About me

I am a software engineer and an angel investor based out of the San Francisco bay area. This page is mostly a collection of curated articles that I have written and tools that I have built.

More professional info is on LinkedIn. You can email me at ashishb AT ashishb.net.

Blog posts & Tools

Infrastructure

If you are an infrastructure engineer consider my Docker 101 blog post and then read how you can deploy web services essentially with zero fixed costs. Afterward, you might like reading about the pitfalls of Docker’s scratch image. You might love or hate me for questioning the serverless functions lock-in.

Tools

  1. My dotfiles contain some of the best tools and setups for an engineer related to Android, infrastructure, and Web3 engineering
  2. A backend template to kickstart Go-based projects on Google Cloud Run
  3. A date parsing library for Go that guesses the format and parses any dates

Go Language

If you use the Go language, you would enjoy reading the most common concurrency pitfall of the Go language for beginners. Or how to do inheritance in Go. Or writing Generics in Go like Java and C++.

DevOps

If you are a DevOps person, you would enjoy the common pitfalls of GitHub Actions. If you use bash, consider making it more robust, this check would have prevented me from deleting my full disk! I did that once.

DevOps Tools

  1. GitHub Actions Boilerplate generator
  2. CircleCI analysis tool
  3. Spammy/dead outbound link checker for your blog

Testing

  1. Always test code along the axis of minimum change.
  2. Test resumable uploads/downloads – this will save bandwidth and latency for both you and your users
  3. Check for missing network timeouts in your network requests

Android

If you like Android, you would enjoy my critique of React Native. A more technical reader would enjoy how to catch NDK crashes and how to catch crashes on the Javascript-to-Java bridge. An old but still relevant article on using Android Fragments without crashing the app. Or how to architect Android apps from emerging markets.

If you are an Android user who loves listening to music or podcasts, consider switching to MusicSync, here’s my reasoning behind building it.

Android Tools

  1. adb-enhanced is a swiss-army knife for Android development
  2. Auto Translate Android app GitHub action to translate non-English languages. I use it for MusicSync and VoiceNotes.
  3. androidtool – a better Android CLI tool
  4. Collection of live Android malware samples for research
  5. The most comprehensive Android Security tools list

Android apps

  1. VoiceNotes – A quick and easy Android app to record location-tagged voice notes on the go
  2. MusicSync – A Google Play Music replacement Android app that can play files from SDcard, Google Drive, the web, and podcasts

UX

If you are a Product Manager, you would enjoy reading some of my product-related posts

  1. Why indeterminate progress bars are bad
  2. How to write better emails to users
  3. Why audio startups fail
  4. When marketplaces work and don’t work

Productivity

  1. AutoSnoozer to improve batch processing of emails and
  2. Mindful Reading to maintain one’s own custom RSS feed for reading.

Travel

I enjoy traveling and writing travel blogs. Check out my travel blogs or reviews on TripAdvisor.

Top Online mentions

  1. BBC
  2. Yahoo! Finance
  3. Business Insider
  4. India Today
  5. Google scholar citations
  6. Todoist blog
  7. Eweek
  8. Android Weekly
  9. Medium
  10. Podcasts – Fundraising Radio and Angelneers

10 Replies to “About me”

  1. Sarika July 18, 2011 at 8:23 pm

    Hi Ashish,

    Came across the gyanbuddy website, which lead me to this page. Curious to know which of the programs are currently active, and if there are any groups in San Diego. Found your website to contain a lot of interesting things, in terms of India, books, travel, etc. too. My parents are in the Bay Area, so am a regular visitor but probably harder to stay involved remotely.

    Hope to hear from you!
    Sarika

  2. Nithin November 15, 2011 at 4:45 am

    Hi,

    I like the format of your website and the articles are very informative.
    My interests are Computer and Network security.

    Keep up the good work!

    Regards
    Nithin

  3. R Jagadeesh December 30, 2011 at 5:19 am

    Hi i really like your writings, they are useful. I saw your post asking for someone who can maintain your iitkcampus intranet blog. i am interested in that.

  4. I loved the summary of Humankind. I am wondering if you have come acroos a Book " A brief History Of Hunan Behaviour" by John Preece. It freely available on internet. for the last one year I am trying to read and make a summary. Akhtar December 6, 2018 at 10:20 pm

    Hi

  5. Nemanja January 11, 2020 at 1:40 am

    Thanks for the summaries.

    I am rhe only one in my team who doesn’t read books (I watch videos 🙂 ) and your summaries help me to to be up to speed.

    Summary from a book The Result Take Care of Itself reminds me of a this paper Value Maximization, Stakeholder Theory, and Corporate Objective Function

    and

    Reminds me of system integrity = performance = workability.

    Basically if we want anything to be in integrity and have maximum performance we should give our attention to the workable parts of the whole system and aim to get them to their highest possibilities.

    Anyway, thanks for the book summaries, they are really helpful.

    Nemanja
    cowibo.io

  6. Arishi August 25, 2020 at 5:21 am

    Hi Ashish…
    Very nicely summarised book.. great work..

  7. Shravanthi Suresh-Silver October 28, 2021 at 9:55 am

    Hi Ashish,

    I came in here to ask you questions about the Guatamala vsia process and ended up spending 30 minutes reading through your short stories and I must say you have some amazing stuff!! I thought your poem on nationality/ identity is VERY cool!

  8. Arcadia Vacations December 14, 2021 at 10:43 pm

    Hi|
    You Really Post informatiive Article.
    Keep Going.
    Thanks

  9. geeky February 16, 2023 at 12:13 am

    Hi Ashish,
    How are you. I saw your note regarding Android webview debug and would like to chat with you.

  10. Ashish February 16, 2023 at 12:14 pm

    Sure, email me

Leave a Reply