Gopal Sharma
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gopalsharma.bsky.social
Gopal Sharma
@gopalsharma.bsky.social
42 followers 140 following 21 posts
CEO https://surya-digital.com

Previously Apple, Qualcomm, University of Michigan
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gopalsharma.bsky.social
I recently wrote about our stance on AI, specifically for junior software engineers.

Hot take / TL;DR version: No AI.

For the nuanced version see surya-digital.com/blog/2025-10...
November 10, 2025 at 9:58 AM
Reposted by Gopal Sharma
suryadigital.bsky.social
Sometimes, the simplest tools: pen & paper — spark the best ideas.

In his latest blog, Sai shares how sketching and writing things down can boost clarity, creativity & problem-solving.

Read the full blog here 👉 surya-digital.com/blog/2025-10...

#Design #UX #SuryaDigital #ProductDesign #Innovation
Surya Digital - Sketching & Writing Things Down Reduce My Anxiety as a Product Designer
This is more opinionated view of how sketching and writing things down has reduced my anxiety, and made me work in a structured way as a product designer.
surya-digital.com
October 9, 2025 at 5:36 AM
Reposted by Gopal Sharma
suryadigital.bsky.social
Here's a blog from our tech lead on how to build a scalable theme system in React that keeps your UI consistent, flexible, and easy to maintain as your product grows.

Read more here: surya-digital.com/blog/2025-09...

#React #SoftwareDevelopment #UI #DesignSystem #SuryaDigital
Surya Digital - Building a Scalable Theme System in React
Building scalable theming in React involves treating themes as centralized configuration objects rather than scattered CSS hacks. This post guides you through designing flexible, maintainable, and por...
surya-digital.com
September 23, 2025 at 9:29 AM
gopalsharma.bsky.social
My colleague Rishil writes about lessons he's learnt about concurrent transactions in #PostgreSQL. I've spent a lot of time learning some of these lessons with him in long debugging sessions.
September 3, 2025 at 8:54 AM
Reposted by Gopal Sharma
suryadigital.bsky.social
Don't let #ChatGPT fool you: Why a custom RAG-powered search index beats simple PDF text extraction.

Get the full story on how and why we built it: surya-digital.com/blog/2025-08...

#AI #ChatGPT #OpenAI #Perplexity #SearchEngine
Surya Digital - Building a Hybrid Document Search Engine with Typesense and LLMs
Building an effective document search system requires more than basic PDF parsing. This comprehensive guide demonstrates how to create a hybrid RAG-powered search engine using [Typesense](https://type...
surya-digital.com
August 14, 2025 at 6:10 AM
gopalsharma.bsky.social
simonwillison.net/2025/Aug/5/g...

Looks promising, waiting to see how well the tool calling works.
OpenAI’s new open weight (Apache 2) models are really good
The long promised OpenAI open weight models are here, and they are very impressive. They’re available under proper open source licenses—Apache 2.0—and come in two sizes, 120B and 20B. OpenAI’s …
simonwillison.net
August 6, 2025 at 12:50 PM
Reposted by Gopal Sharma
suryadigital.bsky.social
Ever wonder how iOS devs keep your apps bug-free?

Ananth from our team breaks down Swift Testing -Apple’s new, simpler way to test apps making crashes less likely before they reach your phone. 📱✨

Read the blog: surya-digital.com/blog/2025-07...

#Tech #Apple #iOS #Swift #Software
Surya Digital - Getting Started with Swift Testing - A Clear and Expressive Approach to Testing in Swift
Swift Testing, Apple’s modern replacement for the aging XCTest framework, offers iOS developers a more expressive and Swift-native way to write tests. Unlike XCTest’s verbose assertion methods and rig...
surya-digital.com
July 30, 2025 at 11:32 AM
Reposted by Gopal Sharma
suryadigital.bsky.social
Designing data tables for mobile: a headache? Our Product Designer Sai cracks the code!

Learn how to make complex data look simple & perform great on phones.

Dive into the insights: surya-digital.com/blog/2025-07...
Surya Digital - Designing Complex Data Tables for Mobile
Designing complex data tables for mobile isn’t about shrinking desktop tables. It’s about rethinking structure for smaller screens. This post shares practical strategies for transforming complex table...
surya-digital.com
July 16, 2025 at 6:01 AM
gopalsharma.bsky.social
I've never really agreed with templated structures for writing user stories. They can be helpful in driving uniformity in large organizations, but for small teams that want to ship fast, I think we can do better.

