now the problem is, Chrome OS was designed to be used only with certain type of hardware - low powered netbooks, so Google took a certain route, in which Chrome OS officially is available only on Chromebooks - certain types of netbooks that come preloaded with Chrome OS - and have to be certified by Google. Kind of like Mac OSX which you cannot use unless you use an iMac or a Macbook.

But ofcourse, you can use Chrome OS just as well on your own Laptop, if you so wish to, because, Chrome OS is actually based on - Chromium OS - the underlying opensource project.

There happens to be a kind guy arnoldthebat, who makes regular releases of builds of Chromium OS that are pretty much compatible with almost all x86 (i386, or 32 bit) and amd64 (64 bit Intel or AMD) CPU based laptops. Most of your generic hardware like touchpads, speakers should work, and if you’re not too unlucky(read have a Broadcomm card), most probably your WiFi will work too. You can catch hold of his builds here - http://chromium.arnoldthebat.co.uk/ I’d recommend using the latest special build as those ones have the widest hardware support.

After you download the .img file, you can create a bootable USB on Linux using this command (given your USB drive is on /dev/sdb) -

dd if=/path/to/downloaded/img of=/dev/sdb

You should boot from your USB drive (you’ll need to enable legacy support if yours is a post-UEFI era BIOS), and play with the OS to make sure everything works, and if you like it, and want to permanently install it to your laptop, read on.

So, if you want Chromium OS to be the only operating system in your laptop, you can just press Ctrl + Alt F2, login with user:chronos password:password and run the command sudo install This will format your hard drive

But instead if you want to install Chromium OS as an additional OS to your laptop then there is way for that too. Here are some necessary conditions though -

You’ll need to make 2 partitions, one 2GB and another at least 4GB in size. Your HDD should have that space, or you should create that by shrinking any existing partitions.
You need to be using GRUB as your bootloader. If you are running Linux with Windows/Mac I am assuming you already are running GRUB. If not, then you can still install GRUB - a step that you can figure out yourself

First take a look at the bootable USB you made out of the Chromium OS disk. It will have two important partitions called - ROOT_A and STATE. We need to create corresponding partitions on your hard disk (these can be larger size than the ones on the USB, a larger STATE partition gives you more local storage space. A larger ROOT-A partition is mostly of no use, as this partition’s content won’t change in the future).

Let’s consider we made the following partitions -

/dev/sda7 - ext2 - 2.15GB
/dev/sda8 - ext4 - 6GB

Now you should copy the corresponding partitions from your USB drive to your own hard disk using dd

#For copying ROOT-A
dd if=/dev/sdb3 of=/dev/sda7
#For copying STATE
dd if=/dev/sdb1 of=/dev/sda8

Next step would be to add a corresponding boot entry for Chromium OS to your GRUB. For that edit /etc/grub.d/40_custom and add the following

menuentry "Chrome OS" {
 insmod part_gpt
 insmod ext2
 set root=(hd0,gpt7)
 linux /boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/sda7 init=/sbin/init rootwait rw noresume console=tty2 i915.modeset=1 loglevel=1 quiet noinitrd tpm_tis.force=1
}

This is considering your’s is a GPT partitioned HDD. If not, remove the insmod part_gpt line, and change the root to (hd0,X) where X = root partition number. After this run sudo update-grub2 to generate the grub.cfg.

Now there is tiny problem with Chromium OS - It expects the STATE partition to be on /dev/sda1 This is hardcoded into the OS. Usually since your /dev/sda1 would already be occupied by some OS (Windows or Linux), you cannot install the Chromium STATE partition there. For that we need to make Chromium expect STATE somewhere else. Mount your ROOT-A partition, and edit the file /sbin/chromeos_startup on it. Change the following line -

STATE_DEV=${ROOTDEV_TYPE}1

Change the 1 at the end to the whatever partition you have put STATE on. If it was on /dev/sda8, change the 1 to 8.

Also in the same file find and comment out this line

mount -n -t ${FS_FORMAT_OEM} -o ${OEM_FLAGS} ${OEM_DEV} /usr/share/oem

This is because we have not made an OEM partition, so we can’t mount it. We do not need the OEM partition to make Chromium OS work.

Finally you should be ready to reboot into Chromium OS be selecting it from the GRUB boot menu.

Multibooting Chrome OS on your Laptop was originally published by Arnav Gupta at //TODO on January 09, 2016.

Doing a table join in Android without using rawQuery

2015-12-30T00:00:00+05:30

Android has some really nice SQLite helper classes and methods. And the ones I like the most are the SQLiteDatabase.query, SQLiteDatabase.update, SQLiteDatabase.insert ones, because they take away quite a bit of pain for typing out SQL commands by hand.

But unfortunately, if you have to use a JOIN, then usually you have to go and use the SQLiteDatabase.rawQuery method and end up having to type your commands by hand.

But but but, if the two tables you are joining do not have any common column names (actually it is good design to have them so - by having all column names prefixed by tablename_ maybe), then you can hack the usual SQLiteDatabase.query() method to get a JOINed query.

