Bhardwaj Rish

rish.pythonanywhere.com/home I've finally updated my website! I now realize I never blogged about it, though it should have been the first thing I wrote about. I love it dearly. I've designed it in a way that makes it a very effective way for me to keep track of the major professional events in my life. I created it when I was in my junior year, when I started applying for internships for the summer. I figured instead of sending boring resumes all around, a simple link and a fancy cover letter would do the trick. I later realized most Indian companies aren't of the same opinion, and that they are accustommed to those dull resumes, but nevertheless the website helped me learn a lot. For starters, I got a deeper hold on Python Flask and deploying it to the web. I started the website with two basic intentions; one to keep a track of all the projects I've done, and second a place to store my favorite music, and analyze how they change over time. I ended up doing neit...

The HoloLens arrived at our office this week, and I've spent about 5 minutes everyday, amusing myself at what the future is going to be like. The possibilities are truly endless - start by watching the video. You know how a lot of companies exaggerate their product in their demo video, and it ends up being nothing as fancy as what you saw? The HoloLens is exactly what they've shown! The projections you see really do look like they're there! In a very simple demo application, you can choose from a set of holograms, resize them and place them anywhere you like. Honestly, anywhere you see space. I placed a hip-hopper guy on my table, a miniature Nasa rocket on the entrance to our floor, and the Globe in the center of the room. And everything looks extremely real! You can move around the holograms, go as close as a centimeter to them, and they all look like a part of your world! This is the future - but it's scary. To the people who aren't a part of the HoloLens...

It has been a month since I've posted anything here! Every now and then when I think it is high time I write about something, I remember the enourmous amount of documentation I have to go through. There is lots that has happened in the past month or so, and I wish I had taken out time to blog about each one of them. My marvellous 4 years (now I know that it's actually 3, really - you generally intern at a company in your last semester, and the semester before that you spend looking and worrying about where you'll be put up in the last semester). College was extraordinary. Now that I've started interning, I realise why everyone says they are the best years of their life. Its much harder to meet like minded people - the equally clueless sorts you met when your first joined university. Once you're out of that town full of people like you, it isn't easy to meet people who are willing to share their clueless-ness. (Trust me, everyone is - no one has any idea what...

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                     +         -...