Posts on life-lessons.in

The Gen-Eval Loop: Getting Quality Outputs from LLMs

Sat, 08 Aug 2026 07:30:50 +0000

Introduction Link to heading

A single prompt to an LLM is a guess. Sometimes it works, but often you end up doing the judging yourself: read the output, figure out what’s wrong, prompt again. I wanted to see what happens when an LLM does that judging step too, so both sides keep going back and forth until the work is actually good.

That’s the idea behind the gen-eval loop. A generator produces something. A separate evaluator grades it against a rubric. The loop repeats with that feedback until the evaluator says pass, or a turn budget runs out. Credit to my colleague Nikhil Prasad for introducing me to this pattern.

Jump-Kick: A Faster Way to Switch Tabs in Firefox

Wed, 11 Mar 2026 07:30:50 +0000

Jump-Kick: quick tab switcher for Firefox

Introduction Link to heading

Over the last few years, I’ve often found myself with far too many tabs open in Firefox. Jumping between them usually meant scanning a crowded tab bar, or cycling through windows and hoping I landed on the right one. This is especially true when my screen is shared. I don’t want others to see private tabs, or waste time searching for tabs, and interrupt the conversation flow. I wanted something closer to a command palette or spotlight for mac for my browser.

Your documentation is also the Product

Sat, 31 Aug 2024 07:30:50 +0000

Your documentation is also the Product

Introduction Link to heading

I spent over 8 years on Bahmni, an opensource EMR & hospital system. As part of that work, I was involved in introducing Confluence into the product in 2012. The initial focus was to introduce public-facing documentation for implementing organisations (aka Implementors), to understand how to implement, deploy, configure and support Bahmni.

Mushtaq: Doctor to Coding Architect (Expertease Podcast #5)

Sun, 31 Oct 2021 02:13:50 +0000

Listen On: Spotify , Anchor.fm , Apple , Google Podcasts

Mushtaq Ahmed: From Doctor to Coding Architect - Episode #5 Link to heading

In this episode on Expertease , we have an honest and insightful conversation with a dear friend and colleague Mushtaq Ahmed , Principal Consultant at Thoughtworks Pune. We cover topics ranging from his interests, his journey from studying to be a Doctor, then becoming a BA, then a Developer and now a Senior Technical Leader; and his passion for programming. He is a Scala evangelist. In the later part of the podcast we discuss his work with Thirty Meter Telescope and architecture principles for building systems at Astronomical scale.

Indian Food Recipes App built with GlideApps [NoCode]

Sat, 19 Jun 2021 02:13:50 +0000

Free App with over 100+ Indian recipes

Food Recipes App - NoCode Link to heading

My brother (Simarpreet), who is a home-chef, wanted to create a mobile app with Indian food recipes (mostly as made in Punjabi homes). The idea being that one has an app in their pocket that can be pulled out while doing grocery shopping, or standing in the kitchen, to quickly see simple home made recipes & ingredients.

Bahmni - Open Source EMR with 1 Million Lines of Code

Thu, 25 Feb 2021 02:13:50 +0000

Image courtsey: Friends without borders

Bahmni Codebase - Moving out of AngularJS Link to heading

Bahmni, an open source hospital management system and EMR has over 1 Million lines of code (LoC)! Out of that over 164,000 LoC are in AngularJS (Angular 1.x). AngularJS is going to be end-of-life in Dec-2021, with no likely SLAs around fixes after Dec-2021.

Insights on Career, Mastery and Craftsmanship (Expertease Podcast #4)

Sun, 29 Nov 2020 02:13:50 +0000

Listen On: Spotify , Anchor.fm , Apple , Google Podcasts

Nikhil Prasad (Part1) - Empowered Engineering Culture - Episode #3 Link to heading

In Part 1 of our conversation with Nikhil Prasad , CTO and co-founder of tavisca , we discussed ways & means of building an empowered Engineering culture, and how Mastery, Autonomy and Purpose play a key role in building a vibrant company culture. You can listen to the insighful conversation here: Nikhil Prasad - Part 1 - Engineering culture .

