Long I have been procrastinating over this. Whenever I had to quit out of the Vim while doing git-rebase interactively I would be going over to a new terminal window, and perform git rebase --abort and then close the other window too.

Today, I learned if you ever want to quit Vim either while committing or rebasing, just do :cq. This quits Vim with an error code, and Git will abort the action.

This is not a technical post; this is something that I have been going through, in life right now. A few months ago, when I left my first job (another time, another post ), I had a plan. I wanted to take few months off and work on my technical knowledge and write amazing software and get a lot of learning out of my little sabbatical.

But I was not able to do that for a few reasons, primo being I had to move homes in Bangalore because my brother got transferred, so the savings that I had set aside wouldn’t be enough. This was not the end. When it rains, it pours apparently. My dad got super sick, he had a growth near his kidney which the doctors diagnosed as cancer. I got really scared with the situation I was going through. The thing about your parents is that no matter how much you fight with them or how much they “control” you; at the end of the day the thought of losing them can scare the hell out of you. For me, they are my biggest support system so I was not scared, I was terrified.

I gave it a really deep thought and took a call. I needed to find a job. The sabbatical could wait. I started applying to companies and talking to people if they needed extra hand at work. One piece of advice – never leave a job unless you have another in hand. Luckily, I had my small pot of gold, savings, so even in this phase I was sustaining myself. Yes, savings are real and you should have a sufficient amount at any given point of your life. This helps you to take the hard decisions and also to think independently (what Jason calls F*ck you money).

It still feels like a nightmare to me. I use to feel that I will wake up and it will all be over. Reality check; it wasn’t a dream so I have to live with it and make efforts to overcome this situation.

Taking up a job for me was important for two reasons,

1. I have to sustain myself
2. I need to have a back up in case my dad needs something (I also have super amazing siblings who were doing the same)

I realised one thing about prayer and God; yes, I believe in God, and I don’t know if prayer works but you definitely get the strength to face your problems and the unknown. I use to call my dad regularly asking how he was doing and some days he could not speak all that much and he use to talk in his weak tone. I use to cry. I was in so much pain although it was not physical or visible. And then, I would cry again.

But tough times teach you a lot, it shows you real friends, it shows you the people you care for and as Calvin’s dad would have said, “It build character!”. I have been through bad times before and the thing about time is , “It changes!”. I knew someday this bad time I am going through will change. Either the agony I am going through will reduce or I will get used to it.

So as I was giving interviews within a month of me moving on from my old job, I was offered one at Clootrack. I like the people who interviewed me and I like that ideas they have been working on. But I have seen people change and I have gone through a bad experiences and at no point of time did I want to repeat past mistakes, so I did a thorough background check before I said yes to them. I got a really good response so here I am working with them.

The accommodation problem that I had was my brother was shifting out of his quarters  and I used to live with him. Well, I helped him pack and I still remember the time when I was bidding farewell to him and my sister-in-law. I had tears in my eyes and after my goodbyes, the moment I stepped in the house I could feel the emptiness and I cried the whole night.  I  could stay at the old place for a week, not more. At this point I can’t thank Abhinav enough that he came as  a support I needed. He graciously let me live with him as long as  I wanted to. Apparently he needed help, paying his bills :P.  This bugger would never accept the fact, he helped me. When dad’s condition was getting bad he gave me really solid moral support. I had also shared my situation with Jason, Abraar, Kushal and Sayan. I received a good amount of moral support from each one of them, specially Jason. I use to tell him everything and he would just calm me down and talk me through it.

So when I shifted to Abhinav’s place all I had was 6 bags and a carton. My whole life was 6 bags and a carton. My office was a 2 hour bus ride one way and another 2 hours to come back. But I didn’t have any problems with this arrangement because this was the least of my problems. I literally use to live out of my bags and I wasn’t sure this arrangement would last long. I had some really amazing moments with Abhinav, I enjoyed our ups and downs and those little fights and leg pulling.

Well, my dad is still not in the best of his health, but he is doing better now. I visit my family more frequently now and yes call them regularly with a miss. I realised the value of health after seeing my dad. I went home after a month of joining Clootrack and stayed with him for a whole month and worked remotely, we visited few doctors and they said he is doing better. After coming back I realised I was not getting any time for myself so I shifted to a NestAway near my office. Although I feel I’ve gotten used to the agony, you never know what life has in store for you next.
It feels much better now, though.

