Angel investing for Software Engineers

Software Engineers peak early in their career and especially in places in the San Francisco Bay area, New York, and Seattle attain accredited investor status early on in their career. Hearing stories of Jason Calacanis and Chris Sacca, many consider trying their hands-on angel investing in startups. If you are considering it, here are my few suggestions for that. Should you do it Angel investing, just like many other exotic ventures such as buying arts and vintage coins, is optional....

A short guide for MBAs looking for a job in the tech world

Why Tech In the past decade, interest among MBA grads towards tech companies has drastically gone up. If you are one of those, take a pause and ask yourself “why”. Of course, there are upsides; the tech sector is growing faster, pays well, has a much better work-life balance than finance, private equity, or consulting. But at the same time, do remember that you spend almost 50% of your waking hours at your workplace, so you must as well enjoy it....

Cryptocurrency trading

Background There are three major types of financial exchanges Stocks and bonds Commodity exchange Foreign exchange (Forex)

This website was compromised

For 6-months, this website was compromised. I am not sure what exactly happened, but it was most likely password-reuse, which lend itself to this problem. The problem became apparent when I first noticed an unusual link to a ride-sharing service. Later, I saw more of those links. That’s when I realized that I couldn’t merely sit and scan every blog post manually and decided to write a small interactive link checker tool....

May 1, 2019 Â· 1 min      Tech

Closeum - closed-source in disguise

Earlier, the Software world was rigidly divided between closed and open-source software. Microsoft Windows is closed-source, GNU/Linux is open-source. Microsoft Office and Lotus Notes are closed-source, LibreOffice is open-source. Turbo C++ is closed-source, and GCC is open-source. But now, a new class of software products has emerged whose core is open-source, but still, the open-source software is of limited use. One model is to offer some critical and useful functionality in a closed-source layer via a managed service in AWS/GCP/Azure, for example, Redis is open-source, but useful modules on top of it are not....

Android: Handling JPEG images with Exif orientation flags

A JPEG file can have Exif metadata which can provide the rotation/translation field information for a raw JPEG image. So, a landscape raw JPEG image could actually be a portrait because it’s EXIF orientation could be set to ORIENTATION_ROTATE_90, the best way to handle such scenarios is to either use a library like Picasso or Glide or at least learn from them. Here is a piece of code from Picasso which loads a JPEG as an in-memory bitmap and performs the right translation/rotation....

Mac OS: App Translocation and Android Studio updates failure

I installed Android Studio via homebrew “brew cask install android-studio” as a part of my automated Mac OS setup. Recently, Android Studio prompted me that an update is available. When I accepted to update, it failed with an error “Studio does not have write access to /private/var/folders/wt/rjv6_wcn4f97_2nth7fqftqh0000gn/T/AppTranslocation/19A80F28-865B-41FC-AA87-B8E43C826FCB/d/Android Studio.app/Contents. Please run it by a privileged user to update.” This error was confusing; I was running Android Studio as myself, a nonprivileged user and the same user owned this directory....

Cross-language bridge error handling: JS-to-Java Example

All languages have certain semantics for dealing with error cases. C deals with them by setting error codes. Java deals with them by throwing exceptions. JavaScript deals with them by throwing exceptions as well but unlike Java, it does have any concept of checked Exceptions. The JS interpreter just stops. And this has some interesting implications in hybrid scenarios like a Webview based app. Consider a simple Android app where most of the code is in JavaScript but is making a request to Java layer....

Architecting Android apps for emerging markets

This is a long post. It covers several decisions like API version, distribution beyond play store, UI & network performance, and minimizing RAM, disk, and battery usage.

Startup founders: How not to write an email

Consider this email, And now consider this one, Hi Ashish, You signed up for the Orchard beta not too long ago, and we’re excited to finally send you an invite! ( Just to jog your memory, Orchard helps you make the most of your relationships, keeping you up to date on where you’re spending your time and who you need to catch up with. It’s somewhere between a personal CRM and a todo list for your connections....