Aniket Pant - Notes and Essays by a developer

Two-Zero-Seventeen

Fri, 16 Nov 2018 06:18:00 +0100

2017 is becoming a distant memory as I write this as 2018 comes to an end. The ending of a year doesn’t hold much to me anymore as reflecting on the time spent at any given moment is completely worth it. I’ll attempt to capture as much of the last year as I can and I hope recollecting events in a chronological order will help.

Focusing on a few things at a time is a fantastic way to improve. After many years of thinking that multitasking works, I spent most of last year focusing on one activity at a time. It would come as no surprise that I performed better when I would write code as opposed to watching TV at the same time. We hear about various productivity techniques but the one that stuck was Pomodoro. Tomato One is a wonderful app for macOS and it allows you to customize your breaks. I have attempted some variations of schedules - 20 minute work, 1 minute short break, 5 minute long break.

In late 2016, I switched my keyboard layout to Dvorak and now I’ve been using it for a little over a year. The progress has been personally transformative as I get to use all my digits and as a Vim user, certain keyboard shortcuts are much more comfortable. I used to occasionally feel pain and numbness around my wrist and some fingers and all that pain is slowly subsiding. I’m quite excited to see how it turns out 3-4 years from now.

The last thing I genuinely tried my very best at was understanding nutrition. I signed up for a three month program aiming to understand nutrition according to my lifestyle. I would have never known that this would be a pretty long journey which will actually play a very important role in fundamentally changing me as a person. The more I learned about what food choices we make, how we make them and potential impact on my health in the long run, the more I realized that everything is a long journey in life. If you spend enough time genuinely trying to learn something, you’ll bear more fruits from this interest. I now cook more than occasionally and really enjoy the food I prepare.

Sometime around the start of the year, I made the decision of moving to the US and I made the move in mid-2017. Now I live in NYC and work on Uber for Business products. This is the first time when I’m living in the US and the experience has been so far overwhelming. It’s a massive cultural shift personally and professionally which deserves an essay of its own.

Two-Zero-Sixteen

Sun, 22 Jan 2017 19:34:00 +0100

I have managed to outplay myself by reading zero books. On the side I have written nothing apart from what my job demanded.

Life at Uber

A year has passed since I joined Uber as the first software engineer joining the Bangalore office. This has been an exciting time for me as I had never worked in such a large organisation earlier. The amount of in-house tooling is nothing short of impressive and every week tends to bring in something new to learn. We have been able to get our numbers up and now have a ~20 people team working as 3 teams. The projects for this year seem super interesting.

To 2017

The year has had a fun start where I worked from Nepal for a week. I am going to continue to take time off for travel every now and then.

The other exciting thing I picked up recently is the Tiny Habits program. If you have a tough time building new habits, this might be for you.

Two-Zero-Fifteen

Sun, 13 Mar 2016 18:48:00 +0100

I usually do my yearly round up post on either the last day of the year or the first day of the new year, but this time I did not have my laptop around me. After working at Zomato for about a year and a half I decided that I wanted to move out to a new company. The exciting news from all of this is that now I am a Software Engineer in Uber and I also happen to be the first engineering hire from India. Fancy, right?

Work at Uber

Uber is an absolutely fantastic place to work and anyone who wants to write great quality code and work on some epic projects, please join us! If you are looking for some knowledge on what we are doing and how you can contribute, get in touch with me. Hit me up on Twitter @noremap.

2016 is going to be the year where I get to work heavily on Python. I have always been reluctant to use Python for any of work for a long time simply because I don’t like the language’s aesthetics. Not a big fan of the lack of braces. I keep feeling the lack of terseness when I work in Python as the language tends to be more verbose than required. This might be happening because I have been programming in Go recently.

Moving to Bangalore

My current location has changed from Gurgaon to Bangalore. I am slowly getting used to the city but so far everything has been fairly pleasant. People in Bangalore, if you are interested in grabbing a coffee or just jamming over ideas with me, hit me up!

I am eagerly looking forward to this year. The first quarter is already over but this year I will try putting out a post every month.

Two-Zero-Fourteen

Thu, 01 Jan 2015 17:36:00 +0100

We all wait eagerly for an year to get over so that we can make a few more promises to ourselves and keep ourselves going. The last year was enjoyable to me in every single aspect.

