hrmnjt.dev::sttp://secure_thought_transfer_protocol

ivanti, clickops and quirks of osascript

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This is a short and sharp one.

One of the necessary evils at work is VPN. I’m yet to experience a non-clunky VPN and I believe this is by design. The VPN software is generally gatekeeped and obscured to make it difficult for the end-user to bypass security controls. What I crave is a better developer experience when using VPN. (I’ve heard good things about Tailscale; but I’m yet to try it or other alternatives.) But, here I’m digresssing. At work, we need to use Ivanti VPN which on MacOS installs and provides a convenient menubar icon.

introducing rfd, again

Sun, 08 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I’m a RFD fanboy! I love reading them, and I wish for a workplace which follows them. I’m a 10x engineer if I write an RFD beforehand (even a minimal one for myself). At work, I always find opportunity for applied ideas and writing specifics makes it concrete and relevant given known implicit constraints.

Secondly, getting your team to talk based on a common medium is a winner. Any common medium - RFDs, emails, “a sprint ceremony”. Hey! if it works for you, great! RFD is more productive than meetings and in absence of an existing culture, I push for RFDs (or equivalent) to share technical improvements (features or tech-debt).

sandwich recipe

Sun, 01 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Prime’s My Dev Setup Is Better Than Yours stuck with me when I watched it last year. Moral of the course (which is more a demo) is – your setup is best for you because it’s yours - custom built for how you work. I tried mocking it with sparse commits here and there. The real kick was changing jobs last year which means new laptop and new vigor to create my “dev setup”. Instead of bikeshedding and analysis paralysis, I went brrr and built a workflow on shoulders of giants. This is production grade software where production is “works on my machine :P”.

build libraries before frameworks

Sun, 04 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Start of this year, we had a re-org at work, which merged 2 data engineering teams together. As part of the merge, engineers started discussing internal projects — one of them was about a framework created to ingest data from multiple sources into central data infrastructure. During the “knowledge transfer” sessions, one detail that kept bothering me was the word framework.

I believe the word — framework is an overloaded term as it has different meaning everyone I know at work. This shard (aka. post) is my understanding for what is a framework, how does it differ from a library and, how should an individual or team start building them.

next 3 months goals

Thu, 10 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I’m going to be 33 this year. These are interim goals till then. I want to proclaim my goals and shout out it to the world so that when I review it in July 2025, I can reflect on my progress and make necessary adjustments. I believe systems are better than goals but since I’m starting from blank slate, below goals are directional for me to create new systems.

0xC0NTENT: START

pyenv to uv

Thu, 02 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Back story: When I read “How fast is your shell?” ¹ by Thorsten Ball, almost an year ago, I immediately jumped my seat to check my shell latency. I use zsh as daily driver, not because of choice, but rather because it comes as default shell on MacOS. When I started my career, choice of shell was an unknown unknown for me. I didn’t know that since macOS Catalina, Apple switched from bash to zsh to avoid licensing obligations of GPLv3 for newer versions of bash. I was also not aware of POSIX compliance of shells and maintaining portability for scripts to run anywhere. Shell scripts was as means to an end and it worked. Over the years, I’m more inclined to terminal based interfaces and reading the article struck a chord somewhere deep and I was compelled to fix my shell startup time.

reading files in style with duckdb and harlequin

Mon, 02 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Earlier, I wrote a small utility to read files with duckdb ¹ and I’m finding amazing mileage for this small utility. I recently found Harlequin ² which natively works with duckdb on the terminal. Its even better than the CLI in some cases because it does SQL IDE stuff but in the terminal.

So, I extended earlier utility function ³ to add a harlequin edit mode.

Now, when I do just npq DATASET I get the default duckdb CLI

reading files with duckdb

Sat, 05 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Couple weeks ago, I was troubleshooting a data pipeline and in the process checking couple of CSV and Parquet file from S3. The workflow for checking CSV files is simple enough and fastest way on MacOS is to have CyberDuck open and previewing file from S3. This feature from Cyberduck is a godsend and it saves so much time and bloat when dealing with data files on S3.

