Bhardwaj Rish

Having finally settled into the post-undergrad work life, I realize how irrelevant my education was! You are hireable only if you add value to your employer. Since humankind is a social animal and most jobs function with constant interaction between people, you should know how to be a resourceful participant in a group and work constructively in a team. Every job can be thought of as a project. Whether it's construction, plumbing, computer engineering, teaching, or nursing. You start with a common objective and collectively work your way towards a goal. Independent of scale,  every  job is a project. Now, a project consists of being able to plan, negotiate, execute under strict deadlines and constantly collaborate with people. Since the primary role of education is to prepare the student to face the real world once they are out of their parents' protection, why don't we focus enough on working in groups? This is why Kindergarten was the best; the reason pre-school ...

I'm very fortunate to have grown up playing with LEGO. I credit my ability to patiently work on a problem for long hours to all my childhood days creating Lego train tracks, castles, and cities with Lego Minifigures walking around. It also taught me the complexity of going from a vague idea in your mind to creating a real physical model, and all the re-thinking and re-working involved. For example, I remember I wanted to create an infinity-shaped train track where the cross-tracks would be at different levels - some sort of a bridge. I ended up using a small table to elevate the track. A track similar to this, except raising one of the tracks at the intersection. It all starts with an idea and a vague picture of how the final model will look. You look at how many Lego pieces you have and whether you have the key resources you'll need. You then start building and as you face challenges along the way you learn to re-route to overcome obstacles. Once you're done with ...

We lost a OnePlus3T dev phone at work earlier this month. This upset me a lot, but later when I reached home and performed my customary routine of locking my cycle to the side railing, I questioned myself if I really have to go through the pain of locking the bicycle every single day - it's added effort and maybe even for no use. Much of security feels that way - 99% of the times nothing will happen, but the day it does you'll curse yourself for not being more careful. I tried coming up with a model to justify whether the daily time spent on securing these valuables was worth it. Here's a simple mathematical equation.  (Securing Justified) =   Price (precious_object)   - Price (things_bought_to_keep_it_safe)   - [ Value (daily_time_spent_to_keep_it_safe) x (#_of_days_from_purchase_till_theft) ]  If >> 0, yes, you should definitely go through the pain of securing your valuable everyday. If ~ 0, you could probably do without...

I haven't written in a whole month and a half, courtesy my 70 hour work week, and weekends away at my friends'. I have a huge list of things I'd like to write about  scribbled [1]   in my Google Keep - there are things from over a year ago now that I haven't published, and wish I did for they seem less relevant to me now. For example, I made a list of qualities I wished to see in a Professor at University and never ended up publishing - but now that's in the past and what seems more relevant to my life at this moment is writing about how startups should function and a list of qualities I'd like to see in my work mentor. This is what I call a writer's dilemma. What were once  matters of consequence [2]  make little sense to write about now, and never will I come back to the time when these things hold as much relevance as they did at the time they were thought of and noted. Anyway, to rid myself of the guilt of not having written in so long, I spent the m...

For over 3 years, I've been writing code in Java, and have worked on several projects which have grown to a moderately large number of classes. Apart from learning the syntax from a book in Grade 11/12, I've never formally learned  how to write quality readable and maintainable code.  The current project I am working on spans in all directions; it's an event based system, there is a lot of input coming from simultaneously running threads, there's Java-C interaction, there are multiple communication channels over different network mediums, there's an entire high-speed display rendering mechanism, and a lot more. The size of the project is sky rocketing and without a structured architecture, the code will not be maintainable in the foreseeable future. So, just as any other engineer would do, I've bought myself a copy of trusty Effective Java to formally learn how  to write code that scales.  Before I read this book, here's as much my 3 years of ...

To future self. If you haven't woken up to places like these, experienced the storm without a shelter for escape, felt the fear of camping in the middle of nowhere, talked to people who don't communicate in the same language as yours, overpowered the voice in your head that makes you think before you act by the time you're 30, please buy a one way ticket and find your way to a life worth living.

Cows. They spend 23 hours of their day looking fixedly at their surroundings. They're born hard-wired with the very basic necessities of life; they understand they need food (1) to stay strong, reproduce to prevent their species from extinction (2) , poop to keep their insides clean (3) and sleep to be able to walk and chew food the next day (4) . They have the very basic emotions; fight or flight; they know they can scare flies, and know they must run away from lions and tigers (5) . Lastly, they have the super-power to ward of harmless flies with their tails only if they desire to . Beyond that, they confidently occupy the roads of the nation sitting in the middle, I repeat, the middle of the streets, constructing a reality like ours in an alternative universe by warping time and space under the influence of different dimensions, creating spheres and circles with constants other than Pi, processing thoughts of millions in a parallelized manner, creating models for learning t...

Inception is the sort of movie that makes you think about it for hours after you see it. This is the second time I've seen the movie, and of course, after watching it I googled whether it was all a dream. I came across this post that I'm sharing as is. It isn't written by me, though I wish I could think of something as stirring as this. This will blow your mind, especially the very last sentence.  -  [Original post] Inception is one of those movies people theorize about, so here’s my take. I have not read about it or looked it up except to check the characters’ names, so this is based solely on what I got from watching it. Needless to say, tremendous spoilers follow for those who have not seen it.  It’s all a dream. Ariadne (Ellen Page) is leading an inception on Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio). The entire film is that inception, and we never see reality.  In reality (which I will label “level 1”), the details of Cobb’s wife and past are basically as we’ve been ...

It had been about two months since we shifted into our new home in Bangalore, and every weekend we would make such grand plans of printing posters and sticking them up. This one particular Saturday we even forced ourselves to sit down before ordering lunch to spend an hour searching for posters and discussing ideas. We ended up watching friends.  This procrastination happened for almost a month, until I sat down and forced myself to it all on my own - it's almost always impossible to motivate a group to get things done if there's no deadline. I made a list of things I like/liked as a child, but just couldn't find worthy high resolution graphics that I could download without paying. So here's what I did. I used to play Nintendo Gameboy a lot as a child, Super Mario Bros was my favorite game. I googled a whole lot of Mario grahics - the bricks, the clouds, the bushes, the coins, (which to be honest was quite tough) and resized them to all match the same size ratio....

TL;DR: Being a good interviewer is difficult; but it'll earn you a lot of bonus points and send you to heaven. As an interviewer you're practically shaping the near and even possibly far future of the interviewee. The very fault of every interviewer is to ask what he expects candidates to know, not to extract what the candidate knows best . Just as with enough make-up and wigs all air-hostesses are made to look identical, interviewers treat candidates from all walks of life as the same factory produced robots. This is exactly what happens. Horses, dogs, elephants and fish are treated the same. The lack of ability of an interview to mould himself to find the very best in every new candidate is what makes traditional interviews a terrible failure! Any professional worth his salt should be much like a psychologist, he should be able to pick up in the short duration he spends with you whether you're fit for the role you applied for, and even be able to suggest wher...