“Excellently observed,” answered Candide, “but let us cultivate our garden.” –Voltaire, Candide
Welcome to Deepak’s home on the Web. Jump ahead to my bio.
Recent Work
What I have been up to lately:
- (Dec 31 2021) My thoughts after reading the graphic novel adaptation of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time.
- (Dec 25 2021) An essay on religion in the 21st century from an existential point of view.
- (Nov 28 2021) A meditation on time and change, reflecting on what it means for our mental well-being.
- (Nov 4 2021) Throwback Thursday: Linux and Unix in the early 2000s as I knew it
- (Oct 12 2021) I note that our screen era relies a lot on eyes and ears, and underserves the remaining senses.
Most Popular
Here is the most popular content.
It always amazes me how these remain popular, because they are so obscure, and in my mind, so ancient.
- (Oct 21 2016) A technical post about closing a network connection in one shot from your application
- (Feb 1 2017) An obscure post about what to do if disk is full on a XenServer hosting virtual machines
- (Feb 2 2017) A race condition can occur in Python if you don’t create a directory correctly.
- (Aug 5 2020) A post on how we built a global ML model with Earth Engine
- (May 21 2016) A tale of debugging a bad error message. This post is probably popular more because of the error message than what I wrote there.
My Favorites
Here are some of my personal favorites:
- (Dec 25 2021) A systems approach to mental well-being, in which I try to link childhood and adulthood through pain and familiarity
- (2020-2021) Our journal article on global irrigation extent and lightning-talk at Google Geo-for-Good summit
- (June 28 2020) We can take a concept from functional programming to apply in real-life: lazy-eval
- (June 10 2016) When I found a bug in the FreeBSD operating system
- (April 10 2021) I very much liked the novel by Julian Barnes, Sense of an Ending
- (2007-2008) I selected and translated some verses from a philosophical work in my native tongue, Kannada, into English
Bio
At work, I specialize in machine learning and software engineering. I have experience with data pipelines, distributed parallel programming systems, cloud platforms, and model operations. I can work with high-level programming languages like Python as well as lower-level languages like C and (x86) assembly. During the pandemic years of 2020-21, I did pro-bono machine-learning research for sustainability with faculty at UC Berkeley.
In my free time, I tend to read books. I gravitate towards psychology, philosophy, and literary drama. I also enjoy books on nature, global topics and trends, strategy, and of course, technology. You will find some of my thoughts and reviews in my blog. Luckily for me, my wife Chaitra is a bibliophile as well.
I live in Mountain View, California, but grew up in Bangalore, India. Most recently (2020) I graduated in Data Science from University of California at Berkeley. I also have a master’s degree (2008) in Computer Science from Ohio State University and bachelor’s degree (2003) in Computer Science and Engineering from PES Institute of Technology, Bangalore.
Full profile, including recommendations, available on LinkedIn.
Recruiters: I do not do “Leetcode” interviews, but I’m open to discussing a realistic technical problem in your company. I believe it gives better signal to both of us.
You can follow me on Twitter.
How can I help you?
If you are:
- a young software engineer and want to talk about your career growth in engineering or workplace relationships,
- a student or adult thinking about pursuing a career in software or machine learning, or
- a manager in a company trying to gauge whether machine learning is for you,
I can help. E-mail me on n.deepak at gmail.com for 1-1 consulting and coaching.
I now also have a newsletter if you’d like to receive occasional updates about new blog posts or content (about 1 per month). You can subscribe on Substack.
Meta
This website has been around since 2000, although it has evolved almost continuously with technology… and me.