Intro on Prithu Goswami

context engineering using links

prithu@prithu.dev (Prithu Goswami) — Sat, 25 Oct 2025 16:04:46 +0530

I came across this interesting post. Some notes after reading it:

Context engineering involves the process of activily making the context window work for the given task. Since LLMs have a bias to information close to the end of the context window, it’s important to optimize for this and remove all noise as the conversation progresses.
Fresh invocations of LLMs with context perform better than stale, long running conversation.
Author reminds us of HATEOAS where we link resources in responses too. Example:

a2a protocol

prithu@prithu.dev (Prithu Goswami) — Sun, 19 Oct 2025 15:47:58 +0530

https://a2a-protocol.org/latest/
- It is primarily for agents to collaborate on long running tasks. A primary agent could leverage many agents to complete tasks.
- This is useful because the primary agent doesn’t have to polute it’s context with other tasks that can be handled in a seperate “thread”.
- The primary agent is responsible to steer the conversation with the secondary agent to get the task done.
Why can’t agents just be tools?
- It’s because tools are mostly actions you perform and there’s a start and an end to it and it’s a concrete task with an output you expect to get quickly. Eg. Create a new resources, update a resource with id 123, read the resource with id 123, etc. Tools don’t allow for multi-turn interactions, whereas a separate agent can follow up with quetsions, clarifications and alternatives to solve a task.
- That being said you still can have an agent as a tool for one-shot answers that don’t require back and forth communication. Things like “translate this block of text to Spanish”

installing nixos on oracle cloud arm instance

prithu@prithu.dev (Prithu Goswami) — Wed, 06 Nov 2024 12:03:00 +0000

Download netboot efi

wget https://boot.netboot.xyz/ipxe/netboot.xyz-arm64.efi

Move it to /boot/efi/
Open cloud shell connection from the instance page. On the instance page it’s labeled “Console Connection” under “Resources”
“Reboot” the instance
Continuously press Esc in the cloud shell. EFI boot manager pops up. Then open the EFI shell and type fs0:netboot.xyz-arm64.efi
Select NixOS from the netboot menu
Install nix os (follow wiki)

access cloudflare r2 using aws cli

prithu@prithu.dev (Prithu Goswami) — Tue, 05 Nov 2024 23:07:00 +0000

Create R2 tokens from the r2 Overview page. “Manage r2 API Tokens” -> “Create API Token”
Copy the access key id and secret access key values
Copy the endpoint url. It’s of the form <cloudflare_account_id>.r2.cloudflarestorage.com. Cloudflare account id is present in the url bar too when you are accessing the cloudflare dashboard and is also displayed in overview page of r2

~/.aws/config:

[profile cloudflare]
endpoint_url = https://<cloudlare_account_id>.r2.cloudflarestorage.com

~/.aws/credentials

[cloudflare]
aws_access_key_id = <> 
aws_secret_access_key = <>

test with:
```
aws s3 ls
```

python logging in aws lambda

prithu@prithu.dev (Prithu Goswami) — Thu, 07 Mar 2024 21:34:00 +0000

LOG_LEVEL = os.getenv("LOG_LEVEL", "INFO").upper()
logger = logging.getLogger()
logger.setLevel(level=LOG_LEVEL)


logger.info("Info log")
logger.info("Error log")

Also see

amazon web services - Using python Logging with AWS Lambda - Stack Overflow

make lambda.zip using python poetry

prithu@prithu.dev (Prithu Goswami) — Thu, 07 Mar 2024 21:04:00 +0000

poetry build
poetry run pip install --upgrade -t dist/lambda dist/reporter*.whl
cd dist/lambda; zip -r ../lambda.zip . -x '*.pyc'; cd ../../

If there are problems with some dependencies (GLIBC version mismatch) use --platform manylinux2014_x86_64 (or another type of linux pypi package) and --only-binary=:all:
```
poetry run pip install --platform manylinux2014_x86_64 --only-binary=:all: -t dist/lambda dist/reporter*.whl
```

without poetry

pip install --platform manylinux2014_x86_64 --only-binary=:all: -r requirements.txt -t /build/lambda

# add your python package /build/lambda

cd /build/lambda; zip -r /build/lambda.zip . -x '*.pyc'; cd ../../

https for local development

prithu@prithu.dev (Prithu Goswami) — Thu, 07 Mar 2024 08:31:00 +0000

Use mkcert

mkcert -install
mkcert localhost # creates two localhost.pem (cert) and localhost-key.pem (key) file

provide the key and cert file to the http server program. For example in python if using uvicorn:

uvicorn.run("api.main:app", host="0.0.0.0", ssl_keyfile=key_path, ssl_certfile=cert_path, reload=True)

python module search path in aws lambda

prithu@prithu.dev (Prithu Goswami) — Tue, 05 Mar 2024 15:48:00 +0000

When you use an import statement in your code, the Python runtime searches the directories in its search path until it finds the module or package. By default, the runtime searches the $LAMBDA_TASK_ROOT (/var/task) directory first. If you include a version of a runtime-included library in your image, your version will take precedence over the version that’s included in the runtime.

Other steps in the search path depend on which version of the Lambda base image for Python you’re using:

localhost not resolving for some programs

prithu@prithu.dev (Prithu Goswami) — Mon, 04 Mar 2024 22:25:00 +0000

Check your `/etc/hosts`

So ran into this stupid error where lnd was not starting because it was trying to lookup localhost and it couldn’t resolve it so it asks the DNS server (1.1.1.1) and obviously can’t resolve it either.

failed to load config: lookup localhost on 1.1.1.1:53: no such host

Add this to /etc/hosts

127.0.0.1 localhost

cloudfront proxied dns redirect loop issue

prithu@prithu.dev (Prithu Goswami) — Mon, 19 Feb 2024 21:50:00 +0000

Faced an issue where I would get stuck in a redirect loop when configured a cloudflare dns as ‘proxied’. Turns out the solution is to set SSL/TLS mode to ‘Full’ and that solves it.

Ref

https://community.cloudflare.com/t/enabling-cloudflare-dns-proxy-results-in-redirect-loop/510465

Debugging dwm to fix an annoying bug

prithu@prithu.dev (Prithu Goswami) — Sat, 17 Feb 2024 18:19:23 +0530

I use dwm as my window manager and I always wanted to hack on it ever since I started using it and I have taken my first step towards that by debugging it and understanding the codebase a little. This post is just going to be a lot of snippets from dwm source code with my explanation on it as I understand it myself and sharing what I learnt while debugging dwm along the way. I wanted to fix an annoying issue I was facing with dwm and through this post I want to document the process of how I fixed it. It’s also a reason for me to practice writing.

A bash gotcha - command substitution in bashrc

prithu@prithu.dev (Prithu Goswami) — Wed, 14 Feb 2024 12:53:00 +0000

I have this alias in my bashrc:

alias qn="cd ~/docs/org/0-inbox/ && vim `date +%Y-%m-%d-%H%M`.md"

which uses Command-Substitution¹ and basically just makes a “quick note” which I can refer later and move it a more appropriate place in my organized notes when I have the time. But when I run this alias it always opens the same note even if I run it at another time.

TIL that using ` (backticks) or even $() in alias this way makes it output the value when the alias is initialized. So it essentially freezes it’s value when the alias is first sourced. So, If I run this command again at another time it will still open the same file. Not what is intended. The solution? Escape the command substitution

useful git tidbits

prithu@prithu.dev (Prithu Goswami) — Sat, 10 Feb 2024 13:05:00 +0000

--force-with-lease

git push --force-with-lease – safer than just --force since if it doesn’t expect the same commit before the force push to be there as yours, it doesn’t push it.

git maintenance start

makes things faster. Does a bunch of stuff in the config that does automatic stuff in the background using systemd timers

git blame -w -C -C -C

much better than just git blame cause it’s smarter about moving of the lines and ignores whitespaces.