I am person who keeps very high expectations for themselves. I try to push myself every single day to learn more, to do better and these are the things that keep me going. My promise for this year is going to be the very same as my last year:

To push harder.

The best of 2014

I completed my graduation in Mechanical Engineering and ended up as a software engineer at Zomato.

A couple of months back I participated in a half-marathon and fared well for my first time. Since, then I have tried to put in more effort into running and I am pretty sure that I will clock a time under 2 hours in my next attempt.

This Christmas I participated in my first ever Secret Santa and to be frank, this was the best experience I have ever had with gifting. Since then, I have been telling all my friends about it and encouraging them to be a part of it.

Regarding my health, I can very well say that I am not in my best shape and I am working towards it. After lurking on the /r/keto subreddit for a long time, I have finally decided that I am going to give it a shot. I am about to complete a week but so far I have not been able to keep my carbohydrates in check, though every day turns out to be better than the last.

Plans for 2015

There are a few projects of my own that are pending since the last year, and I hope to complete them this year.

I have also been engaged in a long battle of writing often since I have started working professionally and I will try my best to do justice to it.

Thanks to my Secret Santa, I have the entire series of A Song of Ice and Fire that I need to start reading.

I will also eat healthy and try to run more often.

Let’s make the most of this year and try to be better!

I love Digital Ocean

Sun, 05 Oct 2014 06:22:00 +0200

I have been using Digital Ocean for only a few months now and the service is remarkable. Yesterday, I got a tiny surprise from them!

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A lovely handwritten note by the wonderful folks at @digitalocean :)
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Thank you for the love @digitalocean :)
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Deploying Sinatra on Digital Ocean

Tue, 23 Sep 2014 20:32:00 +0200

Deploying a Ruby application on a server of your own can get challenging when you wish to make the deployment procedure simple.

Recently, I got myself a Digital Ocean account. My primary motivation of shifting to a VPS was to learn more about deploying applications and to be able to ship out my side projects.

It would hardly take you a couple of minutes to get a droplet up and running.

I quickly created a GitHub repository called hello and wrote a tiny Sinatra application. After this, I created a user account on my server for handling the deployments.

My first choice for a deployment tool was Capistrano and I setup my application to use it. After fiddling with Capistrano for a few days, I realised that SSH Kit doesn’t really work that well for me. Having been used to a Grunt based deployment setup at my present organisation, Capistrano’s in-built tasks did not suit my needs. At present, I wish to have more control over the deployment procedure. Since, I had heard so much praise about the tool and because of the abundant documentation available online, I decided to give it some more time. Even after a few more tries, it didn’t really work out.

Initially, when I was looking around for deployment tools, I had come across Mina, but for some strange reason I dismissed it. After my repeated failures with Capistrano, I decided to use Mina. What Mina does is that it creates a single batch script which it then sends to the server and executes. According to me, this is a fantastic technique because it reduces the number of requests made during the procedure. Also, it allows for the usage of other commands straight away.

My current deploy script is pretty neat:

require 'mina/bundler'
require 'mina/git'
require 'mina/rbenv'
require 'configatron'

require './config/settings.rb'

set :domain, configatron.server.host
set :deploy_to, configatron.server.deploy_to

set :repository, configatron.git.repository
set :branch, configatron.git.branch

set :user, configatron.ssh.user
set :forward_agent, configatron.ssh.forward_agent
set :identity_file, configatron.ssh.identity_file

set :shared_paths, ['log', 'tmp']

task :environment do
  invoke :'rbenv:load'
end

task :setup => :environment do
  queue! %[mkdir -p "#{deploy_to}/shared/log"]
  queue! %[chmod g+rx,u+rwx "#{deploy_to}/shared/log"]

  queue! %[mkdir -p "#{deploy_to}/shared/tmp"]
  queue! %[chmod g+rx,u+rwx "#{deploy_to}/shared/tmp"]
end

desc "Deploys the current version to the server."
task :deploy => :environment do
  deploy do
    invoke :'git:clone'
    invoke :'deploy:link_shared_paths'
    invoke :'bundle:install'

    to :launch do
      invoke :restart
    end
  end
end

desc "Restart the server."
task :restart => :environment do
  in_directory "#{deploy_to}/#{current_path}" do
    queue "bundle exec thin -R config.ru -p 4567 -d restart"
  end
end

desc "Start the server."
task :start => :environment do
  in_directory "#{deploy_to}/#{current_path}" do
    queue "bundle exec thin -R config.ru -p 4567 -d start"
  end
end

desc "Stop the server."
task :stop => :environment do
  in_directory "#{deploy_to}/#{current_path}" do
    queue "bundle exec thin -R config.ru -p 4567 -d stop"
  end
end

desc "Report server process id"
task :info => :environment do
  in_directory "#{deploy_to}/#{shared_path}" do
    queue "print 'Server running with pid:' `cat tmp/pids/thin.pid`"
  end
end

