Amit Jotwani

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

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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