TIL: Cloudfront has a limit on URL length

prithu@prithu.dev (Prithu Goswami) — Thu, 25 Jan 2024 08:51:00 +0000

Make sure that URL lengths are within range 8192 bytes
Some other services might follow a generic 2000 character limit.
http - What is the maximum length of a URL in different browsers? - Stack Overflow

Setting up wireguard VPN

prithu@prithu.dev (Prithu Goswami) — Mon, 27 Nov 2023 15:23:00 +0000

Server Setup

[Interface]
PrivateKey = yMvNoQjJrhKBi9BM1GVDOgp12002CBsafprcucOLNXM=
Address = 10.0.0.1/24
PostUp = iptables -A FORWARD -i wg1 -j ACCEPT; iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -o ens3 -j MASQUERADE
PostDown = iptables -D FORWARD -i wg1 -j ACCEPT; iptables -t nat -D POSTROUTING -o ens3 -j MASQUERADE
ListenPort = 52498

[Peer]
PublicKey = VikFbA8ELVftC2Hzz7ukYCxTT229g2GxkwXmXMwqZhw=
AllowedIPs = 10.0.0.2/32

[Peer]
PublicKey = oIHBz1u1kCu+5UnDmPCQ5kyQmGpHup3YIISPOK1B21Y=
AllowedIPs = 10.0.0.3/32

Client Setup

[Interface]
Address = 10.0.0.2/32
PrivateKey = GY37SEG1RHkdxaxoj+fz3GwE/EqJxDbRK/684pRS13M=
DNS = 1.1.1.1

# Server info
[Peer]
PublicKey = Xwf/2RaaGu4rvvMxJx8oebFMx1LPSU49bUtYsAhGQUU= 
Endpoint = {SERVER_PUBLIC_IP}:52498
# Reach out to the Wireguard Server for every IPv4 address
# All our IPv4 traffic will be "routed" through the server
AllowedIPs = 0.0.0.0/0, ::/0
PersistentKeepalive = 25

ListenPort can be any random port number. Make sure the UDP port is allowed by the firewall on the server
replace ens3 with an actual interface name available on the server

TIL: AWS s3 folders

prithu@prithu.dev (Prithu Goswami) — Wed, 15 Nov 2023 22:46:00 +0000

Although s3 has a flat structure—unlike a filesystem—it has a concept of “folders”. Folders are 0-byte objects whose key names end with a ‘/’ When you create a folder from the s3 console it creates this object automatically and you can manually create it using cli with an object key ending in ‘/’

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/userguide/using-folders.html

using different python version with pyenv and poetry

prithu@prithu.dev (Prithu Goswami) — Fri, 29 Sep 2023 14:04:00 +0000

install pyenv
install a python version using pyenv install 3.9
this should have created a directory ~/.pyenv
tell poetry to use a specific python version - poetry env use /home/prithu/.pyenv/versions/3.9.18/bin/python
then run poetry install

good computer engineering videos

prithu@prithu.dev (Prithu Goswami) — Thu, 28 Sep 2023 21:40:00 +0000

Software

How to “think” (and design) like a Software Architect at Silicon Valley Code Camp 2019

Hardware

The Future of Microprocessors — Sophie Wilson

docker tags with repo name must match the actual image

prithu@prithu.dev (Prithu Goswami) — Sun, 09 Jul 2023 15:12:00 +0000

These are not the same

docker tag api-service:latest 123456789012.dkr.ecr.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/api:latest
docker push 123456789012.dkr.ecr.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/api:latest

docker tag api-service:latest 123456789012.dkr.ecr.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/api-service:latest
docker push 123456789012.dkr.ecr.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/api-service:latest

Maybe this is obvious for future me. But this is the stupid thing I was doing expecting the first command to work when I docker pushed. Need to further investigate what was actually being pushed in the first case?

