Forem: Harshad Sharma

Keyoxide Verification

Harshad Sharma — Tue, 08 Nov 2022 19:40:34 +0000

$argon2i$v=19$m=16,t=2,p=1$MmdaYUIwaVFkRlpyOFdsNA$n7t7fQeaYnjyGPj8jNWDbQ

Ghosts of Programmers Past

Harshad Sharma — Mon, 27 Nov 2017 15:04:01 +0000

For thousands of years, our species has been steadily building up information in ways unlike any other species known to us. It is the key to our success thus far. Information is not necessarily human-made, of course, any state of matter that is not utterly random has some information encoded in it.

It was fascinating to watch my geologist brother take a careful hacksaw to rock after rock, cutting each piece to size for the experiments, analyzing the magnetic properties and building a picture of how sediments formed layers of particles with the magnetic polarity of the earth embedded in every layer, forming a timeline. Even rocks tell stories to those who are listening!

Then I heard this story about Joe Ossanna and one of the programs that he authored back in 1970s: troff. If you haven't heard of it, it's alright, but if you're running a UNIX clone, you can try typing "troff -h" in your terminal.

What is special about this program, is that it was built on now-arcane systems, not many know how the program works, but since it can be patched to fix its assumptions, the code continues to work mostly unchanged from what was written by Mr. Ossanna, to this date (http://troff.org/history.html).

If the command displayed some text and exited, cool - you just confirmed you too have a bunch of computer files that hold the information - the order of things that Joe Ossanna imagined, typed into a computer and shared with others.

You just summoned the ghost of Joe Ossanna!

As your tapped the keys and hit enter, code written by many brilliant minds of our species churned the bit-gears to make the magic of our generation's technology come alive.

How fascinating to realize, that not only have machines always been a part of us - we are made out of molecular machines after all, but also that we've been living as fragments of our ideas, strung together by compilers within our computers.

That seemingly mundane code you write and maintain can be your little ghost after you're gone - still around, ticking away, helping future generations get their work done... what would you make?

I tracked a breakup in a database

Harshad Sharma — Thu, 20 Jul 2017 18:24:24 +0000

Tracking my bipolar through GitHub contributions!

Jan ・ Jul 20 '17

#python

This 👆👆 post reminded me of one particular breakup years ago that took a long while to come to its conclusion and in the meantime had me convinced that I would soon need help. I observed myself being very hopeful one moment and seemingly devastated the other with sometimes just an unanswered phone call as the transition point. It was stupid and silly, but it was also painful and I didn't know what was going on in my head and how to stop it.

As the cliché with geeks goes, in the hour of desperation I turned to code. Over a weekend, I decided to get some metrics on my issue, because y'know… you can't fix what you don't measure. I was working with Django, so I used it to serve a form that let me store a questionnaire to database.

MoodLog:

Timestamp
Mood (-9 to +9) [devastated, shaken, …, blah, okay, …, happy, excited]
Trigger [thought, event, person]
Describe what caused/ triggered the good or bad mood?
Why is this significant? implications?

Now just the MoodLog would have sufficed to produce and look at a graph that goes up in steps to a good mood and crashes all the way down with little reason. Enough to satisfy a curiosity, but not enough to fix my emotional upheaval.

There's no fixing a problem until the facing-the-problem part is sorted out first. I made another table that would add follow-ups to my data-points. I kept going back to every data-point to update it if new information was available about it.

FollowUp:

MoodLog.id
Was this reaction valid/ warranted?
What did I get right?
What did I get wrong? By what margin?

I needed to show to myself that my fears and reactions were either valid - in which case I had bigger problems, or that they were another fantastic creation of my own mind - something I could possibly tackle myself.

It took me two weeks of meticulous logging before the patterns were undeniable as I stared at the graph page that I had added in the weekend in between. Crazy ups and downs in a single day! More interesting were my follow-up logs, I had to eat my words (the implications I expected) so many times… it was humbling. Then something funny happened. As I kept going back and writing the follow-ups regularly, the graph began to smooth out slowly. The deviations from current mood became less volatile, almost bounded to three-four point drop, not more.

As I went from being utterly confused about my own emotional state to having metrics, my mind knew what to expect better than panicking with new imagination every time. The relation soon ended, it had run its course and we both moved on well. For sake of privacy, I destroyed that code and database hence no screenshots, sorry! But I'm glad to this day that the hack worked!

Have a story like this of your own? Share? :D

P.S. Lurker for a while but first time posting… am I doing this right?