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That's why, unless you tell me, I won't even know that you were here🥺
An open letter...
Dear Visitor,
As the heading at the top of the page says, I am indeed Arkadeep Mukhopadhyay. In fact, I've always been Arkadeep Mukhopadhyay and shall continue to be Arkadeep Mukhopadhyay for the foreseeable future. I'm a surgery resident from Mumbai, India. Play the next video for a brief intro from a friend of mine.
I'm delighted to have you here. I would love to give you a freshly baked chocolate cookie, right now. But, the absense of freshly baked cookies in my vicinity and the constrained food teleportation abilities of the 21st century internet is significantly deterring such an effort from my end. And that's why, this website uses no cookies and will never track your activities, show ads or compromise with your privacy.
With that being said, there remains no way for me to know who you are. This letter is a mode of one-way communication and the mic is in my hands with me showing no signs of giving it away. Therefore, there's only one thing that we can do. We can brainstorm the possibilities...
- You can be family. In that case, let us continue this conversation over phone, FaceTime or WhatsApp.
- You can be a friend. Then you would be the target demographic for an informal letter such as this. You can continue reading this letter.
- You can be my teacher, mentor, professor, guide or senior. It makes me very happy that you're visiting my website.
- You can be an acquaintance. You may not know me well. Then again, that's exactly what this website is for. I too would like to know more about you. And once we both learn enough about each other, I'm sure your case shall merge with one of the two preceding possibilities.
- You can be a kind internet stranger. Well, I wouldn't call you that anymore, you're an acquaintance now.
- You can be me. I'm not joking, I literally visit my own site from various browsers and devices to evaluate my site's performance. If you're indeed me, I would like to end this soliloquy right now.
- Finally, you can be a bot scraping my meticulously hand-written content to feed LLMs and train chatbots. That means you must have ignored my robots.txt file. Not cool. (BTW, if you're the google crawler - here's my sitemap, feel free to index my site and boost my PageRank.)
Now that you know me somewhat, I feel comfortable to share that I like to code and write in my free time. I do web development (mainly with Svelte and FastAPI) and some computational neuroscience. Things I write about include humorous newspaper articles, nonsensical stories and mental health and productivity guides. I write this last one mainly to hold myself accountable but I like to pretend that it is for the greater good.
When my time is not free, that is when I'm working, my passion lies in learning intricate human anatomy and applying surgical skills to adeptly heal maladies. A noble agenda indeed but not without steep learning curves and unrelenting thrill. I also thoroughly enjoy having informative and compassionate conversation with my patients, respectfully eliciting the history and diagnosing pathologies like a detective.
I want to keep writing this letter. Later. For now, I shall take a break.
Peace.
Sylvester Standalone
Standalone Open-Source Webapps which are as strong as Sylvester
Agraham Paulincoln once said, "Open Source is for the people, of the people, by the people" (probably). Inspired by that I decided, I should openly publish the stuff I create in my free time directly onto my Github. Now this had 2 benefits.
One, my Github account was lying barren lately as I couldn't really figure out what should I put up there. Most of the code I write are for personal stuff and bizarre projects made for fun. But with a little brushing up, these can be both entertaining and useful for others and if there's something you'd rather change, you can simply clone, fork or send pull requests.
Two, till today I used to host them sporadically via a bunch of static site servers like surge, firebase and at times, even ngroked them right out of my PC. Upkeeping these projects was painful. So, having them all on Github would be stonks.
Mighty Python
Professional yet Primitive Projects painstakingly prepared with Python
In the beginning there was a Python. Then it discovered that it had a tail. And before you can bat an eyelid, it ate its tail.
The telltale tail tale tells an interesting story. But that story is not important now. Instead, now I will show you the projects I create with python.
You see, these are pro-projects. They are quite useful (in niche scenarios), so you can consider them to be "pro" as in professional. They are also quite useless (except in niche scenarios) and hence you shall be forgiven for considering them to be "pro" as in primitive.
Just a very big heading!
Existence of this section is more philosophical than practical.
Recently I read an article on 'The Bitter Southerner' which had a beautiful serif heading spanning the entire width of the laptop screen. Now on my site, I restrict most of the content to a width of about 840px to conserve readable character count per line. But the grand wide title made me want to have one for my site.
And then much akin to Bilbo, I thought, "After all, Why not? Why shouldn't I 'have' it?". And thus I set forth to build this section of the site, as a reminder to my future self about the freedom of having one's own website. So often, while following the best practices for the web and optimising load times for throttled networks, this elusive freedom, though obvious in moments of such Bilboid revelations, simply percolates away from the foresight.
But, the reality remains that this section serves no meaninful purpose, shares no useful fact and does no important job. Not a single soul shall be troubled sans this section. All it is, is a big heading, that renders screen wide when viewed on a screen wide enough!
Rethinking my Blog
I'm trying to be unique, just like everybody else
I think, I have been rethinking the way I blog for quite some time. I finally think, I have rethunk enough. Here's my rethought thought...
When I blog, I do so in episodes. Each post during that episode, tends to share a common narrative. It takes a handful of posts to substantially communicate the entire narrative beyond which my will to continue narrating asymptotically diminishes.
Till today, my go to method was to either create a new blog or a new tag/cetegory in an existing blog when I wanted to share a new narrative. But why not create an episode, the natural, structural and functional unit of my "bloggular" communication? Precisely that, my friend, is the kind of blog that all this rethinking has yielded.