the nilenso blog. ensonians write about work and life

A caution against ephemeralization
We, the Citizens and Systems Thinking
Leaky Bucket Rate Limiting
Spreadsheets and Small Software
A Software Analogy
A reflection on how software is a conceptual mapping built on a pit of analogies.
FOSSMeet 2023: The brazen indifference for Free Software, because people think Something Else is more important.
After an afternoon replete with good food, coconut juice, tropical heat and exhaustion, we went to the venue at NIT Calicut. As we waited for the microphones to be set up for the keynote, I had a chat with the soon-retiring professor who helped conceive FOSSMeet. He helped revive this edition of the conference after a three-year gap, and also had a part in the Free Software revolution in Kerala, which saw schools and government departments adopt Free Software...
small-stalk: Beanstalkd in Clojure
Everyday Recipes for Cooking Noobs
Offline-first apps are appropriate for many clinical environments
Offline-first has several upsides, but the primary benefit is that the app is always snappy and responsive, so clinicians aren’t waiting for their app to talk to the cloud during patient interactions. In a busy clinic like Ravdeep’s, this is a crucial feature. In countries like India, Bangladesh, or Ethiopia where a patient encounter is often less than 5 minutes, every second counts and therefore every call to the server matters.
Training, the Simple way
One year ago (in October 2018), we piloted the Simple app in five public health facilities in Punjab, India. The original process of teaching healthcare workers to use Simple in pilot hospitals involved in-person trainings over a week from members of our team. We’ve come a long way since then.
From wings to cups