I decided to deploy my blog using google cloud storage instead of github pages. I suppose I couldn’t be bothered naming the github repo something other than [username].github.io, nor figuring out how to bypass this. Since running hugo (the library) outputs a static site into the /public folder, I figured just using a storage provider would work. It would also allow me to use cloudflare, …

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My previous website was built using raw HTML, CSS and JS. I did this to avoid the complexity of a static site generator, like Jekyll, not least because I’m not a fan of Ruby! That said, I recently stumbled upon Hugo, which seems pretty neat, and is written in Golang. Although it’s been interesting using Hugo so far, there’s certainly been a learning curve. But it should prove …

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This is a repost of my Medium article, please see here.

They say “the moment” is all one ever has. This got me thinking about the repercussions on how to spend one’s time, at least when it comes to being “productive”, however one defines that. In particular, how much should time be spent on pure learning versus building? Or more generally, on ingesting information versus producing it or putting it into action. This could …

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Decision making can be tricky, and nowhere is it trickier than in deciding what to do with one’s life. The challenge increases with privilege; for it is indeed privilege to have options in the first place. Often a decision is portrayed when there really isn’t one being made. Ben Horowitz, of VC firm Andreessen Horowitz, articulates this very well. This usually takes the form of …

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Every so often I’ll have a moment of inspiration where I feel the need and ability to accomplish a million wonderful things. I’ve found that these moments have become ever more crucial the less time I have to myself. Back in college, although I was generally “busy”, I owned my time. When a moment of inspiration struck, not only could I have a go at it, but more importantly …

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Introduction I recently came upon an ACM Turing Award lecture by John Backus entitled “Can Programming Be Liberated from the von Neumann Style? A Functional Style and Its Algebra of Programs”. It got me thinking about the idea of functional versus imperative (aka “procedural”) programming. To quote Backus, “An alternative functional style of programming is founded on …

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Introduction This is a follow-up to my previous introduction to abstract groups. Let’s recap what we’ve been doing so far. We have these things called “groups”, with an associative operation $\circ$ defined between elements, identities and inverses. Addition on real numbers is a group. Division on integers is not, since $ 1/2 \notin \mathbf{Z} $. We then looked at maps …

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Introduction Groups, and what follows from them, are really cool. Had I known earlier, I would have seriously started studying group theory a long time ago. What makes abstract algebra so interesting, to me at least? I think it’s the balance between generality and structure. The foundation is very simple (and thus general), yet it leads to extremely interesting ways of thinking about …

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Introduction After spending some time thinking about cryptocurrencies, I have developed some opinions on where things are headed. I could be wrong, and these views will no doubt evolve over time, but I hope there is some reason in them. Cryptocurrency is fascinating, and definitely has a role to play in the future; the questions are what role and when. I’ll start by talking about Bitcoin and …

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