See the two tables I have here -

A bit of context - this is an app about tracking car expenses and refuels. Refuels/Services/etc are all various types of expenses. So the ‘expense’ table has all expenses. The ‘refuel’ table has all refuels and a reference to corresponding expense entries (one to one).

Expense table

Refuels table

Where exp_id is a foreign key referencing expense_id

Now ideally, to get the expense where refuel_id was 1, a nice looking SQL query should be like this -

SELECT * FROM expense INNER JOIN refuel
ON exp_id = expense_id
WHERE refuel_id = 1

Which, in android, can be done like this -

String rawQuery = "SELECT * FROM " + RefuelTable.TABLE_NAME + " INNER JOIN " + ExpenseTable.TABLE_NAME
        + " ON " + RefuelTable.EXP_ID + " = " + ExpenseTable.ID
        + " WHERE " + RefuelTable.ID + " = " +  id;
Cursor c = db.rawQuery(
        rawQuery,
        null
);

But of course, because of SQLite’s backward compatible support of the primitive way of querying, we turn that command into

SELECT *
FROM expense, refuel
WHERE exp_id = expense_id AND refuel_id = 1

Now this we can write by hacking the terminology used by the #query() method -

Cursor c = db.query(
        RefuelTable.TABLE_NAME + " , " + ExpenseTable.TABLE_NAME,
        Utils.concat(RefuelTable.PROJECTION, ExpenseTable.PROJECTION),
        RefuelTable.EXP_ID + " = " + ExpenseTable.ID + " AND " + RefuelTable.ID + " = " +  id,
        null,
        null,
        null,
        null
);

To explain a bit, the first argument String tableName can take table1, table2 as well safely, The second argument takes a String array of column names, I concatenated the two projections of the two classes. and finally, put by WHERE clause into the String selection argument.

Doing a table join in Android without using rawQuery was originally published by Arnav Gupta at //TODO on December 30, 2015.

Using NVIDIA Optimus switchable graphics with GTX 860M on Ubuntu 15.04

2015-11-30T00:00:00+05:30

Right since NVIDIA named their switchable graphics solution as Optimus the whole graphics scene on Linux has been a veritable bedlam of Transformer names.

I have been a fan of Bumblebee from the early stages of it’s development, and on my earlier Lenovo Z580 having a GT 740M, it was my goto solution and worked seamlessly right from Ubuntu 12.04 to 14.04.

Times have changed. I have a new laptop now - A Lenovo Y50-70 that has the GTX 860M. And now another project has gained momentum called ‘NVIDIA Prime’.

After wrestling with Bumblebee and Primus for over a week, I finally gave up because there was no stable solution in sight, and the closest I had come to was to manually unload and load the nvidia and bbswitch modules every time I wanted to use the NVIDIA GPU. Without the ease of having `optirun glxgears` available on my shell, without having to do multiple modprobe-fu, I considered there was little benefit of using Bumblebee.

So I have been able to get this work with Bumblebee too, and I will mention how to use both Prime and Bumblebee.

Jump to
- Using NVIDIA Prime
- Using Bumblebee

At the outset let’s discuss a few basic differences.

Bumblebee	NVIDIA Prime
A long running older project	A relatively newer project
Needs command-line invocation	Is a GUI solution (CLI method available too)
A per-process implementation	A session-wide implementation
Focus on power saving	Focus on high performance from discrete GPU
Have to explicitly run each process with bb to benefit from NVIDIA GPU	All processes in current session run either on NVIDIA or all on Intel

NOTE: Before installing any kernel level drivers (either prime or bumblebee), always make sure you have updated linux-headers-generic

Using NVIDIA Prime (nvidia-prime)

So I set off on path to use NVIDIA Prime. Using nvidia-340-updates driver from the xorg-edgers ppa, as of 30th Nov, 2015, this works perfectly. So let’s go through the steps to make it work.
UPDATE: The latest drivers for 860M is 352.63, and you can hence use nvidia-352-updates instead of nvidia-340-updates

First let’s do away with bumblebee if you’ve installed it

sudo apt-get remove --purge bumblebee* primus nvidia*

Perform a reboot here, so your system safely configures itself to run on Intel/mesa.

Let’s add edgers’ repo and install nvidia-340.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:xorg-edgers/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install nvidia-340-updates

Again, it is safe to perform a reboot here.

Let’s get the prime and settings packages now.

sudo apt-get install nvidia-settings nvidia-prime

Now before we reboot, we need to make sure of one thing, that is nvidia is loaded before bbswitch always. For that, edit /etc/modules and add these two lines

nvidia-304-updates
bbswitch

Now reboot your system. If all has gone right, you can switch between NVIDIA and Intel using the nvidia-settings configuration utility. You have to logout and login every time you switch graphics cards. Also unlike optirun/primusrun, when you have enabled NVIDIA, everything in your current sessoin works with NVIDIA and similarly for Intel. To switch graphics, you have to open the nvidia-settings panel and switch graphics card, and logout and login back again..

