Hotels vs Airbnb vs Hostels
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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, […]
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 […]
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.
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 […]