#Agile #UserStories
suryadigital.bsky.social suryadigital.bsky.social @suryadigital.bsky.social · Jul 8
Struggling with user stories? ✍️

Our new blog post shares unconventional tips to write user stories that truly work! Focus on the 'what' and 'why' to build better software products.

Read more: surya-digital.com/blog/2025-07...

#UserStories #Agile #ProductDev
Surya Digital - How to Write Effective User Stories
Explain the what, and why, but not how; cover the edge cases; break or adapt templates where necessary.
surya-digital.com
July 8, 2025 at 2:44 PM
Reposted by Gopal Sharma
suryadigital.bsky.social
Is your PostgreSQL slow even with indexes?

If your queries are crawling, this is a must-read to understand why and how to fix it. Get practical tips to optimize your database performance!

➡️ Dive in here: surya-digital.com/blog/2025-07...

#PostgreSQL #SQL #TechTips #SuryaDigital
Surya Digital - Why PostgreSQL Indexes Fail - The Role of Outdated Statistics
PostgreSQL’s powerful query planner relies heavily on up-to-date table and column statistics to decide whether to use indexes or full-table scans for your queries. When these statistics become outdate...
surya-digital.com
July 1, 2025 at 6:17 AM
gopalsharma.bsky.social
For the last few weeks I've been trying to use dictation a lot more on my Mac and iPhone. The built in dictation is fine, but ends up being frustrating because I have to make a lot of corrections. Been trying wisprflow.ai the last few days and it is *way* better.
Wispr Flow | Effortless Voice Dictation
Flow makes writing quick and clear with seamless voice dictation. It is the fastest, smartest way to type with your voice.
wisprflow.ai
June 24, 2025 at 11:16 AM
Reposted by Gopal Sharma
suryadigital.bsky.social
Essential CLI Tools! 🚀

One of our senior developers just dropped insights on CLI tools that can seriously boost your productivity. If you live in the terminal (like most of us), this blog is for you!

Read the full blog here: surya-digital.com/blog/2025-06...
Surya Digital - Some CLI Tools That Make Life Easier
A practical look at terminal emulators, shells, and a handful of CLI tools that can help streamline your workflow, save time, and reduce friction in your daily development tasks.
surya-digital.com
June 18, 2025 at 5:30 AM
gopalsharma.bsky.social
#Swift & #Java interop could be interesting. If this serves as a means to have something nicer than JNI for performance sensitive code, it could be quite useful. The tooling still seems immature, but hopefully this becomes viable in the next couple of years.

developer.apple.com/videos/play/...
Explore Swift and Java interoperability - WWDC25 - Videos - Apple Developer
Learn how you can mix Swift and Java in a single codebase. We'll introduce the swift-java interoperability project, which allows you to...
developer.apple.com
June 10, 2025 at 6:47 AM
gopalsharma.bsky.social
The new #Containerization framework announced at #WWDC25 looks quite nice!

What would be awesome is if someone took the docker-compose file format & made it compatible with this.

developer.apple.com/videos/play/...
github.com/apple/contai...
github.com/apple/contai...
Meet Containerization - WWDC25 - Videos - Apple Developer
Meet Containerization, an open source project written in Swift to create and run Linux containers on your Mac. Learn how Containerization...
developer.apple.com
June 10, 2025 at 5:30 AM
gopalsharma.bsky.social
Has anyone tried memvid on a real world dataset and written about the results? Curious to see how effective this is.

github.com/Olow304/memvid
GitHub - Olow304/memvid: Video-based AI memory library. Store millions of text chunks in MP4 files with lightning-fast semantic search. No database needed.
Video-based AI memory library. Store millions of text chunks in MP4 files with lightning-fast semantic search. No database needed. - Olow304/memvid
github.com
June 6, 2025 at 10:14 PM
gopalsharma.bsky.social
I’m always wary of blog posts that only share positive elements. There are surely things about server side #Swift that are not as good as #Java. It would be great to see more balanced takes.

swift.org/blog/swift-a...
Swift at Apple: migrating the Password Monitoring service from Java
Swift is heavily used in production for building cloud services at Apple, with incredible results. Last year, the Password Monitoring service was rewritten in Swift, handling multiple billions of requ...
swift.org
June 3, 2025 at 1:57 AM
gopalsharma.bsky.social
I am all for this. The costs of running Postgres on the hyperscalers are insanely high.

www.ubicloud.com/blog/time-to...