RPi server behind VPS using wireguard and iptables NAT

prithu@prithu.dev (Prithu Goswami) — Wed, 01 Feb 2023 09:23:53 +0530

A few months ago, I wanted to host files stored on a portable hard disk on the public internet. These files were just some photos and videos that I wanted to share with some of my cousins. Nothing fancy, just a webdav server using rclone would suffice—a very ad-hoc setup as you can see. I wanted it to be reachable at share.prithu.dev to give it a short and friendly rememberable name. I used the RPi 4 to be the host machine, attached the hard drive to one of it’s usb ports, mount’d the drive at /mount/hdd and ran:

example.com equivalent of IP addresses

prithu@prithu.dev (Prithu Goswami) — Wed, 18 Jan 2023 00:45:00 +0000

The example.com equivalent of IP address is the block of 192.0.2.0/24.

From rfc-3330

192.0.2.0/24 - This block is assigned as “TEST-NET” for use in documentation and example code. It is often used in conjunction with domain names example.com or example.net in vendor and protocol documentation. Addresses within this block should not appear on the public Internet.

API security

prithu@prithu.dev (Prithu Goswami) — Mon, 14 Nov 2022 20:14:00 +0000

programming books and articles

prithu@prithu.dev (Prithu Goswami) — Mon, 03 Oct 2022 12:47:00 +0000

CSRF Cookie

prithu@prithu.dev (Prithu Goswami) — Thu, 29 Sep 2022 23:27:00 +0000

Complete this note with auth methods and how they are implemented are resources.

https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/166724/should-i-use-csrf-protection-on-rest-api-endpoints

Actually good youtube channels

prithu@prithu.dev (Prithu Goswami) — Tue, 06 Sep 2022 08:07:00 +0000

Computer Science

Reducible - 3b1b type videos of CS topics
Ben Eater - Computer architecture and electronics
Computerphile - Computer science explained
Zero To ASIC Course

Science

Nils Berglund - YouTube Makes cool simulations

Infotainment

Asianometry - YouTube Video essays on business, economics, and history. Sometimes about Asia, but not always.

packages, utils and tools

prithu@prithu.dev (Prithu Goswami) — Thu, 01 Sep 2022 14:16:00 +0000

broot - A new way to see and navigate directory trees
hstr - shell history suggest box - easily view, navigate, search and manage your command history.
pasystray - A nice pulse audio system tray written in c
GitHub - Canop/rhit: A nginx log explorer

noise generators

prithu@prithu.dev (Prithu Goswami) — Mon, 08 Aug 2022 21:55:00 +0000

the go programming language book notes

prithu@prithu.dev (Prithu Goswami) — Thu, 04 Aug 2022 20:26:00 +0000

These are notes that I took while reading the The Go Prgogramming Language book

Interesting points

Go has some strictness when it comes to compiling
- if packages are imported but not used - don’t compile
- if a newline is placed incorrectly - don’t compile. Newlines follwing certain tokens are converted to semicolons automatically
- Semicolons are used only when statements are to be written in one line one after another.
- if local variables are not used - don’t compile
Go also has strict code formatting rules built-in, which makes it standard everywhere.

Freedom of Monetary Transaction

prithu@prithu.dev (Prithu Goswami) — Tue, 19 Jul 2022 19:59:00 +0000

Wrote the following in the FOSS United Telegram group, might expand this later as a blog post.

Context

Razorpay was put under scrutiny for accepting donation for a news org (altnews I believe?) from foreign sources. The discussion in the group was that whether or not it should have been allowed. I just chipped in.