I thank God for giving me strength and my friends and family for supporting me in a lot of different ways.

With Courage in my Heart,
And Faith over Head

This year’s Akademy, the annual world summit of KDE, was held in the beautiful city of Vienna, Austria, from 11th to 17th August, 2018. The 7-day event was divided in two parts, with the first 2 days being mostly keynote addresses and different talks by KDE contributors, followed by 5 more days BoFs, and workshops. Just like every other KDE event, this one was also as awesome as it could get.

Welcome party
The evening before the day the conference was scheduled to start, there was a nice welcome party with loads of food and drinks, where I got to catch up with most of the fellow KDE contributors who I hadn’t met for quite some time, and also got to see a lot of new faces as well, talking to whom felt like a breath of fresh air. Overall, it was a warm welcome, and raised everyone’s spirits to get ready for Akademy for the next day.

Conference Day 1
Day 1 was opened by Lydia, our beloved President of KDE. Dan Bielefeld gave the keynote speech, where it was interesting to learn about how free software helps in tackling human rights issues in North Korea. Numerous insightful talks followed it throughout the day. Bhushan’s update on Plasma on mobile devices was interesting, along with David Faure’s talk on how to run KDE softwares without installing them.

Conference Day 2
Day 2 began with the keynote by Claudia Garad where she spoke on how KDE could learn from how Wikimedia faces its hurdles. Aditya Mehra spoke on the visionary Mycroft AI on Plasma. Bhavisha spoke about her contributions to OpenQA. Andreas’ talk on building Automotive ECUs with Yocto was absolutely inspiring. In the Akademy awards, it was great to see deserving individuals being recognised for their amazing contributions.

Social Event
At the end of day 2 of conference, we headed off and met at the nearby Cafe Derwisch – Partycellar to party. Even though there was a looong wait in a queue, it was worth the wait. With loads of food and drinks, and a dance floor, it was the perfect recipe for having fun and socialising. And boy did we make legit use of the dance floor. The party was quite eventful and went way late into the night. It was an evening to remember.

BoFs and Trainings

• In the KDE-India BoF, we discussed the journey of India in KDE so far, the obstacles we faced previously, the best steps we can take for the next conf.kde.in event, among other topics.
  
• The Mycroft BoF taught us how to use the AI, how to add new skills, its progress with Plasma mobile, and the obstacles it faces regarding communicating with 3rd party apps.
• The BoF on the VVAVE Project was particularly interesting to me as it was centred around a music-player app that is similar to the line of software I work on in my current company. We discussed a number of issues, including how to prioritise between online-streaming and playing local files, and how to overcome the technical challenges.
• The training on documentation provided tips and tricks on writing short, informative and comprehensible documents, followed by a hands-on assignment. This was very helpful.

Also, this year is the first time I was able to be a part of the Annual General Meeting, and it was an interesting experience especially for being able to influence the decisions made inside KDE in such a direct and important way.

At the end of the final day, I (among others) got to draw (read scribble) a colorful message about the principles of KDE on a piece of paper, thanks to Lydia. I’m eagerly waiting to see it uploaded somewhere soon!

Hikes, trips and picnics
There was a short walking trip organized on Tuesday evening, August 14, where we walked around interesting parts of the city, with magnificent monuments, churches, libraries, museums, palaces, and sculptures flooded all around. The guide was kind enough to explain the historical significance of each building. Clearly a treat for the eyes and knowledgeable as well. The following day, August 15, we went to Kahlenberg, where we enjoyed the amazing view of the beautiful city of Vienna from above. We also went to the top of one of the towers to take a look at it from even higher. On the final evening of the conference, August 17, we went to have a short picnic somewhere overlooking the Danube river. That was fun as well. Or rather sad, as that was the final day of the conference. My phone is filled with amazing pictures, thanks to all these fun initiatives.

Thank you, KDE, for letting me be a part of this amazing event. Keep rocking!

If you are following me on Twitter, you have already seen a lot of (re)tweets related to Aadhaar. For the people first time hearing this term, it is a 12 digit unique identification number provided by the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI). It is also the world’s largest bio-metric ID system. It is supposed to be a voluntary service.

From the very beginning, this project tried to hide the details from the Indian citizens. Let it be privacy advocates or security researchers or human rights activists, everyone predicted that this will become a monster, a mass surveillance system, a tool of choice of the power hungry dictators.

