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I reached Aswan, Egypt after an overnight train journey. The city is not exactly tourist-friendly, and I wouldn’t get any signal on my Google FI connection. This has happened before but this was the breaking point. I quickly ran to a nearby store and got a local SIM. The plan was cheaper than my Google FI plan (10 US$/GB). It is 2021, SIM cards are activated in a matter of minutes and data is cheap. It might take you ~30 minutes of bureaucracy to get a SIM but the coverage one gets is well worth it. Especially, if you travel in remote areas where international roaming might only provide limited coverage. Further, only buy a pre-paid plan, so, the amount you are going to spend is limited. ...

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

Day 1 - Guadalajara city Start with a walking tour to see the center of the city. Compared to Mexico City, Guadalajara appears safer, cleaner, and more well-maintained. Do check out the largest gold market and the largest covered market in Latin America (“Mercado San Juan de Dios”). ...

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

One core aspect of traveling is figuring out where to sleep. Barring more exotic options like sleeping in a tent or an RV, most people end up choosing either a hotel, an Airbnb (or VRBO), or a hostel for a stay. Read on to see what I like/dislike about each of these and what’s my favorite. Hotels Hotels are designed for tourists and not travelers. Hotels, especially big chains, are great for consistent and high-quality service. ...

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.

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. ...

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.

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.

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. Alternatively, one can take a bus from the bus terminal for 8500 AEP. Apart from that one has to pay 5500 AEP for glacier entry. There is an option to do a 1-hour boat tour of the glacier for 8000 AEP. And for 70,000 AEP, one can hike on the glacier. However, I had done that earlier in Alaska, so, I decided to skip that. ...