I recently watched the following speech by Arnold Schwarzenegger: It had a lot of good points, but one quote by Ted Turner really stood out for me: Early to bed, early to rise, work like hell, and advertise Mr. Schwarzenegger then went on to explain the meaning of the second half of this quote. It’s … Read more
I should be able to lock my phone while using YouTube and still hear the sound in the background. Currently this functionally is only available to YouTube Premium subscribers for $12 a month. This is a bad business practice for YouTube and a bad thing for the world. Bad for Youtube Why is it bad … Read more
My company hired a new VP of Engineering. He asked me an interesting question during our one-on-one: “What makes you a good engineer?”. I had to think about it for a second and I realized that it wasn’t technology or knowledge of certain principles. Obviously there are certain skills that one needs to have to … Read more
Few weeks ago I decided to take it easy on my Social Media use. Top 3 social media sites that I visited were Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit. I miss Reddit the least. I still visit Twitter for direct mentions, but I don’t miss my general feed all that much. I really miss Facebook. Facebook is … Read more
Recently I was working on a fun idea, that was going to take me longer than one week to complete. Towards the second week I found myself dreading going back to work on my “fun” project. I wasn’t sure why… Was I no longer excited about the idea? Was I just too tired? Was I … Read more
Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index is an attempt to estimates total energy cost of mining Bitcoin. Their methodology is based on the fact that energy needed to mine Bitcoin will increase in response to oversupply of mining resources. To quote the Bitcoin Wikipedia article: Every 2,016 blocks (approximately 14 days at roughly 10 min per block), … Read more
I created a light weight RSS reader for people on poor internet connection to get latest headlines: https://alexkras.com/textnews/ I am kind of away form keyboard, but saw that Tweet from @samccone pointing out that http://lite.cnn.com/ was making users download a lot of JavaScript, … and now it seems down. https://twitter.com/samccone/status/906714941360553986. I wanted to provide a … Read more
It appears that Firefox has gone all-in with a new marketing campaign aiming at presenting Google Chrome as a big brother/browser that is watching your every step. They kicked it off with the following billboard posted somewhere in San Francisco. Firefox also appears to be a running ads on various sites targeting similar message. A … Read more
I was reading some articles on Hacker News about how we’ve lost the internet to big companies and how we are not doing anything about it and it got me thinking about Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) again. My story with AMP started in early 2016 when I enabled it on this site. It kind … Read more
Introduction Three days ago I wrote about my interview at Uber. I did not think of Uber as a great place to work. People that I’ve met seemed young, smart and overworked to the point of exhaustion. From my conversation with recruiter I took away that Uber had no problem being the lowest bidder and … Read more