#postgresql #cloud
It's Time to Rethink PostgreSQL Storage
Today, you can get 2.5 million IOPS from a $600 NVMe SSD. By contrast, pushing 2.5 million IOPS through Aurora would cost you $1.3M per month. With NVMe SSDs now faster, cheaper, and more reliable, it...
www.ubicloud.com
June 2, 2025 at 1:55 PM
Reposted by Gopal Sharma
suryadigital.bsky.social
API performance testing doesn’t have to be a pain!

Our dev Rhea shares how to use Locust for simulating real-world load with ease. A must-read for anyone shipping APIs 🐛⚡

🔗 surya-digital.com/blog/2025-05...

#APITesting #Locust #Python #PerformanceTesting
Surya Digital - Performance Testing APIs with Locust: A Practical Guide for Developers
Performance testing is essential to ensure your system performs reliably under real-world conditions. This blog introduces Locust, a powerful and scalable load-testing framework, guiding you through i...
surya-digital.com
May 28, 2025 at 10:25 AM
gopalsharma.bsky.social
I’ve had my reservations with systems like Iceberg because they are complex & hard to operate. Simple things tend to work in the long run. Ducklake seems like a reasonable balance. Going to be trying this out soon.

duckdb.org/2025/05/27/d...

#DataEngineering #Lakehouse
DuckLake: SQL as a Lakehouse Format
DuckLake simplifies lakehouses by using a standard SQL database for all metadata, instead of complex file-based systems, while still storing data in open formats like Parquet. This makes it more relia...
duckdb.org
May 28, 2025 at 7:02 AM
gopalsharma.bsky.social
rambo.codes/posts/2025-0...

If someone had described this bug to me, prima facie I’d have thought this is crazy. Once you know what’s happening - it makes perfect sense!
Cracking The Dave & Buster’s Anomaly | Rambo Codes
Gui Rambo writes about his coding and reverse engineering adventures.
rambo.codes
May 24, 2025 at 4:33 AM
gopalsharma.bsky.social
techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/adforpo...

This looks handy.

#postgresql #vscode
Announcing a new IDE for PostgreSQL in VS Code from Microsoft | Microsoft Community Hub
We are excited to announce the public preview of the brand-new PostgreSQL extension for Visual Studio Code (VS Code), designed to simplify PostgreSQL...
techcommunity.microsoft.com
May 24, 2025 at 4:27 AM
gopalsharma.bsky.social
This is why I do not like Google Cloud. We're using Gemini 1.5 in Lidana because those are the only models that are available in the India region. They're notifying us on May 9 that they will shut off access on May 24 (or with a generous interpretation September 24), and there is no alternative.
May 9, 2025 at 4:48 AM
gopalsharma.bsky.social
sqlite-internal.pages.dev

This is pretty neat!
SQLite File Format Viewer
sqlite-internal.pages.dev
April 17, 2025 at 3:40 AM
gopalsharma.bsky.social
By default, we host Lidana and all internal apps at Surya Digital on Hetzner. Especially in cases where we can run on ARM, it is an order of magnitude cheaper, and often significantly faster than Hyperscalers.

www.hopsworks.ai/post/migrati...
Migrating from AWS to a European Cloud - How We Cut Costs by 62% - Hopsworks
Learn how we migrated Hopsworks Serverless from AWS to OVHCloud, cutting costs from $8,000 to $3,000/month with no loss in service quality.
www.hopsworks.ai
March 15, 2025 at 4:02 AM
gopalsharma.bsky.social
This resonates with me. I really like #Rust, but we don’t use it for most apps because it really isn’t the best option for writing web services. Personally, I find #Kotlin to be a pretty good language for web services.

www.bartoszsypytkowski.com/is-rust-a-go...
Is Rust a good fit for business apps?
While you may hear a lot of harsh words about Rust is this rant, that doesn't have to mean it's a bad language. Rephrasing the classic: there are two types of programming languages: ones that people c...
www.bartoszsypytkowski.com
March 14, 2025 at 1:11 AM