Using Bumblebee (bumblebee-nvidia)

After sorely missing bumblebee for some days, I took another hit at it. And was able to make it work with NVIDIA’s 352.63 drivers. The reason was that, I mainly prefer to run on Intel HD Gfx, and for certain cases (like the OBS broadcaster, Lightworks, Android emulators) need NVIDIA, as an on-demand solution (and not a login/logout solution).

Here were the steps to get it to work. First need to purge away nvidia-prime as they both don’t work together

sudo apt-get remove --purge nvidia-prime

Now install nvidia-352-updates

sudo apt-get remove --purge nvidia*
#optional, not really needed as any nvidia driver uninstalls the previous
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:graphics-drivers/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install nvidia-352-updates

Let us go forward and now install bumblebee

sudo apt-get install bumblebee bumblebee-nvidia bbswitch-dkms primus
sudo systemctl enable bumblebeed #Enable bumblebee daemon in systemd
sudo gpasswd -a $USER bumblebee #add yourself to bumblebee group

We need to make sure the i915 and bbswitch drivers get loaded to the kernel, so edit the file /etc/modules and the following

i915
bbswitch

Now is the important part where we need to make sure that Bumblebee handles loading/unloading of Gfx modules. So it has to be made sure that all installed graphics drivers including nouveau and nvidia-352-updates is blacklisted. Check the file /etc/modprobe.d/bumblebee.conf and ensure the following lines present

blacklist nouveau
blacklist nvidia-352
blacklist nvidia-352-updates
blacklist nvidia

If these lines are not present, the kernel will automatically load the modules and bumblebee won’t be able to handle the load/unload of modules.

Now as a final step we need to inform Bumblebee which version of Nvidia drivers are we using, for doing that check the contents of the file /etc/bumblebee/bumblebee.conf

# Configuration file for Bumblebee. Values should **not** be put between quotes

## Server options. Any change made in this section will need a server restart
# to take effect.
[bumblebeed]
# The secondary Xorg server DISPLAY number
VirtualDisplay=:8
# Should the unused Xorg server be kept running? Set this to true if waiting
# for X to be ready is too long and don't need power management at all.
KeepUnusedXServer=false
# The name of the Bumbleblee server group name (GID name)
ServerGroup=bumblebee
# Card power state at exit. Set to false if the card shoud be ON when Bumblebee
# server exits.
TurnCardOffAtExit=false
# The default behavior of '-f' option on optirun. If set to "true", '-f' will
# be ignored.
NoEcoModeOverride=false
# The Driver used by Bumblebee server. If this value is not set (or empty),
# auto-detection is performed. The available drivers are nvidia and nouveau
# (See also the driver-specific sections below)
Driver=nvidia
# Directory with a dummy config file to pass as a -configdir to secondary X
XorgConfDir=/etc/bumblebee/xorg.conf.d

## Client options. Will take effect on the next optirun executed.
[optirun]
# Acceleration/ rendering bridge, possible values are auto, virtualgl and
# primus.
Bridge=auto
# The method used for VirtualGL to transport frames between X servers.
# Possible values are proxy, jpeg, rgb, xv and yuv.
VGLTransport=proxy
# List of paths which are searched for the primus libGL.so.1 when using
# the primus bridge
PrimusLibraryPath=/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/primus:/usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/primus
# Should the program run under optirun even if Bumblebee server or nvidia card
# is not available?
AllowFallbackToIGC=false


# Driver-specific settings are grouped under [driver-NAME]. The sections are
# parsed if the Driver setting in [bumblebeed] is set to NAME (or if auto-
# detection resolves to NAME).
# PMMethod: method to use for saving power by disabling the nvidia card, valid
# values are: auto - automatically detect which PM method to use
#         bbswitch - new in BB 3, recommended if available
#       switcheroo - vga_switcheroo method, use at your own risk
#             none - disable PM completely
# https://github.com/Bumblebee-Project/Bumblebee/wiki/Comparison-of-PM-methods

## Section with nvidia driver specific options, only parsed if Driver=nvidia
[driver-nvidia]
# Module name to load, defaults to Driver if empty or unset
KernelDriver=nvidia-352-updates
PMMethod=auto
# colon-separated path to the nvidia libraries
LibraryPath=/usr/lib/nvidia-352-updates:/usr/lib32/nvidia-352-updates
# comma-separated path of the directory containing nvidia_drv.so and the
# default Xorg modules path
XorgModulePath=/usr/lib/nvidia-352-updates/xorg,/usr/lib/xorg/modules
XorgConfFile=/etc/bumblebee/xorg.conf.nvidia

## Section with nouveau driver specific options, only parsed if Driver=nouveau
[driver-nouveau]
KernelDriver=nouveau
PMMethod=auto
XorgConfFile=/etc/bumblebee/xorg.conf.nouveau

You need to change the lines highlighted in red accordingly. And finaaaaaaly, reboot, and enjoy bumblebee.

To run any program with NVIDIA use primusrun <program name>. By default everything runs with Intel HD Graphics, and NVIDIA card stays off.

