Experience

Yesterday I was talking to my friend about ways to accumulate tuition fees for kids. He suggested going with Chit funds, as they promise 12% returns. I was shocked to hear it from him. We have known each other for over a decade now. Through countless discussions on personal finance, we concluded long back that protecting money is as important as accumulating it. Chit funds are notorious in our society. During my schooldays, chit fund scams were all over the news every other week.

For those unfamiliar, Aadhaar is a universal identity card (or not). It is a biometric-based 12-digit unique number, more or less covers the entire Indian population.

Aadhaar translates to foundation or root. The Aadhaar number is essential for maintaining access to a bank account or a Demat account, mobile connection, and more. The number follows you like a shadow till death. Heck, the number won’t even leave you after death. You would need it at cremation center, then for the death certificate and for transferring your estate as well.

The last quarter of 2023 was spent away from family for work related in a nordic country. The country is small. The Population density is much smaller. From the land of crowded spaces, this was taking a toll. Staying away from friends and family adds to this as well.

Just to fight off the boredom and depression, I resumed filling the journal on daily basis. Following are the reflections of the process.

This is a very, very small post.

I always wonder if uncertainty is bad, possibly the worst feature of life, or may be a bug in life. But uncertainty is not something new that we tend to experience recently. Since the earliest times, uncertainty has been part of life. Thinking out loud, waking up next morning is as uncertain as the weather.

Fear

The Earth has gone through several extinctions before taking its current form. According to the experts, it has gone through the Big Five Mass Extinction. Apart from these extinction events, we understand now that many species go kaput every day. We could be the ones on any day, and the day hasn’t arrived yet. Recently, a microbe has shown us how brittle we are.

This post deals with my experience on contributing to the open source project - Microsoft Documentation.

My first PR

This is not my first PR to an OSS. My very first contribution was to foambubble/foam. The pull request adds licence file to the repo. Yea, I know. This may not qualifies for core technical task. Nevertheless its my contribution. This lead to my Github badge - Pull Shark.

I started interacting with the developers on the fix on April 14^th 2021. Foam’s riccardoferretti was helpful. After series of conversation and some corrections, my changes were merged on April 19^th 2021. Just 4 days.

If my memory serves right, Snapchat popularised the streak phenomena. Later on, the amount popularity and stickiness it creates among the user, many companies jumped on the band wagon - fitness trackers, calories trackers and many more. What the streak does is it creates a habit among the users and make them to use the particular service on daily basis. Also, it creates a sense of pride with the longer streak on has.

Amidst the pandemic, tracking the daily case numbers from the government bulletin became a habit for us. For a small circle of friends involving 3-4 guys, it’s a routine to dissect the numbers and get meaning from the case number.

The distance between the decision-makers and us is more than the distance between Moon and Earth. Yet, we discuss as if to guide the entire state. The discussions usually raise some questions on the back story about the rise or fall of numbers.

Here, I want to discuss about an unexpected outcome from interview. Contrary to the ‘rona times, I felt happy and contented.

The interview is usually a stressful affair. I usually prepare 100s of topics, then the interviewer will bombard me with 101^st topic. Well, its just a déjà vu, nothing new with the session.

The interviewer was friendly and made me absolutely comfortable, there were no stress-inducing questions, all through the entire discussion.

The relationship lasted for 2 years, 3 months, 11 days. Barring restroom moments, we were together all the time. I’m talking about my Pixel 2, which has provided me a wonderful experience on any electronics gadget that I’ve ever owned.

There are few things, worth mentioning here, both positive & negative.

Software-hardware, made for each other - Even though I haven’t used any flagship mobile till then, I feel P2 showed me how it feels when OS is made for hardware. Literally, there were no lag. The pure android is so much more tasty than any other flavor, particularly better than TouchWiz of Android¹

Are you connected to WiFi?, isn’t it slow?”

First part of above sentence is objectively denotes ‘WiFi’. The second part contextually denotes ‘WiFi’ through the word – ‘it’.

According Merriam-Webster, Context is defined as,

The parts of a discourse that surround a word or passage and can throw light on its meaning

Every tech giant is boasting that their digital assistants can understand our contextual conversation. Indeed it is a big step for machines to understand our natural speech.