Introduction
My name is Swaroop. I currently work as a Staff Engineer in the Machine Learning Platform team at DoorDash in San Francisco.
I write mostly about what I have learned in pursuit of my curiosity, mostly around software engineering, books and ideas.
I have previously worked at big companies, did freelancing, tried building a startup, and was at startups of all sizes (from 6-person company to Series B+ to acquisition).
Long ago, I wrote A Byte of Python beginners book and A Byte of Vim book.
Contact
Email me: blog@swaroopch.com
Tweet me: @swaroopch
Books
A Byte of Python
This is a book on programming using the Python language. It serves as a tutorial or guide to the Python language for a beginner audience. If all you know about computers is how to save text files, then this is the book for you.
- Syed Talal (19 years old) says: “The best thing I found was A Byte of Python, which is simply a brilliant book for a beginner. It’s well written, the concepts are well explained with self evident examples.”
- @suren says: Byte of Vim and Python by @swaroopch is by far the best works in technical writing to me. Excellent reads #FeelGoodFactor
- @Stripeh says: I found the tutorial by swaroopch.com to be quite awesome, got through it in no time, very practically minded.
A Byte of Vim
A Byte of Vim is a guide to help you to learn to learn about Vim, the text editor of choice for many programmers. This guide is aimed at both beginners who do not know anything about vi or vim and wish to learn how to become more productive in their writing, and intermediate users who wish to pick up advanced Vim tricks.
- @ven_cse (Venkatesh) says “Started liking #vim, thanks to “A Byte of Vim”
- @Pradeek says “@swaroopch ‘s Byte of Vim is an excellent resource for Vim beginners like me. #awesomework”
Blog Reviews
- Girish Kadkol and Sampad Swain say: “Aspiring techies and college students recommend to follow @swaroopch , his blogs are good and knowledgeable.”
- Atul Chitnis says: “What’s awesome is @swaroopch’s blog posts, and how they MAKE me & others think.”
- Snehal Pal says: “His blog is an amazing assortment of advice and contains stories of life as a techie, startups and hacks.”
- Sreehari says: “Awesome awesome blog of @swaroopch ! Must read!! http://www.swaroopch.com/ No wonder it remains one among the top 10 #blogs in india! :-)
- Prashish Rajbhandari says:“Reading @swaroopch ‘s blog. Very informative and inspirational. Thanks. :)”
- Sitakanta says: “The blog of @swaroopch is responsible for me leaving job to do this mad thing called a startup. So beware :)”
- Vinay H R says:“The more I read @swaroopch blogs, the more inspiration I get from it.”
- Krishna Bharadwaj says: “I consider Paul Graham and Joel Spolsky as some of the greatest technical writers. Swaroop C H writes some amazing articles as well!”
- Avinash Kundaliya says:“Yeah! seriously man.. awesome blog..”
- Chaitanya Nettem says: “I love your blog. I just love it.”
- A R Karthick says:“Your blog posts show great clarity of thought.”
- Abhinav Upadhyay says: “Your blog posts inspired me quite a lot during my early days at college :-)”
- Chirag Gupta says:“I’ve been reading your blog for so long (since 2004 I think) that I find it funny when people discover it now :)”
- Chirag Gupta says: “I think I started following his blog like 7 years back. Those days, I didn’t even use RSS much :)”
- H N Prashanth says: “you got yourself hardcore followers of your blog, we are watching every move! ;-)”
- Prateek Narang says: “I like your writing….it makes me think.”
- Laurentiu Alexe says: “I’ve discovered your blog after downloading the Python book. Very nice book and amazing blog. Thanks!”
- Aditya Bhushan says: “your views and answers (will) help a lot of people.”
- This blog has been featured as a recommended read in Outlook Magazine, for B-school students.
- This blog has been consistently rated as one of the top ten blogs in India, out of 20,000 blogs listed at Invesp BlogRank. Read about how it happened.
History
- Started as an intern and fresher at Yahoo!
- Totally loved Yahoo!, the coolest company (back then) he can ever work for
- Worked on analysis and statistics of Yahoo! Search, called Yahoo! Buzz Index (a product for advertisers)
- Worked at Adobe in the awesome Flex team
- From the IDE to the data visualization platform
- Wrote a beginner’s programming book on Python
- Open source enthusiast, so released under Creative Commons license
- Popular book: Millions of downloads
- Translations by volunteers to Chinese, Italian, German, Indonesian, and many others (Spanish, Arabic, etc.) in progress
- Used by NASA and 8 universities
- Delivered talks on Python at 7 different conferences and colleges
- Used as a reference book in MIT OpenCourseWare for their “Introduction to Computer Science and Programming” 2011 class
- Wrote another book released in 2008 on the Vim 7 editor for both beginners and advanced users
- Got a very good response with more than 10,000 readers in the first 3 days and 5000+ PDF downloads.
- Lot of nice feedback
- Writes a weblog
- Average of 2500+ readers per day
- Was ranked No. 6 in India according to Indiblogger ranking (as of July 23, 2009)
- Was ranked No. 5 in India according to Invesp Ultimate BlogRank listing (as of August 17, 2009)
- Was once listed on BlogStreet.com as one of India’s Top 100 blogs
- Read how his blog got him a job
- Passionate about Running, Trekking, Cycling
- 1 full marathon (42km), 4 half marathons (21km), 1 duathlon (10km running + 10km cycling)
- Delivered a well-received talk on “Why You Should Run” at BarCampBangalore6
- 16 treks
- Entrepreneurship
- Started right from college by selling Linux CDs in the days of dial-up internet
- Co-founder of the team that created ion, the iPod Charger, as featured in the Economic Times
- Finished a full-time experiment called IonLab
- Previously a product leader at InfiBeam.com working on projects such as Crossword.in and Build a Bazaar.
- Startup
- Was a consultant and early employee with Automatic, acquired by SiriusXM.
- Was an engineering manager for AI team at Helpshift.
The Dreamer. Dream On. Dream On.