After collecting over 250+ quotes, I'm seeing following problem emerge

• Since I was using markdown there was no way cross reference category, if the quote span across multiple categories. For a short time, using tags solved the problem, but it was not ideal for listing quote by tag.
• Reading by tag/author is simply not possible.
• No randomness: I wanted to see one of my collected quote randomly.

While brainstorming with Claude, I learnt there's a name for what I was doing. People call it a commonplace book, a personal notebook of quotes and ideas worth keeping. So I built an online version of it - Sridhar's commonplace.

Design choices

I made only two design choices for this project.

• Quotes are full of quote marks, and escaping every one of them in JSON is painful. YAML needs no escaping, and its multi-line support keeps long quotes readable. So, I chose YAML over JSON. Each quote is a YAML object with three fields: text, author, and tags.

  - text: |
      Be curious. Read widely. Try new things.
      What people call intelligence just boils down to curiosity.
    author: Aaron Swartz
    tags: [curiosity]

• There should be NO database and NO server. Each category can have its own YAML file to be backward compatible.

Commonplace

I wrote a neat little Python utility script to turn these yaml files into a static website. Every time I push to GitHub, GitHub Actions builds the site and publishes it on GitHub Pages for free.

URL: https://sridharrajs.github.io/commonplace

Each Category/Author/tag has its own page with associated quotes. The home page shows a random quote, and the Surprise me button shuffles to the next.

So far, I've moved 53 of my 250+ quotes, and the rest are work in progress. Meanwhile, if you keep quotes too, fork commonplace and start your own.

Follow these steps to enable Dropbox on your Kobo eReader:

• Install NickelMenu: Connect the device via USB cable. Download NickelMenu and extract the files and copy the nickelmenu folder into the .kobo folder. After copying, restart the device.
• Connect the device again, you can see nickelmenu or nm present within .adds folder.
• Open the nickelmenu.cfg file within it and add the following line:

  menu_item:main:Dropbox:nickel_open:library:dropbox

  If you don't find it, create a new file named config.txt and add the above line.
• Save the changes, eject your Kobo.
• Connect the device again. Go to .kobo/Kobo and open the Kobo eReader.conf file.
• Find [FeatureSettings] section, if it doesn’t exist, create it.
  Add the following sections.
  dropbox_link_account_poll=https://authorize.kobo.com/{region}/{language}/LinkDropbox
kobo_dropbox_link_account_enabled=True

Now, Dropbox will be available in the menu. You can link your account and access your files directly from the Kobo eReader.

        /app|log|create|ping|graphql/ domain:*.google.com
    

This pattern matches any of the following paths under google.com:

• /app
• /log
• /create
• /ping
• /graphql

You can also make it case-insensitive by adding the i flag at the end of the regex pattern: /app|log|create|ping|graphql/i domain:*.google.com

Completed The Intelligent Investor, this will be the 2nd book for the year.

When I wrote 2023 year end review, I had 7425 bookmarks, now Its 6629 - a 10% reduction.

Gmail is now 20 years old. Though I use many software, the following are the list of software that I use almost everyday, which are in the same league.

• Python: 33 years
• Vim: 32 years
• Debian: 30 years
• JavaScript: 28 years
• VLC player: 23 years
• Firefox: 19 years
• Git: 19 years
• Android: 15 years

It takes at least 10 years to make a good software.

JavaScript, which wasn't even invented when I was born, is what pays my bills now. Who knows what the future holds? Learning and adopting new technology is the only way to be relevant in the future.

Vim

There are two things.

1. Vim, the editor
2. Vim motions

The easiest way to use Vim is to master the motions and practise before jumping right into using Vim, the editor. The next step is to start customizing the .vimrc, the Vim config file, as needed. Let's see some of the changes I made to my .vimrc file.

First, some basics: let's disable the nocompatible, disable swap and back file creation, show title and status line, highlight the cursor line and set encoding.

    set nocompatible
    set nobackup
    set noswapfile
    set history=1000
    set encoding=UTF-8

    set title
    set ls=2
    set cursorline

    set relativenumber
    set number

    set nowrap
    set ignorecase
    set smartcase
    set showmatch
    set hlsearch
    set incsearch
    set wrapscan

    syntax on

    filetype on
    filetype plugin on 
    filetype indent on 

    call plug#begin()
        Plug 'doums/darcula'
        Plug 'editorconfig/editorconfig-vim' "EditorConfigReload to reload configs
    call plug#end()

    colorscheme darcula "enable darcula theme, the closet to webstorm dark theme

    call plug#begin()
            Plug 'ctrlpvim/ctrlp.vim'
    call plug#end()

    let g:ctrlp_map = '<space><space>' " use double spaces instead of ⌘P
    let g:ctrlp_cmd = 'CtrlP'

    " auto completion for fuzzy matching
    set wildmenu
    set wildmode=list:longest
    set wildignore=*.docx,*.jpg,*.png,*.gif,*.pdf,*.pyc,*.exe,*.flv,*.img,*.xlsx

 
    " moving lines up/down
    nnoremap <S-k> :m -2<CR>
    nnoremap <S-j> :m +1<CR>

    " change block cursor when in insert mode
    let &t_SI = "\<Esc>]50;CursorShape=1\x7"
    let &t_SR = "\<Esc>]50;CursorShape=2\x7"
    let &t_EI = "\<Esc>]50;CursorShape=0\x7"
    
    set ttimeout
    set ttimeoutlen=1
    set listchars=tab:>-,trail:~,extends:>,precedes:<,space:.
    set ttyfast

    " disable arrow keys
    for key in ['<Up>', '<Down>', '<Left>', '<Right>']
        exec 'noremap' key '<Nop>'
        exec 'cnoremap' key '<Nop>'
    endfor

To check my current .vimrc configs, head over to sridharrajs/dotfiles/blob/master/.vimrc

• Rule 1: I should publish for a year, aka 52 weeks.
• Rule 2: I should mention the week number on the title to factor in the missing weeks.
• Boundary: Never spend more than 1 hour per day: for all book reading and tinkering with side projects.

Looking back, the version 1 of the experiment was sucessful. I read 7 books, worked on 4 side projects, and answered 5 questions on stackoverflow.

Now, for this year, I want to tweak rule #1. I'm changing the frequency from weekly to publishing when ready. The rest will stay the same. Let's see how weeklies season 2 goes!

• Naallanaa Murukku - The RJ Balaji Podcast: I've been listening to this podcast since Season One. If you understand Tamil, I highly recommend this. Since this is a Spotify exclusive, you can listen to it only on Spotify.
• Soft Skills Engineering: Listening to this podcast for 5+ years. If you're working in tech, you must listen to this podcast.
• The Morgan Housel Podcast: I've been listening to this podcast since its inception.

Other than these, I listen to a few podcasts based on the episode title.

Reading

I started reading Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity.

Fixing Google Analytics

By default, google analytics will record analytics for all events irrespective of the domain. But this can be problematic since tracking localhost will add more noise to the analytics. The solution for this is to ignore the analytics based on the domain.

Reading

Summarizing my notes from the Range book is still pending for 3 weeks in a row. The only meaningful update I could make for now is to add my notes of the original raft paper^[1], which I read in Week 50: Understanding Raft.

Mobile

I learnt the hard way to not rely on a single phone without backups in 2020. But these days, I'm mostly on Android after my iPhone died due to lack of OS Updates.