Using NVIDIA Optimus switchable graphics with GTX 860M on Ubuntu 15.04 was originally published by Arnav Gupta at //TODO on November 30, 2015.

Reimagining the PTO : A messenger and a friend

2015-11-23T00:00:00+05:30

The acronym PTO, to most people from a generation, would mean the Post and Telegraph Office. The “messenger” of the nation (talking about India here) during the 80’s and 90’s when the modern India was being built. From Bollywood films to R K Narayan novels, the postman was an integral part of life and culture, and I might go so far as to say, part of the life and soul of Indian lifesytle.

Not many of my generation can identify with the term PTO, but due to the developments in the mobile internet technology field for the last couple of years, I’ll coin a new expansion of the acronym - Personal Task Outsourcing. (Oh yes, taking a cue from BPO).

But I am not just talking a superficial cue from BPO. In its essence the booming BPO business in India, the coinage of the term ‘bangalor-ed’ in American industries, all were stemming from the fact that human labour is cheap (way too cheap) in India. There were and are millions of unemployed Indians happy to accept the job of sitting with headphones on their head and silently listening to complaints of disgruntled customers.

By what I mean by Personal Task Outsourcing, has a lot to with the same. Though idea did not take root in India (as it never unfortunately does in most cases). What started with companies like Magic (getmagicnow) and Butler was soon copied by three players in the Indian startup space , namely — Akosha (who renamed themselves to Helpchat), GoodService, and Haptik. It was helped largely by the boom in India’s hyperlocal and food tech domains. There were multiple startups delivering products like food, cosmetics, electronics to your home, and providing doorstep services like cabs, cleaning, repairing, language/art classes, yoga, massage and what not.

And while the tech savvy, early adopting, Generation Y or Z (or whatever is latest) is okay with using apps like Uber or Foodpanda or UrbanClap, the less mobile savvy people could do with services like Helpchat where they would only have to mention what they want over a messaging interface (which thanks to Facebook and Whatsapp, everyone is well versed with).

And thus was born the concept of Personal Task Outsourcing. With countless players like TextmyPA, Jaadu (jeez they even copied Magic’s name) quickly jumping into the bandwagon, and all getting funded lavishly.

For now, I can only see them succeed. Because India always had a surplus of people ready to work at dirt cheap rates to sit across a terminal and the do the job of a computer. The last few decades it was attending calls, now it is fulfilling people’s personal needs over chat. Also there is a crop of people in tier 1 cities in India who are addicted to online services, and they are lazy. So if chatting with someone fulfills your need, instead of downloading an app and going through sign up, discovery, ordering, then why not.

So there, ladies and gents, we have a new PTO. Once again a messenger by function. But far more in its impact in our lives. And if the bets of Helpchat, Haptik or GoodService is right, maybe this PTO will also become the life and soul of a modern Indian’s life.

P.S. A word of advice to Mark Zuckerberg. You really should start M’s services in India soon. You’ll get both customers and people ready to work behind the desk …err chatscreen, in large numbers

Reimagining the PTO : A messenger and a friend was originally published by Arnav Gupta at //TODO on November 23, 2015.

Sublime Code Snippets : Autogenerate Java key constants - an example

2015-10-31T00:00:00+05:30

I largely use Jetbrains products for my day to day development work (which is mostly Android). I really love the Live Template feature that is available on IntelliJ, for example if I type psfs and press Tab I get the following on the screen

public static final String

These days, sometimes I use Sublime Text 3 as well, because unless I need all the features of an IDE, it’s too heavy to open up, especially if other stuff is running on the laptop. One of those days when I was using Sublime, I needed to create a lot of Database key constants - i.e. in the form of

public static final String KEY_ONE = "key_one"

So it so happens that there exists functionality like live templates on Sublime as well, in form of Snippets

To create a new Snippet, go to Tools -> New Snippet. Ideally you save your snippets in ~/.config/sublime-text-3/Packages/User/MySnippet.sublime-snippet

Here is an example config for the Snippet that creates Java key constants

<snippet>
	<content>public static final String ${1/(.+)/(\U\1)/g} = "${1}";</content>
	<tabTrigger>jkey</tabTrigger>
	<scope>source.java</scope>
	<description>public static final String KEY = "key"</description>
</snippet>

Now when you type jkey and press tab, it creates

public static final String | = "|"

The pipes ‘ ’ represent the cursor position. When you start typing in lowercase for example my_key_one, automatically the variable name updates in uppercase MY_KEY_ONE.

Sublime Code Snippets : Autogenerate Java key constants - an example was originally published by Arnav Gupta at //TODO on October 31, 2015.

Jekyll:Syntax Highlighting in Github Favoured Markdown codeblocks

2015-10-25T00:00:00+05:30

You are using Jekyll to host a blog on Github pages. And you need to add Syntax Highlighting to your code. And you want to mark your code blocks using the triple backtick format of Github flavored markdown.

