Gowtham

Knowledge Graph

2026-06-19T15:14:49+00:00

This is more of a TID (Today I Discovered) rather than a TIL (Today I Learned) entry.

I have come across graph databases earlier, but was never able to wrap my head on why and where you needed it (until today). Apparently, graph databases are the perfect fit for Knowledge Graph solutions where you have multiple entities that will be linked together by a relationship. ex: a user owning a laptop, a service depending on another service, etc.

This can be an efficient way to let your agents sift through a ton of data that your organisation currently has or will have. I’m currently bootstrapping my own personal agent (mostly by writing SOUL.md, IDENTITY.md, FINANCIALS.md, etc), but now I have a new toy to play and experiment with. I’ll try to write in detail about it when that happens.

Why didn’t IPv6 work in my home network?

2026-04-12T14:04:12+00:00

Debugging why IPv6 was not working on my home network even though my ISP supports it.

Blogs I read and recommend

2026-03-28T05:24:12+00:00

I have been meaning to list the best blogs I usually read via my self hosted miniflux, so you can also explore and add it to your list if you find it useful.

Some special mentions:

Karan Sharma - I personally learnt and got into nomad because of Karan and also contributed once upstream. He’s an avid open source enthusiast, experiments a lot and share it across in his blog.
Jake Howard - Most of my self-hosted infra is inspired by Jake’s infrastructure. He writes a lot on self hosting.
Sean Goedecke - Writes more about politics in the corporate world. Sometimes developers need the harsh pills and should know about how a company thinks, behaves and rewards it’s people.
Lalit Maganti - Similar to Sean, but also have some technical entries as well. I personally love his essays.
Simon Willison - Writes a lot on the recent developments in the field of LLMs.

And the following blogs that cover a lot on linux, AI and computers in general:

and the usual - news.ycombinator.com and lobste.rs.

Named Entity Recognition (NER)

2026-01-24T13:14:20+00:00

While researching on how to cluster some document contents together in an ML pipeline for a pet project, I came across NER (Named Entity Recognition). Apparently, it’s a technique in NLP which can be used to identify named entities like persons, places, date, organizations, etc.

In python you can use libraries like spaCy, BERT, etc to do this or you can also use LLM to extract this info as shown here.

Self Hosting Setup - 2025

2025-12-18T17:24:12+00:00

It’s been two years since the last self-hosting setup post. The setup largely remained pretty much the same with the following changes:

piHole and dnscrypt-proxy has been replaced with Adguard Home since it does both.
photoprism - self-hosted alternative to google photos and iCloud photos. I have bought a new iPhone with iCloud plans for my family, but I’m still backing up all the photos here just in case. I am planning to explore immich in the next year when I get some time.
loki, prometheus, grafana, blackbox-exporter and alertmanager - for observability.
jellyfin - currently testing as an alternative to plex.
uptime-kuma - for uptime monitoring.
Actual Budget - helps me to keep track of my finances. Earlier, I was using MyExpenses in android which is open-source with some paid features and since I’m not carrying my android phone daily, I moved to actual and it’s been great so far.

I added two servers in late 2023 in addition to the raspberry pi and they’ve been running for 2 years without any problems:

blr - server from DigitalOcean in Bangalore region. Takes care of latency sensitive and critical services.
hydra - server from Hetzner in Germany. The arm64 shared servers are good in terms of price-to-performance ratio. I use this server for all the resource heavy services.
pi - a raspberry pi 4B connected to my home network and runs a DNS server alone for now.

All the services are deployed as docker containers via ansible and terraform. I talk to all these servers via tailscale SSH.

MySQL truncate in transaction

2025-06-30T16:26:00+00:00

MySQL truncate does an implicit commit. So, if you are using a transaction, it will commit the transaction and for any reason if you want to rollback, you will not be able to do it. Use DELETE FROM table_name instead.

Side projects

2025-05-26T14:43:49+00:00

When I was around 17, my cousin and I wanted to earn money to buy some video games. We had a computer and we thought why not create a website and put up ads like every other website. The only thing is we don’t know how to create, host and run a website. After a quick google search, we stumbled upon Blogger. We signed up, created a new site, created some posts, changed the default theme and also signed up for Adsense.

All set (we thought), but no-one visited the site. We constantly checked the stats page and there’ll be some random users from random countries who visited the homepage and will leave in a few seconds. We just don’t know what’s wrong with the site. Then we came to know about SEO (Search Engine Optimization) which made us change almost all of our content as per the Google SEO recommendations. Then this blogger site was eventually moved to Drupal, then to Wordpress and then finally to a static site built on top of jekyll.

This small side-project helped me learn a lot about managing servers, DNS, SEO, HTML, CSS, JS, PHP and ruby to some extent. After getting my first job at Cognizant, all these learning alongside very minor explorations with docker helped me land my second job.

