(link for all the code) What is traceroute? If you’ve fiddled with networks you must be familiar with the famous traceroute tool. Its a script that traces the path to a host and prints info on every hop it encounters. To give an example if you run traceroute kalbhor.xyz you should see something like this : ❯ traceroute kalbhor.xyz traceroute to kalbhor.xyz (18.140.218.13), 64 hops max, 52 byte packets 1 dlinkrouter. Read more

Recently I started interning at Avanti Learning Centres, an Indian startup focussing on providing interesting and lucid ways of learning. Think of Khan Academy, but focused towards the Indian audience. One of my first tasks as an intern was to automate the backing up of their databases. I had to look at the problem broadly and list out the standard ways of taking database backups, and then choose a method that would work best. Read more

Preface Previously the deployment process at Avanti was largely adhoc, with no streamlined simple “touch of a button” system. New code was usually deployed in such a manner : Tell load balancer to take down Server A, deploy new code on Server A (Server B handles all traffic). Tell load balancer to take down Server B(while getting Server A up again) and deploy new code on Server B. Read more

This is in no way going to be a comprehensive guide on how to get started with open source; its going to be more of a description of my journey. This might help you if you’re a beginner struggling to make your way into open source. My realisations/experiences in a chronological order : Realisation #1 : If you’ve never contributed to a project before, its going to be extremely difficult to contribute to someone else’s code I spent weeks trying to find a project that was interesting and easy to contribute to. Read more

If you use GitHub a lot, there’s a bunch of stuff that could help improve your experience. These include GitHub integrations, Chrome extensions and other tips and tricks. I’ll be briefly explaining few of my favourite one’s, and then provide an exhaustive list. OctoTree OctoTree is a browser extension available on Chrome, Firefox, Opera and Safari to show a code tree on GitHub and GitLab. It is very useful to me since it allows me to view the project source without having to clone every repository on my computer. Read more