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Finnish are considered the happiest people in the world. In less than two days, I learned the secret of that. I spent about two days in Helsinki, the capital of Finland, where roughly 30% of the country’s ~6 million people reside. Day 1 - sauna and walking tour Compared to Oslo, Helsinki seemed more lively. Still below Copenhagen in my ranking, though. One thing stood out, and that’s Sauna. The Finnish sauna goes up to 100ºC! And that is the lovely enjoyment in the city of Helsinki. There are two Saunas that I tried, one of them in a public sauna called Sompasauna, a free, 24-hour sauna run fully by volunteers. If you are planning to go here, then go at 9 or 10 PM during summer to see the full crowd. ...

There was recent news about 47% decline in the number of apps on Google Play Store. As a hobby Android developer, who has been developing MusicSync, a Google Play Music + Podcast replacement for the last five years, I thought I would share my experience of maintaining an Android app. And why this reduction in the number of apps is not surprising to me. ...

“The apartment rents are high right now, but we got a good deal”, he said, smiling alongside his roommate. Another friend said, “We got a good deal on a car loan, so, we took the loan, it’s good for building credit history to buy a house later”. “The instructor was super-happy with our amazing group. He taught us a few special tricks that he says he rarely taught.” “The bartender was super-nice to us and made us a special drink” ...

Oslo is one of the weirdest Nordic cities that I visited. It is dull compared to Copenhagen or even Stockholm. The Baumol effect of the oil-funded economy makes it a really expensive place to visit as well. Infact, it is one of the few cities which feel more expensive than San Francisco. To get from the airport to Oslo city, just take a 124NOK train ride. There is a faster 240NOK train ride as well which isn’t worth it. ...

If you are running Python in production, you will almost certainly have to decide which web framework to use. Let’s consider a rudimentary Hello world based test comparing the performance of two popular web frameworks for Python - FastAPI and Flask. I will intentionally use Docker for benchmarking as most deployments today will explicitly or implicitly rely on Docker. For Flask, I will use this Dockerfile 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 # Build: docker buildx build -t python-flask -f Dockerfile_python . # Size: docker image inspect python-flask --format='{{.Size}}' | numfmt --to=iec-i # Run: docker run -it --rm --cpus=1 --memory=100m -p 8001:8001 python-flask FROM python:3.13-slim AS base WORKDIR /app RUN pip3 install --no-cache-dir flask gunicorn SHELL ["/bin/bash", "-c"] RUN echo -e "\ from flask import Flask\n\ app = Flask(__name__)\n\ \ @app.get('/')\n\ def root():\n\ return 'Hello, World!'\n\ " > /app/web_server.py ENTRYPOINT ["gunicorn", "web_server:app", "--bind=0.0.0.0:8001", "--workers=4", "--threads=32"] And for FastAPI, I will use this ...

Recently, after doing some Google mandated updates of MusicSync, my music player Android application, I received the following error in Android Studio during the build process. Plaintext 1 AAPT2 aapt2-8.8.0-12006047-osx Daemon #1: Daemon startup failed I tried to search for the error on Google, and got zero results. ...

My previous article recommended that one should reconsider using Python in production. However, there’s one category of use case where Python is the dominant option for running production workloads. And that’s data analysis and machine learning. Almost all bleeding-edge work in data analysis and machine learning, especially around LLMs, happens in Python. So, here are some of my learnings on how to run Python in production. ...

Dublin is a small city. Despite its high per-capita GDP, unlike Singapore or Tokyo, the city feels fairly low-key and more of a middle-affluent country. The official languages are Gaelic and English. To preserve Gaelic, all laws are officially passed in Gaelic! Day 1 The city of Dublin is not huge. You can walk everywhere and even skip public transport. I would recommend starting with a walking tour that gives you a great idea of the city. Rick Steve has great guides as well. ...

GitHub Actions (or GitLab CI) is great for Continuous Integration (CI). However, using it for Continuous Delivery (CD) for docker images isn’t necessary. And there is a better approach.

Here’s a simple project success heuristic. All projects have some element of uncertainty but over time the questions should become more refined. If that’s not happening, then the project is almost certainly failing. The company might still succeed via a pivot but the project is unlikely to. Consider the progression of questions for a consumer (B2C) product. Would anyone use this? Would a million people use this? What’s the total addressable market? Would people pay for this? Is 10$/month too high or can I increase the price further? Notice how questions keep becoming nuanced. ...