Chez Sai
  • Home
  • About
  • Calendar

Hacking

A collection of 34 posts

Hacking

SES gotchas

AWS' documentation for setting up SES to receive emails at your custom domain (instead of say gmail.com) is pretty self explanatory but there are a few gotchas that tripped me up for

  • Sai Ramachandran
2 min read
Hacking

Can you hear me now?

Get on a plane. Arrive in Mumbai or Bangalore or New Delhi or Cochin. Exit the contrived conveniences of the aircraft. Look around you. People. Thousands upon thousands upon thousands of people living

  • Sai Ramachandran
1 min read
Hacking

Deep Dive​

Of late, this blog and its sister publications on Medium have been feeling a little neglected. Where I used to try to write a long form post every day, my output had tapered

  • Sai Ramachandran
9 min read
growth hacking

The #1 Reason Why No One Signs up for Your Mailing List

I am going to level with you - if you are hoping to make a living on the internet, without a tribe of loyal fans things are going to be rough. The tribe doesn't have to be massive, even a thousand loyal fans will do.

  • Sai Ramachandran
2 min read
growth hacking

Does Your Website have a Personality?

Your website has a certain ethos, certain spirit but it is likely different from what I am used to in unsettling ways. This is probably costing you a conversion. How to overcome that?

  • Sai Ramachandran
3 min read
Hacking

Letsencrypt ipv6 gotcha

As per its website, Let’s Encrypt is a free, automated, and open Certificate Authority. A certificate authority (CA) verifies that your website exists and runs on the server (IP address) you say

  • Sai Ramachandran
1 min read
Reflecting

How You Too Can Win on the Web

When you first start an online business or a presence, it is easy to be seduced by the Internet's immense possibilities and imagine yourself riding a never-ending upsurge of customers towards unimagined wealth

  • Sai Ramachandran
2 min read
Hacking

d3js Advisory

In case you have, like me, played around with older versions of d3 and wondered why calls to load data in v5 don't seem to work, please do the smart thing instead of

  • Sai Ramachandran
1 min read
Hacking

OTPC messaging

The holy grail of encoding/spycraft is the One Time Pad Cipher [Wikipedia]. A very simple implementation of a One Time Pad Cipher could be as follows: Anand and Bipasha agree to use

  • Sai Ramachandran
2 min read
Marketing

Streamlining Marketing

In the spirit of "Sell before you make", I have been testing the market for a few startup ideas I have. If I were testing my ideas in more cohesive countries

  • Sai Ramachandran
1 min read
Hacking

Irritating UX - II

Your browser does not support the audio element. Another day, another example of UX that could be so simple to fix that not fixing it shows a deep chasm where user empathy should

  • Sai Ramachandran
1 min read
Hacking

Why traditional Networking is a false mistress

Tl;Dr - In this post, I'll try to convince you that when we outsource "networking" to others, we lose our chance of finding a unicorn. Co-working spaces and hacker meetups

  • Sai Ramachandran
2 min read
Hacking

What I found when I dug deep for my WHY

Tl; Dr: I answered these questions honesty and the outcome is not what I thought. In response to bullet point number 14 in this post by Thrive Global [Medium Link], I took a

  • Sai Ramachandran
2 min read
Hacking

A 2048 hack

I recently again started obsessively playing 2048. It has gotten to a stage where I look up high scores and strategy discussions for the game on Quora. While my own high score is

  • Sai Ramachandran
1 min read
Hacking

Irritating UX

I recently subscribed to the Washington Post’s basic digital package. It’s the least I could do to support their journalism. I have to say though that their UX is beyond vexing

  • Sai Ramachandran
1 min read
Hacking

On building a mass movement

Venture Capital and Silicon Valley would have us believe that the best, fastest way to build unicorn startups was to "disrupt" everything and "seek forgiveness, not permission". I found

  • Sai Ramachandran
2 min read
Hacking

Simplest life hack

My cousin is a dentist in Mumbai. Now that she has moved back home after her wedding - her husband is also a Mumbaikar - she’s starting her practice in the city.

  • Sai Ramachandran
1 min read
Hacking

Need for speed

In India, if you ever get on the road to go from point A to point B, you will notice that, on average, we operate at speeds well under 40kmph (25mph). And this

  • Sai Ramachandran
1 min read
Hacking

Super strong passwords

Like everyone else on the planet, I have been fretting about setting and using strong passwords for each of the myriad online accounts I own. I tried the xkcd (HorseStapleBattery...) trick but after

  • Sai Ramachandran
2 min read
Hacking

I have just posited a new theory of marketing

This New Scientist article is headlined thusly - Half the universe’s missing matter has just been finally found When I first saw this headline on Hacker News, I was immediately drawn in.

  • Sai Ramachandran
1 min read
Hacking

Marketing is hard

I am an engineer. I am used to giving an input, waiting a second or so for the _system_ to do its magic, and then seeing an output. Marketing is structurally similar. There

  • Sai Ramachandran
2 min read
Hacking

Gut microbes

I love that every few weeks there is news, that microbes in our gut keep us safe from disease X or condition Y. Let the Pfizers and Schering-Ploughs of the world invent blockbuster

  • Sai Ramachandran
1 min read
Hacking

On DNSSEC

If you have ever called a customer care number and the operator asks you for the last 4 if your SSN to confirm your identity, you have experienced the human version of DNSSEC.

  • Sai Ramachandran
1 min read
Hacking

Treat stable websites as "REST" services?

Now that both Firefox and Chrome can easily be run in headless mode, can we treat stable, never tweaked websites as RESTful services? For example, consider Mozilla's recently launched service Send - a

  • Sai Ramachandran
1 min read
Hacking

You.S.A

A few days ago, I wrote about my hack to stay in touch with friends and family in the US without spending a fortune on calling cards. Yesterday, I launched that as a

  • Sai Ramachandran
1 min read
Chez Sai © 2018
Latest Posts Twitter Ghost