AMA

My book.

josd.captnemo.in in case someone is interested

Started writing last year, but have kinda lost momentum.

Do lots of interviews. Bizzare/stupid thing off the top of my head:

The browser makes a second request to the registrar for every https certificate check

So every time you hit google.com, you also hit thawte

Tip for interviews: Your solutions don’t matter as much as your reasoning. If you are able to explain why you took a particular design decision, and give its limits, that’s usually good enough.

Also, people getting confused between hashing, encryption, encoding

I’m still disheartened at the number of people unaware of bcrypt

Yay! Someone does read it

md5 is broken.

https://codahale.com/how-to-safely-store-a-password/

If you are ready to move, just move to bcrypt

Because hand-rolling salts is (slightly) harder than bcrypt anyway

Since bcrypt handles that for you

SHA-256 - 3110.2 M/s

From 2012 - http://blog.codinghorror.com/speed-hashing/

My point over there is that web developers should be aware of how the web itself works

I don’t think a CS education is necessary. I don’t have one

Point 7 in this blog post: https://captnemo.in/2015/10/12/get-better-at-software-development.html

No, undergrad.

And that too in Production & Industrial engineering

Which means I just took 1 java course throughout my entire college

I’m taking haskell classes at Nilenso these days

Friend is running them, and he gives homework

He’s planning it for 6 months or so…

Trying to catch up with Rails 5 features on a side project

Elixir is something I want to explore as well, if I get the time

I usually leave both at work, though.

My system76 is almost like a workstation now

I have a Mac Air

Which I use for travel, conferences and at home

@hiemanshu: With O-rings?

Which keycaps? I’m still waiting for a nice cheap release at massdrop

Started programming in basic at school. Senior at school taught me C++ because I couldn’t make good things in basic

Started web-development at college. Mostly PHP because that is what someone told me to do…

Slowly moved over to other web-related stuff, linux and so on…

I lurked on reddit for a long time before making an account

The idea was to make a novelty account and start flamewars everwhere

Friend carried it on a flight to India.

I got it shipped to his home.

It’s a nice machine with good specs and everything

But the build quality isn’t worth it

i3 - Since June last year.

I was using cinnamon before that.

Intro: @nemo here. I work as a software dev at Razorpay, doing things no one else finds the time for

I’ve been programming since school. Doing web development for the last 5-6 years now.

In my free time, I do writing, sketching, and slacklining these days.

Also, I love playing boardgames and retro games (I have a cool raspberry pi setup where we play Tank weekly)

If you are in bangalore and wanna play Dungeons and Dragons sometime, let me know :simple_smile:

I have a shitty blog post about the nick

I do run pinta on i3, and don’t face any issues

I guess you can’t run gimp in multi-window/floating mode easily

But the single window mode should work fine.

Probably an ATH-M50x, if I can convince myself, or a UE Roll

I like my sennheisers, and they are quite cheap compared to ATH.

Quite happy with my current audio setup, actually

Nopes, they aren’t

I don’t find M30 much comfortable either, and M50 is just too costly for me to justify

I stream my laptop pulseaudio to icecast in office

And just pick up the music on my phone when I walk. It’s fun sometimes :simple_smile:

Hehe. Starting editor flamewars is supposed to be my job

power-management: nothing. It’s mostly used as a workstation, as I said. screen-lock: i3, with a composite lock wallpaper. volume: volumeicon display manager: xdm, because that was easiest to setup.

https://github.com/captn3m0/Scripts/blob/master/i3lock.sh

My i3 config is pretty well commented: https://github.com/captn3m0/dotfiles/blob/47ba1ddf79df271c17cf04b7a6a3506fb114976c/files/i3/.i3/config

I think I covered most of it in my blog post. I helped out with the school program. We went to nearby schools and taught kids rubik’s cubes, basic ciphers, drama etc

hillhacks is very volunteer driven, so I was also helping with the conference scheduling, logistics etc

I use xautolock for that

I like showing off my lock screen, so no monitor turnoffs for me

hiemanshu: I’m really good at Road Fighter. Sometimes play Pokemon, but mostly stick to Tank, Tetris, and Tennis (the nintendo one)

nikhil: hillhacks is a very open event. There is an online signup and it’s highly recommended you join the mailing list

We had lots of tents so didn’t face any accomodation related issues last year, thankfully

I got involved because sva posted a link to hillhacks on the null mailing list and I got instantly hooked (Hacking in the Himalayas is a great pitch)

Contra is harder these days. None of us are good at it anymore

On the PC, I only do linux gaming now

Sometimes on the mac, but limit myself to games that are available for linux

I’ve been playing Risk of Rain these days

Used to play a lot of AoE, still visit the subreddit

I was pretty good at roadrash at one point..

