Programming

This is a story of a messaging app used by billions of users. The app followed an extremely strong model of privacy. The app never persisted the user’s data on the servers. All the communication is end-to-end encrypted. A lot of users of this app, especially, on Android would regularly uninstall and reinstall the app. Now, to prevent these users from losing messages, the messages were backed up to the user’s SD card. In the Android security model, an SD card is a public storage space, accessible to all apps. So, to keep messages private, the backups were encrypted. ...

Google Domains A year back, I had to migrate my domain after Google decided to shut down Google Domains. I had to, not only, painfully setup multiple side-projects subdomain mappings again on a new domain registrar but also re-verify my domain and re-create those mappings on Google Cloud Run. Google Container Registry Google Container Registry is shutting down in 2025. It has been replaced with a new project called Artifact Registry. So, why is Container Registry being shut down? Probably because it 10X cheaper than Artifact Registry. ...

I use Makefile for Android just like I use Makefile for my non-Android side-projects.

Android has two distinct navigation guidelines as opposed to iOS. Getting them right is nuanced.

Let’s say you are building a git analytics product. Your product supports GitHub and GitLab for now. It might support more products in the future. 90% of the codebase that supports GitHub and GitLab is identical. 10% is specific to GitHub and GitLab. There are two ways to build software abstractions here. The easy path to fall for is to have unified objects that take care of both GitHub and GitLab data. These objects would, however, behave 10% differently depending on whether it is GitHub or GitLab. Your codebase will be ridden with conditionals that trigger only for one or the other. ...

If you run any web service always enable support for serving compressed responses. It will save egress bandwidth costs for you. And, more importantly, for your users. Over time, the servers as well as client devices have become more powerful, so, compressing/decompressing data on the fly is cheap.

Hugging Face is GitHub for machine learning models. Their on-the-fly model download scheme, however, is difficult from a DevOps perspective. Here’s how to disable it.

Every public-facing API service should have API usage limits. If this seems overkill then ask yourself if would it be OK if a single IP sends a million requests a second. This does not apply just to publicly documented services but even to undocumented services that are publicly accessible.

The ultimate guide to using Poetry inside Docker

I recently added adb-enhanced to the Homebrew package manager. Here are some of my learnings and future tips to smoothen up the process.