However, for Parquet files, I had to download and inspect the file or use parquet-tools to read the file. It’s very nifty again but because I want to inspect the data, I need to deal with AWS sessions and the command is verbose too.

vim-motion cheatsheet

Mon, 08 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Right now, my coding workflow can be summarized as furious alt-tab between Firefox, Sublime Text and iterm2 and maxing out on keyboard shortcuts for all three of them. I always had the urge to ditch Sublime as well and move to my own personalized development environment but setting up neovim and leaving the comfort of Sublime felt like unnecessary pressure for me. In order to get hooked on Vim motions I switched to vim-bindings on Sublime Text and found myself using them a lot instead of Sublime shortcuts which don’t feel very natural and intuitive anymore. But my range was very little; I’m not using a lot of what is possible; a lot of what can be good and intuitive.

macos menubar

Mon, 04 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I really like my 16.2-inch MacBook; the mini-LED backlit; the Liquid Retina XDR; the 1600 nits peak; the P3 gamut wide color; and the ProMotion for adaptive 120Hz refresh rates. But with all these goodness, there is a “notch” situation. It doesn’t bother me so much until some of the menubar icons go below it and I can’t find that anymore. Apparently, everyone in Cupertino thought that the best solution to “not having enough room to display menubar apps” is to “hide them with zero indication that there are more that simply can’t be displayed. Thank you, Notch!

git organized (part ii)

Sun, 18 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Like last year, I was watching FOSDEM'24 this year from home. There were many interesting topics but one of them was “So You Think You Know Git” by Scott Chacon ¹. Since I’ve already tried to make the local git workflow better, it was relatively low energy for me to try out suggestions from this talk.

Another reason to revisit this was Julia’s toot ² which was a mega thread where a lot of people wrote their favorite gitconfig options. I would definitely recommend reading that thread (full of hidden treasures).

branching strategy with airflow

Sun, 21 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

context specific opinions

Recently, I started working on a new team and this is the time we are talking about way of working and as per the unpopular opinion above, it was time to talk about branching strategy. There was a constraint - “We were going to commit into an existing monorepo and leverage existing infrastructure”. This is not a bad position to be in. I’m pro-reusability when it comes to infrastructure; it eases startup as there is always a baseline and reduces the silos. I also like monorepos a lot as well; they make it easier to collaborate with team and learn from different teams.

2024

Tue, 09 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Embracing the oddities

There is something strange about “new year”.

There is hope that something new is going to begin and it might be better than status quo. There is quiet that happens at work when people go on annual leaves and there is suddenly time available to work on stuff we wanted to do but could never get to. There is pleasant weather in Dubai which makes you want to go out often. There is happiness of spending extra time with family. This cocktail of feelings happens every year towards the end of the year but never otherwise. It is reasonable but strange.

git organized (part i)

Wed, 06 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Git is core part of my daily workflow (work or otherwise) and there are far too many ideas stash-ed in my head which can either (a) improve hygiene or (b) increase productivity.

folders, aliases and visual feedback

Before today, I organized all repositories in freedesktop.org xdg-user-dirs(1)¹ inspired $HOME/code folder for both personal and work repos. I can’t trace back why I do so but I would thank my past self to not organize folders aggressively and follow a convention (even without knowing it too well).

pbe: adding features to blog

Thu, 30 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

The term “PBE” is a play on the an acronym IDE i.e. Integrated Development Environment and abbreviation for “personalized blogging environment”. The core idea of the post to check on all personalizations I wanted to do on this blogging setup and also stay as reference to how certain elements on the website might behave.

why the hell did it take you 10 months to do this?

It did not. After I wrote the first post, I started burning my energy on my day job which was interesting and hectic to say the least. There were lot of things for me to learn and a lot of time was spent fixing stuff for work. Meanwhile, my development workflow has changed a lot

commencing boot sequence

Sun, 12 Feb 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Hello, world!

Boot Sequence is the set of instructions that get the computers running when we press the power button. For example in Linux, it is generally first is the BIOS starting up MBR. MBR runs GRUB which executes Kernel which executes init sequence which executes runlevel programs. I’m not sure of all the things that happen in a sequence, but that content is probably for next post. For me and this website though, as the catchy title says, this is the first set of step which hopefully is going to setup the pattern of blogging for me.

notes 1.0.0

Sat, 02 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Months ago, I started on an implementation for a note taking command line utility that would work for my use case. It took me some time now to find time between work and COVID to make enough progress on my side project/utility.

Read about context

I’ve now finally been able to write and complete the 1st version of the basic feature list that I expected to cover.