2020 - iPhone SE 1st Gen

2023 - Motog40

One obvious difference here is the screen size. Other than that, rest all remains the same.

• Utility - Bhim, Dropbox, Authy, Sodexo and Spotify.
• Work - Slack and teams
• Family - Telegram and Google Meet.
• Necessary evil - what’s app

For everything else, Firefox.

Scouting for good podcast transcription software

I listen to a lot of podcasts, and not all of them have transcript enabled. I'm scouting for a decent podcast transcriptor that will help to extract the quotes and interesting ideas from them.

References

• [1] Raft: In Search of an Understandable Consensus Algorithm - My annotated version

I still have a Twitter account, but My Twitter usage has decreased considerably in the last year. Anyway, this week, the Twitter app on my phone is gone too. So now it's only on my Desktop browser, usage of which is rare and mostly broadcasting. Let's see when I feel like coming back fully. It's not just Twitter; even my Instagram usage has decreased heavily. In general, my social media usage is at an all-time low.

This has been my usage pattern as well. From being my 3rd place to hangout on the Internet, Twitter usage has decreased drastically over the last few months. Removing the free API has broken my workflow. Bookmarking on Twitter means it is yet another place to read.

Reading

• Summarizing my notes from Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World book is still a work in progress.
• Total unread count = 10257.

Onebible

• Last week, I deployed the minimal version of the onebible.in. This week, I migrated the index.html to a proper node app. This is to add the page templating for privacy policy page, setting analytics + og tags and to serve the cached assets.
• Added og meta tags for better SEO indexing.
• v1.5.14 release was politely calm. No crashes.

I completed the Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World book. Summarizing the notes is WIP.

Onebible

I fixed the following bugs

• fix I யோவான் 2 : 13 #28
• fix: proverbs 24:4 #29

These were part of v1.5.14 release via release(v1.5.14): upgrade db to v18 #30

Also, I revamped the onebible.in

• Leader election: a new leader must be chosen when an existing leader fails.
• Log replication: the leader must accept log entries from clients and replicate them across the cluster, forcing the other logs to agree with its own.
• Safety if any server has applied a particular log entry to its state machine, then no other server may apply a different command for the same log index.

Leader election

Election Process

Raft divides time into terms of arbitrary length, and each term begins with an election, in which one or more server attempt to become the leader. At any given time each server is in one of three states: leader, follower, or candidate.

In normal operation there is exactly one leader and all of the other servers are followers. Followers are passive: they issue no requests on their own but simply respond to requests from leaders and candidates. The leader handles all client requests (if a client contacts a follower, the follower redirects it to the leader). The third state, candidate, is used to elect a new leader

If a candidate wins the election, then it serves as leader for the rest of the term. In some situations an election will result in a split vote. In this case the term will end with no leader; a new term (with a new election) will begin shortly. Raft ensures that there is at most one leader in a given term.

Communication

Communication between server happen using remote procedure calls (RPCs), and it requires only two types of RPCs for driving consensus

• RequestVote RPC: initiated by candidates during elections.
• AppendEntries RPC: initiated by leaders to replicate log entries

Leader-follower protocol

The first step is to elect a distinguished leader, and then give the complete responsibility for managing the replicated log. The leader accepts log entries from clients, replicates them on other servers, and tells servers when it is safe to apply log entries to their state machines.

Each server stores a current term number, which increases monotonically over time. Current terms are exchanged whenever servers communicate; if one server’s current term is smaller than the other’s, then it updates its current term to the larger value. If a candidate or leader discovers that its term is out of date, it immediately reverts to follower state. If a server receives a request with a stale term number, it rejects the request.

Election process

Raft uses a heartbeat mechanism to trigger leader election. When servers start up, they begin as followers. A server remains in follower state as long as it receives valid RPCs from a leader or candidate. Leaders send periodic heartbeats (AppendEntries RPCs that carry no log entries) to all followers in order to maintain their authority. If a follower receives no communication over a period of time called the election timeout, then it assumes there is no viable leader and begins an election to choose a new leader. a follower increments its current term and transitions to candidate state. - electing the leader which has the recent version of the log(key difference)

A candidate wins an election if it receives votes from a majority of the servers in the full cluster for the same term. Each server will vote for at most one candidate in a given term, on a first-come-first-served basis

While waiting for votes, a candidate may receive an AppendEntries RPC from another server claiming to be leader. If the leader’s term (included in its RPC) is at least as large as the candidate’s current term, then the candidate recognizes the leader as legitimate and returns to follower state. If the term in the RPC is smaller than the candidate’s current term, then the candidate rejects the RPC and continues in candidate state. The third possible outcome is that a candidate neither wins nor loses the election: if many followers become candidates at the same time, votes could be split so that no candidate obtains a majority. When this happens, each candidate will time out and start a new election by incrementing its term and initiating another round of RequestVote RPCs. Raft uses randomized election timeouts to ensure that split votes are rare and that they are resolved quickly.

Log replication

The leader appends the command to its log as a new entry, then issues AppendEntries RPCs in parallel to each of the other servers to replicate the entry. When the entry has been safely replicated, the leader applies the entry to its state machine and returns the result of that execution to the client. If followers crash or run slowly, or if network packets are lost, the leader retries AppendEntries RPCs indefinitely (even after it has responded to the client) until all followers eventually store all log entries.

The leader decides when it is safe to apply a log entry to the state machines; such an entry is called committed. Raft guarantees that committed entries are durable and will eventually be executed by all of the available state machines. A log entry is committed once the leader that created the entry has replicated it on a majority of the servers.

The leader keeps track of the highest index it knows to be committed, and it includes that index in future AppendEntries RPCs (including heartbeats) so that the other servers eventually find out. Once a follower learns that a log entry is committed, it applies the entry to its local state machine

In Raft, the leader handles inconsistencies by forcing the followers’ logs to duplicate its own. This means that conflicting entries in follower logs will be overwritten with entries from the leader’s log. To bring a follower’s log into consistency with its own, the leader must find the latest log entry where the two logs agree, delete any entries in the follower’s log after that point, and send the follower all of the leader’s entries after that point.

When a leader first comes to power, it initializes all nextIndex values to the index just after the last one in its log. If a follower’s log is inconsistent with the leader’s, the AppendEntries consistency check will fail in the next AppendEntries RPC. After a rejection, the leader decrements nextIndex and retries the AppendEntries RPC. Eventually nextIndex will reach a point where the leader and follower logs match. When this happens, AppendEntries will succeed, which removes any conflicting entries in the follower’s log and appends entries from the leader’s log (if any). Once AppendEntries succeeds, the follower’s log is consistent with the leader’s, and it will remain that way for the rest of the term. A leader never overwrites or deletes entries in its own log

Timing and availability

broadcastTime ≪ electionTimeout ≪ MTBF

• broadcastTime is the average time it takes a server to send RPCs in parallel to every server in the cluster and receive their responses;
• MTBF is the average time between failures for a single server.

In order to avoid availability gaps, new servers join the cluster as non-voting members (the leader replicates log entries to them, but they are not considered for majorities). Once the new servers have caught up with the rest of the cluster, it can start to act as leader.

Log compaction

Creating a Snapshot with metadata like the last included index and last entry in log can help in doing the consistency checks in the AppendEntries. The leader must occasionally send snapshots to followers that lag behind.

the leader would create a snapshot, then it would send this snapshot to each of its followers. However, this has two disadvantages.

