Posts

Dominica, not to be confused with the Dominican Republic , the nature island, is not easily accessible via the mainland United States. The airport is small and only propeller planes can land there. The island is beautiful and is one of the few Caribbean islands with a rainforest. It is known to have 365 rivers. The currency is East Caribbean Dollar (1 USD = 2.7 XCD). The USD has full acceptance, though. Kalalau is the national dish. It’s a soup made from Dakshin, and I would recommend trying it out. Public transport is better than most other islands but is still limiting if your itinerary is jam-packed. There are two towns, Roseau and Portsmouth. I would recommend staying in Roseau if you don’t have a rental car since most tours, taxis, and buses depart from there. Most good activities are on the south side of the island. The south faces the calmer Caribbean Sea while the north side faces a more turbulent Atlantic Ocean. Things to do Boiling Lake - a 6-hour round-trip hike on a well-marked trail. It starts at Laudat, the highest village on the island. You can either take a 50 EC$ taxi or a 5 EC$ public bus from the Botanical Gardens. There is a “breakfast river” stop one hour into the hike where you can refill water bottles. The temperature at the center of the lake is about 400ºC, while at the edges is 80ºC. Victoria Falls - The most beautiful falls on the island. It has an excellent natural swimming pool. It has a bit convoluted of a hike that involves crossing a river four times. So, it is hard to do this without a guide. Wavine Cyrique Falls - The falls themselves are not extraordinary, but the hike to the falls is pretty intense and involves climbing down a ladder on the cliff along with a cliff hike. ...

Recently, this question came up during the discussion. “How many source-code repositories should a startup have?” There are two extreme answers, a single monorepo for all the code or repository for each library/microservice. Uber, for example, had 8000 git repositories with only 200 engineers! I think both extremes are wrong. Too many repositories make it hard to find code and one single repository makes it harder to do simple things like testing , bisecting (to find buggy commit), deciding repository owners.

Quick reference for converting Celsius to Fahrenheit and vice versa

A sample of LinkedIn requests I receive these days. Hi Ashish, I’m the CEO of [redacted]. [redacted]. I’m looking for financial partners and would like to connect to see if we’re a fit. Hi Ashish, I’m the CEO of [redacted]. [redacted]. I’m looking for financial partners and would love to connect! - M Hey Ashish, I’m the CEO of [redacted] - [redacted]. I’m looking for introductions to financial partners and would like to connect to see if we’re a fit. - S Hi Ashish, I’m the CEO of [redacted]. [redacted]. I’m looking for introductions to financial partners and would love to connect! - K

Cancun, or, more precisely, Cancún, is a coastal tourist city on the Caribbean (eastern) side of Mexico. There are two significant areas, Punta Cancun (tip of Cancun), also known as the Hotel Zone and Playa Del Carmen. We chose to stay in Punta Cancun. The Hotel Zone is walkable and you don’t need to rent a car if you are staying there. Buses are always available to go to other parts of Cancun though you rarely will. ...

The book takes a data-driven approach to analyze the world.

We all have to make significant code changes from time to time. Most of these code changes are large. Consider the scenario that you merged one such significant change, and then other team members made a few more changes on top. Then a major bug is detected. You desperately make the fix. It makes it in. You declare a victory, and a few hours later, your colleague notices another bug/crash/performance regression. Your commit cannot be reverted. It isn’t just about you. Many others have built on top of the change you made—the code sloths along in this broken state for a few days before you eventually fix it. Everyone has faced this issue at some point or the other.

After renting a moped in Thailand, I stopped at a small shop to ask for a petrol pump/gas station. Instead, the shop owner handed me a bottle of gasoline for purchase. “Must be a peaceful country where they can sell gasoline in bottles.”, I said to myself, “In most parts of the world, people would use this as a petrol bomb during violent protests and riots.”

We decided to do a packaged tour of Kerala, India. The tour included round-trip flights from Delhi to Kochi, a taxi for the full journey, and all the hotel stays. Day 1 - Kochi to Munnar While going from Kochi to Munnar, a three-hour drive, we first stopped at Valara falls and then saw the Ayurvedic (herbal) medicinal and spice production at Greenland Spice Garden . Day 2 - Munnar We checked out the Mattupetty Dam and the nearby market. From there, we headed to Echo Point . While returning, we stopped at the Cowboy Adventure Park . I would highly recommend this park; your driver won’t probably want to take you here since the price is too low to give him a kickback. We had to skip Eravikulam national park since we spent too much time (~3 hours) at the Cowboy Adventure Park. Then, we headed back to Munnar and checked out the Tata Tea Museum. There isn’t much to see at the museum. In the evening, we ended up for a massage at an Ayurvedic Massage Centre . The center appears rustic, but the experience was excellent. ...

If you are building an app that uses the user’s contact book then their certain gotchas to avoid. Telephone country codes are prefix-free If a country has a country code “+91”, then no other country will get a country code like “+912” or “+913”. This scheme ensures that numbers are inherently unambiguous. Telephone numbers can have multiple representations Since most people don’t dial internationally, telecom systems implicitly assume a domestic call. So, someone dialing 612-555-1234 in the US is dialing “+1-612-555-1234”, while the same person in India is dialing “+91-612-555-1234”. Since international dialing would be more infrequent, telecoms require unique prefix numbers like “00” to distinguish whether someone is 612-555-1234 in their country or 0061-255-51234 in Austria. In some states, even the domestic area code is not explicitly required. So, a user might have stored “555-1234” as the phone number to which telecoms will implicitly prefix the user’s area code. And if the user wants to dial beyond their area, the telecom operator would require an additional “0” prefix to mark that it is an STD call . This localization has a massive implication regarding processing cleaning and normalizing phone numbers retrieved from the user’s contact book. Both country code and area code don’t contain “0”, and usually, that’s superfluous. So, while telecoms might be OK with calling or sending SMS to “0-612-555-1234”, they will treat a number like “91-0-612-555-1234” as incorrect. ...