Now that’s a very unique set of circumstances to be in, and if you are in those shoes, you might have figured out that it seems almost impossible to get this to work. Here are the basic blockers -

Github doesn’t allow user plugins. So you cannot just put coderay.rb inside _plugins
Github by default uses redcarpet as the markdown interpreter. But, kramdown has inbuilt syntax highlighting support, redcarpet doesn’t
Since `` kind of code block demarcaters work, no one in the Jekyll/Redcarpet/Kramdown community wants to help fix this issue.
Redcarpet can interpret GFM, while Kramdown cannot. Although the documentation says it can.

But that aside, lets quickly take a look at how this can be solved. So Github uses redcarpet internally to parse markdown, and we should stick with it, because that’s the only bet to successfully interpret GFM code blocks. Also, Github Pages has pygments installed already, so for syntax highlighting we have to use pygments only. So put the following lines in your _config.yml

# Conversion
markdown: redcarpet
highlighter: pygments
redcarpet:
  extensions: ["no_intra_emphasis", "fenced_code_blocks", "autolink", "strikethrough", "superscript"]

Now here is a very important step. Having a pgments css file and having it included is very important. Even if all the other configs are ok, but the css not included, the Jekyll site wont build on Github’s server.

You can save the following as assets/css/pygments/solarized-dark.css

/* Solarized Dark 

For use with Jekyll and Pygments

http://ethanschoonover.com/solarized

SOLARIZED HEX      ROLE
--------- -------- ------------------------------------------
base03    #002b36  background
base01    #586e75  comments / secondary content
base1     #93a1a1  body text / default code / primary content
orange    #cb4b16  constants
red       #dc322f  regex, special keywords
blue      #268bd2  reserved keywords
cyan      #2aa198  strings, numbers
green     #859900  operators, other keywords
*/

.highlight { background-color: #002b36; color: #93a1a1; max-width: 56.25rem; padding: 1rem; border-radius: 1rem; margin: 0px auto 2em; }
.highlight .lineno { color: #586e75 } /* Line Numbers */
.highlight .c { color: #586e75 } /* Comment */
.highlight .err { color: #93a1a1 } /* Error */
.highlight .g { color: #93a1a1 } /* Generic */
.highlight .k { color: #859900 } /* Keyword */
.highlight .l { color: #93a1a1 } /* Literal */
.highlight .n { color: #93a1a1 } /* Name */
.highlight .o { color: #859900 } /* Operator */
.highlight .x { color: #cb4b16 } /* Other */
.highlight .p { color: #93a1a1 } /* Punctuation */
.highlight .cm { color: #586e75 } /* Comment.Multiline */
.highlight .cp { color: #859900 } /* Comment.Preproc */
.highlight .c1 { color: #586e75 } /* Comment.Single */
.highlight .cs { color: #859900 } /* Comment.Special */
.highlight .gd { color: #2aa198 } /* Generic.Deleted */
.highlight .ge { color: #93a1a1; font-style: italic } /* Generic.Emph */
.highlight .gr { color: #dc322f } /* Generic.Error */
.highlight .gh { color: #cb4b16 } /* Generic.Heading */
.highlight .gi { color: #859900 } /* Generic.Inserted */
.highlight .go { color: #93a1a1 } /* Generic.Output */
.highlight .gp { color: #93a1a1 } /* Generic.Prompt */
.highlight .gs { color: #93a1a1; font-weight: bold } /* Generic.Strong */
.highlight .gu { color: #cb4b16 } /* Generic.Subheading */
.highlight .gt { color: #93a1a1 } /* Generic.Traceback */
.highlight .kc { color: #cb4b16 } /* Keyword.Constant */
.highlight .kd { color: #268bd2 } /* Keyword.Declaration */
.highlight .kn { color: #859900 } /* Keyword.Namespace */
.highlight .kp { color: #859900 } /* Keyword.Pseudo */
.highlight .kr { color: #268bd2 } /* Keyword.Reserved */
.highlight .kt { color: #dc322f } /* Keyword.Type */
.highlight .ld { color: #93a1a1 } /* Literal.Date */
.highlight .m { color: #2aa198 } /* Literal.Number */
.highlight .s { color: #2aa198 } /* Literal.String */
.highlight .na { color: #93a1a1 } /* Name.Attribute */
.highlight .nb { color: #B58900 } /* Name.Builtin */
.highlight .nc { color: #268bd2 } /* Name.Class */
.highlight .no { color: #cb4b16 } /* Name.Constant */
.highlight .nd { color: #268bd2 } /* Name.Decorator */
.highlight .ni { color: #cb4b16 } /* Name.Entity */
.highlight .ne { color: #cb4b16 } /* Name.Exception */
.highlight .nf { color: #268bd2 } /* Name.Function */
.highlight .nl { color: #93a1a1 } /* Name.Label */
.highlight .nn { color: #93a1a1 } /* Name.Namespace */
.highlight .nx { color: #93a1a1 } /* Name.Other */
.highlight .py { color: #93a1a1 } /* Name.Property */
.highlight .nt { color: #268bd2 } /* Name.Tag */
.highlight .nv { color: #268bd2 } /* Name.Variable */
.highlight .ow { color: #859900 } /* Operator.Word */
.highlight .w { color: #93a1a1 } /* Text.Whitespace */
.highlight .mf { color: #2aa198 } /* Literal.Number.Float */
.highlight .mh { color: #2aa198 } /* Literal.Number.Hex */
.highlight .mi { color: #2aa198 } /* Literal.Number.Integer */
.highlight .mo { color: #2aa198 } /* Literal.Number.Oct */
.highlight .sb { color: #586e75 } /* Literal.String.Backtick */
.highlight .sc { color: #2aa198 } /* Literal.String.Char */
.highlight .sd { color: #93a1a1 } /* Literal.String.Doc */
.highlight .s2 { color: #2aa198 } /* Literal.String.Double */
.highlight .se { color: #cb4b16 } /* Literal.String.Escape */
.highlight .sh { color: #93a1a1 } /* Literal.String.Heredoc */
.highlight .si { color: #2aa198 } /* Literal.String.Interpol */
.highlight .sx { color: #2aa198 } /* Literal.String.Other */
.highlight .sr { color: #dc322f } /* Literal.String.Regex */
.highlight .s1 { color: #2aa198 } /* Literal.String.Single */
.highlight .ss { color: #2aa198 } /* Literal.String.Symbol */
.highlight .bp { color: #268bd2 } /* Name.Builtin.Pseudo */
.highlight .vc { color: #268bd2 } /* Name.Variable.Class */
.highlight .vg { color: #268bd2 } /* Name.Variable.Global */
.highlight .vi { color: #268bd2 } /* Name.Variable.Instance */
.highlight .il { color: #2aa198 } /* Literal.Number.Integer.Long */

