Posts on Maheswaran Moothiringode

My website is now continuously built and deployed!

Sun, 01 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000

This blog is now continuously built and deployed.

This post will serve as a test for me to see if the deployment works fine. 😄

I am using a self hosted drone-ci instance to build, test and deploy my site to AWS. 😎

The tech behind my sites

Tue, 26 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Blogs have been an amazing source of learning for me in the past few years. And I have been having this keen interest in starting one and maintaining it myself.

I now have created three different pages I plan to maintain with as many posts as possible. Here is what is behind each of those.

My Website

I remember buying the domain some time in 2009 back when I was in college. But then left it unused for quite a while. I setup a blog after a while. But then moved to using a landing page that I have right now. This was setup some time in early 2018.

This is a simple static landing page which is mostly taken as is from HTML5Up’s Aerial template.

The site is built as a hugo static site. Using Seth MacLeod’s port (no longer public on Github) of the template. I added my own slight variations on the site and this is available on my github.

I got rid of most of the stylings there. I loved the background color they used and decided to keep that as the base color for all my sites.

My Blog

This is what I consider will be a changelog of everything that happens in my life. This blog is also a static site. Built using Hugo - the amazing static site generator.

The layout is my own. Inspired by most of the blogs I read. May not be the best on all devices, but works. Hugo’s templating system makes it easy to play with the different things and create all the pages that I need.

The source code is available on github if you want to go through how I created it.

My Projects home

Call this a portfolio if you must. But I consider this a placeholder for all the amazing open-source projects I have created and plan to create in future. 😄

This is also a static site built on Hugo. Layout is slightly different to show more details as compared to the blog. Still something I have created on my own in the quest to becoming CSS and design master.

Hosting

All these websites are hosted on AWS as of this post.

The websites are hosted as a static site on S3, with a route 53 domain configuration pointing to a Cloudfront distribution.

Most of the things I setup follow the AWS tutorial to setup a static site. The setup is not free, but the cost is very very less. Right now, I spend just half a dollar to maintain all these sites.

Looks like this is my fourth hosting solution as per Complete DNS History

I had setup automated deployment on Travis for a while. But went back on that after moving to AWS. Have to setup that again, but that is for another post. 😄

Halite 3 - My Python bot in Silver League

Thu, 31 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Halite is an artificial intelligence challenge, by Two Sigma. The competition is mostly about writing a bot which then competes against other players. You are ranked based on how well you do against them.

The goal is to write a program to control a set of bots that can move around on a fixed size board and collect items that are scattered across the map.

I reached the silver league, which is top 25%. With a rank of 730 out of around 3000 competitors.

As per their analysis I made 14 different versions. The first few was me just submitting the tutorial bot. Then the next few was me trying to figure out how their offline tools work and submitting from there. I spent about an hour each of the next times I played with my bot. Making small updates and pushing it out.

Here is a snapshot of a game in which my bot won. My program controls all the bots in red. View the full replay here.

Most of my changes were just slight variations to handle one or two conditions that I saw happening most in the games played by my then bot. I didn’t get to make use of some components like dropoffs etc in the game.

Read more about how the game works in their learn section.

The game is definitely a fun way to experiment with programming in a competitive environment. Didn’t get to spend a lot of time on this contest. But will definitely try to put some time away for this the next time this happens.

View my implementation here.

Hello World! (Again)

Tue, 01 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Hello World !

Again. I look back at every time I wanted to jot down my thoughts and started. Every time saying to myself “This is the one that becomes world-famous.”

Then, I freeze up. The fear that I might become the next Dork,¹ for Sidin to write about, grips me.

But then, I have so many papers with my thoughts written down. Not everything is public or will be.

This blog that you are reading now is the next trial in that long line. This is written in Hugo. And deployed on AWS as a static website.

Here are some of my old trials that are still on the interwebs.

My Jekyll Site
I didn’t want to “migrate” this one over to Hugo.
Let’s just say this one is best left as it is now.
To keep the “new beginnings” philosophy that led to this site, I’ll keep the old one “archived”.
My Wordpress Blog
The first blog where I wrote the most. Has not been updated in a while.
My personal favourites on this blog are these two.

An Interview With Mr. Chikungunya
The Engineer Goes Vegetable Shopping

Check them out if you want to get a peek into how my thought processes were back then.

I pen down my thoughts on Twitter often. Though that is pretty inconsistent.

Or check the list of social networks that I am in.

Hang around, you might get to know more of me.

In case you have not read it, Dork is a series of books where the story is written as the author chancing upon the diary of the Dork in some fashion. ↩︎