Empowered Engineering Culture - Nikhil Prasad (Expertease Podcast #3)

Fri, 02 Oct 2020 02:13:50 +0000

Listen On: Spotify , Anchor.fm , Apple , Google Podcasts

Nikhil Prasad - Cultivating an Empowered Engineering Culture (Part1) Link to heading

In this third episode of Expertease , we have an insightful chat with Nikhil Prasad , CTO and co-founder of tavisca , a 700 people, product company, that is considered to be a strong people-centric organisation in Pune.

Nikhil Prasad

Exiting the Rat Race - The Entrepreneurial Journey of Sandeep Nanu (Expertease Podcast #2)

Sat, 01 Aug 2020 02:13:50 +0000

Listen On: Spotify , Anchor.fm , Apple , Google Podcasts

Sandeep Nanu - Exiting the Rat Race Link to heading

In this second episode of Expertease , we have a spirited chat with Sandeep Nanu , serial entrepreneur and founder of a brand and communication consulting firm WriteClick .

Sandeep Nanu

Sandeep talks about his first job as a WebDesigner and the lessons he learnt there, including the important of respecting your commitments to other and their time. We discuss his first company, CBeyond – his challenges in dealing with large corporations and his motivation to instead find a better way to work sustainably, which led him to start WriteClick eventually in 2010.

Art of Experience Design with Aditya Karle (Expertease Podcast #1)

Wed, 22 Jul 2020 02:13:50 +0000

Listen On: Spotify , Anchor.fm , Apple , Google Podcasts

Description Link to heading

In this first episode of Expertease , we have a light-hearted chat with Aditya Karle , Head of Design at ThoughtWorks India, to deconstruct the art of Experience Design (XD).

Aditya Karle

1:10: We talk about his journey to becoming a Designer and getting involved in Software Design, discuss differences between UI design, UX and XD.

10 reasons for buying the Ford EcoSport Petrol (Automatic) - Review

Mon, 30 Dec 2019 02:13:50 +0000

I spent a few months researching automatic petrol vehicles in India, before finally settling on the Ford EcoSport. Read on to find out why.

Ford EcoSport

UPDATE: 9-Sep-2021: Today Ford announced a shutdown of most of its car manufacturing facilities in India. Read the annoucement here . I NO LONGER RECOMMEND CONSIDERING BUYING A FORD ECOSPORT CAR. This blog post is still useful for historical perspective and might give you an idea on how to evaluate a Car for purchase.

I Know That I Know Nothing

Sat, 12 May 2018 02:13:50 +0000

In this blog I introduce a model for helping us articulate unknowns in our knowledge and in projects.

Beach side in Colombo, Sri Lanka

Introduction to the Model Link to heading

Some months ago, while attending a ThoughtWorks Leadership training program, I encountered a very fascinating awareness model (** It’s inspired from the Johari Window model. See notes at the end of the blog). I was captivated by its implications.

Are You Telling A Story?

Sat, 31 Mar 2018 02:13:50 +0000

My Martin Backpaker Guitar

Student: I am giving my first talk in 6 weeks.
Teacher: Excellent.

Student: When would you call a presentation a success?
Teacher: The audience vividly remembers it 3 days after you presented it.

Student: How can I make this happen?
Teacher: By telling a compelling story, instead of stating the facts.

Student: Why is a story important?
Teacher: Imagine this. You are sitting for lunch with your team, and you suddenly remember that one of your colleagues attended the XP conference yesterday. You ask him, about the conference. He answers with one of the following answers:

12 Things I Learnt While Teaching Application Security

Wed, 12 Apr 2017 02:13:50 +0000

Turkey (Istanbul)

Introduction Link to heading

ThoughtWorks runs an Application Security 101 training for people not very familiar with common security topics. The training curriculum covers topics like Threat Modelling, Same Origin Policy, CSRF, Secret Management, Library Vulnerabilities, STRIDE among many others.

