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My Writings in 2020

A list of my writings on Medium for various publications this year

As Medium doesn’t have an authentic way to create a Table of Contents for private blogs or non-Medium owned publications yet, one has to make do with a list of the kind I’m going to make here. The beginning of the end of 2020 is near. Finally, a year that has been hard on the world is coming to an end. Although 2021 is just a number and it's coming doesn’t really mean that any of our problems from 2020 are going to go away from a change in dates, calendar years do make us put things in perspective.

This year I wrote about the things that surround me — technology and music. I also wrote a bit about personal finance but realized that I needed to educate myself more on that front. I have been reading a lot of books about personal finance lately. I have also been following some people like Aswath Damodaran, JL Collins, and Mr. Money Moustache. Reading and writing about personal finance is fun. And very important too.

So far I have written 98 pieces in this calendar year. I have rejected many which were not accepted in the publications for which I wrote. The idea has been of continuous improvement and also to put the additional time (saved because of not having to commute) to use.

This year, I also learned about a lot of technologies (courtesy Servian, my employer). I did five professional certificates this calendar year — one for each cloud platform — Google Cloud, Azure, and AWS, one for Spark Databricks, and the last one for HashiCorp Terraform. It’s been an exciting year for learning.

I have tried to share my thoughts and ideas about technology, music, personal finance, and more in the following articles.

I’ll keep updating the list for 2020 for the month of December. Looking forward to writing more and writing better in 2021.

Technology

1. Notes on AWS Block Storage
2. Notes on DynamoDB
3. Short Introduction to ggvis in R
4. A Basic Guide to Initial & Exploratory Data Analysis
5. A Day In The Life of a SQL Engineer
6. Easy Fixes for SQL Queries
7. Meet Google Meena
8. We’ll Always Have Sequel
9. Generating Test Data Using SQL
10. How To Think About Data
11. How To Avoid Writing Sloppy SQL
12. Randomizing Data in SQL
13. Type Casting in SQL
14. How to Take an Interview
15. Complete Data Engineer’s Dictionary
16. The Many Flavours of SQL
17. Ultimate PySpark Cheatsheet
18. PostgreSQL — From The Horse’s Mouth
19. Defensive Query Writing
20. Easy Fixes for SparkSQL Performance
21. Indexing Very Large Tables
22. Weird & Unusual SQL
23. Git Best Practices for SQL
24. Data People, Come to the Clouds
25. Table Design Best Practices for ETL
26. Rookie Git Mistakes To Avoid
27. Easy Fixes for Redshift Performance
28. MySQL 8.0 In The Cloud
29. State of the Art Infrastructure as Code
30. The Ultimate Guide to Linting
31. 4 Advanced SQL Features You Haven’t Used Enough
32. Cataloging Tools for Data Teams
33. JavaScript for Data Engineers
34. The Definitive Introduction to DataVault
35. PostgreSQL 13 Features Distilled
36. A Beginner’s Guide To Database Reliability Engineering
37. Data Pipeline Design Principles
38. Numbers Every Data Engineer Should Know
39. The New Data Engineering Stack
40. Mac in the Cloud
41. Dataform is Joining Google Cloud
42. Indexing Best Practices
43. Bridging the Gap Between Engineers & Analysts
44. Schemaless Ingestion in QuestDB using InfluxDB Line Protocol

Music

1. A Women’s Day Special
2. Early Morning Chai with Lalit
3. Bhairavi by Akhtar Atta Qawwal
4. Yugal Bundi
5. An Unheard Voice from Jaipur-Atrauli
6. Daydreaming in Bhimpalasi
7. Have You Gone Nats
8. Bhairav For Purists
9. Ratanjankar’s Masterpiece
10. Nusrat’s Shivranjani
11. Ali Ghar Deho Badhayi
12. Tears of Nilambari
13. Ameer Ali Murkeyan Wale
14. Do Dhaivat Ki Jaunpuri
15. In Search
16. Jaijaiwanti at Amaltas
17. Celestial Yaman
18. Vilayat Khan’s Maand Bhairav
19. Sadka Panjtan Da
20. A Different Bilawal
21. Bindadin Maharaj’s Dadra
22. Live at Vézelay Abbey
23. Someone’s Talking About Riyaaz
24. Afternoon Coffee With Gauri
25. Get Me Across The River
26. Farewell To a Musical Soul
27. Brindabani Meets Another Gandhar
28. A Dev Gandhar from the 1930s
29. Adana in Jhaptaal
30. The Queen of Banaras

Finance

1. The First Step to Financial Freedom
2. A Necessity of Sorts
3. A Savings Experiment
4. How Microinvesting Works
5. Minimalism Is Hard
6. Your Day Job Might Not Be Enough
7. Easy Ways Not To Lose Money
8. Get A Secret Bank Account
9. Understanding Microinvesting
10. Importance of Time in Minimalism
11. My Experience with Microinvesting
12. What is Reverse Budgeting
13. Money in the Time of Chaos
14. Where Does Money Go
15. Living Below Your Means
16. Fix Your Money Habits
17. Nextgen Consumer Fintech You Should Know About
18. Save/Invest
19. Simple Ideas for Building Wealth

Miscellaneous

1. Embrace The City
2. A Fuller Education
3. Don’t Fear Being Judged
4. On Being a Virus
5. Where is the Best Place to Write
6. The Charm of Joe Rogan Experience
7. Delayed by 15 Years
8. One Year at Servian
9. A Month of Journaling
10. Chess: The Original Game of Thrones
11. I’m on Unsplash
12. What Christopher Hitchens Can Teach Us About Writing