• Sending the snapshot to each follower would waste network bandwidth and slow the snapshotting process. Each follower already has the information needed to produce its own snapshots, and it is typically much cheaper for a server to produce a snapshot from its local state than it is to send and receive one over the network.
• the leader’s implementation would be more complex. For example, the leader would need to send snapshots to followers in parallel with replicating new log entries to them, so as not to block new client requests. servers must decide when to snapshot.

One simple strategy is to take a snapshot when the log reaches a fixed size in bytes. If this size is set to be significantly larger than the expected size of a snapshot, then the disk bandwidth overhead for snapshotting will be small.

Safety

Election restriction

In any leader-based consensus algorithm, the leader must eventually store all of the committed log entries. Raft uses a simpler approach where it guarantees that all the committed entries from previous terms are present on each new leader from the moment of its election, without the need to transfer those entries to the leader. This means that log entries only flow in one direction, from leaders to followers, and leaders never overwrite existing entries in their logs. RequestVote RPC implements this restriction: the RPC includes information about the candidate’s log

Follower and candidate crashes

If a follower or candidate crashes, then future RequestVote and AppendEntries RPCs sent to it will fail. Raft handles these failures by retrying indefinitely; if the crashed server restarts, then the RPC will complete successfully. If a server crashes after completing an RPC but before responding, then it will receive the same RPC again after it restarts. Raft RPCs are idempotent, so this causes no harm.

Client interaction

Clients of Raft send all of their requests to the leader. When a client first starts up, it connects to a randomly- chosen server. If the client’s first choice is not the leader, that server will reject the client’s request and supply information about the most recent leader it has heard from (AppendEntries requests include the network address of the leader). If the leader crashes, client requests will time out; clients then try again with randomly-chosen servers.

References

• Raft: In Search of an Understandable Consensus Algorithm (Extended Version)

Page structuring

• Structure the content with a <title> & 1 <h1>, <h2> - <h6>: for sub headings.
• Always have an About section.
• Configure to display 404 page for the missing/invalid pages.
• Check for a11y assistance using axe DevTools and Web Accessibility Evaluation Tools.

Content

• Images: Compress the images for size.
• Images: Set alt texts.
• Add external links with rel="nofollow".

Social

• Enable RSS feeds for your site. If you want to generate a dynamic feed, check How to generate a custom RSS feed from scratch programmatically.
• Add your other social(Twitter, Github, Instagram, LinkedIn) links using:<link rel="me" type="text/html" href="social URL>"/>.
• If you are collecting email, secure your form with csrf tokens.

Server configurations

• Enable https using lets encrypt.
• Enable caching at the server side for static assets like image, js and CSS by adding location ~* \.(css|gif|jpg|jpeg|js|png|ico)$ { expires 365d; } in site's nginx config.
• Redirect the non-https traffic to https version.

Performance

• Use CDN-minified versions for bootstrap and other widely used dependent libraries to leverage browser caching.
• Minifying and serving the site's own static assets like JS and CSS.
• Verify the page performance on Google PageSpeed Insights, Pingdom Website Speed Test and GTmetrix.

SEO

• Set author name as meta: <meta name="author" content="YOUR_NAME_HERE">.
• Add robots.txt and updated sitemap.xml to the site.
• Verify site ownership on both Google and Bing webmaster tools.
• In webmaster consoles: Add all variants of domain - http, www.

• Prefer Working On Things You Can Show: Work you can show off is prima facie evidence of your skills. One of the reasons developers have embraced OSS so much is because it gives you portable capital between companies: if your work is sitting on Github, even if you leave one job, you can take it with you to your next job. If you cannot build things you can show at work, you should build things you can show outside of work.
• Prefer To Work Where People Can See You: Don't try to make a career out of optimizing the SQL queries. Instead, work in positions where by you're exposed to lots of people. Optimize for impact and visibility.
• Consumption Is Sometimes Valuable, But Creation Moves You Forward: Reading and watching videos about the latest happening is valuable. But you'll learn more by shipping a failure than from reading about a thousand successes.

Few things that I'm working in parallel.

• I initially created utilities in Python to create an OS wide installer. After learning about sindresorhus's execa, I'm porting my scripts to JavaScript to publish an npm.
• Resumed reading books after a very long time, I'm 68% through Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World.
• The free Twitter developer key for self, used in pin-tweet is broken for the second time. I'm considering turning Twitter completely.

NPS vs Index funds

Extracting Links from emails

I believe everything you need to read should be in a single place. I created pin-tweet to help with that. It posts links to Pinboard from Twitter, from mastodon, and from mobile, but one thing still left out is email. I'm considering exploring options to post from email as well.

Changes in the email subscription

Earlier, this blog had four categories for the subscription. I'm consolidating them into a single list to keep things simple. Also, I'll be offloading the email list to a third-party app for delivering emails.

Unread bookmarks count down by 193

மருந்தென வேண்டாவாம் யாக்கைக்கு அருந்தியது
அற்றது போற்றி உணின் - குறள் 942

His body needs no drugs who only eats
After digesting what he ate before

Taking inspiration from Thirukkural #942, I chose to read and clear about 193 bookmarks instead of starting anything new. Now, the total unreads are at 10327.

We can use Proxy to create a proxy for another object in JavaScript. We can intercept and redefine the operations on the proxied object through a proxy object.

    const proxy = new Proxy(target, handler);

Proxy takes 2 parameter.

• target - the object to proxy.
• handler - the object with redefined operations.

Setting an empty {} as a handler creates a no=ops proxy.

    const user = { name: 'john', age: 20 };

    const proxyUser = new Proxy(user, {}); // creates a no-ops proxy
    proxyUser.name; // john
    proxyUser.age; // 20

We can use also can redefine operations in the handler.

    const user = { name: 'john', age: 20 };

    const handler = {
        get(target, property) {
            if (!target[property]) {
              throw new Error(`'${property}' doesn't exist. Read the doc manual.`);
            }

            console.log(`Property '${property}' has been read.`);
            return target[property];
        }
    };

    const proxyUserWithLogs = new Proxy(user, handler);
    proxyUserWithLogs.name; // Property 'name' has been read.

Please note that private fields won't be accessible since the proxy create a different object.

    class User {
      #details = {
        firstName: "John",
        lastName: "Doe",
        email: "john.doe@example.com"
      };

      get details() {
        return this.#details;
      }
    }

    const user = new User();
    const userProxy = new Proxy(user, {});

    user.details.firstName; // Property 'details' has been read.
    userProxy.details.firstName; // TypeError: can't access private field or method: object is not the right class

Problem

Ensuring atomic property in a transaction is relatively easy when the transaction happens within one application transacting with a single database. However, it would be challenging if the transaction spans multiple microservices or uses heterogeneous database mixes(RDBMS + NoSQL).

Two Phase Commit

This pattern involves a coordinator orchestrating the transaction between the participating microservices. As the name suggests, it involves two phases.

• Prepare
• Commit

Two Phase Commit

Prepare phase: We acquire the lock on the resource we want to update and make the change but wait to commit. If the microservices could do that, it would respond OK to the coordinator in the happy path. It will still respond if it cannot do, stating that it couldn't acquire the resources. After sending back the response, the services await further instruction from the coordinator.

Commit phase: If the coordinator receives a guarantee from all the participating microservices, it proceeds to the commit phase. Else, it aborts the transaction. Timeouts must be implemented at each service level to free up resource locks If the coordinator doesn't send the commit instructions.