I was a trainer for one of the recent batches in ThoughtWorks Pune, and in researching some of these topics, I came across many interesting links, videos and information. I decided to write a blog outlining them as a reference for my ‘students’. I hope that my technologist friends out there will also find this information fascinating.

Understanding Open Source Software

Sun, 12 Mar 2017 02:13:50 +0000

My acoustic guitar - Greg Bennett

I have been contributing to Open Source Software (OSS) for over 3 years now, at ThoughtWorks. Many people seem to have some misconceptions about OSS, or don’t fully realise the implications and impact of OSS. In this blog, I have shared a few of my learnings and thoughts on this topic. If you are technologist – who has some familiarity with OSS, then it’s likely that this article will be helpful.

Reduce Computer Eye Strain with F.lux

Mon, 05 Sep 2016 02:13:50 +0000

About 3 years ago, one of my colleagues in ThoughtWorks, Sam Gibson , suggested I try out f.lux .

f.lux changes the Color temperature of my mac screen in the evening, so that the blue light from the screen is removed, and instead a nice warm set of colors are emitted from the screen. This drastically reduced the strain that I felt on my screen at night. It felt weird, the first 3 or 4 days, when my screen colors changed in the evening. But then soon enough, I even stopped realizing when f.lux changed the colors. It would only be a passerby, who would look at my screen, and wonder: Hey what happened to your screen?

Mars Rover Problem in Scala

Sun, 24 Apr 2016 02:13:50 +0000

Priyank Gupta, a respected ex-ThoughtWorker from the Pune office, wrote an excellent blog series in 2014 titled: Decoding ThoughtWorks Coding Problems .

In this blog he explains what constitutes good code & design, using the now decommissioned Mars Rover problem as an example. His code is in Java. I decided to showcase the same design in Scala, using only “the good parts” of Scala, with an aim of keeping the solution easy to understand, and enhance.

When Money gets in the way of Life

Thu, 03 Mar 2016 02:13:50 +0000

Credits: Singapore Art Museum

A dialog between a Human and a Doctor goes like this in most parts of the world…

I wrote this blog on Bahmni Community Blogs on Medium. Read the full blog here: When Money gets in the way of Life - Bahmni Blogs

Every Single Retro

Wed, 03 Feb 2016 02:13:50 +0000

The outcome of almost every retro can be captured easily by this poster:

Every Single Retro

The Velocity Conundrum

Fri, 25 Dec 2015 02:13:50 +0000

Near Chinatown street in Singapore

Velocity! It’s a term that has potentially confounded, frustrated and perhaps amused Agile practitioners and customers alike at some point. It’s a concept that can be quite helpful though, when used accurately as a planning & estimation tool.

Velocity is a measure of the number of story points delivered in an Iteration. The word delivered here means - dev & test complete, and ready for Production. Depending on your organizational maturity it could also mean – in Production.

Podcasts I Love

Sun, 15 Nov 2015 02:13:50 +0000

Tibetan artists in Norbulingka Institute, Dharamshala, India

Driving in India is a test of patience. And a waste of time.

A few months ago, I decided to try an experiment while driving to office, about a 30 minute ride each way. The experiment was: Podcasts.

Turns out, I had uncovered something amazing. Podcasts made me forget the time I spend on the road, and instead opened a window to a world I didn’t know existed. I now found an opportunity to hear interviews and stories, of lives of people, in far away places. People, whose stories, I would otherwise never have heard.

I moved to Jekyll

Sun, 01 Nov 2015 02:13:50 +0000

Tibetan artists in Norbulingka Institute, Dharamshala, India

My blog on Google Blogspot techie-notebook.blogspot.com hit the 100,000 views mark. I am super excited. But, I didn’t really like the way my blog looked. I wanted it to be simple. I wanted it to be elegant. I wanted to render code, like it should. I wanted the programmer in me, to be in control. So I moved to Jekyll .

