Developer

Running python on air-gapped systems

Saturday, Jan 13, 2024 | 4 min read
Categories: Developer,
Tags: Python,
How to reproducibly run python code on a system with no internet access.

Helping fix aircraft - from NLP to Bayes Nets

Wednesday, Oct 25, 2023 | 9 min read
Categories: Developer,
Tags: Nlp, Machine Learning,
NLP to help aircraft mechanics reason about maintenance actions

ChatGPT x Tennis - a weekend hacking project

Sunday, Aug 20, 2023 | 11 min read
Categories: Developer,
Using ChatGPT as my coding assistant to help me play more tennis

Trials and Tribulations of Maintaining a Hugo Blog

Saturday, Sep 30, 2017 | 5 min read
Categories: DevOps, Developer,
Tags: Hugo, Web Development, Powershell,
As of the writing of this post, I maintain this site using my very own theme created in hugo. Hugo is a static site generator. It takes a bunch of plain text, applies a theme, and renders it as HTML. This is opposed to applications like Wordpress that assemble a page each time its served, to put it simply. This compute once, use many times approach saves on processing time and makes a site more portable.

Optimizing static sites with hugo

Monday, Feb 6, 2017 | 3 min read
Categories: Developer, Meta, DevOps,
Tags: Javascript, Hugo, Web Development,
According to httparchive the average size of a web page in 2016 was around 2.5MB. Now this may not seem a lot in this age where the internet is the primary media delivery platform - but it is worth noting that most web pages serve text as their primary content. Looking at the report sheds light on what constitutes an average web page: The HTML content takes up around 50-60kB. Images, understandably, make up the biggest chunk with ~1.

Testing code with sensitive data

Tuesday, Sep 6, 2016 | 2 min read
Categories: Developer,
Tags: Git, Powershell, Testing,

I recently renewed work on my first ever github project. Over the course of a whole year when that project was dormant, I’d learned some new tricks. I now try to focus on writing tests for my projects. It is immensely convenient when I add features here  and there and need to check the whole code for errors.

Anyways, my project requires API keys to imgur.com. However I do not want to hard-code them into my test.py file. But I also do not want to manually provide keys every time I run tests. So what do I do?

Developing with C/C++ on console

Saturday, Jan 30, 2016 | 1 min read
Categories: Developer,
Tags: Bash, C/C++, Linux,

I am taking a High Performance Computing course this semester. For that we have to ssh into the university’s computing cluster. The interface is entirely console based. Now that might seem awesome at first: typing away commands like a “hacker”. And it is awesome. But after a while it gets tiring, particularly when I am writing code.

Making a simple web app blindfolded, and with both arms tied…

Monday, Sep 21, 2015 | 1 min read
Categories: Developer,
Tags: Javascript, Web App, Web Development,

Over the last weekend, I was looking to brush up my web-dev skills (what little I had learned on the side). I decided to make a simple web app for my residents to use (I am a Resident Advisor).

Objective: Display tips, event news, free food notifications provided regularly by RAs and faculty to residents on a website.

Parsing websites on a budget

Thursday, Jul 23, 2015 | 2 min read
Categories: Developer,
Tags: Javascript, Web App, Web Development, Web Scraping, YQL,

Say you are an up and coming web developer. You want to make a web app that can access content on other sites. Perhaps you want to make a word cloud from a news article on BBC. Or you want to see what videos a site has embedded within itself. You could achieve that by doing some server side voodoo. The ‘standard’ way to go about it would be to download the site to your server and then serve its contents to your webpage.  But that would require two things: