My parents are visiting me this month, and somehow we were randomly chatting about nursery rhymes. There was a particular one that we vaguely remembered but couldn’t recall the lyrics of – “Exercise is really great.” After struggling to remember it for a while, and then googling the name and failing to find anything, we remembered… my childhood audio cassette! When I was a kid, my parents would ask me to recite the songs and nursery rhymes I had learned and recorded them. Well, we did have an MP3 version of the cassette. Alas, my mom said we hadn’t actually recorded this particular song. A few minutes later, while I was annoying my wife with the MP3 of my childhood cassette, my mom jumped up out of her chair – the song was on it!

There exists a fantastic newsletter called Money Stuff by this brilliant writer called Matt Levine. I seriously cannot overstate how much I love reading it – it’s truly amazing. It’s not just me, lots of other people like it too. You should read it!

Recently, I was idly wondering about the topics Matt Levine writes about in Money Stuff. I thought it would be interesting to see because of how they sort of reflect trends in Finance news. I had some free time on my hands in between jobs and I decided to find out!

A few weeks ago, I was watching some informative system design talks at work. One of the topics discussed was circular dependencies in distributed systems. In particular, I learnt something I found fascinating: if your system has a hard circular dependency, you can never reboot it!

A few weeks ago, I upgraded my Linux OS to Ubuntu 18.04 (from 16.04). I did a clean install and overall it’s been nice - some function keys that didn’t work before now work great out of the box! However, one thing that’s annoyed me is the *beep* sounds that the shell makes (both Bash and zsh).

Here’s a puzzle. What do you think this Javascript code does?

f();
var f = 5;
function f() {
    console.log("Hello!");
}
f();

I recently wrote a post about Balloon, a new programming language I’ve been working on. In this post, I’ll try to put down some more of my thoughts on what I want to see Balloon become.

Since February this year, I’ve been working on a project that I’ve wanted to work on for quite some time now - a new programming language. After about 200 commits, things are now in working condition!

I’ve been working with server-side generated HTML for several years now, and the problem of code injection into HTML pages has been pervasive. A couple of days back, I discovered something fantastic that Go has built right into the standard library to help with this: context-aware autoescaping in HTML templates.

“Hello, world.” Words that every programmer first learns how to print (or printf).