Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

This Week I Learned -  *  Supabase is an open-source Backend-as-a-Service (BaaS) built around PostgreSQL. It is a Firebase alternative that can help you set up a backend in less than 2 minutes. * Add the possibility of an Internet Service Provider-level blocking of a service to the list of things you should debug when your code isn't working. Now if your perfectly working code accesses some paid premium AI-Model APIs suddenly throws errors, you'll be losing tokens while you figure that it was in fact your ISP that was glitching.  A subset of users based in India accessing Supabase over JioFiber, Reliance Jio's fiber-to-the-home broadband service, faced routing/block issues. Supabase’s own infrastructure was fully operational but users on JioFiber (and some other Indian ISPs) couldn’t connect to Supabase services like Dashboard, Auth, Edge Functions, Postgres in ap-south-1, etc. The root cause turned out to be ISP-level DNS resolution failure. The ISP’s DNS serv...

Cartoon co-created with Grok. See more of my AI co-creations

Cartoon co-created with Grok. See more of my AI co-creations Yellapragada Subba Rao (1895-1948) was a pioneering Indian-American biochemist whose discoveries revolutionized medicine and biochemistry. He remained an "alien" (the technical term for non-citizens) even after 25 years of lab heroics. The 1946 Luce-Celler Act finally made Indians like him eligible for citizenship but paperwork stayed pending till his 1948 death.

TL;DR - Netflix embeds caches (Open Connect Appliances) in  Internet Service Provider (ISP)  networks to store popular content locally. This reduces latency by serving streams directly from the ISP, avoiding long-distance internet transit. It improves streaming quality, cuts bandwidth costs for both parties (settlement-free), and handles high traffic efficiently—benefiting users with faster, more reliable viewing. Over 1,000 ISPs partner for this. Sounds interesting? Read on... In the fast-paced world of online streaming, where every second of buffering can feel like an eternity, Netflix has been quietly building an invisible empire of data caches across India. A recent tweet by tech journalist Aroon Deep (@AroonDeep) has pulled back the curtain on this network, revealing how many of these specialized servers—known as Open Connect Appliances (OCAs) —are embedded directly into local Internet Service Providers (ISPs) in major cities.  This setup isn't just tech...

  In this video series , Google’s Addy Osmani provides invaluable wisdom for those starting or maturing their careers in software engineering.

This interview features Grady Booch, a pioneer of software engineering (co-creator of UML and object-oriented design), discussing why AI is not the "end" of the profession, but rather the catalyst for its Third Golden Age. The Three Golden Ages The First Golden Age (Late 1940s – Late 1970s): Focus: Algorithmic abstraction and decoupling software from hardware. Drivers: The Cold War and military funding (e.g., SAGE missile defense) pushed the need for real-time, distributed systems. Abstraction: Moving from machine-level "plugboards" to assembly and early high-level languages like Fortran and COBOL [08:52]. The Second Golden Age (Late 1970s – Early 2000s): Focus: Object-oriented programming and design. Drivers: The "Software Crisis"—the industry couldn't produce quality code fast enough to meet demand. This era saw the rise of the PC, open source, and the internet. Abstraction: Moving from processes/functions to objects and classes (e.g., C++, Smalltal...

This Week I Learned -  *  Brain Moore  prompted nine different AI models to programmatically generate World Clocks to show how some of them struggle with the rendering. Every minute, a new clock is displayed. Each model is allowed 2000 tokens to generate its clock.  *  2025 State of AI   * India’s first sovereign LLM Sarvam AI's 30B-parameter model is pre-trained on 16 trillion tokens and supports a 32,000-token context length, enabling long conversations and agentic workflows while keeping inference costs low due to fewer activated parameters. It is a mixture-of-experts (MoE) model and has just 1 billion activated parameters, meaning that in generating every output token, it only activates 1B parameters. * Alibaba Group's Qwen3.5-397B-A17B is a new open weight multimodal model built to be faster, cheaper, and more agent capable than its predecessors. It combines text, image, and video processing in a single architecture and uses a mixture of experts design...