Joining Zomato

Sat, 07 Jun 2014 11:22:00 +0200

I am excited to say that I have joined Zomato as a Software Engineer.

Over here I will work on anything and everything web where most of my work will engage me with PHP. In my free time, I will try to engage myself in developing tools to assist myself and team here!

Two-Zero-Thirteen

Wed, 01 Jan 2014 19:21:00 +0100

Another year came to an end and I have learnt a great deal about life from this one. Coding was a major part of it but meeting people, living in a different city and learning about a new culture is definitely fascinating.

The year started the very same way as each year starts. There was college, loads of work and a number of other things on my list which kept me busy.

By June, I had the chance to go for a small vacation to Bhutan where I got to witness a culture which is absolutely different from anything I have seen to date.

In July, I started with my six month internship at Tata Autocomp Systems Ltd., Pune where I was working on one aspect of industrial engineering. In these six months, I was also reading up a lot on compiler and language design. A friend of mine helped me pave my way through functional programming and I picked up Haskell and Elixir.

Along with all of this, I read a good amount of books which I was missing out on since I joined college. This was definitely something I was craving for. I still have a dozen books that I need to read before I set off on a new journey which will start in May when college gets over.

We all should realize the importance of people in our lives. Being in an new city without any support from my parents was an experience in itself. Getting the opportunity to reconnect with old relations and making new relations is just amazing. I met two people who actually helped me shape my outlook towards many things in life. I learnt about what I was missing out on while I stayed in the college enclosure.

So, that was pretty much my life in 2013. At the moment I am working with Instamojo and helping them build front-end.

I am sure the future holds a lot of excitement.

Musket Fire

Sun, 09 Jun 2013 06:48:00 +0200

Musket is the latest RubyGem I am working on. The project started off after I was fed up of writing standard files again and again. We front-end developers need to create many HTML files which have a standard structure. We also write a a lot CSS and JS, and most of these files have a similar starting point.

As of now Musket doesn’t do a lot of things other than generating a file with a standard HTML template but I do have a few things in mind for extending it. I wish to bring in templates for jQuery plugins and other HTML modules that are always required for demos and mockups. These HTML templates would include elements like tables and lists, as they are the elements I need frequently.

HNsearch, my first gem

Sun, 19 May 2013 12:25:00 +0200

I finally wrote my first Ruby gem and it’s called HNsearch. All it does is allows me to search for users and items on Hacker News from my terminal. It was a great experience for me to write a gem of my own and if you like to work with Ruby, then you should write one too.

What all did I use?

HNsearch uses Nestful, Thor and JSON gems.

Nestful is a simple gem that allows one to make requests. I used it to communicate to the hnsearch API.
Thor is a powerful gem that helped me write the command line interface.
JSON does what it is supposed to do. It parses the generated hash to a JSON object which was easy to fiddle with.

How did I do it?

It wasn’t a lot of effort to write a small gem of this sort. I started with some starting queries on the Internet like writing your first ruby gem and how to write your first ruby gem. I found some great posts on the same -

Since, I was trying to write a command-line application, the third link was the most useful for me. I quickly set up a Bundler project using bundle gem HNsearch and it created my starting directory structure.

% tree
.
|-- .gitignore
|-- Gemfile
|-- HNsearch.gemspec
|-- lib
|   |-- HNsearch
|   |   `-- version.rb
|   `-- HNsearch.rb
|-- Rakefile
`-- README.md

As I needed a gem that I could run directly from the terminal, I created a directory bin and created a file called HNsearch inside it. The file just starts the CLI from my module HNsearch.

Writing a gem of your own is a satisfying experience and you get to learn a lot from it. And another advantage that comes along with it is the part where others can download your gem and use it.