But, is it right to curb the inflow of money from foreign sources in some cases but allow it for others? Money should be free and neutral. It’s a tool for humans to use to communicate value, just like how data is used to communicate information. If you believe humans should be free to communicate privately with whomever they wish to, for any reason whatsoever, be it illegal or legal (remember again, you can’t be selective, either everyone has encrypted p2p private communication or no one does), then why curb money? This goes with FOSS as well, you should be free to use any software out there for whatever you want – only you will be liable for how you use it; the software itself doesn’t care and need not know what you are using it for. One could sell illicit goods using magento and tor - none of those two pieces of software care about it, they are neutral to the use case. If you believe the government has no business looking into our chats then I fail to understand why most people here don’t mind the government having a tab on our financial activities. Richard Stallman himself doesn’t use a credit card nor does he have a bank account (might have one for official use, cause he has no option), he likes cash, cause it’s private. Also, I am not a fan of today’s “crypto”, “web3” ecosystem either, most of it is just ponzi and get rich quick schemes. Don’t bash me for “supporting” it.

AWS S3 access policy nuances

prithu@prithu.dev (Prithu Goswami) — Sat, 09 Jul 2022 19:17:00 +0000

If you want to give access to everything in the bucket (objects) make sure the resource arn for the s3 bucket must also have a /* indicating all objects in the bucket

"Resource": [
  "arn:aws:s3:::BUCKET-NAME",
]

This one won’t give access to objects in the bucket, the following one will.

"Resource": [
  "arn:aws:s3:::BUCKET-NAME",
  "arn:aws:s3:::BUCKET-NAME/*"
]

There is a difference between these two resources. One is the bucket itself (arn:aws:s3:::BUCKET-NAME) and tthe other refers to the objects in the bucket arn:aws:s3:::BUCKET-NAME/*

AWS Resource policies

prithu@prithu.dev (Prithu Goswami) — Sat, 09 Jul 2022 15:20:00 +0000

There are two ways to manage access of a bucket - user policies or resources policies. Access policies that you attach to your resources (buckets and objects) are referred to as resource-based policies. You can also attach polcies to your users in your account, called user policies.
Resources policies are attached to the resource (in s3 for eg. buckets or even objects). Resource policy dictates who is allowed to access the resource

Principals

Principal element is used in resource-based policies. The Principal element specifies the user, account, service, or other entity that is allowed or denied access to a resource.

EKS vs ECS vs Fargate

prithu@prithu.dev (Prithu Goswami) — Tue, 07 Jun 2022 22:02:00 +0000

tldr; ECS is just AWS’s proprietary orchestration solution. EKS is their kubernetes service - you don’t have to manage the kubernetes control plane (don’t have access to master node, but you do get the kubernetes API). Fargate can be used with ECS or EKS and basically abstracts away the compute nodes on which containers run.

using xxd to create binary data

prithu@prithu.dev (Prithu Goswami) — Tue, 03 May 2022 15:11:00 +0000

xxd is a great tool. I have seen it be use in so many places. For some weird reason though it seems to come packaged with vim?. Don’t know about other distros, but that’s the case with Arch. Seems like xxd was created by Bram and is a part of vim source code. Haven’t looked into it further, but that’s what I concluded.

Anyways here’s a small example:

echo -en "89504e470d0a1a0a0000000d4948445200000001000000010100000000376ef9240000000a4944415478016360000000020001737501180000000049454e44ae426082" | xxd -r -p

The -r does the reverse of what xxd is meant to normally do, i.e print hexdump of a binary data. The -p just tells it to treat the input as ‘plain hexdump’ (which is a single line of hex digits without any other formatting)

playwright is really good for browser automation

prithu@prithu.dev (Prithu Goswami) — Sun, 01 May 2022 01:31:00 +0000

playwright is really good for browser automation. It is a re-write of puppeteer, I believe, and is maintained by the same devs and has tons of improvements, maybe because it was supported/sponsored by microsoft.