Understanding Vagrant Boxes and VMs

Sat, 03 Oct 2015 02:13:50 +0000

On top of Mt Billing in Dharamshala, India

Vagrant does a lot of things auto-magically under the hoods, and most of the times people are left confused when they want to delete or add boxes or VMs. I will try and explain the relationships between Base Boxes, VMs, Virtual Box Instances among other things, in this post.

Installing ThoughtWorks GoCD Server on a Digital Ocean Droplet

Sun, 16 Aug 2015 02:13:50 +0000

Near Chinatown street in Singapore

Today I experimented with installing ThoughtWorks GoCD Server and agent on a Digital Ocean CentOS droplet. Note that you will need to ensure that you setup swap space on your digital ocean droplet , before proceeding with installing GoCD.

Read the steps here on my old blog: Installing ThoughtWorks GoCD Server and Agent on Digital Ocean Droplet .

Building Applications for Multiple Countries and Languages

Sat, 14 Feb 2015 02:13:50 +0000

Near Chinatown street in Singapore

I have worked on a couple of projects where we had to make the application multi-country savvy (also called internationalisation or i18n), and I think it would be good to pen down various areas we considered, and the tools we used. Note that, these practices are from the perspective of a Java/Scala project, but can easily be adapted to other platforms too – since the basic requirements are similar.

Way To A New Project

Fri, 28 Nov 2014 02:13:50 +0000

On top of Mt Billing in Dharamshala, India

You move to a new project. Its exciting. It holds promise of something awesome (usually). You are ready to dive. You want to learn things fast. You want to contribute. You want to become effective. You want to be welcomed. And then maybe, become invaluable.

There are some tips I have learnt on how to navigate new projects effectively. I would look forward to hearing what you have to say about yours. And, I suspect there will be more.

Difference between sorted, sortWith and sortBy in Scala

Sat, 26 Jul 2014 02:13:50 +0000

Near the Norbulingka Institute, Dharamshala, India

Scala collections provide you three options for sorting: sorted(), sortWith() and sortBy(). Here is a simplified explanation:

sorted Link to heading

Will sort the list using the natural ordering (based on the implicit Ordering passed)

sortBy (an attribute) Link to heading

Sort by a given attribute using the attribute’s type. e.g. given a list of Person objects, if you want to sort them in ascending order of their age (which is an Int), you could simply say:

Using Capybara and Rspec assertions in Page Objects

Fri, 10 Jan 2014 02:13:50 +0000

Near the Norbulingka Institute, Dharamshala, India

On my Rails project, I am using RSpec and Capybara to write functional tests.
I did not want to specify any HTML elements in my Capybara feature files, since that makes the feature files brittle to HTML / CSS changes. It also violates the DRY principle and basic code hygiene.

Read the full blog on my older blog site here: Using Capybara and Rspec assertions in Page Objects

Vagrant: Setup development environments FAST!

Sun, 16 Dec 2012 02:13:50 +0000

Near the Norbulingka Institute, Dharamshala, India

If you have never heard of Vagrant, or are interested in understanding what is Vagrant, then this blog should be useful to you.

Setting up a development environment for many projects now-a-days isn’t a matter of simply running a script or downloading a piece of software. On most projects, the average setup time to get all up and running is usually a day, and sometimes more. Most often, time is spent on setting environment variables, handling software version conflicts, or general configuration. Not to mention, that once you are done, doing this for the next project would be even more challenging.

POKA YOKE - Applying Mistake Proofing to Software

Sun, 22 Jul 2012 02:13:50 +0000

Near the Norbulingka Institute, Dharamshala, India

Note: This has been one of my highest read blog posts ever with over 100,000 views. I am humbled. Thank you!