Working

• All or nothing: It is all or nothing. All services complete the transaction, or we roll back the partial ones. Failures are handled through rollbacks.
• Latency: Since the coordinator awaits responses from all the participant services, the longest response time determines the overall response time of the system.
• Single point of failure: Improper implementation of the coordinator would turn it into a single point of failure for the system. Sufficient redundancy should be built at the service level to avoid deadlocks. Also, each coordinator should have redo logs to resume working in case of crashes.

Source code for generating diagram via mermaid.js is at https://gist.github.com/sridharrajs/f97ba3ed8c176aeb2b10b5986b21d931

In pin-tweet, I manually built the URL by individually encodeURIComponent for each query string.

Ref: pinboard-service.js

But discovered native URL() that offers a better way to work with URLs. By default, all params are automatically encoded.

• searchParams.set() - for building the URL
• searchParams.get() - for parsing the URL
• searchParams.has() - to check for the existence of a param

You can check searchParams for other helpful functions.

const url = new URL('http://example.org')

url.searchParams.set('q', 'demo')
url.searchParams.set('title','some long title')
url.searchParams.set('third_param', 3)
url.searchParams.set('boolean_param', true)
url.searchParams.set('invalid_param', 'some value')

const destinationURL = url.toString() // http://example.org/?q=demo&title=some+long+title

// fetching and checking keys
url.searchParams.has('page') // false
url.searchParams.get('third_param') // '3'

url.toString() // http://example.org/?q=demo&title=some+long+title&third_param=3&boolean_param=true&invalid_param=some+value

if (url.searchParams.has('invalid_param')) {
    url.searchParams.delete(key)
}

url.searchParams.size // 4
url.toString() // http://example.org/?q=demo&title=some+long+title&third_param=3&boolean_param=true

I made pin-tweet to use URL() via tech: using native URL() for setting the URL #20 PR.

I migrated pintweet to use twitter-api-sdk, Twitter's official npm library via tech: upgrade to twitter official npm #18 PR. The credentials which used to work earlier aren't working any more. I had to create a fresh project-app and generate a token to use the Basic API.

Onebible

I fixed 10 bugs and did an Android app release.

• Tamil typo in Acts 1:12 #14
• Tamil typo in Ezra 10:14,24 #15
• Tamil typo in Hebrew 11:10 #16
• Tamil typo in Revelations 9:5 #17
• Tamil typo in எரேமியா 4 : 25 #18
• Tamil typo in எபிரெயர் 4 : 3 #19
• Tamil typo in எபிரெயர் 7:20 #20
• Tamil typo in II நாளாகமம் 7:14 #21
• missed out word in II சங்கீதம் 45 : 10 #22
• Font issue - Malachi 2:16 #25

All these fixes are part of the 1.5.12 release. If you haven't updated the app yet, do it now.

You should optimize your page description after optimizing the Page structure and Title for the SEO.

• The description is for the user. Make a crisp summary of why they have to visit the link and what will be the reward for it.
• Search engines display your first 110 - 150 characters based on the listing page's device(web, mobile).
• Add a keyword to the description contextually. e.g., Github in the image.
• Avoid: Don't use a standard template. It would be considered duplicate, negatively impacting the search rankings.

Search result

Page's description

<meta name="description"
          content="GitHub is where over 100 million developers shape the future of software, together. Contribute to the open source community, manage your Git repositories, review code like a pro, track bugs and features, power your CI/CD and DevOps workflows, and secure code before you commit it."/>

How to remove duplicates gracefully

If you're building a site from scratch, one of the things that you need to take care of is preventing duplicates. It can be the title, description or URL.

e.g.,

• https://example.org/about-us
• https://example.org/about-us/

If both these pages serve the same content, it is a duplicate. It will negatively impact the search engine ranking. You need to do the following things to solve it.

• Remove the trailing slash in the URL and redirect the user back to the preferred URL version.
• Redirect the HTTP and non-WWW versions to the preferred URL version.

Note: When redirecting the user to the preferred version of the URL, the status code should be 301 to update the site's change on the search index.

What is NPS

National Pension Scheme(NPS) is a voluntary retirement solution for individuals. The individual has to contribute to their pension account while working, and during their retirement, an income will be generated from the accumulated pension corpus. At the time of retirement, you can withdraw a maximum of up to 60% of the corpus in a lump sum without tax. But for the remaining (minimum) 40%, you must purchase an annuity to pay a monthly pension. The monthly income from the annuity would be taxable based on the slab tax that would prevail then.

How does it work

As per Pension Fund Regulatory and Development Authority(PFRDA) guidelines, your contribution gets invested into Equities(top 200 stocks based on market capitalisation, max exposure to equity is 75%), Govt. Securities, Corporate Bonds and Alternate Assets are based on the following schemes to build your retirement corpus.

1. Aggressive Life Cycle Fund (with equity up to 75%)
2. Moderate Life Cycle Fund (with equity up to 50%)
3. Conservative Life Cycle Fund (with equity up to 25%)

There are two types of accounts

• Tier I
• Tier II

Note: You can open a Tier II account only if you have an active Tier I account.

Profession pension fund managers(SBI, UTI, HDFC, ICICI, Kotak and others) will manage the funds under both these accounts. You can switch between them once a year for Tier I and 4 per year for Tier II account.

Why

Tax benefits ~ 2 Lakh/annum.

- Your employer can contribute 10% of your salary (Basic + DA) under Section 80 CCD(2). The contribution upto up-to 7.5 Lakh is tax-free.

- ₹1,50,000 tax deduction under Section 80 CCE.

- ₹50,000 under section 80 CCD(1B) over and above ₹1.50 lakh under Sec 80 CCE.

It is a genuine long term product.

- ELSS has 3 years lock-in period.

- PPF has 15 years lock-in period.

- But with NPS, Funds within your Tier I account is locked for the longest period (60 - your age at the time of enrollment). E.g., Since it is available for an individual from the age of 18. The lock-in period would be 42 years.

- With 12% being the average 5 year CARG, Your money has the best chance to compound uninterrupted.

Lowest cost ratio

With 0.09% as the fee, NPS has the lowest cost ratio for managing funds.

Instead of using filter and map together to extract a list. We can also use flatMap to save iterating through the collections.

Since we're not reducing the array to a single item, flatMap seems more natural than reduce.

Scott Adams' Financial Advice

I came across Scott Adams' financial advice. All simple, sensible advice covering mutual funds, credit cards and insurance. The only change it requires to work within the Indian context is, swapping 401K/IRA with National Pension System(NPS). Rest all hold good. But remember, simple is not easy.

• Make a will.
• Pay off your credit card balance.
• Get term life insurance if you have a family to support.
• Fund your company 401K to the maximum.
• Fund your IRA to the maximum.
• Buy a house if you want to live in a house and can afford it.
• Put six months’ expenses in a money market account.
• Take whatever is left over and invest it 70 percent in a stock index fund and 30 percent in a bond fund through any discount brokerage company and never touch it until retirement
• If any of this confuses you, or you have something special going on (retirement, college planning, tax issue), hire a fee-based financial planner, not one who charges you a percentage of your portfolio.

Onebible 1.5.10

As said earlier, I've published v1.5.10. If you haven't updated it, update it now.

I continued reading more about SEO best practices. This week I learnt about <title>.

