Amit Jotwani

My Ghost website went down this morning

Woke up to a 504 error this morning. It's hosted on Digital Ocean, so I reached out to support, which wasn't very helpful. They basically said this, and then dumped a bunch of not-very-helpful-generic-504-articles. As a self-managed infrastructure as a service (IaaS) provider, we do not have access to your

terminal

Creating my first warp.dev workflow

I've been playing around with warp.dev, which is a new terminal app for Mac (Windows coming soon it looks like) with a focus on improving developer productivity. Looks really good, and has already improved quite a few workflows for me. Speaking of which, it actually has a feature called

Why are my Terminal sessions taking a long time to load? (hint: check your zshrc file for duplicate lines of code)

This answer on Reddit helped troubleshoot. I just commented everything, and it made the load lightening fast. Then, on a closer look, I found this mess. No idea how it got to this, but commenting out all but one of them did the trick. I was wondering why my terminal

Setting up Sublime Text 3

Adding an alias to zshrc fileWanted to add an alias to quickly open Sublime Text editor from the command line. Here's how - Open the file ~/.zshrc in a text editorAdd the following line - alias sub="/Applications/Sublime\ Text.app/Contents/SharedSupport/bin/subl"Close and reopen the command

How do I see the curl request that Postman is making in the background?

Now that I am playing around a bit more frequently with APIs, especially Twitter’s v2 API, and Airtable’s API, I have found myself playing around a lot more with Postman. It’s my new favorite app/service. I have obviously been living under a huge rock all this

playground

Playing around with Postman

I have known of Postman for a while now - it's a tool you can use to explore and test APIs. I just never got down to using it much. That changed quite a bit in the last week or so. I started playing around with it while exploring the

flask

Create a Content extension for Canva using Flask

Saw this Quick Start guide on Canva's developer portal that walks you through creating a content extension for Canva's users. It uses Node.js and Express.js as the server backend. I wanted to replicate this example using Python and Flask as the server. My Flask server listening and responding

programming

How to deploy a Flask app to Digital Ocean's app platform

I recently went throught the process to put my side project howbigisthebaby.io on Digital Ocean's new app platform, and wanted to document it in case anyone else found it helpful (or atleast me revisiting this later). Part 1: Setup the environment for the Flask app Step 1: Create the

The "What do you do" Identity Crisis

When you work for someone else, the first sentence of your answer to the question - “what do you do?” (and your Twitter bio) is more or less taken care of. It's on your business card. It's on the org-chart. That's who you are. They provide you with an identity.

How to add a Twitter CTA at the end of each article on Ghost CMS?

I recently saw a tweet that it's a good idea to have a CTA at the end of each article. In fact, Daniel Vassallo argued that the CTA should be pointing to Twitter instead of an email list. So, how do I do that in Ghost?Being new to Ghost,

tool

New: Bulk Link Generator

I had written a bunch of short essays as part of Ship30for30 challenge over the summer. Now that I was redoing my website, I thought it would be nice if I could have a collection of those links here. I had the titles and the URLs for all of them

Setting up Ghost - some early thoughts...

Just setup Ghost on this website (ajot.me). Had been running a home grown version of Flask + Flask-Frozen for a couple years. It was cool, but I was starting to feel friction in getting my thoughts out. Decide to give Ghost a whirl. Here are some early thoughts (less than

essays

New Project: How big is the baby?

We are expecting our first baby soon and like most first-time parents, we signed up for a bunch of pregnancy tracking apps that tell you how big your baby is each week. You know like, "this week your baby is as big as an eggplant". As informational as they were,

essays

Programming for lazy humans

I have come to realize that "being lazy" is a perfectly legit reason to learn a bit of programming. Being lazy is good. All things being equal, we bias towards being lazy - finding the easiest path to a problem with the least amount of friction. Being lazy is an

script

Get Spotify Track information (Apple Script + Text Expander)

Here's the Apple script that will get the track information from Spotify for the current track. Once you have this, you just need a way to print the result somewhere. I use the Text Expander app on the Mac to insert text snippets with simple keyboard shortcuts. if application "Spotify"

essays

Minimum Effective Dose for Typing Speed

I can touch type. But my typing speed is no match for my brain speed. I have tried several typing apps, with little improvement to show. Also, for some reason, almost all of them want me to learn typing pseudo words “Prilor Jioc ceat enels”! I hit a plateau at

essays

The Online Cooking Recipe Ecosystem is Fucking up the Customer Experience (CX)

Attempting to follow a food recipe on the internet is like playing a game of Minesweeper. You want to cook Pasta. You’re just looking for ingredients and the steps. The process. But instead you’re badgered with unending introductions and long form backstories. Ads of all shapes and forms

essays

Hey Amit, are you still doing Stand-up Comedy?

My wife gifted me six weeks of stand-up comedy classes for my 35th birthday. While I loved watching stand-up, actually doing stand up comedy had never occurred to me. My wife tells me that she gifted me the classes because she saw something in me. Something which made her realize

tutorials

Hello Swift - My first iOS app using SwiftUI

It took me some time. Fine, it took me a few years, but I finally got around to creating my first iOS app, using SwiftUI. Created a simple single screen app that displays a random quote on the click of a button. A different quote each time you click that

tutorials

Hello Django - How to set up your first Django web app

Been meaning to write this post for my future self, who’s invariably going to forget the steps to set up Django on a new machine. So, here are the steps to set up Django on a Mac. Django what? Django is a fully featured Python web framework that can

tutorials

How to make HTTP Requests to an external API from an Alexa Skill using Python

As a developer, every day we interact with remote APIs and web servers. Almost all services we consume on the internet today are available in the form of an API: weather forecasts, geolocation services, Twitter feeds, and so on. It’s only fair to imagine, that you may run into

tutorials

Creating an Alexa skill using the Command Line Interface (CLI)

If you’re into building skills, you’re probably familiar with Alexa Skills Kit’s Command Line Interface, which lets you create and manage your skill using the CLI, like updating the interaction model, and the backend code. You can of course manage these directly through the Alexa Developer Console,

essays

For God's sake, follow your dreams

We were just about getting ready to warm up for the practice game over the weekend when I had an interesting conversation with one of the team mates I actually didn't know quite well. "So what do you do?" he asked. "Well, we work for ourselves, we run a software