Like any other complex system, the majority of the people only see the advertisements from the government and completely miss all the problems and horror stories this project is creating. Here are a few links below for the interested people to read.

• IRC session log from Kiran Jonnalagadda
• Karana (detailed posts related to various parts of the project) Must read site.
• Aadhaar fail Details of scams/failures/deaths/other issues from Aadhaar project

Neither my wife, nor our daughter has an Aadhaar (I also don’t have one), that means Py (our daughter) did not get admission to any school last year.

Whenever security researchers or journalists tried to report on the project, the UIDAI tried to hide behind denials and police complaints against the journalists or researchers. There are various reports on how one can get access (both read/write) to the actual production database with as little as $10-30. We now have examples of terrorist organizations having access to the same database. The UIDAI kept telling how this is an unhackable technology and for security they have a 13 feet wall outside of the data center which in turn will keep all hackers away.

They have already build 360 degree databases on top of Aadhaar, and now they are trying to link DNA to the same system.

The current government of India tried their level best to argue in the Supreme Court of India to tell that Indians don’t have any rights to privacy. But, thankfully they failed in this effort, and the Supreme Court ruled privacy as a fundamental right. We are now waiting for the judgment on the Aadhaar (which will hopefully come out in the next few weeks).

Meanwhile, the evil nexus is pushing down Aadhaar to the throats of the Indian citizens and Pakistani spies and gods.

A few days ago, in an event in Jaipur, they asked Edward Snowden the following question.

How big of an issue is privacy?

The answer started with from where that argument comes from.

The answer is that Nazi Germany. The nazi minister of propaganda Joseph Goebbels did this. Because he was trying to change the conversation away from “What are your rights?” and “What evidences must the government show?” to violet them, to intrude into your private life and instead said “Why do you need your rights?”, “How can you justify your rights?”, “Isn’t strange that you are invoking your rights? Isn’t that unusual?”. But, in a free society this is the opposite of the way it is supposed to work. We don’t need to explain why you have a right. You don’t need to explain why it is valuable, why you need it. It is for the government to explain why you don’t deserve it. They go to a court, they show that you are a criminal. This is increasingly falling out of favor, because the governments and companies think that it is inefficient. It is too much work. Life would be easier, life would be more convenient for them, life would be more profitable for them if we didn’t have any rights at all.

But, privacy isn’t about something to hide, privacy is about something to protect. And that is the very concept of liberty. It is the idea that there can be some part of you, of your life, of your ideas that belong to you, not to society. And you get to make the decision about who you share that with. -- Edward Snowden

Why are we reading this in your blog?

This might a question for many of you. Why are reading this in a blog post or in a planet? Because we, the people with the knowledge of technology are also part of these evil plans. We now know about many private companies taking part with their local government to build 360 degree profiles, to track the citizens and to run the mass surveillance systems. For example, related to Aadhaar, for the last 4 years, Google silently pushed the Aadhaar support phone number (which now UIDAI is trying to stay away from) to every Google Android phone in India. When they got caught red handed, they claimed that they did it inadvertently. Finacle software by Infosys denies creation of bank accounts without Aadhaar. Microsoft is working to link Skype with Aadhaar. Bill Gates is trying to push the idea that Aadhaar is all good, and does not have any issues.

What can you do?

You can start by educating yourself first. Read more about the technologies which controls our lives. Have doubt about the things and try to understand how they actually work. Write about them, ask questions to the people in power. Talk about the issues to your friends and family.

This is not gong to be an easy task, but, we all should keep fighting back to make sure of a better future for our next generation.

I'm quite fond about having a google-free phone. I run a lineage OS without g-apps, use my own caldav and carddav server to sync my contacts and calendars, can find every software I need in the F-Droid app and live happy ever since.

However, what has bugged me was synchronization of personal photos and videos. I did several attempts to solve that using webdav (owncloud/nextcloud), but my phone was not happy with the available clients and the battery would not last very long.

I now have a setup that allows me secure synchronization that I'm quite happy with, using rsync from my phone to server. It's simple and slim and feels just too familiar to be a bad idea.

Termux - Terminal Emulator and Linux Environment

Termux is what I've been looking for on Android for a long time. Native Linux on my phone would be priceless, but the ease of use and installation makes Termux a more than good compromise. It comes with a nifty packet manager and allows me to run small Python and R scripts including web-scraping etc. on the fly.

You can get Termux for free in the Google Playstore, the extensions however will cost around 2\$ (which is okay, you'll support some really good work!). Using the F-Droid app you can install the extensions for free.

I also installed the extension Termux:Widget that allows to start scripts via single tap from home screen - a very handy addition, I use it to reboot my raspberry pi or wake-on-lan my computer that's in the basement.

Set up rsync

To set up Termux for this task, install rsync first:

pkg install rsync

Generate a key-pair (I just use the defaults):

ssh-keygen

Per default this will create the files id_rsa and id_rsa.pub in your ~/.ssh directory. Make sure to put the contents of id_rsa.pub into the ~/.ssh/authorized_keys file on your target server.

And set up the Termux storage:

termux-setup-storage

Create a folder for the Termux:Widget shortcuts and create the script:

mkdir .shortcuts
echo "rsync -h -r --info=progress2 ~/storage/dcim/* robin@<myserver>:/<path_to_my_rsync_folder>" > .shortcuts/sync

Conclusion

With the Termux widget this simple setup allows stable and quick sync of my data that leaves me with a few worries less. In fact I set this up on my wife's phone as well, since it's working so nicely.

I have been working on a pet project to write a File Indexer, which is a utility that helps me to search a directory for a given word or phrase.

The motivation behind to build this utility was so that we could search the chat log files for dgplug. We have a lot of online classes and guest sessions and at times, we just remember the name or a phrase used in the class, backtracking the files using these phrases aren’t possible as of now. I thought I will give a stab at this issue and since I am trying to learn golang I used it to implement my solution. It took me a span of two weeks where I spent time to upskill certain aspects and also to come up with a clean solution.

Exploration

This started with me exploring similar solutions, because why not? It is always better to improve an existing solution than to write your own. I didn’t find any which suited our need though so I ended up writing my own. The exploration led me to discover a few  libraries that proved useful. I found fulltext and Bleve.

I found bleve to have better documentation and some really beautiful thought behind the library. Really minimal yet effective. At the end of it all, I was sure I was going to use it.

Working On the Solution

After all the exploration I tried to break the problem into smaller pieces and then go about solving each one of them. So the first one was to understand how bleve worked. I found out that bleve creates an index first; for which we need to give it the list of files. The index is basically a map structure behind the scenes, where you give it the id and content to be indexed. So what could be a unique constraint for a file in a filesystem? The path of the file! I used it as the id to my structure and the content of my file as the value.

After figuring this out, I wrote a function which takes the directory as the argument and gives back the path of each file as well as its contents. After a few iterative. improvements it diverged into two functions; one responsible to get the path of all the files and the other to just read the file and get the content out.

func fileNameContentMap() []FileIndexer {
	var ROOTPATH = config.RootDirectory
	var files []string
	var filesIndex FileIndexer
	var fileIndexer []FileIndexer

	err := filepath.Walk(ROOTPATH, func(path string, info os.FileInfo, err error) error {
		if !info.IsDir() {
			files = append(files, path)
		}
		return nil
	})
	checkerr(err)
	for _, filename := range files {
		content := getContent(filename)
		filesIndex = FileIndexer{Filename: filename, FileContent: content}
		fileIndexer = append(fileIndexer, filesIndex)
	}
	return fileIndexer
}

This forms a struct which stores the name of the file and the content of the file. And since I can have many files I need to have a array of said struct. This is how a simple data structure evolves into a complex one.

Now I have the utility of getting all files, getting content of the file and making an index.

This leads us to the next crucial step.

How Do I Search?

Now that I’ve prepped my data the next logical step was to retrieve the searched results. The way we search something is by passing a query so I duck-typed a function which accepts a string and then went on a spree of documentation look up to find out how do I search in bleve. I found a simple implementation which returns the id of the file which is the path and match score.

 func searchResults(indexFilename string, searchWord string) *bleve.SearchResult {
	index, _ := bleve.Open(indexFilename)
	defer index.Close()
	query := bleve.NewQueryStringQuery(searchWord)
	searchRequest := bleve.NewSearchRequest(query)
	searchResult, _ := index.Search(searchRequest)
	return searchResult
}

This function opens the index and search for the term and returns back the information.

Let’s Serve It

After all that is done I need to have a service which does this on demand so I wrote a simple API server which has two endpoints index and search.  The way mux works is you give the endpoint to the handler and the function to be mapped with it. I had to restructure the code in order to make this work. I faced a really crazy bug which when I narrowed it down, came to a point of a memory leak and yes, it was because I left the file read stream open, so remember when you Open always defer Close.

I used Postman to heavily test it and it was returning good responses. A dummy response looks like this:

 [{"index":"irclogs.bleve","id":"logs/some/hey.txt","score":0.6912244671221862,"sort":["_score"]}]

Missing Parts?

The missing part was I didn’t use any dependency manager which Kushal pointed out to me, so I landed up using dep to do this for me. The next one was one of my favourite  problems of the project and that was how to auto-index a file. Suppose my service is running and I added one more file to the directory, then this file’s content wouldn’t come up in the search because the indexer hasn’t run on it yet. This was a fascinating  problem and I tried to approach it from many different angles. First I thought I would re-run the service every time I add a file but that’s not a graceful solution. Then I thought I would write a cron job which would ping /index at regular intervals and yet again that struck me as inelegant. Finally I wondered if I could detect changes in a file. This led me to explore gin, modd and fresh.

Gin was not very compatible with mux so didn’t use it, modd was really nice but I needed to kill the server to restart it since two services cannot run on a single port and every time I kill that service I kill the modd daemon too so that possibility also got ruled out.

Finally the best solution was fresh although I had to write a custom config file to suit the requirement, this approach still has issues with nested repository indexing which I am thinking how to figure out.

What’s Next?

This project is yet to be containerised and there are missing test cases so I would be working on them, as and when I get time.

I have learnt a lot of new things about the filesystem and how it works, because of this project. This little project also helped me appreciate a lot of golang concepts and made me realise the power of static typing.

If you are interested you are welcome to contribute to file-indexer. Feel free to ping me.

Till then, Happy Hacking!

Couple of weeks ago, Jen pointed me to vcrpy. This is a Python implementation of Ruby’s library with same name.

What is vcrpy?

It is a Python module which helps to write faster and simple tests involving HTTP requests. It records all the HTTP interactions in plain text files (by default in a YAML file). This helps to write deterministic tests, and also to run them in offline.

It works well with the following Python modules.

• requests
• aiohttp
• urllib3
• tornado
• urllib2
• boto3

Usage example

Let us take a very simple test case.

import unittest
import requests

class TestExample(unittest.TestCase):

    def test_httpget(self):
        r = requests.get("https://httpbin.org/get?name=vcrpy&lang=Python")
        self.assertEqual(r.status_code, 200)
        data = r.json()
        self.assertEqual(data["args"]["name"], "vcrpy")
        self.assertEqual(data["args"]["lang"], "Python")


if __name__ == "__main__":
    unittest.main()

In the above code, we are making a HTTP GET request to the https://httpbin.org site and examining the returned JSON data. Running the test takes around 1.75 seconds in my computer.

$ python test_all.py
.
------------------------------------------------------------------
Ran 1 test in 1.752s

OK

Now, we can add vcrpy to this project.

import unittest
import vcr
import requests

class TestExample(unittest.TestCase):

    @vcr.use_cassette("test-httpget.yml")
    def test_httpget(self):
        r = requests.get("https://httpbin.org/get?name=vcrpy&lang=Python")
        self.assertEqual(r.status_code, 200)
        data = r.json()
        self.assertEqual(data["args"]["name"], "vcrpy")
        self.assertEqual(data["args"]["lang"], "Python")

if __name__ == "__main__":
    unittest.main()

We imported vcr module, and added a decorator vcr.use_cassette to our test function. Now, when we will execute the test again, vcrpy will record the HTTP call details in the mentioned YAML file, and use the same for the future test runs.

$ python test_all.py
.
------------------------------------------------------------------
Ran 1 test in 0.016s

OK

You all can also notice the time taken to run the test, around 0.2 second.

Read the project documentation for all the available options.

I have been trying to have regular monthly Emacs meetups online, starting from 2018.

The following are the meeting minutes and notes from the Jitsi meetings held online in the months of February and March 2018.

February 2018

The February 2018 meetup was primarily focussed on using Emacs for publishing.

Using Emacs with Hakyll to build websites and resumes were discussed. It is also possible to output in muliple formats (PDF, YAML, text) from the same source.

I shared my shakthimaan-blog sources that uses Hakyll to generate the web site. We also discussed the advantanges of using static site generators, especially when you have large user traffic to your web site.

I had created the xetex-book-template, for creating multilingual book PDFs. The required supported features in the same, and its usage were discussed in the meeting.

Kushal Das asked about keyboards use in Emacs, and in particular for Control and Alt, as he was using the Kinesis. The best Emacs keyboard options available at http://ergoemacs.org/emacs/emacs_best_keyboard.html was shared. The advantage of using thumb keys for Control and Alt was obvious with the bowl shaped keyboard layout in Kinesis.

We also talked about the Emacs Web Browser (eww), and suggested the use of mu4e for checking e-mails with Emacs.

March 2018

At the beginning of the meetup, the participants asked if there was a live stream available, but, we are not doing so at this point in time with Jitsi.

For drawing inside Emacs, I had suggested ASCII art using Artist Mode.

Emacs has support for rendering PDFs inside, as the following old blog post shows http://www.idryman.org/blog/2013/05/20/emacs-and-pdf/. nnnick then had a question on “Why Emacs?”:

nnnick 19:23:00
Can you tell me briefly why emacs is preferred over other text editors

The discussion then moved to the customization features and extensibility of Emacs that makes it well suited for your needs.

For people who want to start with a basic configuration for Emacs, the following repository was suggested https://github.com/technomancy/emacs-starter-kit.

I had also shared links on using Org mode and scrum-mode for project management:

• https://github.com/ianxm/emacs-scrum

• https://gitlab.com/shakthimaan/operation-blue-moon

I shared my Cask setup link https://gitlab.com/shakthimaan/cask-dot-emacs and mentioned that with a rolling distribution like Parabola GNU/Linux-libre, it was quite easy to re-run install.sh for newer Emacs versions, and get a consistent setup.

In order to SSH into local or remote systems (VMs), Tramp mode was suggested.

I also shared my presentation on “Literate DevOps” inspired by Howardism https://gitlab.com/shakthimaan/literate-devops-using-gnu-emacs/blob/master/literate-devops.org.

Org entries can also be used to keep track of personal journal entries. The Date Trees are helpful in this context as shown in the following web page http://members.optusnet.com.au/~charles57/GTD/datetree.html.

Tejas asked about using Org files for executing code in different programming languages. This can be done using Org Babel, and the same was discussed.

Tejas 19:38:23
can org mode files be used to keep executable code in other languages apart from elisp?

mbuf 19:38:42
Yes

mbuf 19:39:15
https://orgmode.org/worg/org-contrib/babel/languages.html

The other useful tools that were discussed for productivity are given below:

• Magit for VCS: https://github.com/magit/magit.

• Workgroups for workspace management: https://github.com/pashinin/workgroups2.

• Winner mode to switch between sessions in windows: https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/WinnerMode.

• Emacs Code Browser is like a full flown IDE-like environment: http://ecb.sourceforge.net/.

Tejas said that he uses perspective-el, but it does not have the save option - just separate workspaces to switch between them - for different projects basically.

A screenshot of the session in progress is shown below:

Arun also suggested using Try for trying out Emacs packages without installation, and cycle-resize package for managing windows.

Tejas and Arun then shared their Emacs configuration files.

Arun 19:51:37
https://github.com/aruntakkar/emacs.d

Tejas 19:51:56
https://github.com/tejasbubane/dotemacs

We closed the session with few references on learning Emacs Lisp:

Tejas 20:02:42
before closing off, can you guys quickly point me to some resources for learning elisp?

mbuf 20:03:59
Writing GNU Emacs Extensions.

mbuf 20:04:10
Tejas: Emacs Lisp manual

Tejas 20:04:35
Thanks 

I had organized a hands-on scripting workshop using the Elixir programming language for the Computer Science and Engineering department, MVJ College of Engineering, Whitefield, Bengaluru on May 5, 2018.

The department were interested in organizing a scripting workshop, and I felt using a new programming language like Elixir with the power of the Erlang Virtual Machine (VM) will be a good choice. The syntax and semantics of the Elixir language were discussed along with the following topics:

• Basic types
• Basic operators
• Pattern matching
• case, cond and if
• Binaries, strings and char lists
• Keywords and maps
• Modules and functions

Students had setup Erlang and Elixir on their laptops, and tried the code snippets in the Elixir interpreter. The complete set of examples are available in the following repo:

https://gitlab.com/shakthimaan/elixir-scripting-workshop

A group photo was taken at the end of the workshop.

I would like to thank Prof. Karthik Myilvahanan J for working with me in organizing this workshop.