Git repository - https://github.com/hrmnjt/notes

snigdha and harman: an invitation

Sun, 23 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000

We met 8 years back and back then none of us knew that we are going to spend lots of time staying together being significant to one another. What started as a friendship back then has evolved to a promise that we hold to each other to stay together for time to come.

Back in 2012, the year when the world was going to end, we were still trying to get an engineering degree (we were stubborn and not superstitious at all). I was stupid and idiotic and she was classy and kind. We were working together to give back to society in college being part of The iCare Group. We would have not met or the equation would have been very different if it were not for this group.

dotfiles: setting up

Mon, 03 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000

A simple set of enhancements can personalize shell and it becomes more productive and enjoyable to work with.

I like command line interfaces. The biggest affinity that I have towards CLIs are predictability and reproducibility. If you do any actions which can be codified, it become very simple to repeat those actions and do it in the same way as many times as possible. These fundamental behavior of command line interfaces have also shaped how I design code in life with a speck of idempotence, abstraction and simplicity. Although I have a lot to learn on this subject, the love for shell never decreases.

sphinx for documentation

Fri, 10 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Sphinx is awesome if you have to use it for open source documentation for python projects. Some of the things that I particularly like about that is:

code is automatically included as a part of your documentation
- if you put awesome docstrings in your python code, you will be rewarded
thousands of integrations - free publishing, nice community and great tooling
documentation is a part of code - goes hand in hand

There are multiple awesome sources for someone who wants to start using Sphinx for their project. This post is an effort from my end to layout the context and make a reference for future projects.

latex based resume

Wed, 01 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000

LaTex is a pretty old technology and I was not aware of it till very recent.

I was always amazed by the similarity in which the scientific journals and research papers were formatted. I was under the impression that there is a standard defined somewhere; brought to existence by a group or institutions; and is so sacred that everyone follows the same formatting. In the search, I found BibTex and then Tex and its friends - LaTex and ConText.

notes 0.1.0

Sun, 22 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000

I always think about putting thought together and need a scribbling place. For stuff that can be shared, this section of my blog works well. For the private stuff, not so much though.

One thing I’m very concerned about is the promise of a software or tool which takes data from users. I’ve become more and more cognizant about my online presence in the recent times.

What do you say to a note taking application which:

dubai vs voip

Wed, 11 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Dubai, or should I say UAE have had an ever long issue with VoIP. Club it with the costly telecom plans compared to other countries, it becomes borderline impossible to talk to people back in India.

People generally resort to VPN, but I find that to be a very un-natural way of making calls. Mind you, I’m very pro-VPN. In fact, I like the improved privacy and have fiddled with OpenVPN back in Bangalore days a lot.

start microblog

Tue, 10 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Concern 1: I don’t like posting updates to Twitter. Why? Because:

I’m a slow thinker
I’m very crude in my thoughts
I hate the infamous Imposter Syndrome, which I think is rooted somehow on social media
I hate broadcasting personal details which are not of importance to the whole world

What I do on Twitter is - read a lot of good stuff (among rants, jokes, memes and related stuff), learn about new trends and retweet things which appeal.

creating cleaner hugo theme

Sat, 27 Jul 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Solving my troubles by creating a theme focused on content, cleanliness, speed, responsiveness and privacy.

Vulnerabilities, security alerts and Dependabot

Github is an awesome place for people to collaborate for anything code. Last month, around the time for Github Satellite 2019, Github acquired Dependabot With this change, security fixes became way easier and I was delighted.

All Github repositories now feature a Security tab and Github using Dependabot to create alerts for security vulnerabilities that exist in code. Dependabot makes it better by analysing the vulnerabilities and create automated PR for you to solve the issues. With this careless coders like me, can fix the issues w.r.t. security and learn more as well. Read more

using GoLang Present for coded presentations

Thu, 30 May 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Are you lazy programmer who wants to make a rich presentation with cheap efforts?

In a hurry? TL;DR:

Why do we make presentations?

Visual communications are highly constructive and comprehensible form of creating memories.

Wikipedia says:

Visual communication is the conveyance of ideas and information in forms that can be seen…

…Visual communication is a broad spectrum that includes signs, typography, drawing, graphic design, illustration, industrial design, advertising, animation, color, and electronic resources…