Convert your PDF to text online — Recently, I found myself facing the need to convert my personal PDF files to text. While there were many existing PDF to text converters available for this task, I couldn’t shake the feeling of unease about uploading my private documents to unknown servers. …

I made Tournacat, an add-on that syncs upcoming Esports schedules of tournaments to Google Calendar. Two months later, Tournacat has garnered paid users and is slowly growing. In this post, I will share my experience building Tournacat using various technologies, including Cloudflare Worker, Hugo, and Google Apps Script. Along the…

Practices for writing highly testable and flexible Python code — So, a few weeks back, I stumbled upon this awesome talk by Brandon Rhodes. I was so hooked that I couldn’t resist the temptation to dive right into the example he shared and jot down my learnings. One key takeaway I’ve learned is the importance of separating I/O operations (i.e…

Distinguishing multiple exit points in loops — Can you use else in a for loop in Python? The answer is a resounding yes! I know it sounds crazy. The use of else after for and while loops in Python is not a widely known idiom. The use of the for-else construct is often misunderstood and overlooked. For…

A faster search experience on Google Chrome — I hopped on the DuckDuckGo (DDG) hype train some years ago. It lasted for about 5 months. Unfortunately, I can’t help to be constantly reminded how good Google search is. An anecdote probably for another day. Though DDG did not become my default search engine, there’s one feature that changes…

All the fuss about the Python GIL explained — So, you have heard of the Global Interpreter Lock or GIL for short? What exactly is GIL? Well, in short GIL is a mechanism that is built into the CPython interpreter. It is designed to prevent multiple native threads from executing Python bytecodes at once. “Blah-blah-blah, stop trying to sound…

Creating modular and reusable code in Python — Decorators are incredibly powerful in Python. They are useful for creating modular and reusable code. Plus, they’re pretty cool once you get the hang of them! In this article, we’ll look at what decorators are, why you should use them, and when you should and shouldn’t use them. As always…

An in-depth guide, including comparisons — 28 November 2022 is a sad day for developers. If you haven’t heard, Salesforce (Heroku’s parent organization) is phasing out its free tier plan on this date. For many years, Heroku has been the de facto standard platform as a service (PaaS). So many students and developers deployed their first…

Stop comparing JWT and Cookies — There is a lot of confusion about cookies, sessions, token-based authentication, and JWT. Today, I want to clarify what people mean when they talk about “JWT vs Cookie, “Local Storage vs Cookies,” “Session vs token-based authentication,” and “Bearer token vs Cookie” once and for all. Here’s a hint — we…