Or if you prefer light, please use this one instead

/* Solarized Light 

For use with Jekyll and Pygments

http://ethanschoonover.com/solarized

SOLARIZED HEX      ROLE
--------- -------- ------------------------------------------
base01    #586e75  body text / default code / primary content
base1     #93a1a1  comments / secondary content
base3     #fdf6e3  background
orange    #cb4b16  constants
red       #dc322f  regex, special keywords
blue      #268bd2  reserved keywords
cyan      #2aa198  strings, numbers
green     #859900  operators, other keywords
*/

.highlight { background-color: #fdf6e3; color: #586e75; max-width: 56.25rem; padding: 1rem; border-radius: 1rem; margin: 0px auto 2em; }
.highlight .lineno { color: #93a1a1 } /* Line Numbers */
.highlight .c { color: #93a1a1 } /* Comment */
.highlight .err { color: #586e75 } /* Error */
.highlight .g { color: #586e75 } /* Generic */
.highlight .k { color: #859900 } /* Keyword */
.highlight .l { color: #586e75 } /* Literal */
.highlight .n { color: #586e75 } /* Name */
.highlight .o { color: #859900 } /* Operator */
.highlight .x { color: #cb4b16 } /* Other */
.highlight .p { color: #586e75 } /* Punctuation */
.highlight .cm { color: #93a1a1 } /* Comment.Multiline */
.highlight .cp { color: #859900 } /* Comment.Preproc */
.highlight .c1 { color: #93a1a1 } /* Comment.Single */
.highlight .cs { color: #859900 } /* Comment.Special */
.highlight .gd { color: #2aa198 } /* Generic.Deleted */
.highlight .ge { color: #586e75; font-style: italic } /* Generic.Emph */
.highlight .gr { color: #dc322f } /* Generic.Error */
.highlight .gh { color: #cb4b16 } /* Generic.Heading */
.highlight .gi { color: #859900 } /* Generic.Inserted */
.highlight .go { color: #586e75 } /* Generic.Output */
.highlight .gp { color: #586e75 } /* Generic.Prompt */
.highlight .gs { color: #586e75; font-weight: bold } /* Generic.Strong */
.highlight .gu { color: #cb4b16 } /* Generic.Subheading */
.highlight .gt { color: #586e75 } /* Generic.Traceback */
.highlight .kc { color: #cb4b16 } /* Keyword.Constant */
.highlight .kd { color: #268bd2 } /* Keyword.Declaration */
.highlight .kn { color: #859900 } /* Keyword.Namespace */
.highlight .kp { color: #859900 } /* Keyword.Pseudo */
.highlight .kr { color: #268bd2 } /* Keyword.Reserved */
.highlight .kt { color: #dc322f } /* Keyword.Type */
.highlight .ld { color: #586e75 } /* Literal.Date */
.highlight .m { color: #2aa198 } /* Literal.Number */
.highlight .s { color: #2aa198 } /* Literal.String */
.highlight .na { color: #586e75 } /* Name.Attribute */
.highlight .nb { color: #B58900 } /* Name.Builtin */
.highlight .nc { color: #268bd2 } /* Name.Class */
.highlight .no { color: #cb4b16 } /* Name.Constant */
.highlight .nd { color: #268bd2 } /* Name.Decorator */
.highlight .ni { color: #cb4b16 } /* Name.Entity */
.highlight .ne { color: #cb4b16 } /* Name.Exception */
.highlight .nf { color: #268bd2 } /* Name.Function */
.highlight .nl { color: #586e75 } /* Name.Label */
.highlight .nn { color: #586e75 } /* Name.Namespace */
.highlight .nx { color: #586e75 } /* Name.Other */
.highlight .py { color: #586e75 } /* Name.Property */
.highlight .nt { color: #268bd2 } /* Name.Tag */
.highlight .nv { color: #268bd2 } /* Name.Variable */
.highlight .ow { color: #859900 } /* Operator.Word */
.highlight .w { color: #586e75 } /* Text.Whitespace */
.highlight .mf { color: #2aa198 } /* Literal.Number.Float */
.highlight .mh { color: #2aa198 } /* Literal.Number.Hex */
.highlight .mi { color: #2aa198 } /* Literal.Number.Integer */
.highlight .mo { color: #2aa198 } /* Literal.Number.Oct */
.highlight .sb { color: #93a1a1 } /* Literal.String.Backtick */
.highlight .sc { color: #2aa198 } /* Literal.String.Char */
.highlight .sd { color: #586e75 } /* Literal.String.Doc */
.highlight .s2 { color: #2aa198 } /* Literal.String.Double */
.highlight .se { color: #cb4b16 } /* Literal.String.Escape */
.highlight .sh { color: #586e75 } /* Literal.String.Heredoc */
.highlight .si { color: #2aa198 } /* Literal.String.Interpol */
.highlight .sx { color: #2aa198 } /* Literal.String.Other */
.highlight .sr { color: #dc322f } /* Literal.String.Regex */
.highlight .s1 { color: #2aa198 } /* Literal.String.Single */
.highlight .ss { color: #2aa198 } /* Literal.String.Symbol */
.highlight .bp { color: #268bd2 } /* Name.Builtin.Pseudo */
.highlight .vc { color: #268bd2 } /* Name.Variable.Class */
.highlight .vg { color: #268bd2 } /* Name.Variable.Global */
.highlight .vi { color: #268bd2 } /* Name.Variable.Instance */
.highlight .il { color: #2aa198 } /* Literal.Number.Integer.Long */