After joining Freshworks as a Platforms Systems Engineer, we are supposed to manage the servers for our services and all my previous experiences came in handy. Somewhere in the middle around 2020, projects like Kubernetes and Nomad were interesting and I learnt them both. I tried deploying a sample rails app using these orchestrators and even contributed a small enhancement to Nomad. Luckily the organisation was moving to kubernetes and my previous experience helped me to move faster and also assist other developers who are new to it. In the meanwhile, I moved to another team managing multiple golang services and it was way easier for me to onboard because of my previous open-source stint.

These are just the major instances which I can think of where my side-quests have helped me to connect the dots. At any point of time in my career, I have at-least one side-project that I actively work on. It may not see the light of day, but it helps to learn something new. So, if you’re a developer, please have a side-project.

Python Type Ordering

2025-02-06T17:14:49+00:00

Found out order of the types are important in the same python file for type hints. This will throw Undefined name: B error if the class is used before it’s defined. For example, consider the following code:

from typing import List

class A:
    items: List[B]

class B:
    name: str

To fix, we should reorder the classes:

from typing import List

class B:
    name: str

class A:
    items: List[B]

Python self-contained script execution with uv

2025-02-06T17:14:49+00:00

I’ve been playing with uv a lot lately for some python automation projects. TIL, uv supports running a single python file that has inline dependency declarations and runtime.

Official documentation - https://docs.astral.sh/uv/guides/scripts.

# create a script
uv init --script example.py --python 3.13

# add depedencies
uv add --script example.py 'requests' 'pandas'

# run the script
uv run example.py

First PC Build

2024-12-14T17:14:49+00:00

This entry was supposed to go live on December 2023 and it was only published until a year after in 2024.

I was 10 years old when I got hooked with Road Rash on a PC at my neighbour’s house. My parents got me a Toshiba laptop when I was 17 years old and I played some casual games in it from time to time. This laptop served me great for 4 years and then one day during heavy thunderstorms, it got fried due to an electrical surge.

I bought a second laptop — this time a Lenovo with Nvidia 960M graphics inside with my side gig money. This one worked for 3 years and I extended 3 more years by changing its internal disk to SSD. By this time, I also had a 13-inch macbook pro from work and since it’s unix based, it became my goto for all development work.

I then bought two more mac devices (2018 Macbook Pro and 2023 M2 Mac Mini), but the urge to build myself a desktop PC was still there and I wanted to build a PC myself. Currently, Mac Mini works great for my development work and for some cracked sessions in Factorio, but some good games like Cities Skylines, Stronghold Crusader series, Anno 1800 and other castle simulation RTS games were only available on PC.

I had some free time in December and thought I could build a PC for the holidays. I stumbled upon GamersNexus and lurked on IndianGaming discord for research and clarified some of my questions with the community. Since I already had a 4k monitor (Dell Ultrasharp U2720Q), I wanted to build a system that can comfortably handle at least 1440p. So, after tons of research this is my parts list:

Component	Part	Price
Motherboard	Gigabyte B650M Gaming X AX Wifi	₹17,700
CPU	AMD Ryzen 7800X3D	₹34,600
PSU	Corsair RM850e	₹10,500
Memory	Corsair Vengeance DDR5 32GB 6000Mhz (16*2)	₹9,500
SSD	Samsung 980 Evo 1TB	₹8,750
GPU	Sapphire Pulse 7900XT 20GB	₹81,900
Cabinet	Corsair 4000D Airflow Black	₹6,550
CPU Cooler	Deepcool AK620 120MM	₹5,475
	Total (excluding shipping)	₹1,74,975

If you’re building a PC in India, you should definitely visit pcpricetracker to compare prices between multiple PC parts online retailers. Amazon was costly even with a 5% discount from Amazon Pay card. You should also check with offline retail stores in your cities. I got most of the parts from an offline retail store in Coimbatore. The cabinet and the CPU cooler that I wanted were not available in that store, so I had to order online at PC Studio.

After all the parts arrived, I unpacked all the parts. I knew it will take a lot of patience, so I prepared everything for the BIOS POST.

unpacked parts on the floor. in hindsight, doing it on the floor was a mistake.

I started setting up the motherboard, RAM, PSU and the CPU. I saw the BIOS POST and then proceeded with the usual build. After mounting the CPU cooler, NVMe drive, GPU and some cable management, it was ready. All worked well after boot and sadly when I was closing the side glass panel of the cabinet, I dropped 5cms above a hard surface and it cracked.

shattered glass panel of the cabinet

When I looked this up on the internet, I realized it’s one of the newbie mistakes the new builders make. Fortunately, Corsair support was kind enough to send a replacement without any charges even after I offered to pay them. Thanks Corsair. Till the replacement came I used a cloth to seal the cabinet. Anyway, this is the final build after spending 4 hours on it.

final image of the cabinet. sorry i didn’t take any pictures in-between.

It’s beautiful, isn’t it? Okay, there are no fancy RGBs, but it gets the job done. Now I’m playing all the games at 4k and the system handles it very well. I just wish I have more time to game :).