• The average length of the page title that ranks on page 1 of Google is between 45 to 55 characters. If the title is lengthier, Google truncates it after displaying up to 60 characters.
• Use only ONE<title> tag to represent the page's title. Use <h2> for subheadings.
• If you're writing list-style posts, include the number in your title. e.g., N way to do ABC
• Prefer :, () over - when writing the title, since - is reserved for specifying the domain name.
• Avoid setting the date on the title unless there is a scope for updates + re-rank. e.g., How to solve XYZ in 2022.
• Avoid: appending domain names to the title to save characters since search engines auto appends it based on the context

Onebible Android app updates

I released v1.5.9 on Jul 12, 2021. An update was due for a very long time. Before I could work on any of the user reported issues, a migration to a recent android version was required even to get the build passing. I was focusing on wrapping it via tech: upgrade app to the recent android version (#23) PR.

Vimtutor

If you're learning vim, you can use vimtutor to learn the basic navigation and functionalities. It comes default along with vim, so if you've vim, you've vimtutor as well.

I was reading about the bank run that happened at the Silicon Valley Bank. They went bust not because of the lending practices but because they needed their invested assets at a loss to meet short-term deposit withdrawals. Though in India, deposits are insured up to 5 Lakhs per person per bank, the withdrawal can be restricted, as in the case of YesBank. The only way to mitigate this risk is to diversify your funds across banks.

Pointers to improve SEO

If you want to rank well on search, you need to optimize three things

• Assets - Images, JavaScript and CSS.
• Load time.
• Page structure.

Assets: Images, CSS, and js are called static assets because they don't change often. So, it is recommended to minify and cache assets. We can use tinypng to compress image size to keep them light.

Load time: The faster the page loads, the better the user engagement with the page. So, run the page with the following sites and work on the suggestions.

• Google PageSpeed Insights
• Pingdom Website Speed Test
• GTmetrix

Page structure: Optimize the page for a better user reading experience.

• Place one <title> within <head> with a unique title for each page.
• <description>: summarize what the page will be about as the description.
• Add structured data markup, if applicable.
• Add both HTTP and HTTPS versions and www and non-www versions to the search console.
• Set a proper alt description for the images.
• When linking to other site, if you don't want to part some of your reputation, use rel="nofollow".
• Enable HTTPS for your page. You can use lets encrypt.
• Set <lastmod> in sitemap.xml to force reindex the page.

I'm continuing to learn more keys for cut/copy/paste in vim

You can also use these keys along with numbers. eg: :3 - will simply take you 3rd line. We can add d or y based on whether we need to copy or cut/delete.

• :3d - for deleting 3rd line.
• :3y - for copying 3rd line.
• Ndd - for deleting the next N lines including the current.

Since I'm using ESC key for switching modes, I remapped the caps lock key to be ESC within vim.

Debugging in react-testing-library

While debugging the failing tests in a different repo, I learnt about prettyDOM, which is an effective way to debug the HTML code that gets rendered.

    import { prettyDOM } from '@testing-library/dom';

    const div = document.createElement('div');
    div.innerHTML = '
HTML Element
';

    console.log(prettyDOM(div));
    //<div>
    //<h1>HTML Element</h1>
    //</div>
    

I published my notes from Rich Dad and Poor Dad. Next, I'm picking Refactoring, 2nd edition.

Effective deleting

I'm learning how to effectively delete in vim with key combinations in NORMAL mode.

eg:

You can also delete the current line by dd and x to delete the character that's under the cursor. Since all of these are vim shortcuts on doom emacs, you can use them on vim elsewhere too.

Thirukkural #942

மருந்தென வேண்டாவாம் யாக்கைக்கு அருந்தியது
அற்றது போற்றி உணின் - குறள் 942

His body needs no drugs who only eats
After digesting what he ate before

I've been thinking about this thirukkural for some time. Though it talks about medicine, I think it can be applied to our urge to keep consuming information every day. I started this year with 8943, but currently, it is at 9464. ~500 links in 2 months. I need to devise a strategy and burn this list down.

I completed Rich Dad Poor Dad last week, and this will be the first completed book for 2023. Currently, I'm summarising my notes from the book. Next, there are a bunch of books in which I've completed somewhere around 6 to 18%. I'm planning to pick and finish one of them.

• Mindset - Updated Edition: Changing The Way You think To Fulfil Your Potential - 13%
• Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code - 13%
• Designing Data-Intensive Applications: The Big Ideas Behind Reliable, Scalable, and Maintainable Systems - 6%

Update on emacs

Since switching to doom emacs two weeks ago, things have been going well after getting the initial learning curve. It is emacs with vim mode for people unfamiliar with doom emacs. You get all the key binding for vim on emacs for editing + all emacs modes.

• C-x becomes SPC
• M-x becomes ESC :

Update on Twitter

After cross posting both on my Twitter and Mastodon accounts, it is clear that folks I follow on Twitter have yet to all migrate to Mastodon. But at the same time, I've discovered a few interesting people mastodon. So, I'll continue to use both for some time until I have a clear preference.

Books

Use mark for highlighting

If you're using <strong> + some styling for highlighting the text, you can use <mark>, which is the semantic equivalent of it.

emacs update

I've been tinkering with my emacs configs for a while now. But now, for a change, I started using doom emacs.

Pin-tweet

Starting from Feb 9, Twitter will charge for the API access. Not sure whether it would be applicable for developer self-token as well. But it certainly impacts pin-tweet.

Books and Links

I resumed book reading. Rich Dad Poor Dad is 55% complete.

Despite clearing 200+ links, there are about 9064 links to be read in my pinboard account.

Subscribe by email

Adding an email subscription is still in progress.

NGO websites

We got a new requirement. NGOs wanted to check the possibility of collecting the email address of the volunteers. Based on the requirements, WordPress seem to be a good fit since it matches all the required criteria.

Prismjs

I have been using GitHub gist to display code snippets. But recently, I discovered prismjs for the same. It is light. Just 15KB in total and can be served from our server instead of making multiple calls like gist.

A comparison between a sample gist from Cleaner array manipulation using ES5/6/lodash post and prismjs block.

const totalByOne = users.reduce((previous, current) => {
    return previous + current.balance;
},0);

const totalByTwo = _.reduce(users, (totalBalance, user) => {
    return totalBalance + user.balance;
}, 0);

console.log(totalByOne); //220
console.log(totalByTwo); //220

The best part is that it isn't an image. It is copyable code highlighted text.

Books

We visited the Chennai book fair during the last week of the event and brought the following books.

Spoils from chennaibookfair 2023 📚

PinQL

I raised chore(react-ui): adding react to the app #2

This PR does the following things

• Adds react to the repo at clients/reactui/ folder. For now, it is going to be react only. But in the future, I'm planning to add more clients like Svelte. All of them will be consuming the same response from GraphQL powered backend.
• Since now we have 2 apps within the same repo technically, I added concurrently, to start both of them at once.

Subscribe by email

I'm wrapping up the final form validations and DB schema changes to accommodate the new category for weeklies. It should be ready in a week or two.

Publishing book summary

I need to publish my notes for the following books I completed in 2022.

1. Just Keep Buying: Proven Ways to Save Money and Build Your Wealth by Nick Maggiulli
2. Show Your Work!: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered by Austin Kleon
3. How to Live on 24 Hours a Day by Arnold Bennett
4. How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life by Scott Adams
5. Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change by Kent Beck

Side Projects

1. pin-tweet: Parse RSS feeds from youtube channels and Spotify and add them to Pinboard.
2. pinql: build React front end UI.
3. backup-scripts: add Google/Azure to the mix?

