Gaganpreet Arora

Tools for working with JSON

Wed, 15 Nov 2023 23:14:52 +0100

I often work with JSON responses and need to process, view or compare objects. I have come to depend on a bunch of command line tools for these tasks. Do you use any other tools? Let me know in comments below. View (bat) # bat (better cousin of cat) is perfect for reading syntax highlighted JSON. It’ll use a pager for files that don’t fit on the screen and files can be searched by using the / operator.

Copy to clipboard from tmux on a remote ssh session

Wed, 08 Feb 2023 22:39:37 +0100

Note: A better approach is documented in this blog post by Igor Babuschkin. My current working setup is tmux + neovim. On top of that, I use my desktop for development that I often access remotely outside of home. One of the drawbacks of working remotely via SSH was that I couldn’t copy to my client’s native clipboard (eg: to share code snippets in Slack) remotely. It took me some time to figure out how to do it, and it’s quite straightforward.

Hyperproductive API clients with FastAPI using OpenAPI Generator

Mon, 30 May 2022 15:48:25 +0200

OpenAPI-Generator is a spectacular tool built on top of OpenAPI schemas that can generate API clients from OpenAPI schemas. Coupled with the automatically generated OpenAPI schema in FastAPI, it’s a formidable paradigm to learn. I’ve been using this pattern in some of my recent projects and it’s made me very productive. A working example of this blog post can be found in this bare-bones Github project . If you are looking for a real world example using this pattern, you can look at my FastAPI-Starter project, which is a Cookiecutter project that uses this pattern and tons of other helpful features.

Disable Sony noise-cancellation on Linux

Thu, 07 Apr 2022 23:44:17 +0200

I really like my Sony 1000XM3 headphones. They are super comfortable to wear and pack away compactly when I’m travelling. I have always hated one feature though: the headphones always start with noise-cancelling (NC) enabled. This default setting irritates me because it means I have to charge my headphones more often. In addition, I’ve also had ear fatigue when I use NC for too long. [0] Sony provides no way to change this default (they would rather add gamification to their mobile app).

Creating a "Deploy to Heroku" button

Tue, 25 Jan 2022 21:52:48 +0100

Heroku makes it a breeze to deploy applications to the cloud on their free instances. Although it’s straightforward, here are my notes of how I set up the “Deploy to Heroku” button for No Cookie Analytics . Step 1: Choose a Docker image # The No Cookie Analytics comprises separate backend and frontend (SPA) apps. To make the deployment process less complex, I set up a monolith Docker image where the backend served static assets.

Onyx Boox Note Air 2 Review

Sun, 23 Jan 2022 17:53:40 +0100

I take a lot of notes and it was becoming a real headache to organise and revise things I had studied. I’ve been eyeing the e-ink tablet market since Remarkable launched a few years ago. The lack of a backlight and a recently introduced subscription model drove me to go for a Boox Note Air 2 instead. Here’s my experience of using the tablet for 6 weeks. Unboxing # The first thing I noticed as I was unboxing was that the pen nib was bent and crushed (see update at end of this section).

My favourite books of 2021

Tue, 28 Dec 2021 22:58:45 +0100

This year I read more non-fiction than I usually do and I read 32 books this year. I also wrote a similar list for 2020 .

What I learnt building a SaaS

Mon, 29 Nov 2021 22:26:02 +0100

Background # It was around the start of the pandemic in 2020 that I started hacking away at some of the ideas that I had collected but didn’t have a chance to work on. I had come across the FingerprintJS project, and I had an idea to use similar fingerprints for a cookie-free analytics platform. At that time, other competitors in this market were still in their infancy, and I wanted to build an analytics product that will have more information for marketeers to base business decisions on.

