I've been working at Even for over a year now, and we use Cloud Run for everything. And I mean EVERYTHING. We use it to host our website, our backend server, our offline pipelines, our dashboards and our cron jobs.

And its been pretty incredible. By structuring all our backend to be event driven, we've managed to keep all our operations serverless, and our cloud costs extremely low. As you might know, Cloud Run charges you only for the time the server is actually processing a request, in increments of 100ms, which means that irrespective of how many services...

The story starts with a blunder. In fact, my first major blunder of the year. A couple of weeks ago, I was enthusiastically adding continuous integration and deployment to my projects. It the midst of it, I found out that GitLab CI can be used to build artifacts for deployment. For example, a project could be build, and provide the built binaries as artifacts.

Since I had been adding CIs to many of my projects, one of my requirements was to have PDFs for my documents (resume, project papers for instance) to be built automatically any time I change the...

A couple of days ago, I decided to start writing a detailed guide to GSoC and open source contributions. However, I have seen many people read articles without actually doing anything, and that really upsets me. As a result, I decided to create an obstacle course along with the article series so that people would have to show some proof of work before they can proceed to the next blog post.

My immediate problem however was much simpler. This is a statically generated blog. There is no configurable server side. This means that if I decide to password protect an...

TL;DR

I automated the procedure of obtaining and installing HTTPS certificates for all my domains and subdomains using the APIs provided by Namesilo (my registrar), GitLab (my host), and Certbot (certificate issuing package).

Long version

Not being on https is seriously bad for your website. Leaving out the actual security issues of not using https, the policy changes in Google Chrome also make a non-https website look bad to an end user. I shifted this blog to https more than an year ago (May 2016) and since then I have been using certificates generated by Letsencrypt for this blog.

So, I know I haven't written anything in a while, and that's because the last semester was my heaviest yet. But now since that has passed, I no longer have excuses to not write more articles. So go ahead, read on.

Before starting this article, if you do not know about Nix/NixOS, first go and read up about it: NixOS. NixOS in my opinion is the single most promising operating system ever written. Instead of being FHS compliant, NixOS keeps all files under hashed directory names under /nix/store so that files from different packages never have any collision. This...

The series:

1. An intern's views - How I got here
2. An intern's views - A month's end at Google
3. An intern's views - How far have I come?
4. An intern's views - End of diary

Before I start, I would like to point out that I'm writing this from Hong Kong, sitting in front of Disneyland, waiting for it to open. Life is good.

I'm not really sure what to write about. I've mostly written about my experience as a Google Intern. I've written about the work I've done. I've written about how I...

Hey... Whoever is reading this.

This article has been sitting in my mind for a week now, and I finally decided to write it. So, a week ago, a guy messages me to ask for some tips on GSoC. I like that, it makes me happy to know that I can help someone. However, it was obvious that the guy didn't have much confidence in himself.

I guess that's fine. Anybody who has seen me during exams and interviews would know how much I panic before anything important. But there is a key difference. I never feel like I can't...

AKA, what the hell about work? I have gone on and on about getting here. The things I found here. But I have still made no mention of what I do here. Well, here it is. So sit back, and read on.

1. An intern's views - How I got here
2. An intern's views - A month's end at Google
3. An intern's views - How far have I come?
4. An intern's views - End of diary

In case you haven't read the last article, you might want to.

So where were we? Oh yeah, end...

The series:

1. An intern's views - How I got here
2. An intern's views - A month's end at Google
3. An intern's views - How far have I come?
4. An intern's views - End of diary

Okay, okay.. I know this article is a bit late (and I've backdated it a bit), but I've been really busy. As it turns out, work at Google isn't all that easy (...did I think it would be?). But I'll get to that later 😉.

So let's walk through my first few days in the office. So, on my...

AKA, how I got an internship in Google. In case you were wondering why the actual title is so obscure, it is because I want this article to be mostly linked by the rest of the (monthly) articles in this series (I'll update the links as I write them)

1. An intern's views - How I got here
2. An intern's views - A month's end at Google
3. An intern's views - How far have I come?
4. An intern's views - End of diary

So, for those who know me, you'd know that getting into Google...