Posts on Karthik Macherla

My Floor Desk Setup

Sun, 22 Jan 2023 13:42:55 -0400

Introduction

A floor desk is a desk which requires you to sit on the floor. They are usually lower to the ground.

I’ve always had a pretty big vendetta against chairs. With the amount of articles, videos, and research done showing how bad they are for our posture, you’re most likely sitting in one anyways because – how else are you supposed to work?

Four months ago, I moved to Seattle and I had to furnish my apartment from scratch. I knew I’d be working from home a lot so I definitely needed a desk setup that I was happy with. After everything I heard about chairs, I really wasn’t motivated to pay a lot for the traditional desk + chair set up. After all, if I’m going to spend 8+ hours a day on it, is there really no other healthier/more sustainable option?

When Learning is Dangerous

Wed, 23 Jun 2021 16:44:38 -0700

Learning without continuously doing makes mistakes hit harder.

…

We always think that learning is a good thing. For the last three years, I’ve definitely thought this way, and tried to learn as much as I could in my time at Penn and outside of it.

But I’m starting to realize that some of my learning has actually set me back a few steps, and has not only taken away from time I could’ve spent with my friends and family, but has actually made it harder for me to get better at new things. Now that I’m finally starting to understand what this bad learning is, I definitely don’t want others to fall down the same path as me. So today, we’ll talk about what this bad learning is, why I think I did it, and how to overcome it.

Things I like

Sun, 23 May 2021 10:24:54 -0400

A running list of things I like. All of these things have made a pretty big impact on my quality of life this year, and I hope some of these can for you too.

Food

Don Memo’s Chicken Burrito
McDonald’s McChicken
Lucy Ho’s Azu Chicken Fried Rice
Platt Hot Chocolate

Software

Typora - A way faster/cleaner alternative to Word
Alfred (universal copy paste feature is unreal)
Notion
Whimsical (for diagrams)
TickTick
iTerm2

Books/Readings

Atomic Habits - James Clear
The Last Lecture - Randy Pausch
The Dip - Seth Godin
Westgate, E. C. (2020). Why Boredom Is Interesting

Courseload

CIS 555 - First CIS class that truly made me feel ownership of the code I wrote for homeoworks. No implementation stubs, etc.
OIDD 490 - First solid introduction to behavior psychology + behavior change for good
OIDD 245 - Really taught me how to go out and get things done on my own in the data science world (i.e. web-scraping data + getting good insights)

Music

The Blue Stones
Lil Wayne
Oh Wonder
Maître Gims

Misc

Z-lib for free books and the iPhone Books app for a quality reading experience.
Netlify + Hugo + Markdown for making it super easy + almost free to make this blog (Shout-out github student pro-pack for a free domain for one year)
Healthy Minds Meditation Program: bringing a scientific approach to behavior change
Learn X in Y Minutes

Understanding the Homeless Shelter Diet and How We Can Do Better

Sun, 11 Apr 2021 17:50:27 -0400

Like a lot of people this past year, I’ve been forced to eat many more meals at home rather than outside as a result of the pandemic. Moreover, from the increased number of meals made at home, my grocery store bills have been way higher, and I’ve realized that eating healthy is actually really expensive.

For many who don’t have the privilege of eating healthy, how are they doing? A better question could also be, how are we doing to help them especially in these unprecedented times?

Fun with Selenium: Scraping Instagram Locations

Wed, 17 Mar 2021 13:42:55 -0400

In this project, I’m going to show you how my friend and I scraped data from Instagram’s (somewhat) public API and how we used this data to gain insights about the most popular locations to take pictures in a given area.

Find repo here.

Motivation

One of my close friends really likes taking pictures. One thing I never realized was how hard it was to find good places to take pictures, especially in Tallahassee, FL (my hometown).

Panther: A Distributed Web Crawler in Python

Thu, 11 Mar 2021 23:32:40 -0500

Overview

Panther is a distributed, (mostly) compliant, web-crawler written in Python.

In English: Panther is a service that lets you slowly download/index the web piece-by-piece.

In a nutshell, the way it does this is using an algorithm called BFS. If you think of the web as an actual web like below (with urls as points and links as edges), then what Panther does is start at a point and slowly expand from that center by visiting its closest neighbors.

Blanche: A Spotlight Search for Chrome

Wed, 13 Jan 2021 15:20:41 -0500

One thing that’s really been on my mind for the last semester is just how differently people are starting to view their computers/devices now in comparison to just 10+ years ago. It seems like for the early half of the 21st century, we’ve always forced software and hardware to adapt to the user. Today, I think the tide is starting to change; I think that people are now increasingly expected to adapt to the technology available, not the other way around. As we’ll see, I think this change in expectations could be used to make pretty large changes in the way we interact with the web.

Temporal Landmarks: What they are and why they matter

Fri, 27 Nov 2020 09:24:22 -0500

Introduction

I love Thursdays. At Penn especially, Thursdays for most of us are when we’re done with our classes for the week, and we can just max and relax. When it’s Thursday, it feels like the next school week is a forever away and is a problem for the “future me” to solve.

In the same vain, there’s so many things right now that we constantly delegate to a new and better “future us” to solve, at way bigger time scales. If I asked you to imagine your yourself 10 years from now, what would you think? Would you be smarter, more confident, better rested? Would life be more stable/fun (even more than it already is)? Chances are, if you’re like me and a bunch of other people, in ten years, so much would change that you probably see yourself as more settled, and all of those unsolved problems (career, love life, etc.) would have just magically been solved. Also, for a smaller number of people, the sheer amount of stuff you would have done in ten years probably makes you think that you’d be living such a different life that you might little in common with who you are now.

Workflow 1.0: Terminal

Mon, 02 Nov 2020 23:39:28 -0500

I think a workflow is really important. Of course everyone agrees, but I want to go further and argue that having the right workflow at the right time could actually determine how well things works out for you in the long term and even how passionate you are about this something in the future.

Many people’s first impressions of programming is incredibly intimidating since the amount of things thrown at them is really high and the number of familiar things (software used, relatable experiences) is really low. If you’ve taken a CS class or tried to learn programming, you probably remember the experience yourself. But most importantly, when you’re first starting out, the scariest thing is trying to step outside the box of what you know to work. The average person is not only new to the language or skill they want to learn, but also new to the software and the toolchain surrounding the language/skill they’re learning. The worst experience isn’t being wrong about something, it’s not knowing when or even how you’re wrong. Those experiences aren’t tied to CS as much as they’re tied to the toolchain since great software nowadays highlights when you’re wrong or shows you how to fix runtime errors in a meaningful way. But most importantly, great software is understandable and predictable so you know what to do when something fails, and exactly how to fix it.

Why I'm Starting This Blog

Sun, 01 Nov 2020 21:48:42 -0500

Over the last three years, I’ve learned so much since coming to Penn. The people, the presence, the courseload, the food, and everything in between has taught me a lot about what makes me happy and the kind of person I want to be. This year especially has been a turning point for me in terms of how many things I’ve developed newfound appreciations for.

But with everything I’m learning, it seems like I’m forgetting things faster than I want to. It also feels like this knowledge really isn’t really going anywhere. While it’s fun knowing how to think through distributed systems concerns, for example, part of me feels super daunted by the thought of ever actually doing anything with the things I’ve learned. Most of all, sometimes I’m super scared that my learning might be completely emotional, and that I really haven’t learned anything yet.