Abhishek Rao's blog

  YouTube (YT) can be a double edged sword for our long term well being. One the one hand it contains many informative, useful videos that improve our understanding of the world, on the other hand one could easily be sucked into mindlessly watching useless videos. Understanding how YT works will help us use it better. One thing we have to be wary about is YTs recommender system. This can hook us on and make us crave for more videos . I would recommend extensions like Distraction Free YT to avoid seeing YT recommendations next to current video. Instead of recommendations we can choose based on channels. Channel list Below I have shared a list of channels/playlist which I believe are more substance than style.   General 3Blue1Brown - YouTube Maths visualizations. Asianometry Semiconductors, history, general. Crash Course World History This channel has multiple courses, but the original history one was really interesting. Daniel Patton - YouTube Book reviews. DW Documen...

I have been a software Engineer in Microsoft for a year and half and I would like to share how I have learned the craft so far in hopes that it may help others. Theory  I like reading books as I believe this gives much deeper understanding of a subject. After some research online and asking people for suggestion I found some candidates. Programming Pearls by Jon Bentley is small book so I figured I could finish it fast. One important take away I got from this book is that a good Software Engineer thinks a lot before jumping to code. The second book I read is Code Complete 2 . This is old and you might want to skip some parts (Gotos, pointers etc) which are not applicable today. This book took many months to finish but it was worth it. I especially liked the parts about construction at different levels (requirement, architecture, OO classes), guide for naming, refactoring functions. Find all the learning resources your company provides and make good use of them. If you don'...

For some time I have become interested in history. I never liked that subject in school because I couldn't connect it with anything else but now things are making more sense. I can fit various facts into places, make sense of this world, so history now makes sense. I guess there is a basic urge to make sense of things. Questions like how did we end up here? Where are we going etc. This is especially soothing when I see the stark difference between India and USA and ask myself why is India so poor? Well a bit of history makes it abundantly clear. India has been free for only 50 years so we need some time. Looting by the British had taken it's toll. It all started with this video series made by John Greene called Crash Course World History  Youtube Playlist link . It was interesting and fun to watch. I also like this show because it shows the future of content creation, where individuals not big companies create content. I liked it so much that recently after couple of years w...