Tools

1. TabPro: Publish it as a chrome plugin.
2. vi: publish my dotfiles

If you visit the home page, you can check the other site pages, such as books and archives. But if you land directly on one of the posts via Google search, you won't be able to access these pages since there is no entry point to them. I've fixed this now by adding a hamburger menu to the site.

TabPro

I made TabPro Chrome compatible via feat(chrome): add support for chrome #2 PR. The icon is WIP before uploading it to the chrome web store.

Subscribe by email

Based on the feedback I got from people, I'm working on adding an option to subscribe to the blog by email.

I published the 2022 year in review.

Unread links

My backlog links count at the beginning of the year is 8943

Emacs

While doing a fresh install of emacs on a new system, I ran into package unavailable issues. So, I fixed it via chore: fix fresh installing issues #1 PR. This PR does a couple of things

• When you run emacs with this repo as your config folder, it will auto-install all the missing dependencies when it loads for the very first time using emacs's package-install package
• Adds a script to display the load time.

emacs with load time

Learning

• How to generate a custom RSS feed from scratch programmatically
• Learning vim
• ES2022 - JS standard vim

Books read in 2022

I read the following books.

1. Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential by Tiago Forte - My notes.
2. Just Keep Buying: Proven Ways to Save Money and Build Your Wealth by Nick Maggiulli
3. Show Your Work!: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered by Austin Kleon
4. How to Live on 24 Hours a Day by Arnold Bennett
5. What The Heck Do I Do With My Life by Ravi Venkatesan - My notes.
6. How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life by Scott Adams
7. Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change by Kent Beck

My backlog links count in 2022

I started tracking the number of unread links seriously in June only. The idea is to be read-and-process-it than merely being an information hoarder.

Unread links

StackOverflow

I wrote the following answers

1. how to use async-await in custom validators
2. How to make Telegram BOT reply to a specific message?
3. Why is my code not working properly my output reflects twice in console , in for loop statement for print month date until 31
4. How can use the .count() method in mongoose to count multiple collections
5. Undefined when searching with Find Mongoose Express

Side projects in 2022

I followed working in PR-style. PRs will have the following title based on the scope of change.

• feat: for a new feature
• refactor: refactoring the existing functionality
• fix: bugs fixes
• docs: for adding and tweaking README.md and other docs.

The followings are the list of side projects I worked

pin-tweet

• tech(trackers): refactor stripping away the tracker from URL #17
• fix: empty [] in ack response #16
• refactor: tagging #14
• docs: adding changelog and version bump #13
• feat: add support for mastodon #12
• fix(telegram): inform the user when bookmarking fails #11
• tech: replace node-fetch with axios #10
• feat(telegram): adding support for posting links directly from telegram to pinboard #9
• feat(normalize-url): using normalize-url to strip tracking codes #8

utilities

• feat: support for pulling all github changes at once #2
• feat(commit.py): adding support for multiple origins #1

backup-scripts

Script for uploading backups to s3.
Source code: sridharrajs/backup-scripts

Tool list

• VS Code - Added shortcut to splitting the pane vertically.
• Browser configurations - Added a11y related (Wave, axe DevTools), ClearURLs and TabPro plugins

Books & links

I completed the Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change by Kent back.

The last unread link count was 8540two weeks ago, and I cleared around 80 links this week alone. Hoping to allocate more time to this activity as we head towards year end.

Adding RSS feeds to the site - WIP.

I summarised my understanding of RSS in How to generate a custom RSS feed from scratch programmatically. This site has a couple of RSS feeds.

• https://sridhar.co/rss.xml - RSS feed for all posts
• https://sridhar.co/weekly-updates-rss.xml - RSS feed for weekly updates

For now, the RSS feed does not have the content of the posts, and I'll work on improving this in the coming weeks.

Simply setting a goal (daily, weekly, or whatever you’re capable of) and tracking this type of accomplishment can radically change your behavior. When you start to search for outstanding accomplishments, you naturally go through the process of evaluating and prioritizing your activities based on the business value of what you might work on.

Tracking hits at a reasonably high frequency will ensure that you don’t get stuck: if you’re supposed to produce a hit per day, you can’t spend two weeks crafting the perfect task. This type of thinking and work becomes a habit rather than a major production. And, like a developer addicted to the green bar of a unit test suite, you start to get itchy if you haven’t knocked out today’s hit. You don’t have to worry so much about tracking your progress, because performing at this level becomes more akin to a nervous tic than a set of tasks that need to be planned out in Microsoft Project.

I choose weekly to plan and execute things per project/week. So far, this has been going great and has helped me accomplish more without burning out.

Programming & Learning

Onebible

I filed a new user reported issue - Tamil typo in II நாளாகமம் 7:14 #21.

Pin-tweet

As mentioned last week, I implemented trimming query params like utm_campaign, utm_medium and utm_source for the rest of the channels via tech(trackers): refactor stripping away the tracker from URL #17 PR.

Adding RSS feeds to the site - WIP

I'm learning how to build RSS feeds for the site from scratch. The idea is to have two feeds, one for the regular posts and the other for the weekly updates.

• Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change (The XP Series) - 58% completed.

The unread bookmark count is 8540.

Programming & Learning

Onebible

While I got the fix(tamil): grammatically error in 6 verse #21 PR was merged last week, I got a couple of user reported issues.

• Tamil typo in எபிரெயர் 4:3 #19
• Tamil typo in எபிரெயர் 7:20 #20

I'm planning to address them this coming week.

Pin-tweet

I'd changed the telegram bot's response to include the list of applicable tags for the given URL. While using it for some time, I noticed that if the URL doesn't have any matching rule, empty [] is set in ack response. I've fixed this via fix: empty [] in ack response #16 PR.

Bug

Fix

Pin-tweet trims query params like utm_campaign, utm_medium and utm_source only when used as CLI. I need to extend this for other channels as well, so that bookmarked doesn't contain any trackers. Also, these query parameters should be config driven from rules.json file instead of being part of the code.

The unread bookmark count is 8438.

Programming & Learning

Updates on My Mastodon account

A good majority of the people whom I follow on Twitter have migrated to mastodon. Despite following them, my following hasn't achieved the right balance. Currently, it is tech-heavy, but I'm planning to experiment by following people across my interests to fine tune it. If you have any suggestions of people to follow for Humour, தமிழ், and personal finance topics, send them my way.

Pin-tweet 2.0.0 changes

Last week, I was evaluating npms for working with Mastodon APIs. But when I sat down to do the actual implementation, I discovered that both the bookmarks and unbookmark APIs are straightforward, and using an npm to make a couple of network calls seemed overkill. So, I changed the implementation to reflect this. More details on feat: add support for mastodon #12 PR.

The logic for tagging the URL as a bookmark was tightly coupled with Twitter since it was the only service for which this script was written. But now things have changed. So, I took this as an opportunity to refactor it to be generic through refactor: tagging #14 PR.

Also, I've added Changelog.md to the repo through docs: adding changelog and version bump #13 PR.

• Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change (The XP Series) - 55% completed

The unread bookmark count is 8293.

Programming & Learning

site revamp

Last week, it was a home page revamp. This week, it is sitemap.xml and archive revamp. I build the entire site in the expressjs framework while optimizing the home page, I noticed that the generation setup could be improved. I exactly worked on that this week.

pin-tweet

Evaluating the mastodon-api module to retrieve the mastodon bookmarks. Once that is done, I need to update the pin-tweet to post them to the pinboard.

• Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change (The XP Series) - 37% completed
• Designing Data-Intensive Applications: The Big Ideas Behind Reliable, Scalable, and Maintainable Systems - 6% completed.

The unread bookmark count is at 8238.

Programming & Learning

Home page revamp

As I said last week, home page revamp is complete. The new page is visually optimized for the quick eye scan than wanting to read anything to know.

Old

New

Also, new page is 100% optimized for speed and accessibility.

Google PageSpeed Insights

Wave evaulation

Axe dev tool

Reprioritizing tasks

• Planning to complete Extreme Programming Explained by this week.
• Adding support for moving mastodon bookmarks to pinboard in pin-tweet.
• The Richest Man in Babylon summary - Paused.

• Mindset - 13% completed.
• Designing Data-Intensive Applications: The Big Ideas Behind Reliable, Scalable, and Maintainable Systems - 6% completed.

Summarizing my notes from The Richest Man in Babylon - WIP.

The unread bookmark count is at 8113.

Programming & Learning

Mastodon.social

I created @sridharrajs@mastodon.social in 2017, but haven't been active on the site. After the recent changes at Twitter, I dusted off the handle. Mastodon today reminds me of the early days of Twitter. I'm hoping to spend some time there.

utilities

Raised a feat: support for pulling all github changes at once #2 PR that adds pull.py for git pull across all git repos at once. This utility project eventually needs to be an installer.

pin-tweet

I'm refactoring tagging section of pin-tweet to use regex instead if checks.

Revamping home page

I'm revamping the home page of this site. Should be published by next week.

Tweets

Mindset - 13% completed. Summarizing my notes from The Richest Man in Babylon - WIP.

The unread bookmark count is at 7915. I've inbox 0 on all my email account, meaning I've read-replied-deleted-moved links to pinboard.

Programming & Learning

Onebible

fix(tamil): grammatically error in 6 verse #21 is still open. But I've paused App development for now to allocate time for other high priority things.

Fixing broken URL on sridhar.co

I was working on fixing the broken URL on this blog.

Tweets

• சிவகாமியின் சபதம் - 59% completed.
• Mindset - 6% completed.

Summarizing my notes from The Richest Man in Babylon - WIP.

The unread count is at 7857. I think this will the maximum count I'll have for sometime. I've cleared all my email inbox and moved all links to the pinboard.

Programming & Learning

Onebible

Last release was made on Jul, 2021. I'm taking this as an opportunity to revisit the item that can be trimmed from the app.

சிவகாமியின் சபதம் - 57% completed.

The unread count is at 7761.

Programming & Learning

Onebible

Raised fix(tamil): grammatically error in 6 verse #21 in the upstream repo that fixes the following issues

• #14 Tamil typo in Acts 1:12
• #15 Tamil typo in Ezra 10:14,24
• #16 Tamil typo in Hebrew 11:10
• #17 Tamil typo in Revelations 9:5
• #18 Tamil typo in எரேமியா 4:25

These issues will be addressed from the app side in version 1.5.10 which is in works.

Going all-in on vim

I'm using vim for writing journal and diary. The idea is to replace vscode with vim eventually.

Resurrecting My Debian laptop

I resurrected My HP laptop by servicing it for the hardware issue. In fact this entry itself is written using vim on Debian. Feels so good.

Tweet

The unread count is at 7739.

I took a break from my regular format and focused only on reading சிவகாமியின் சபதம். 38% completed.

• சிவகாமியின் சபதம் - 22% completed

The unread count is at 7621.

Programming & Learning

Utilities

commit.py, an utility script to publish the staged changed was hard coded to push only to origin. I fixed it to pick all the remotes available at repository setup in feat(commit.py): adding support for multiple origins #1

android.onebible.in

I've started working on fixing typo issues and will be raising PR next week and if possible, release an app update.

• Building your second brain - My notes
• சிவகாமியின் சபதம் - 18% completed

Finally, I published my notes from the book and resumed my book reading.

If you're a serious note-taker, you might already know most of the things that Second brain teaches, but if you're entire new to the subject, I highly recommended checking on Derek Siver's take on the subject.

If digital, use only plain text. It’s a standard format not owned by any company. It will be readable in 50 years on devices we haven’t even imagined yet. Don’t use formats that can only be read by one program, because that program won’t be around in 50 years. Don’t use the cloud, unless you’re also going to download it weekly and back it up in plain text outside that cloud. (Companies shut down. Clouds disappear. Think long-term.)

From Benefits of a daily diary and topic journals

Or Thoreau's take on same subject.

The unread count is at 7475.

I'm solely focusing only on completing the Building a Second Brain summary. Until it is done, won't be spending my time on anything else.

Programming & Learning

Filing issues

I filed one of issues on Github.

• android.onebible.in: Tamil typo in revelations 9:5 #17

The unread count is at 7397.

I'm solely focusing only on completing the Building a Second Brain summary. Until it is done, won't be spending my time on anything else.

Programming & Learning

Filing issues

I filed couple of issues on Github.

• pinboard-kotlin: incorrect bookmark count #82
• android.onebible.in: Tamil typo in Hebrew 11:10 #16

StackOverflow

• how to use async-await in custom validators

• Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change (The XP Series) - 27% completed.
• Mindset - Updated Edition: Changing The Way You think To Fulfil Your Potential - 5% completed.

Summarizing Building a Second Brain book is still WIP.

The telegram integration has improved my workflow so much that, my bookmark count now increases by double digits every day. So much information to read-process-journal-discard. The unread count is at 7242.

Programming & Learning

Improving backup strategy

Both Google one and iCloud seem to be offering 200GB of storage(inclusive of phone backups) at ~ ₹200. But if you want to be self-reliant without being locked into their ecosystem, Amazon S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval storage seems a viable option for storing backups on the cloud. I wrote backup-scripts, a python script to explore uploading images to s3.

Pin-tweet

I deployed the PR changes, I noticed that in case of failure due to timeout, there is no message to the user in case of failure to bookmark. Fixed that in PR #11 and migrated from node-fetch to axios in PR #10. After adding telegram, I'm preferring the bot over the Pinkt app since it is just a one step process of bookmarking links.

StackOverflow

• How can use the .count() method in mongoose to count multiple collections
• Undefined when searching with Find Mongoose Express

I've completed the Building a Second Brain book, and a post summarizing my notes from it is WIP. Not much of a change in the unread count, it is at 7064.

Programming & Learning

pin-tweet

Adding links from the FOSS United telegram group to the pinboard, individually was painful. so, I created a telegram bot for added it to pin-tweet via #9 PR

StackOverflow

• How to make Telegram BOT reply to a specific message?
• Why is my code not working properly my output reflects twice in console , in for loop statement for print month date until 31

As predicted last week, my unread count has crossed 7k and currently is at 7020. I got a few interesting pointers from Building a Second Brain book on how to improve my note-taking workflow. I'm already putting them into practice. 90% done with the book and the rest should be completed by this week.

Programming & Learning

Onebible

Earlier, godlytalias had suggested that we fix both XML and JSON files as well. Both bible.xml and bible.json have 31K+ lines and roughly around ~14MB each. I'm writing a nodejs migration script that efficiently reads the file's content line by line and replaces-if-required without loading all the content at once into the memory.

KeePassXC - a replacement for KeePassX

KeePassX, my password manager since 2014 is no longer being actively maintained. So like me, If you're using KeePassX, you can migrate to KeePassXC as suggested in the official blog. No other change is required. Everything works as-is since the password databases are compatible with each other. Also, for mobile, I discovered KeePassDX, and updated my toolbox to reflect all these changes.