Yeah, I remember spoon getting turbo. Except it was only 20 turbos or so?

And then retype

Wow. Didn’t know cognizance invited him

I’d ask him which for-profit companies are doing free software correctly

You usually hear him giving negative companies: google/android, facebook is evil and so on..

I’d be interested in knowing if there are any companies he thinks that take software freedom as seriously as he does

nvim these days

usual mode of transport is uber in bangalore

Going to get a cycle for commute soon. Still researching

I’d like to get started with running, but for now I slackline every sunday

homeopathy, pseudo-science

We need better architects, if we want to make this a reality. Government + technology has never mixed well together in India..

UPI, for eg, is a nice initiative. I’m still worried about the day aadhar gets hacked, though

Digital India is such a bad umbrella term, btw.

No idea what chair this is. Standard swivel office chair

Table is open office long style. You’ve seen our office, no?

captnemo.in/setup/

Haha. That’s my hotspot name

Same as the hillhacks wifi password

You’ll have to come to the next one to get that

Kindle is better

However, I’ve bought too many physical books last few months.

Chair is adjustable, along with the chair armrests

Hmm, I like the build quality of my Air

But it still doesn’t have wifi support on linux

You can get a pro and install linux on it

Couple of people in our office do that

haha. it’s on my to-watch list.

Don’t watch too much anime. Just the usual: deathnote, FMA: brotherhood, code geass.

Watching samurai champloo these days

not much interested in automobiles. Would love to own a Tesla someday My cooking skills have varied over time. These days I’m limited to maggi

I like Truffles in bangalore.

I like bangalore. Mostly because of the people and the communities here, which I sorely missed while living in places like Dehradun

I’d like to try working from a place like mussorie or nainital someday

Give me enough time and I can make a developer out of anyone. Might take a while for some folks, but it’s doable.

You should pick your profession carefully, you will be spending a lot of your lifetime doing it. Make sure it’s something that you enjoy.

On WM: I was using Cinnamon with lots of shortcuts for workspace switching. I think I’m more productive with i3, but don’t really have a way to test that.

However, I used to use byobu extensively before I shifted.

I even got the same shortcuts for splits in i3 from byobu. Don’t use them anymore but they helped me switch over to i3

Haven’t taught basic programming in a while, but teaching people how to think is usually someone else’s job.

More relevant is the ability to model a given problem

Even basic things like recognising inputs/outputs for a program.

I think drawing flowcharts and doing all those “write a program for ….” questions in school was helpful for me

It works brilliantly

Exactly as you’d want it to: workspaces can move between monitors

I use Win+Shift+(A|S) to move current workspace to left|right

Notes: https://github.com/abhin4v/haskell-classes
Lesson Plan: https://slack-files.com/T026CAXFZ-F03C4TACH-22a00bae5a

abhinav says he’ll get us to write production ready haskell in 6 months

But I doubt that.

@hariprasad.kulkarni physical classes at nilenso office

@ashwinik probably on my devmail idea

1. I like Wingify

Other companies I like are hasgeek (not sure if it’s a startup still), nilenso

@ashwinik: Original Idea: https://github.com/captn3m0/ideas#newsletters-for-github

Proper Specification: https://hackpad.com/Idea-Initial-Discussion-WNTdLjDyPhM

Chat: http://friends.hasgeek.com (Join #devmail)

Not a very good idea for a startup, because of the small market size and hard monetization

@chaitanya yes, cubbon park. Go there every Sunday. Didn’t go today. Won a quiz instead :)

I3 has the sanest config among tiling wms

@sa1 he wrote production Haskell at his previous gig. Currently does clojure i think

I don’t remember his previous company, just that he did haskell there.

@sathyabhat: The first 10 people at razorpay were all from iitr (From 2 different batches). 8 of us from SDSLabs as well

voldyman: Do you really expect an answer here? Standard answer: good weather, awful traffic

mudit: I was only doing c++ before college because I didn’t have proper internet. I gave very little time to acads, which shows in my grades

What were the habits / situations / beliefs u think helped u a lot in your college years?