Wikivoyage has disappeared from DuckDuckGo

Tue, 26 Oct 2021 12:43:04 +0200

Update (2021-10-31): DuckDuckGo now includes results for Wikivoyage again, as do Bing and Yahoo. I have been planning a long due vacation and I was doing some research into the places I wanted to visit. My goto travel guide is Wikivoyage: it’s well organised, text-heavy (instead of slideshow-heavy alternatives) and skimming the guide of a region will generally give a good idea of what to expect. So imagine my surprise when I enter a query with the keyword “Wikivoyage” on DuckDuckGo:

No escorts allowed: How I fought spammers

Mon, 18 Oct 2021 16:28:37 +0200

Warning: This post features text that might not be safe for work. Background # Incorporating anti-spam measures are the least of concerns while building a user generated content (UGC) platform. Unless you’re paranoid and spend precious time building moderation features in your platform, there will come a day when you sorely miss those tools. This is a story about exactly how this happened and how I dealt with it at Polarsteps.

Optimising a Vuetify app

Wed, 07 Jul 2021 14:53:00 +0200

Background # I’ve been building No Cookie Analytics in Vue using the Vuetify framework. Most of my time was spent hacking away without any due regard to performance. I looked at the PageSpeed Insights score, which handed out an abysmal score of 29 (out of 100). It was not shocking, I hadn’t spent any time on this part. The app was sluggish and I knew I had to fix it. Here’s my before and after scores with the steps I took to optimise the app:

Lessons learnt migrating a Flask application to Python 3

Wed, 02 Jun 2021 12:11:26 +0200

I recently migrated a medium sized Flask application from Python 2 to Python 3. Python 2 was retired over a year ago and upgrading the app was long overdue. I imagine there are still others who could use my lessons to migrate their apps. Background # A medium sized Flask application, ~20000 LoC running on Heroku with multiple celery workers. The app was already using the latest version of Python 2.

My favourite books of 2020

Thu, 31 Dec 2020 22:34:38 +0100

Working and living from home gave me a lot of free time that I could dedicate to reading. I read 40 books this year. I usually read fiction, however this year I aimed to read a mix of fiction and non-fiction.

IPython embed and autoreload

Mon, 07 Dec 2020 21:01:38 +0100

IPython makes for very productive and effortless sessions working interactively with Python. From the numerous extensions for IPython, autoreload is one I use often. It’s very useful for working with existing code and being able to edit code from my code editor and have changes reflected automatically within the IPython terminal.

The story of udemy-dl

Sun, 25 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000

The recent takedown of the youtube-dl project resurfaced memories of a similar project, udemy-dl, that I worked on years ago. I also had to abandon the project due to a DMCA notice. In light of what happened to youtube-dl this felt like the right time to write about it. Beginnings # Back in 2013 when I was starting off as a software consultant, I landed a project to build a desktop GUI application.

Adapting types to fix SQLAlchemy's "can't adapt type" error

Wed, 21 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I have recently been using Pydantic a lot, which is pretty cool since it lets me specify concrete types on my previously untyped data. Until I ran into an error when I was inserting data stored in a Pydantic model to my postgres database using SQLAlchemy. Problem # I have a Pydantic model like this to define my incoming data from a request: # Pydantic class class EventSchema(BaseModel): ip_address: IPvAnyAddress Another part in my code defined an SQLAlchemy model to persist this incoming information (along with other data not shown here):

Fixing crackling audio on USB powered speakers and Raspberry Pi

Wed, 26 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Powering USB speakers from Raspberry Pi # I recently set up Mycroft (an open source personal assistant) on my Raspberry Pi. I bought a set of cheap speakers which run on USB power and plugged them into the 3.5mm output and the power cable to a USB port on the Pi itself. Right away I heard constant crackling noises coming out of the speakers. I figured I had a set of defective speakers but I could not reproduce this when I tried the same setup with my laptop.

Guest post: Better SQLAlchemy and Beyond

Fri, 31 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I wrote a blog post which was originally published on the Tiqets Tech blog .

Guest post: 10 things learned building our first Shopify App

Tue, 09 Jul 2019 00:00:00 +0000

I wrote a blog post which was originally published on the Shopify blog .