Programming

Google’s official client for Mac OS, “Backup and Sync” is no more. It has been replaced by “Google Drive” now. One problem is that the new approach exposes files as a Network Drive, which, for some reason, isn’t indexed by Spotlight. So, you can no longer search for the Google Drive files via Spotlight unless you re-enable the indexing. After jumping through multiple non-working solutions, I found one that enables indexing on Google Drive. ...

GraphQL is an overkill. REST is simple and easy to use. Open API is a specification that can be used to define RESTful APIs.

In MusicSync, one of the views became complex and too slow to be inflated on the UI thread. So, I decided to do some Pooling around it to inflate it on the background thread and use it on the UI thread. This made the UI snappier, reducing multiple-second load times when opening some folders. However, soon I ended up with an edge case where re-opening the activity (and not the app) led to a semi-functional app. This edge case is hard as it gets triggered only in particular scenarios where the user destroys the activity via swipe up. At the same time, the app keeps running due to the attached foreground service that’s playing the media. And on activity re-creation, I got stale views! ...

Javascript isn’t a language. It is just a specification. Well, that’s true for many other languages like Python and Java. However, most languages have just one de facto implementation. For example, CPython for Python. Java has two major ones - Oracle’s JDK and Google’s Android Java. That’s not true for Javascript though.

This is a story of a messaging app used by billions of users. The app followed an extremely strong model of privacy. The app never persisted the user’s data on the servers. All the communication is end-to-end encrypted. A lot of users of this app, especially, on Android would regularly uninstall and reinstall the app. Now, to prevent these users from losing messages, the messages were backed up to the user’s SD card. In the Android security model, an SD card is a public storage space, accessible to all apps. So, to keep messages private, the backups were encrypted. ...

Google Domains A year back, I had to migrate my domain after Google decided to shut down Google Domains. I had to, not only, painfully setup multiple side-projects subdomain mappings again on a new domain registrar but also re-verify my domain and re-create those mappings on Google Cloud Run. Google Container Registry Google Container Registry is shutting down in 2025. It has been replaced with a new project called Artifact Registry. So, why is Container Registry being shut down? Probably because it 10X cheaper than Artifact Registry. ...

For more than 10 years, this website has been running on WordPress. Over time I come to dislike it for multiple reasons.

Generated code, ideally, should not be committed to version control. Committing generated code can sometimes speed up testing and code generation but it is a design smell. It is better to cache generated code via CI caching. Committing generated code to version control is the worst as it is hard to even detect the difference. However, there are a few specific circumstances where committing generated code/config/data to version control is worth it. ...

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. ...

I recently added adb-enhanced to the Homebrew package manager. Here are some of my learnings and future tips to smoothen up the process.