Bhardwaj Rish

Thoughts. I woke up in a strange trance like state this morning. There are questions to which I finally had answers to - a simple theory, an explanation to a particular thought that I have been trying to articulate for the past several months. It was all so clear, every thought, every word that my mind spoke made perfect sense. Like magnets each thought clicked in perfect harmony, leading me from one sentence to the next. I haven't had such a flash of clarity in months, though this lasted for probably under a minute. And just as my conscious brain kicked in, it all seemed to go away. I forgot the keywords of every sentence that led me from one to the next. Much like hearing the sound of an engine take off, seeing a train leaving the station as soon as you arrive at the platform, this train of thoughts fled just as I was about to make sense of it. I am still unable to work back how the dots connected, and am not certain how long it'd take me to be able to pen down what I...

tldr; Signing pdfs is a looong process - it takes me 15 minutes every time I do so! You open your email and see a pdf that needs to be signed and sent back. Until 2005 or so, when phones were not smart, and they didn't know the Internet existed, it'd be a huge hassle to digitally sign these pdfs. (Or so I've been told - I was just 10 around that time.) People then would first print, sign, scan and then finally send the signed pdf. I suppose that'd take around 30 minutes. It takes me 10-15 minutes now and I'm not really glad about it. Here's what I do. I've kept a saved copy of my signature on my laptop saved as a .png (I'm certain that's not the smartest thing to do). I open that on GIMP. If the pdf requires the date to be written I do this - take a blank piece of paper, write the date, take of picture of that, send it to my computer via gmail (not very proud of using gmail for this.) Then, I download the pdf, open each page that requ...

Jan 2016 Me : So I spent the whole weekend working on this app - it was a whole lot of fun, though I barely slept. I found this amazing website with brilliant content and thought it'd be cool to make an app out of it. Friend : Its great, but do you reckon anyone would use it? Oct 2016 Me : Over ONE HUNDRED THOUSAND   people have used it, and about 60% use it regularly! :D Friend : Whaaaat! How? LifeHacks on Google Play . Here are the numbers behind the scenes. A collation of statistics and insights you may find interesting. Total Installs (number of unique users the app has been installed by) Interesting note: The first 1,000 installs took 3 months (Mar'16); The first 5,000 installs took 5 months (May'16); The first 10,000 installs took 6.5 months (Jul'16); and now I get around >3,000 installs a day. Exponential growth! Currently Active Installs (i.e., number of users with the app still installed) It's about 60% retention rate, whic...

Procrastination has reached a whole new level! I remember writing a blogpost about Hacktoberfest (I never ended publishing it) on the 1st of October, about how this month is going to be a super productive month. It's the 17th today, and it feels like I wrote that post just yesterday. But wait, it also feels like it has been an eternity of me doing absolutely nothing since I wrote it. Except wait, I finally finished reading The Catcher in the Rye, saw every episode of Minute Physics, discovered a lot of new music, and many random articles on HN. Back to the beginning of October. I had it all sorted - I penned down goals alright, I made plans - I have a nice little 10x5cm diary I write my tasks in (I used to use Keep, but I feel writing down what you want helps much more). It was all going to be perfect. I was glad I knew exactly what I'd do. But here's why things didn't work out. List of things to do: Task Deadline Priority Willingness Boring assignment tha...

tl dr; Hello world kickstarters are easy, and they're shit. Everyone can do HTML. But can they really? Everyone can develop. Take any tool, any technology and the simplicity of the hello world program will have you thinking you're a champ developer off to make the next Whatsapp/(fine, Allo if you think it's that good). It's then a major leap to going from the hello world program to developing something truly on your own. Give yourself a pat on the back for publishing a website, or releasing an app on the AppStore/Playstore - you've done what most hello-worlders couldn't. But you're still a long way away to mastering the tool. Here's what truly makes you a good developer. Initiate a project on their own, taking an idea, and ponder over its necessity/usability/awesomeness. Then design the concept on paper, thinking through the interface and experience. Remember, paper is important . Translating what's on your mind to paper is extremely challen...

tl dr; This article on Hackernews. Its a Sunday morning and you're out shopping. You're buying milk and cereal when you happen to meet this person. You start talking to him and well, he's no different from the average Indian engineer. (To be honest, it really doesn't matter if you're from an IIT or a local college in Assam. All Indian engineers are the same. Blog on that later.) You start talking about life in the city and your respective universities and how long it's been since you left college already. Oh, he's just another one like you. But then, he tells you he works at Google, and suddenly, you have this new-found respect for him. Till now, he was just another guy. But now? You've given him a near superhuman status because he was hired by Google . Buuut wait. Should you be?  Google hired him, yes. But. Did they hire him well ? Was he really what they were looking for, or was he just another one of those people that could solve puzzle...

tldr; Buying a laptop, level of difficulty : so-very-hard-near-impossible-super-legendary-level-hard . You're making an investment that'll stay with your for years. You're buying something you're going to see, use, spend time on everyday. You've got to make the right decision. It should be perfect. You find the right specifications at the right cost, but then its just so ugly. You find a beautiful laptop, but then its specifications are barely good enough for browsing the net and running MS Excel. You finally find the right specifications, the beautiful keyboard you've been looking for with the perfect trackpad, and bam, it costs twice as much as what the ugly-but-right-specifications laptop costs. Oh and of course, then there's the high end MacBook Pro, that's priced at everything I own, combined. The cheaper MacBooks aren't worth buying. Looks                     +         -...

devRant Probably the best online community I've come across, and a really nice social network. I've been viewing its posts over the last 6 months or so, and the quality of the content remains as good as when it first started, if not better. Its pretty much 9gag for devs - unlike users from SO and Reddit, the people here are light hearted, post meaningful, hilarious rants from their adventures in programming. Here are a few :D A good laugh :D (Though, I would've preferred Sublime over Notepad++ :p) A couple more funny posts - - Exception up = new Exception("Something went really wrong"); throw up; // hehehe - Boss : Nice job with that bug, when the erp feezes and magically starts working after a few seconds. My code : try {                      // something something                  } catch(Exception e) {     ...

Google Allo. Just a chat app? Sorry, but lol. Yes, okay, its extremely pretty and looks so bubbly and cute. Plus it has those nice little cat stickers. I love all that. But. It's much, much more than that. Sundar Pichai was supremely confident with Google's ability to process language during his keynote in I/O '16. Allo is Google's playground, and humans their subjects. Allo is their path to testing and building a 100% literate machine that can communicate in perfect everyday-human-like language - and it becomes more like you the more you use it. Like IBM's Watson, Google will have a system that knows what to say under different circumstances, understand emotion, and interact differently with different people. It will be able to not only take part in everyday conversation with everyday humans like you and I, but even debate with top notch speakers, artfully reply to political leaders, logically argue with mathematicians, and so much more. And all this, in...

tl;dr . Subscribe to updates over email on the play store. LifeHacks has been doing really well on the play store recently. It gets about 2-10 written reviews each day, which are quite fun to read. Over the past couple of weeks, I developed a habit of opening the developer console every morning right after I woke up, to read and reply to the meaningful reviews. So, I fiddled around with the console and found out you could subscribe to updates via email. Its great because for one, you get immediate push notifications. The real benefit is the persistence of emails. The dev console doesn't show deleted reviews, but emails sent can't be unsent. ;) I had a good reply ready in my mind for this guy. The place I've hosted these images is blazingly fast and can take a whole lot of load. His Internet was probably messed up at the he tried the app, and immediately jumped to the play store to write this review. (Though I wonder how that didn't give him connectivity issues....