It also has a wonderful feature of automatically recording your actions and converting them to a script. Running this would open a browser window and you can then record your actions.

npx playwright codegen https://netbanking.hdfcbank.com/netbanking/

TIL: literal ipv6 in URLs

prithu@prithu.dev (Prithu Goswami) — Thu, 28 Apr 2022 01:14:00 +0000

TIL from RFC2732 that the way you access an ipv6 address in a browser is by enclosing it in square brackets http://[2401:4900:f00b:dead:2f2d:48ac:9fdb:b7ff]:8080/path/file.txt

setting up cgit with nginx

prithu@prithu.dev (Prithu Goswami) — Thu, 28 Apr 2022 00:27:00 +0000

server {
  server_name git.prithu.dev;
  listen 80;
  access_log /var/log/nginx/git.prithu.dev/access.log;
  error_log /var/log/nginx/git.prithu.dev/error.log;
    #auth_basic "Git Login";
    #auth_basic_user_file "/srv/git/.htpasswd";

  location /static {
    alias /var/www/cgit;
    try_files $uri =404;
  }

  location / {
    fastcgi_pass  unix:/run/fcgiwrap.socket;
    fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME /usr/lib/cgit/cgit.cgi;
    fastcgi_param PATH_INFO       $uri;
    fastcgi_param QUERY_STRING    $args;
  }

    listen 443 ssl; # managed by Certbot
    ssl_certificate /etc/letsencrypt/live/git.prithu.dev/fullchain.pem; # managed by Certbot
    ssl_certificate_key /etc/letsencrypt/live/git.prithu.dev/privkey.pem; # managed by Certbot
    include /etc/letsencrypt/options-ssl-nginx.conf; # managed by Certbot
    ssl_dhparam /etc/letsencrypt/ssl-dhparams.pem; # managed by Certbot
}

resources to learn about aws vpc

prithu@prithu.dev (Prithu Goswami) — Wed, 27 Apr 2022 20:25:00 +0000

Videos

nginx reverse proxy and url rewrite

prithu@prithu.dev (Prithu Goswami) — Tue, 26 Apr 2022 21:21:00 +0000

Was just setting up shiori behind nginx and I wanted it such that https://prithu.dev/shiori passess the request to port 8001. I have been in this situation before as well where a path needs to be sent to a another host or application server.

Just doing the following wont work:

location  /app {
  proxy_pass         http://localhost:8001;
  proxy_set_header   Host $host;
}

nginx forwards the client request (http://root.com/app) to our app server (assuming running locally) as http://localhost:8001/app, but there is no route defined as /app. Our app expects a request to be sent to /. And this app might just be an api. So the client making a request like http://root.com/app/users would be recieved by the app server as http://127.0.0.1/app/users instead of http://127.0.0.1/users. There are two ways to solve this, though both of the methods are not exactly equivalent, and other use cases and situations might warrant the use of either of them:

keeping it simple dense and precise

prithu@prithu.dev (Prithu Goswami) — Mon, 25 Apr 2022 23:08:00 +0000

I am going to try to keep this as dense and precise as possible and only store “usefull” knowledge. I am going keep this for things like “how was I supposed to run a webdav server using rclone again”; well maybe not that, because that’s just a one line and belongs in the snippets.md file. But more like “how do I setup weechat on android using an ssh tunnel and a weechat relay?”. I can imagine forgetting that. Or perhaps some sort of small tutorial or something?

Using server-side git hooks to auto publish blog posts

prithu@prithu.dev (Prithu Goswami) — Wed, 28 Oct 2020 00:20:37 +0530

Git hooks are great to automate your software development workflow. They can be used to implement CI/CD workflows. Many PaaS services like Netlify and Heroku trigger a build process of your app or website when you push to a remote repository. In this post I want to go through how one could implement that automated process using git hooks for a static blog using just a bash script with nginx serving the files on a VPS.

