I’ve recently been fascinated by minimalism and the sheer bliss it brings into my life. I don’t own a personal computer or laptop since I decided to use my work laptop for all my professional and personal development needs. Here’s how I’ve set it up for maximum productivity and portability. …

Some quotes/thoughts I admire, gathered during my college years: Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. What would you do if you weren’t afraid? Life begins at the end of your comfort zone. It’s the space between the bars that holds the cage. A ship in a harbour is safe but that’s not why ships were built. The lesson is simple, the student, complicated. Things may come to those who wait, but only the things left by those who hustle.

I was using a Desktop with Linux Mint for a while before moving to Mac. I now use MacBook Air as my workstation and have a very minimalist setup on it with minor tweaks. I’ve recently had to change my workstation multiple times and setting everything up just the way I like was a tedious process. Listing it down here so that the process consumes less time in the future. I plan to automate the setup process soon.

I was looking for a simple and clean way to showcase open source contributions to GitHub repositories on my résumé. Specifically, a single link to show all contributions towards an organization on GitHub. GitHub’s URL query parameters make it a breeze. Here’s how to enlist all pull requests contributed across repositories within a GitHub organization: github.com/pulls?q=author:<GH_username>+org:<GH_org>+is:pr

Earphones kharab hue to arson baad thode gaane gunguna liye Thode ghaas pr baith gye, to thoda aasmaan ki or nazar ghuma li Thodi dooriyon mein nazdeekiyan mehsoos ki, thodi nazdeekiyon mein dooriyan Thoda zindagi se mile, thoda apne aap se Isi mein safar beet gaya.

I recently found myself tasked with reliably sending non-promotional text messages to Indian phone numbers via Zapier. The mainstream Zapier app to do so is Twilio. I found the following limitations when using Twilio for Indian phone numbers: I can’t currently buy Indian phone numbers to send SMS from. It fails to send SMS to numbers with DND (Do Not Disturb) mode enabled. I’ve found the Gupshup API to be very reliable for this usecase. Although, interacting directly with this API via Code on Zapier wasn’t very smooth.

I found myself grokking through the list of interfaces returned by the ifconfig command to get my private IP address and opening a new tab in my browser to get my public IP address. Both of these have better and more efficient ways to get to them individually, including some nifty command line tools. I wanted to get both of these with a single command. Following utility helps me do that. Hope you find it useful.

If you’ve been wanting an easier way to spin up a multi-member MongoDB Replica Set for local development, then here’s a cleaner way of doing so without having multiple terminal sessions open. Just fork the gist below and use make start to get the replica set up and running, make stop to stop it. Connect to it using mongo --port 30000. Credits: I read this and wanted an easier way to use it in development.

When I was asked to introduce myself using a short profile during my on-boarding at SocialCops, I started thinking of an awesome way to do exactly that. I wanted the introduction to be symbolic of the work I do in some fashion. I stumbled upon an idea. How about creating a man page for myself? I mean, that’s how computer science engineers are introduced to the software they use and build upon. So here’s a shot at introducing myself by means of a UNIX-style manual page: