career on S Anand

Perl, 1994-2011

Sat, 28 Sep 2024 16:51:14 +0000

In 1994, I learnt Perl. It was fantastic. I used it to:

1995: Build CCChat - the unofficial IITM email system and software repository
1999: Build my entire blog from scratch
2000: Author my 2nd year thesis on the Behavioural Aspects of Financial Analysts by analyzing 600MB of IBES data
2002: Analyze where to place the central processing hubs for a bank
2004: Analyze the interest durations of public sector banks
2005: Creating music quizzes
2006: Create my own music search engine (which earned me about $100 a month in Google Ad revenue for a while)
2006: Automated resume filtering
2007: Create custom search engines
2008: Build application launchers

In 2006, I was convinced I should stick to Perl over Python.

In 2008, Google launched AppEngine and it provided free hosting (which was a big deal!) but had only 2 runtimes: Java and Python. The choice was clear. I’d rather learn Python than code in Java.

By 2011, I stopped installing Perl on my laptop.

Though most people know me mainly as a Python developer, I’ve programmed in Perl for about as long as I have in Python. I have fond memories of it. But I can’t read any of my code, nor write in it anymore.

When I watched The Perl Conference (now called The Perl and Raku Conference – Perl 6 is called Raku), I was surprised to hear how much the language had declined.

There were fewer than 100 attendees - and for 2025, they’ve decided to go smaller and book a tiny hotel, so as to break-even even if only 20 people show up.

Few languages have had as much of an impact on my life and thinking. My knowledge of modern programming comes from The Camel Book, functional programming from Higher Order Perl, Windows programming from Learning Perl on Win32 Systems, and so on. Even my philosophy of coding was shaped by Larry Wall’s the three great virtues of a programmer.

This is my homage to the language that shaped me. Bless you, Perl!

The LLM Psychologist

Sat, 17 Aug 2024 03:24:21 +0000

Andrej Karpathy mentioned the term LLM psychologist first in Feb 2023. I’ve been thinking about this for a while, now.

I’ve always been fascinated by psychologists in fiction. I grew up with Hari Seldon in Foundation, wanting to be a psycho-historian. (I spent several teenage years building my mind-reading abilities.) I wanted to be Susan Calvin, the only robopsychologist.

Instead, I became an engineer and a manager.

Over the last few months, several things changed. Most of my time is spent researching LLMs.

I also have a new job.

So, on Fri 9 Aug, I spoke to our head of HR.

“Manju, I’ve decided to officially designated myself as LLM Psychologist.”

“Um,… sure Anand, whatever works for you.”

On Sat 10 Aug, I delivered a TEDx talk at MDI Gurgaon. During the talk, I said,

So, as of now, I am finally an LLM Psychologist. Let me head over to my LinkedIn profile and update my designation. There. Now, you have the pleasure of talking to the world’s only (and first) LLM Psychologist!

Obviously, that gimmick drew an applause and that’s what it was designed for.

But there it is. To the best of my knowledge, I’m now the only official LLM psychologist in the world - and very likely the first official one.

As Oscar Wilde said 🙂

Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.

Links:

Wed, 04 May 2022 09:45:08 +0000

When Sunil Kardam said Gramener is the one place he got to apply all his skills - management, engineering, people skills and analytics - it reminded me how cross disciplinary Gramener is.

There’s something to be said for generalists in the era of deep focus.