Dheepak's blog

Of late I’m spending good amount of time with my toddler. The things she learns and the way she communicates is intriguing me. To be frank, I believe almost every kid does the same, more or less. But as I am seeing her development from very close I do observe on how she learns.

1. Imitation: She imitates us. Whatever we do she tries to replicate us. For example, she tries to saute the imaginary food on her toy kitchen set.

2. No Ego: They doesn’t decide on whom to copy from. She mimics what her cousin does. The cousin we are talking about is barely an year old. She sees something new, she copis it; no discrimination on age.

3. Not thinking what others thinking: She doesn’t consider what others thinking. Isn’t it this factor stops us from doing what we love. Having said that, sometimes she screams in public place irritating fellow beings.

4. Identifying patterns: Numbers are abstract concept for a toddler. Yet, on saying 3, she runs. Its more like a pattern matching than understanding 1-2-3.

5. Observing all the time: There is no dedicated learning time for her. She just goes on to observer and mimic all the time.

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.

This is a follow up to last month’s post on same name.

What’s new?

• Tooltip - Earlier, we were employing the browser’s native tooltip. With this update we have customised tooltip with publish date and categories along with the title of post.
• Transitions - On hovering the circles turns green and tooltip pops up.

Scope for improvement

This is a follow up to last month’s post on same name.

There are few changes made to the chart.

1. Today marker: Instead of drawing a full line for the current year, we are allowing the line to grow with passing day. This is a major change.
2. Transition: The trasnition effects are the major change here. Ironically, the amount of code change is minimum - tbh addition of 2 lines is all that’s needed.
3. Hyperlinks: All the hyperlinks are made colored with dark blue, as this is the default color in all browsers.
4. Tooltip: We have used title tag to implement the tooltip. This is not a major change or in other words the tooltip can be better. For that we have to go for CSS method, which is still a bit far from my reach.

Scope for improvement

This is an attempt to recreate the earlier created blog post through D3js.

I’m more of backend developer, working predominantly in Python + SQL. But, trying out JS is long time wish, which got fufilled through a Udemy course and some good imspiration.

The visuals can be improved vastly and can add few more options. But this post is to show the progress. Also, this is an attempt to conform that D3JS output can be hosted on our static site.

Once in a while we stumble into something interesting while we are not looking for it. This is a post on how I came across a chart while going through an online course, the experience in replicating the chart, the lessons I learnt.

The instructor of the course - Course: Data Visualization Fundamentals and Best Practices by ObservableHQ. While going through his website I found this interesting chart - Blog Calendar.

The discovery

Displaying his blog posts over the years in a chart was something I’m seeing for the first time. Since then even during his class I was seeing it how it was built and imagining how it would look for my blog. During the time provide for the final assignment, I doubled down and spent time on exploring tools to recreate the chart.

The 30s are tricky period. Till 20s you can survive with a student or young earner tag. In the late 20s, you experience what the freedom is. And, when you start feeling you can do whatever you can and reach wherever you want to in life. Now you’re in your 30s and most likely you got punched at your face.

Right now the project focuses on creating dashboard for Mutual funds, and gradually adding other investement vehicles viz stocks, PPF, and EPF.

Fetching NAVs

To track the mutual funds, we come across an API by Yuvaraj Loganathan - MFAPI. Thank you, Yuvaraj. The API gets updated on daily basis and free to access (as in free beer). For our project, which is not intended for any financial gain, this api is the right fit.

Osmosis

Osmosis is term all of us come across during our schooling days.

In biology, osmosis is the movement of water molecules from a solution with a high concentration of water molecules to a solution with a lower concentration of water molecules, through a cell’s partially permeable membrane.

Water purification through reverse osmosis is one of the popular application in our day to day life.

Do we see anything similar to Osmosis in real life?

This is continuation in the series about our side project. This post is a follow up to the pervious post on various tools used to build the process of building the application

The Environment

Core language used in our project is Python. Python is used to fetch details from API calls, cleaning the API return value, and also writing it into DB. Even though the language is very popular and user ranges from amateurs to big corporations, it undergoes development. Implying the new versions are created and released often. And so, setting up the environment is necessary.