• Being part of SDSLabs, where I had some nice mentors
• Sticking to one thing I was good at, which I happened to find quite early (web dev). Not necessarily a good thing though. @ashwinik did web for a long time before deciding to do his MS and so on..

How u learnt so much so fast?

• Writing code, making products teaches you faster than anything else can

Also, another thing to keep in mind: I’m probably the worst person to take academic advice from.

People are asking me college advice on the ama. Someone please tell them I'm not fit to answer these questions.

— Nemo (@captn3m0) March 6, 2016

For the mentorship question, I was in second year when we started SDSLabs, so there were people senior to me as well

@muditbhutani: I had a career choice between software development and software security. Decided to keep infosec as my side hobby.

@aps: Should have started infoseciitr from within college rather than remotely

Yes, I was pretty much interested in software.

Shitty decisions when you are kid who just cleared JEE, I guess

Also, Roorkee was close to my place.

I don’t regret it much, because for me college was about a)learning on my own b) figuring out what I wanted to do c) getting around like-minded people. IITs, despite the shortcomings in technical education, are really good at these three things.

nikhil: I am a decent enough production engineer. A lot of P&I work is essentially modelling problems to maths with tools like simplex, linear algebra, and the like. It’s just that I writing software and making products, far more than I’ll ever enjoy doing cost-benefit or a value engineering analysis

Other career choices I’ve considered: software security, writing.

Yes, but we track different metrics, and the customer feedback loop is usually much faster/better in our industry.

And it’s not what we do on a daily basis as developers. Optimising for cost is what you do as a P&I engineer

Mostly yes. The only other career choice I gave some serious thought was infosec, but I never really matured much in that (compared to working on products and code)

I knew I wasn’t getting into production as a career choice pretty early on

did you tried working for software giants

I had a couple interview offers, but decided I wanted to try startups first. Being an HN addict would do that to you. Also, not having a CS background meant I would have to spend a few months brushing up my cs fundamentals. I decided to use that time elsewhere

@perverted_sage: Do the MIT OCW course on algos. Read CLRS.

@hashfyre: I don’t think I work on a 16+ hour schedule, especially seeing as I sleep more than 8 hours usually. I use pomodoro occasionally for working on a focused mode

I have a plan to print cards that say:

Ankit Fadia won the charlatan of the year award at DEFCON. Don't buy his books if you wanna learn something.

and go to bookstores and put that in all his books

Short answer: I didn’t manage it. I sidestepped the problem by missing even more classes. Not something I’d recommend

You’ll like reading this, btw: http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html

1. It’s not just restricted to India. See the link that hiemanshu just posted in #general.
2. I don’t think that any software developer wants to make insecure products. It’s just that security is lower down the priority list of things compared to features
3. However, companies ignoring security reports is something I can never understand. Your first priority should be the security of your customers and you are doing them a great disservice by ignoring security reports.

There are still some good companies in India taking security seriously. https://fallible.co/ for eg.

However, security consultancy (where you are the one doing pen-tests, and not running metasploit) is something I’m yet to see any indian company do well

You and your loaded questions

Anyway, doing a webinar on 14th about UPI. Register if you’re interested :simple_smile:

Yes. Universal Payments Interface. You can find more details at https://razorpay.com/upi/ (scroll)

sudhir: Wanna write a self-help book? /s

Go build things. Rest all will fall into place

Books

I mostly read Science Fiction/Fantasy these days with an occasional non-fiction mixed in. I’m a Neil Gaiman and Brandon Sanderson fan. Still waiting for Winds of Winter to come out. The best three books I read last year (all links are to my reviews):

1. Lions of Al-Rassan (Historical Fantasy)
2. Goblin Emperor (Medieval Fantasy)
3. The Martian (SF)

PHP: I do php/js at work mostly, but love writing Ruby. I’m currently running php7 on dev (and soon on prod), which makes writing code so much more better. There are still issues, yes, mostly regarding inconsistent APIs and names in standard library, but having access to a nice package manager (composer/packagist) can clear most of these. I still call bullshit on the php/scale argument, though.

Death of a language:
I don’t think any language deserves to die. Not even Javascript. Especially not javascript, because that would probably trigger a global economic meltdown. No javascript =

• more than half the internet stops working, preventing even this ama from continuing
• facebook dies a sad death, along with spotify, netflix, google (which survives somewhat)
• Chrome stops working, because even the <chrome://settings> page runs on javascript

By eradicating javascript, you have killed node, mongodb, spidermonkey, and businesses worth billions of dollars relying on things as simple as grunt.

and I thought you did RoR?

