hrmnjt.dev::sttp://secure_thought_transfer_protocol

ivanti, clickops and quirks of osascript

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This is a short and sharp one.

One of the necessary evils at work is VPN. I’m yet to experience a non-clunky VPN and I believe this is by design. The VPN software is generally gatekeeped and obscured to make it difficult for the end-user to bypass security controls. What I crave is a better developer experience when using VPN. (I’ve heard good things about Tailscale; but I’m yet to try it or other alternatives.) But, here I’m digresssing. At work, we need to use Ivanti VPN which on MacOS installs and provides a convenient menubar icon.

introducing rfd, again

Sun, 08 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I’m a RFD fanboy! I love reading them, and I wish for a workplace which follows them. I’m a 10x engineer if I write an RFD beforehand (even a minimal one for myself). At work, I always find rough edges when “my code is compiling (iykyk)” and writing specifics to improve these edges makes it concrete given team setting and other workplace constraints.

Getting my team to talk based on a common medium is a winner. Any common medium, be it RFDs, emails, workshops, “a sprint ceremony” (whatever makes you communicate easily). RFD is more productive than meetings and in absence of an existing established team culture, I lobby for RFDs (or equivalent) to share technical improvements (features or tech-debt).

dotfiles (sandwich) recipe

Sun, 01 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Prime’s My Dev Setup Is Better Than Yours stuck with me when I watched it last year. Moral of the course (which is more a demo) is – your setup is best for you because it’s yours - custom built for how you work. I tried mocking it with sparse commits here and there. The real kick was changing jobs last year which means new laptop and new vigor to create my “dev setup”. Instead of bikeshedding and analysis paralysis, I went brrr and built a workflow on shoulders of giants. This is production grade software where production is “works on my machine :P”.

next 3 months goals

Thu, 10 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I’m going to be 33 this year. These are interim goals till then. I want to proclaim my goals and shout out it to the world so that when I review it in July 2025, I can reflect on my progress and make necessary adjustments. I believe systems are better than goals but since I’m starting from blank slate, below goals are directional for me to create new systems.

0xC0NTENT: START

pyenv to uv

Thu, 02 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Back story: When I read “How fast is your shell?” ¹ by Thorsten Ball, almost an year ago, I immediately jumped my seat to check my shell latency. I use zsh as daily driver, not because of choice, but rather because it comes as default shell on MacOS. When I started my career, choice of shell was an unknown unknown for me. I didn’t know that since macOS Catalina, Apple switched from bash to zsh to avoid licensing obligations of GPLv3 for newer versions of bash. I was also not aware of POSIX compliance of shells and maintaining portability for scripts to run anywhere. Shell scripts was as means to an end and it worked. Over the years, I’m more inclined to terminal based interfaces and reading the article struck a chord somewhere deep and I was compelled to fix my shell startup time.

reading files in style with duckdb and harlequin

Mon, 02 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Earlier, I wrote a small utility to read files with duckdb ¹ and I’m finding amazing mileage for this small utility. I recently found Harlequin ² which natively works with duckdb on the terminal. Its even better than the CLI in some cases because it does SQL IDE stuff but in the terminal.

So, I extended earlier utility function ³ to add a harlequin edit mode.

Now, when I do just npq DATASET I get the default duckdb CLI

reading files with duckdb

Sat, 05 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Couple weeks ago, I was troubleshooting a data pipeline and in the process checking couple of CSV and Parquet file from S3. The workflow for checking CSV files is simple enough and fastest way on MacOS is to have CyberDuck open and previewing file from S3. This feature from Cyberduck is a godsend and it saves so much time and bloat when dealing with data files on S3.

However, for Parquet files, I had to download and inspect the file or use parquet-tools to read the file. It’s very nifty again but because I want to inspect the data, I need to deal with AWS sessions and the command is verbose too.

vim-motion cheatsheet

Mon, 08 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Right now, my coding workflow can be summarized as furious alt-tab between Firefox, Sublime Text and iterm2 and maxing out on keyboard shortcuts for all three of them. I always had the urge to ditch Sublime as well and move to my own personalized development environment but setting up neovim and leaving the comfort of Sublime felt like unnecessary pressure for me. In order to get hooked on Vim motions I switched to vim-bindings on Sublime Text and found myself using them a lot instead of Sublime shortcuts which don’t feel very natural and intuitive anymore. But my range was very little; I’m not using a lot of what is possible; a lot of what can be good and intuitive.