Make sure to add <link rel="stylesheet" href="http://blog.championswimmer.in/assets/css/pygments/solarized-light.css"> to the layout of your posts. Most probably might be in _includes/head.html or specifically in _layouts/post.html

That should be it. Your Jekyll blog posts, with GFM code blocks should now be highlighted in Solarized, if all went well. As a proof, I am using the same method in this very block. Feel free to check out the sources.

Jekyll:Syntax Highlighting in Github Favoured Markdown codeblocks was originally published by Arnav Gupta at //TODO on October 25, 2015.

Linux refugee in Windows aylum: A scoop of chocolatey nuget

2015-10-20T00:00:00+05:30

I forgot my laptop’s charger at my dorm when I came home this weekend, but I had to work on my GSoC project as my contributions were lagging. I had to borrow my Dad’s XPS running Windows 8. Fuck. Windows. Without any development tools installed.

So it’s not like I don’t ever use Windows at all. I have a Windows 7 dual boot set up running on my laptop for the times when I need to twilight as the Knight of Arkham City or don the blues to give Ferguson’s boys a drubbing or kill some Templars in the French/American Revolution. But that’s pretty much all that I do on Windows - play games. I do not even have PDF Reader or an Office Suite or any browser other than Internet Explorer on Windows - which should suffice to say how much of anything else I do on Windows.

And here I was supposed to work on my GSoC project which involved

Git; to get the source and commit back
Nodejs; to get bower and gulp to serve the project to localhost to test it out
A half decent text editor because Notepad is total jackshit
A commandline that doesnt want arguments with ‘/’ and dir trees with ‘' and shows files with ‘ls’ and . . you get what I mean ? I want fucking bash.

Package Manager

For a Linux refugee, the first pain point is the obvious absence of a package manager. (I hear Windows 10 FINALLY has one). It is really such a PITA if you cannot simply get ruby or node or python via apt-get install nodejs python ruby And as it happens, there are three options in front of you -

NuGet - The package manager that is now default in Visual Studio as well.
Scoop - My personal favourite and the closest you get to a Linux package manager, and has a repository of almost all known development related packages.
Chocolatey - One of the earliest attempts to get a apt-get like interface on windows.

Here is a brilliant blog describing how to get Scoop installed on your Windows machine, plus some tips on how to enable execution policy on Windows Powershell.

Git support

I cannot ever stop singing praises for Github for all the cool work they do, and one of them is bringing Windows and Git as close to each other as possible. The thing is Git was developed by, well none other than Linus Torvalds, the guy who made Linux, and so historically, Git (which is possibly the best distributed VCS in the world) has primarily been a relic of the Linux realm. Github for Windows is great way to bring not just Git to Windows, but via the Git Shell that comes with the package, you get a decent bash/zsh like command line interface too.