  Cartoon co-created with Grok. See more of my AI co-creations

This Week I Learned -  * Python turns 35 this month. It started as a hobby project in 1991.  * A sovereign cloud is a type of cloud service where data is both legally protected and physically stored within a country’s borders. Global spending on sovereign cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS) is expected to reach $80 billion in 2026, marking a 35.6% increase from 2025, according to Gartner. * Just 3.3% of Copilot Chat users pay for it * Kimi K2.5 is an open-source model from Moonshot AI. Kimi K2.5 Built as a native multimodal model, K2.5 delivers state-of-the-art coding and vision capabilities and a self-directed agent swarm paradigm. Kimi K2.5 is available via Kimi.com, the Kimi App, the API, and Kimi Code. Kimi.com & Kimi App now supports 4 modes: K2.5 Instant, K2.5 Thinking, K2.5 Agent, and K2.5 Agent Swarm (Beta). Beyond text prompts, K2.5 excels at coding with vision. By reasoning over images and video, K2.5 improves image/video-to-code generation and visual d...

In 2026, the landscape for online IDEs has shifted toward "AI-native" environments. Most platforms now offer a free tier that includes a chat assistant, though they usually limit the number of "high-reasoning" (GPT-4 or Claude 3.5/4 level) queries you can make per month. Check out this list of online code editors for web apps that feature built-in AI chat, perfect for getting started at no cost: 1. Firebase Studio is Google's modern browser-based IDE with Gemini AI chat/assistance built-in for code generation, debugging, explanations, refactoring, and even agent-driven workflows. Excellent for web apps, supports frameworks like React, Next.js, etc., live previews, and easy deployment. It has built-in Gemini chat and code completion. Because Firebase Studio was designed "for the AI era," it excels at adding Gemini-powered features (chat interfaces, content generation, personalization, etc.) into web apps. You can prototype AI flows (model inference, ag...

Cartoon co-created with Grok. See more of my AI co-creations

It's interesting how the UI/UX of AI assistants has been evolving over time.  The interaction options with each individual Chat and a Conversation thread have gradually expanded over time.  ChatGPT Gemini Grok Chat Copy  Good response Bad response Share  Try Again Branch in new Chat  Read Aloud Report Message Good response  Bad response  Copy response Double check response  Listen  Export to Docs Draft in Gmail Export to Replit  Report Legal issue Regenerate  Read Aloud  Start Thread (2/26) Copy  Create share link  Love it  Needs improvement  Report Issue  Export to PDF Conversation Share  Start a group chat Rename  Pin Chat Archive  Delete Share  Pin  Rename  Delete Rename  Pin  Delete Claude Copilot Perplexity Chat Copy Give positive feedback Give negative feedback Retry Go...

This Week I Learned -   * "Programming is the art of making the ambiguous incredibly specific through sculpting. AI sculpting is less about vibes and more about finding the specificity you want and keeping the system stable through changes. Good SDLC practices still matter, historical context still matters, and knowing how things work matters" - Scott Hanselman   * "I believe literally every prediction you hear about it (AI) is complete bunk, opinions disguised as knowledge . No one knows, which is uncomfortable, but get used to it. That's the nature of life these days in so many different ways." - Bill Shander * " Anthropic has launched plug-ins for its Claude Cowork agent to automate tasks across sales, productivity, product management, marketing, legal, finance, enterprise search, data, customer support, Bio Research, among others. Essentially, the plug-ins are built to automate specialised tasks across different functions within an organisation. Anthro...

Cartoon co-created with Grok. See more of my AI co-creations

After learning that 2023 was the world’s hottest year on record, I began tracking the weather more closely. Then 2024 surpassed it , becoming the first calendar year to cross the 1.5°C threshold and set a new record. 2025 brought a series of extreme weather events , with multiple COP climate change summits taking place that have not yielded any concrete results. To stay aware of what's happening around the world and make personal changes, I plan to keep taking notes this year too and adjust my expectations. I've set up a dynamic chart to display weather data for my area (Miyapur) using Zomato's WeatherUnion API like I did in 2025 .     It fails to return data occasionally but seems to be more reliable than the  data provided by Telangana State Development Planning Society which has fewer weather stations (Kukatpally, Serilingampally) and farther away from where I stay. Comparing values from both sources reveal a big difference in minimum temps (avg 6.1°C) b...

Trigger → this tweet . Cartoon co-created with ChatGPT. See more of my AI co-creations