macos menubar

Mon, 04 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I really like my 16.2-inch MacBook; the mini-LED backlit; the Liquid Retina XDR; the 1600 nits peak; the P3 gamut wide color; and the ProMotion for adaptive 120Hz refresh rates. But with all these goodness, there is a “notch” situation. It doesn’t bother me so much until some of the menubar icons go below it and I can’t find that anymore. Apparently, everyone in Cupertino thought that the best solution to “not having enough room to display menubar apps” is to “hide them with zero indication that there are more that simply can’t be displayed. Thank you, Notch!

git organized (part ii)

Sun, 18 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Like last year, I was watching FOSDEM'24 this year from home. There were many interesting topics but one of them was “So You Think You Know Git” by Scott Chacon ¹. Since I’ve already tried to make the local git workflow better, it was relatively low energy for me to try out suggestions from this talk.

Another reason to revisit this was Julia’s toot ² which was a mega thread where a lot of people wrote their favorite gitconfig options. I would definitely recommend reading that thread (full of hidden treasures).

2024

Tue, 09 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Embracing the oddities

There is something strange about “new year”.

There is hope that something new is going to begin and it might be better than status quo. There is quiet that happens at work when people go on annual leaves and there is suddenly time available to work on stuff we wanted to do but could never get to. There is pleasant weather in Dubai which makes you want to go out often. There is happiness of spending extra time with family. This cocktail of feelings happens every year towards the end of the year but never otherwise. It is reasonable but strange.

git organized (part i)

Wed, 06 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Git is core part of my daily workflow (work or otherwise) and there are far too many ideas stash-ed in my head which can either (a) improve hygiene or (b) increase productivity.

folders, aliases and visual feedback

Before today, I organized all repositories in freedesktop.org xdg-user-dirs(1)¹ inspired $HOME/code folder for both personal and work repos. I can’t trace back why I do so but I would thank my past self to not organize folders aggressively and follow a convention (even without knowing it too well).

notes 1.0.0

Sat, 02 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Months ago, I started on an implementation for a note taking command line utility that would work for my use case. It took me some time now to find time between work and COVID to make enough progress on my side project/utility.

Read about context

I’ve now finally been able to write and complete the 1st version of the basic feature list that I expected to cover.

Git repository - https://github.com/hrmnjt/notes

snigdha and harman: an invitation

Sun, 23 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000

We met 8 years back and back then none of us knew that we are going to spend lots of time staying together being significant to one another. What started as a friendship back then has evolved to a promise that we hold to each other to stay together for time to come.

Back in 2012, the year when the world was going to end, we were still trying to get an engineering degree (we were stubborn and not superstitious at all). I was stupid and idiotic and she was classy and kind. We were working together to give back to society in college being part of The iCare Group. We would have not met or the equation would have been very different if it were not for this group.

latex based resume

Wed, 01 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000

LaTex is a pretty old technology and I was not aware of it till very recent.

I was always amazed by the similarity in which the scientific journals and research papers were formatted. I was under the impression that there is a standard defined somewhere; brought to existence by a group or institutions; and is so sacred that everyone follows the same formatting. In the search, I found BibTex and then Tex and its friends - LaTex and ConText.

notes 0.1.0

Sun, 22 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000

I always think about putting thought together and need a scribbling place. For stuff that can be shared, this section of my blog works well. For the private stuff, not so much though.

One thing I’m very concerned about is the promise of a software or tool which takes data from users. I’ve become more and more cognizant about my online presence in the recent times.

What do you say to a note taking application which:

dubai vs voip

Wed, 11 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Dubai, or should I say UAE have had an ever long issue with VoIP. Club it with the costly telecom plans compared to other countries, it becomes borderline impossible to talk to people back in India.

People generally resort to VPN, but I find that to be a very un-natural way of making calls. Mind you, I’m very pro-VPN. In fact, I like the improved privacy and have fiddled with OpenVPN back in Bangalore days a lot.

using GoLang Present for coded presentations

Thu, 30 May 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Are you lazy programmer who wants to make a rich presentation with cheap efforts?

In a hurry? TL;DR:

Why do we make presentations?

Visual communications are highly constructive and comprehensible form of creating memories.

Wikipedia says:

Visual communication is the conveyance of ideas and information in forms that can be seen…

…Visual communication is a broad spectrum that includes signs, typography, drawing, graphic design, illustration, industrial design, advertising, animation, color, and electronic resources…