A more linux-ey CLI

While what Git Shell provides is really nice, if you are weeping silently because you really really want a proper Linux CLI inside Windows (oh dear you, I can feel you man), then there are few tweaks that you can do.

You can get powershell, and install the Solarized theme, that makes stuff really awesome

> scoop install concfg
> concfg import solarized small
> scoop install pshazz
> pshazz init #Run this everytime you open your shell

Best text editors available

I do not want to make it an opinionated advice here, so I’ll just list all the options that you have

Sublime Text - The most widely used, and has maximum extensions. Pretty fast.
Atom - A new javascript-based text editor by Github. Runs in it’s own Chromium runtime, so can be slow and bloaty. Might not be suitable for large files. The UI is brilliant, and overall design and experience was the best for me.
Brackets - Adobe’s hat in the growing ring of Chromium-runtime based editors. Has got robust live-preview support. And the colors and themes are soothing.
Visual Studio Code - And finally how could Microsoft stay behind. They took Electron the runtime used by Atom, and made their own code editor too. If you ask me, they should make VS Code default instead of Notepad/Wordpad on Windows 10.

Linux refugee in Windows aylum: A scoop of chocolatey nuget was originally published by Arnav Gupta at //TODO on October 20, 2015.

Android Protip: Show selected value of ListPreference

2015-10-18T00:00:00+05:30

Here’s a quick Protip for people who are still writing complex onPreferenceChanged code to show the selected value of a ListPreference

Just add android:summary="%s" and Android will automatically do it for you ;)

For example, your code might look like : -

    <ListPreference
        android:summary="%s"
        android:defaultValue="km"
        android:entries="@array/distance_unit_names"
        android:entryValues="@array/distance_unit_values"
        android:key="distance_unit"
        android:title="Distance Unit"/>

Android will even put the currently selected value when you enter the preference screen.

Android Protip: Show selected value of ListPreference was originally published by Arnav Gupta at //TODO on October 18, 2015.

Autoconnect Ubuntu Server to a Wifi network

2015-09-28T00:00:00+05:30

So I just turned my old Lenovo Z580 into a Android Build Server. And the first problem I faced was that of making it auto connect to the home Wifi everytime I turn it on.

Basically we have to edit the file /etc/network/interfaces and make the contents somewhat like this -

auto wlan0
iface wlan0 inet dhcp 
                wpa-ssid YOUR_WIFI_SSID
                wpa-psk  YOUR_WIFI_PASSWORD

This is assuming you are on a WPA/WPA2 PSK encryption. If you are on WEP, why dear why ? Move to WPA. If you want to affix a permanent static ip address to your server, the contents should rather be like this

auto wlan0
iface wlan0 inet static
				address 192.168.1.111
				netmask 255.255.255.0
				gateway 192.168.1.1
                wpa-ssid YOUR_WIFI_SSID
                wpa-psk  YOUR_WIFI_PASSWORD

This is assuming your router’s ip is 192.168.1.1, and the ip you want to affix the server is 192.168.1.111. Change them to suit your needs.

Autoconnect Ubuntu Server to a Wifi network was originally published by Arnav Gupta at //TODO on September 28, 2015.

//TODO

Hustle Culture

Delhi to Bangalore Road Trip

Nativescript-Vue: Native Mobile Apps in Javascript without the Hard Parts™

Why Vue ? Why Nativescript ? Why Nativescript-Vue?

How Nativescript works

The Layouts

Working with the Native Ecosystem

The App architecture and using Frameworks

Things to take care of . . .

. . . and you are ?

Very Strict Sequelize: Into the land of Typescript Overkill

Typescript: Enforce ‘correct’ code

Sequelize: A good target

Typescript + Sequelize: We’re pretty much in Java/C# land here

Leverage Live Templates: Do not write boilerplate

Autocomplete Bliss + No Typo Mayhem in run time

Typescript: Invest in boilerpate for long term safety

Creating an Ember.js Addon

Getting Started

Adding an util

Using Typescript

extend instead of .create()

Tech Conferences : A fun place to be

The Talks

The Speakers

The Networking

The Sponsor Kiosks

Indian Parents : Before and after graduating

Don't jump onto the Firebase bandwagon yet

The data storage problem

The realtime problem

Handling File uploads in HTML5 and Express (with Multer)

Sending a streaming zip file in node.js

Replication to Github Enterprise with Gerrit

Multibooting Chrome OS on your Laptop

Doing a table join in Android without using rawQuery

Using NVIDIA Optimus switchable graphics with GTX 860M on Ubuntu 15.04

Using NVIDIA Prime (nvidia-prime)

Using Bumblebee (bumblebee-nvidia)

Reimagining the PTO : A messenger and a friend

Sublime Code Snippets : Autogenerate Java key constants - an example

Jekyll:Syntax Highlighting in Github Favoured Markdown codeblocks

Linux refugee in Windows aylum: A scoop of chocolatey nuget

Package Manager

Git support

A more linux-ey CLI

Best text editors available

Android Protip: Show selected value of ListPreference

Autoconnect Ubuntu Server to a Wifi network

`extend` instead of `.create()`