60 milliseconds is when we notice something isn’t immediate. Any user interaction, that involves sending data over the network or doing heavy computation on it, usually takes way longer than 60 milliseconds. So, we end with a progress bar. There are two broad categories of progress bars, one that shows the absolute/relative progress, a determinate progress bar, and one that does not an indeterminate progress bar.
In 2020, the web is still the most accessible permission-less platform. For the past few months, I have been playing and building side projects to simplify my life. I started with a Calendar Bot for scheduling events, DeckSaver for downloading decks from Docsend, AutoSnoozer for email management, and StayInTouch for maintaining follow-ups. When I started on this journey, I had the following in my mind. Cost of domain ~ 12$ a year or 1$ a month Cost of a VM ~ 10$ a month
A basic webserver Docker containers are small OS images in themselves that one can deploy and run without worrying about dependencies or interoperability. All the dependencies are packed in the same container file. And the docker runtime takes care of the interoperability. You are not tied to using a single language or framework. You can write code in Python, Go, Java, Node.js, or any of your favorite languages and pack it in a container. Consider a simple example of a Go-based webserver
Update: As of April 2020, I have switched over to GitHub Actions. Travis CI has become buggy and flaky over time and I got tired of trying to keep the builds green. My GitHub action scripts can be seen here. Just like many software engineers, I maintain my config files for GNU/Linux and Mac OS in a git repository. Given that, I wrote a fair bit of them in interpreted code, notably, Bash, it is a bit hard to ensure that it is bug-free. The other problem I face is that packages on homebrew, the Mac OS package manager becomes obsolete and gets deleted from time to time. I added CI testing on Travis CI to prevent these breakages and to ensure that my dotfiles are always in good shape for installation. The great thing about Travis CI is that it is entirely free for open-source repositories even for testing on Mac OS containers.
Why Tech In the past decade, interest among MBA grads towards tech companies has drastically gone up. If you are one of those, take a pause and ask yourself “why”. Of course, there are upsides; the tech sector is growing faster, pays well, has a much better work-life balance than finance, private equity, or consulting. But at the same time, do remember that you spend almost 50% of your waking hours at your workplace, so you must as well enjoy it....
Earlier, the Software world was rigidly divided between closed and open-source software. Microsoft Windows is closed-source, GNU/Linux is open-source. Microsoft Office and Lotus Notes are closed-source, LibreOffice is open-source. Turbo C++ is closed-source, and GCC is open-source. But now, a new class of software products has emerged whose core is open-source, but still, the open-source software is of limited use. One model is to offer some critical and useful functionality in a closed-source layer via a managed service in AWS/GCP/Azure, for example, Redis is open-source, but useful modules on top of it are not....
Consider this email, And now consider this one, Hi Ashish, You signed up for the Orchard beta not too long ago, and we’re excited to finally send you an invite! ( Just to jog your memory, Orchard helps you make the most of your relationships, keeping you up to date on where you’re spending your time and who you need to catch up with. It’s somewhere between a personal CRM and a todo list for your connections....
When the code runs on your servers, you have much more control over the “context” in which it runs. On the mobile devices, the device OS and the user control the context. This difference leads to some subtle implications. One significant set of differences comes from the lack of control of the platform. For server-side code, one can choose from a wide array of languages. For the mobile code, however, the best choice would almost always be the one dictated by the platform - Java/Kotlin on Android and Objective-C/Swift on iOS....
iPhone iPhone iPhone 3G -> iPhone 3GS iPhone 4 -> iPhone 4S iPhone 5 -> iPhone 5S iPhone 6 -> iPhone 6S (and plus sizes) iPhone 7 (and plus sizes) Android Nexus One Nexus S Galaxy Nexus Nexus 4 Nexus 5 Nexus 6 Nexus 5X & Nexus 6P Pixel & Pixel XL While iPhone is recognized as a global name while erstwhile Nexus and now, Pixel has almost no branding outside of the Android fanboys....
Our brain loves distractions, and multi-tasking gets bored quickly. When we read text or watch a photo, it engages us visually, a video (with audio) engages us even more. The bandwidth of eyes is much larger than the bandwidth of our ears. When we are watching something, it utilizes more bandwidth and hence occupies more of our attention span. Also, given the way our eyes work, we can focus more on the exciting aspect of the visual feed....