I was reading this (old read) earlier today: http://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/10/28/dont-call-yourself-a-programmer/

More particularly this quote:

Most software is not sold in boxes, available on the Internet, or downloaded from the App Store. Most software is boring one-off applications in corporations, under-girding every imaginable facet of the global economy. It tracks expenses, it optimizes shipping costs, it assists the accounting department in preparing projections, it helps design new widgets, it prices insurance policies, it flags orders for manual review by the fraud department, etc etc. Software solves business problems.

Ruby lets me write my code cleaner and faster than anything else.

GIL is still troublesome, though. For me, your code should run as fast as it needs to

And if I need to a different language for a particular purpose, I’ll do that gladly

I break it down into services, figure out the bottlenecks, and would have a list of low-hanging fruits.

Scaling is not something you can just wish into thin air.

You always have plans and know what all things you can optimize and improve

Exactly.

sudhirkhanger: Arya

Lots of people have tried it: http://www.skulpt.org/ (Python) http://trydecaf.org/ (Ruby) http://moonshinejs.org/ (Lua) along with attempts like Dart itself

none of these are transpilers. They either modify the browser runtime

Or run a VM inside javascript

I’d probably go with lua, but I haven’t really given it much thought

Not much to have an opinion. I’ve gone through some of SICP

P4, 40GB hdd, 128MB RAM. Windows 98

2003, I think

Ranger and pcmanfm

Urxvt

Mostly ubuntu on servers

I have multiple hackerearth profiles, but can’t find the one with my ruby submissions right now

The last time I was trying out CC, I ended up doing this: https://www.hackerearth.com/notes/how-i-found-a-bug-in-hackerearth/

I liked codewars better: http://www.codewars.com/users/captn3m0

I want to try out https://starfighter.readme.io/docs/what-is-stockfighter-faq soon

Haven’t gotten much time

Kevin Mitnick’s books are a nice fun read.

The nice part about our industry is that most content is freely available online

My favorite recommendation is Don’t Make Me Think, which is such a great book that I think all developers should be forced to read it

Yes, I use goodreads extensively

You can follow me at https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/6170741-abhay-rana

1. The only reason wallets are popular is because they bypass the RBI 2 factor guidelines
2. RBI has managed to hold our economy pretty well. Their stance on 2 factor is understandable, even though it doesn’t let SaaS companies mature in India at all. NPCI on the other hand is trying really nice things with UPI and IMPS and so on. RBI is even doing a consultation on Card Acceptance Infrastructure currently: https://rbidocs.rbi.org.in/rdocs/PublicationReport/Pdfs/MDRDBEDA36AB77C4C81A3951C4679DAE68F.PDF.
3. There is a lot of regulation in the payments industry (which is kinda needed) that inhibits growth and experiments. However, the only authorities RBI grants this power to are banks, which are monolithic and slow and very risk-averse. However, a few banks like RBL are doing good stuff here. The regulations I’d want to attack are those that prohibit private players from doing [X] while allowing banks to do [X]. Opening a bank is next to impossible in India, and as such, you are left to tying up with banks and hoping you get decent terms.
4. Wallets will hopefully die out over the next few years as we move to better payments infrastructure (things like UPI). They fragment the ecosystem and should not be allowed to flourish beyond a certain limit. Otherwise, you face the same risks as China, where a single private provider (AliPay) controls the majority of the online payments market. Contrast this to somewhere like US, where you have digital wallets, but no one uses them (like AMEX ezeclick) because the incentive for using them isn’t high enough.

UPI kinda does, but it’s still early days. It’s not even live yet.

Merchants can initiate collect payments easily, which open a upi:// intent on android etc

This can be made into a QR code easily

MPIN is separate from USSD, actually

yes, but it’s separate infrastructure

Which they are improving and making better with UPI

See http://www.npci.org.in/Product-Overview-NUUP.aspx

So, the MPIN acceptance kinda becomes open with UPI

I’ll go into more detail in the webinar :simple_smile:

I think you’ll like the changes that UPI is bringing :simple_smile:

@sa1 That is a nice answer, better than I could have answered.

shagun: hackerearth tricked me into creating multiple ones, and they have no way of combining

One from gmail, one because I logged in via github, 2-3 more from other email addresses

Yeah, I’ve been planning to

But it’s not high on my list. Don’t use HE much

one horse sized duck. I could probably run faster