For years, automobile companies have utilized “Mistake Proofing” as a technique for ensuring high quality, high speed manufacturing – especially in cases of mass scale production. This is also known as Poka-Yoke (in Japanese) and was adopted and formalized as part of the Toyota Production System. This blog attempts to raise awareness (with examples) for the need of Poka Yoke in Software Design and within the Software Development process.

Web Vulnerabilities - Phishing, Cookies, XSS and CSRF

Sun, 29 Apr 2012 02:13:50 +0000

Near the Norbulingka Institute, Dharamshala, India

Last week I gave a presentation on “Web Application Vulnerabilities” as part of our weekly Dev meetup at ThoughtWorks. The presentation was aimed at covering some vulnerabilities and risks that plague Web based applications, and to make folks aware of risks and possible mitigation options. In specific, topics covered were Phishing, Social Engineering, Cookies and Cross Site Request Forgery (CSRF or XSRF).

8 months at ThoughtWorks Pune

Sat, 25 Feb 2012 02:13:50 +0000

Near the Norbulingka Institute, Dharamshala, India

I joined ThoughtWorks, Pune in June 2011. 8 months ago. Previously I had worked with Persistent Systems, IBM Software Labs and Performix (a start-up). I would like to pen down my ThoughtWorks journey so far. Correction. Incredible journey.

For sake of readability, let’s list down the things I feel are awesome and different about ThoughtWorks, and why I catch myself wondering why the hell did I not apply to ThoughtWorks earlier. For the record, I joined ThoughtWorks as a Senior Consultant, and my role here is Programming, Programming and yeah Programming. :) Lets see.. what this means.

Posts on life-lessons.in

The Gen-Eval Loop: Getting Quality Outputs from LLMs

Introduction Link to heading

Jump-Kick: A Faster Way to Switch Tabs in Firefox

Introduction Link to heading

Your documentation is also the Product

Introduction Link to heading

Mushtaq: Doctor to Coding Architect (Expertease Podcast #5)

Mushtaq Ahmed: From Doctor to Coding Architect - Episode #5 Link to heading

Indian Food Recipes App built with GlideApps [NoCode]

Food Recipes App - NoCode Link to heading

Bahmni - Open Source EMR with 1 Million Lines of Code

Bahmni Codebase - Moving out of AngularJS Link to heading

Insights on Career, Mastery and Craftsmanship (Expertease Podcast #4)

Nikhil Prasad (Part1) - Empowered Engineering Culture - Episode #3 Link to heading

Empowered Engineering Culture - Nikhil Prasad (Expertease Podcast #3)

Nikhil Prasad - Cultivating an Empowered Engineering Culture (Part1) Link to heading

Exiting the Rat Race - The Entrepreneurial Journey of Sandeep Nanu (Expertease Podcast #2)

Sandeep Nanu - Exiting the Rat Race Link to heading

Art of Experience Design with Aditya Karle (Expertease Podcast #1)

Description Link to heading

10 reasons for buying the Ford EcoSport Petrol (Automatic) - Review

I Know That I Know Nothing

Introduction to the Model Link to heading

Are You Telling A Story?

12 Things I Learnt While Teaching Application Security

Introduction Link to heading

Understanding Open Source Software

Reduce Computer Eye Strain with F.lux

Mars Rover Problem in Scala

When Money gets in the way of Life

Every Single Retro

The Velocity Conundrum

Podcasts I Love

I moved to Jekyll

Understanding Vagrant Boxes and VMs

Installing ThoughtWorks GoCD Server on a Digital Ocean Droplet

Building Applications for Multiple Countries and Languages

Way To A New Project

Difference between sorted, sortWith and sortBy in Scala

sorted Link to heading

sortBy (an attribute) Link to heading

Using Capybara and Rspec assertions in Page Objects

Vagrant: Setup development environments FAST!

Recommended Reading for Lateral Dev Hires at ThoughtWorks

POKA YOKE - Applying Mistake Proofing to Software

Web Vulnerabilities - Phishing, Cookies, XSS and CSRF

8 months at ThoughtWorks Pune