python one-liners using list composoition

prithu@prithu.dev (Prithu Goswami) — Wed, 13 May 2020 11:34:00 +0000

TIL that there are really good ways of writing one-liners in python. I knew they existed but today I took a closer look at them. Most of the iterations can be done using list composition. You don’t even have to be composing a list, you could be just executing a normal function call like in the example below uses “print”

curl -s https://www.imdb.com/list/ls020046354/export  |\
    python -c 'import csv,sys;[print (a["Genres"]) for a in csv.DictReader(sys.stdin)]'

reversing a firmware of security camera and squashfs

prithu@prithu.dev (Prithu Goswami) — Thu, 30 Apr 2020 21:50:00 +0000

I saw a cool video by ghidra ninja on yt that went over firmware reversing for an a small security camera. He got the firmware from the site of the manufacturer and went over binwalk and showed how there’s a linux filesystem on it in squashfs form. This was really amusing — the fact that there is a whole file system in a single binary. He then goes on to to see a rc script that runs on the device (this is after separating the filesystem and unsquashing it) and edits that code to include a reverse shell using nc. Some version of nc do not have the -e flag though and there’s a workaround for that in the man page of nc itself. I find that kind of ironic.

dependency chain attack on magneto

prithu@prithu.dev (Prithu Goswami) — Tue, 28 Apr 2020 14:35:00 +0000

There are hardware skimmers that collect card data when swiped but there can also be code written that can skim cards in an online checkout screen using code injection techniques. There was this incident where a group of hackers got access to a Magneto site and they modified a js library used in the checkout page and added a skimming code that would capture the card data entered in the forms of the page and send it to their servers.

physical pen testers

prithu@prithu.dev (Prithu Goswami) — Mon, 06 Apr 2020 19:46:00 +0000

I was listening to an episode of darknet diaries and learnt that there is this profession called a “physical penetration tester” where basically a person works for a institution who wants to test the security of their physical infrastructure (buildings). A client could be a bank or some other financial firm.

The episode interviews two such people that worked for the security firm coalfire. They tell a story of when they were hired by the Iowa state to pen test their courthouses. And then later while they were on their job doing the pen testing on the building they get arrested and are prosecuted with felony charges. This gets out of hand as there is a lot of misunderstanding between officials, the judges, the sheriff who arrested them during the night. This goes to show that you are just not safe no matter what you are doing. Although they were bailed out by their company, coalfire, they will have to live the lasting consequences of the whole ordeal. Every time they get background checked, or every time an officer pulls them over or when they apply for a job, there will always be the stamp of “Oh this guy was once charged for burglary”, even though those men were doing their job that night.

The beauty of Unix pipelines

prithu@prithu.dev (Prithu Goswami) — Sun, 02 Feb 2020 17:45:30 +0530

View discussion on Hacker News

The Unix philosophy lays emphasis on building software that is simple and extensible. Each piece of software must do one thing and do it well. And that software should be able to work with other programs through a common interface – a text stream. This is one of the core philosophies of Unix which makes it so powerful and intuitive to use.

This is an excerpt from The Unix Programming Envirnonment

The joys of using configurable programs like vim and i3

prithu@prithu.dev (Prithu Goswami) — Mon, 02 Dec 2019 14:15:30 +0530

I see configurable software like vim and i3 really good tools to work with. I strongly believe you should have control over how something works in your toolset. Tools like vim and i3 allow for users to customize their workings in order fit their needs - this is what makes them so powerful and a joy to use. There are many instances where one feels the need to tweak their tools so that they could do things which would make their lives a little more easier. Most of the times these are small ad-hoc tweaks and this is where programs like vim and i3 shine.

Using jq to display cricket scores on i3bar

prithu@prithu.dev (Prithu Goswami) — Sun, 07 Apr 2019 13:19:12 +0000

i3bar screenshot

It’s the IPL season and I thought why not keep a track of the score of the matches that are in progress. I have two tests tomorrow and I don’t want to be wasting time looking at the scores every now and then; instead let’s spend some more time looking into an utility that I haven’t used before and test and play around with it. I don’t even like cricket that much.