Currency issues in Argentina

I have traveled to many countries around the world. Some accept credit cards. Some only deal in cash. Some accept US Dollars. Some only accept local currency. Nowhere, however, I have dealt with a system as weird as Argentina. There are myriad exchange rates.

Abstractions should be deep not wide

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....

Some data on podcasting

A few years back, I scraped data on podcasters from iTunes. The data was a bit underwhelming and made me realize that podcasters can’t be a potential market. It is a bit dated but I believe is still relevant.

Always support compressed response in an API service

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.

Perito Moreno Glacier

A day in El Calafate - Patagonia, Argentina

El Calafate is the gateway to Argentina’s Patagonia region. However, there isn’t much to do in this city as such beyond the Perito Moreno Glacier. If you are flying into El Calafate, then I would recommend first going to El Chaltén. And then spend your last day in El Calafate before flying out from the airport that’s less than 20 minutes away by taxi. I took an 11500 AEP guided bus tour to Perito Moreno Glacier that included a pick-up and drop-off back to my hotel....

hugging-face-down

Hermetic docker images with Hugging Face machine learning models

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.

American Elections

The United States has a federal system of government. The more interesting aspect is how Americans vote thrice for the federal government.

February 25, 2024 · 3 min      Politics

The sound of "ch"

There are at least three different ways “ch” gets pronounced in English words and that tells you the origin of those words.

API services should always have usage Limits

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.

Laguna De Los Tres

Hiking in El Chaltén - trekking capital of Argentina

El Chaltén, a small town in Patagonia, Argentina is a hiking heaven. There are three major hiking paths in El Chaltén, and all of them are easily accessible from the town. One is located in the south, the other two are in the north-west and north-east side of the town, respectively. Here’s my recommendation on how to do all those hikes in three days.