Updating utility script

Updated commit.py, my utility script to push the changes to BitBucket and Gitlab services.

No change in the book reads. Unread count 6924 and will probably hit 7k next week.

Programming & Learning

Onebible PRs

I raised a massive PR - #20 correcting 100+ verses and got it merged.

Markmap - VS Code extension

I discovered Markmap, an extension to visualize your markdown files in VSCode. I've been using it for a week, seems to be solid.

Improving backup strategy

There are three categories of things that need to be backed up.

1. Notes.
2. Code
3. Media files.
4. Docs - pdfs, password file.

For #1, I create and edit notes as plain simple markdown .md files on vscode and store them using git. I leverage git remote to keep my backup on GitLab and bitbucket in sync. Improving redundancy here means, having multiple remote set!

For #2, I've all my code and configs for text editor(emacs, dotfiles, vscode, webstorm-settings), and browser tweaks on Github. My 2FA codes are on Authy.

For #3 & #4, I've been using an external hard disk. Thinking of improving the redundancy by adding a cloud provider.

Pratyush had a suggestion that does an incremental backup of the OS. Piwingo seems to be a decent option for #3 alone. I'm exploring other options as well. I'm more interested in backing up the content I create on the system than the system itself. Since 2020, I've been intentionally switching phone platforms now and then to keep my tech dependency in check. So far, it is successful and this helped me learn what is important and what isn't. So, wanted to replicate the same on the laptop as well.

• Building a Second Brain - 30% completed
• Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change (The XP Series) - 21% completed
• Refactoring - 2nd edition - 13% completed
• Mindset: Changing The Way You think To Fulfil Your Potential - 8% completed

Pinboard unread count 6873.

Programming & Learning

PinQL updates

I published the roadmap for the PinQL and was working on adding the mutations to complete the CRUD operations on links.

• Create a bookmark - addBookmark mutation
• Read all bookmarks - Post query
• Update an existing bookmark - updateBookmark mutation
• Delete a bookmark - deleteBookmark mutation

For schema design and screenshot, Please refer to #1 PR. Integrating rule is in progress.

Improving backup strategy

One of the goals of 2022 was to work on being tech independent. I've started working on that. The cost for storing 1GB of data on Amazon S3 is ~ ₹2 ($0.025) in Asia pacific Mumbai region. I've 10s of GB of kids' photos and videos. Exploring options to have a copy on the cloud as a backup option in addition to the external hard drives.

Reading Building a Second Brain book gave ideas on how to capture notes, and organize them. I was focusing on reading links from Pinboard. Despite clearing a whole bunch of links, my unread count is still at 6868. Net -10 only.

• Building a Second Brain - 30% completed
• Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change (The XP Series) - 21% completed
• Refactoring - 2nd edition - 13% completed
• Mindset: Changing The Way You think To Fulfil Your Potential - 8% completed

Programming & Learning

If you want to have control over your time, and thereby your life. You need to be deliberate with the things that you do with your time. Sometimes it means making it harder for you to do certain things.

PinQL - updates

I'd written a Query for fetching the article for PinQL on Week 3. This week I was working on adding mutation for bookmarking an article. Also, a blog post about the idea behind PinQL is in the works.

Site clean up

I'm retiring the now page of this site, from now on any request to https://sridhar.co/now will be redirected to https://sridhar.co/weekly-updates with status code 301.

I didn't read books this week, was focusing on completing the review of What The Heck Do I Do With My Life book. Here is the published summary.

• Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change (The XP Series) - 21% completed
• Refactoring - 2nd edition - 13% completed
• Building a Second Brain - 6% completed

Read a bunch of a11y related links, my bookmark count is 6878

Programming & Learning

a11y

I'm continuing to learn more on the a11y standards and on how to improving the accessibility for the webpages. Will be sharing my learnings soon. Meanwhile, if you're using eslint for your JavaScript linting, add eslint-plugin-jsx-a11y to your project to to spot accessibility issues in React apps.

Fixed a couple of a11y issues. Following is the report.

Google Lighthouse report - accessibility score 100

Discovered axe DevTools - Web Accessibility Testing, a browser plugin for static analysing the a11y issues. Adding it to my browser-configuration

Side projects - Jenkins & FB page clean ups

I'm was mostly working on configuring Jenkins to do the CI/CD for my side projects. Closed down FB pages of my defunct side projects except onebible.in page to narrow down focus.

• Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change (The XP Series) - 21% completed
• Refactoring - 2nd edition - 13% completed
• Building a Second Brain - 6% completed

Added a bunch of a11y links, as a result, my bookmark count is 6867

Programming & Learning

Onebible PRs

PR #19 which I raised last week and #17 were merged this week. These PRs were making changes only on the .sqlfile. In addition to the .sql file, the repo has .xml, .json file format as well. Next up, I'm planning to write a script to take care of updating these as suggested by the repo owner.

Testing for a11y

I was learning more about a11y and was focusing on how to make the site accessible for both keyboard-only users and screenreader-only users.

Before

After

Testing and fixing a11y issues is easy using the WAVE browser extension. Along with WAVE, I discovered ClearURLs - an open sourced browser extension for removing utm_source, utm_medium, utm_campaign, and similar tracking parameters from URLs before loading them.

Adding both WAVE & ClearURLs to my browser-configuration

Adding test for a node script

While adding tests for the node script, I learnt that you can use assert that comes with Node.js instead of using an npm dependency.

If you want to test a condition for a little utility program without wanting to add any additional dependencies, you can use the native assert that comes with Node.js pic.twitter.com/oLAIQZEc4z

— Sridhar Raj Sampath Kumar (@sridharrajs) July 14, 2022

• Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change (The XP Series) - 21% completed
• Refactoring - 2nd edition - 13% completed

Bookmark count = 6790. Apparently rate of adding new links > my rate of reading links.

Programming & Learning

One way to improve your reading habits is to have a HEALTHY BACKLOG of all YOUR links in one place before you want to read them. Links from email newsletters, tweets, WhatsApp, and telegram all in one place.

I wrote pin-tweet, a node utility script to solve it.

In 2020, I wanted to do a side project using GraphQL but didn't really get started with it. But this year, I'm getting started. Introducing PinQL, a webclient for Pinboard + my rules powered using GraphQL. I just got the basic things set up.

• Just Keep Buying: Proven Ways to Save Money and Build Your Wealth - completed this week.
• Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change (The XP Series) - 19% completed
• Refactoring - 2nd edition - 12% completed

Bookmark count = 6730. Apparently rate of adding new links > my rate of reading links.

Programming & Learning

As I said last week, I raised fix(tamil): unrecognized font clean up and verse corrections - batch3 #17 in OneBible.

I'm digging into MDN pages and refreshing my understanding of JavaScript Object

• Just Keep Buying: Proven Ways to Save Money and Build Your Wealth - 56% completed
• Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change (The XP Series) - 19% completed
• Refactoring - 2nd edition - 12% completed

There are about 6689 bookmarked links lying on my pinboard account.

Programming & Learning

My fix: font issue in tamil/bible.sql #15 PR was merged last week. I've 2 PR worth of patches, planning to raise at least 1 coming week.

If you are using JavaScript, starting with ES2022, you can use Array.at() for accessing array items instead of accessing them using [] braces.

After trying to use emacs for so long, I'm starting to learn vi editor.