Ashveen Bansal

3 years, 124k lines of code, 30 docs and infinite learning


Expected: Internal politics.
Reality: People gave peer bonuses whenever I helped them.

Expected: It would be hard to take leaves on short notice due to some emergency.
Reality: I was always told “don’t worry about your work” whenever there was an emergency.

Expected: My “I wasn’t able to do that” would be criticized.
Reality: Everyone, no matter how senior, helped me whenever I was stuck.

Expected: I am going to hate my manager.
Reality: I have given a dance performance at only one wedding - my manager’s.

Expected: Five star hotels have the most hospitable staff.
Reality: Hospitality of Google’s office staff (REWS) can beat any five star hotel.

Expected: Arranging commute to office would be hard.
Reality: The office cab service's (gCab) helpfulness in arranging last-minute cabs makes commuting worry-free.

 #LifeAtGoogle

How do iPhones work more smoothly with just half the RAM of Android phones?


Maybe because they are more optimized? But if it was just because of optimizations, Android would have caught up by now.

iOS Apps are built for very specific processors. Android apps have to support a variety of processors. A code compiled for one kind of processor can't be directly run on other processors. So, Android uses Java. 

Java is platform-independent - it can run on various types of machines and operating systems. Android apps are (partially) compiled into bytecode which is then compiled into native code during runtime. iOS apps are directly compiled into native code. Running native code directly is much more efficient and requires less memory.

iOS also has a more aggressive memory management system than Android. Android is lenient with background apps so apps keep consuming memory in the background. Java’s garbage collection is also not very efficient (compared to Swift's ARC) and leads to utilization of more memory.

Because of these, iOS apps require just 40% RAM of their corresponding Android apps! Hence Apple also only gives 50% RAM of Android phones.

People believe leaving Google for a startup/edtech venture is a risky move, they don’t know about the safety net Google provides.

Google has a policy that if an ex-Googler (Xoogler) wishes to rejoin Google at the same level and within one year of departure, they don’t have to give interviews! They are directly moved to the team matching phase. So, as long as there is an opening in Google for the same level, they can easily join back. For the high performers, they sometimes even extend this limit to two years.

I know many people who rely on this while leaving Google. They know they can try something different for a few months and if it doesn’t work out they can easily come back.

I have even seen people coming back within 2 months of leaving Google.

A less known benefits of Type-C is that it has a handshake mechanism that allows the device and charger to agree on the maximum power that can be delivered. This means that you do not need to worry about using a charger with a higher power rating than your device can handle.

The handshake mechanism works by the device and charger exchanging messages to determine the maximum power that can be delivered. The device will send a message indicating the maximum power it can handle, and the charger will send a message indicating the maximum power it can deliver. If the two messages match, then the charger will deliver the maximum power to the device. If the two messages do not match, then the charger will deliver the lower of the two values.

For example, if you have a phone that can only charge at 15W, you can use a charger that can charge at 65W without worrying about damaging your phone. The handshake mechanism will ensure that the charger only delivers 15W of power to your phone.

How can the VLC media player double your speakers’ output?


You must have seen that it is possible to increase volume to 200% on VLC. But does that double the output of your speakers?

At the most basic level, audio is represented by a stream of numbers - specifying the amplitude or volume level. Most audio files use 16-bit signed integers which can store values between -32769 and 32768.

So let's say you have three volume levels in an audio file:  -1234, 9000, 23456
If you want to increase the volume to 150% you multiply all samples by 1.5 to get these new values:  -1851, 13500, 35184

However, the last number is too big. So the program will change it to 32768 because that's the maximum limit. This is called audio clipping.

So you can turn up the volume over 100%, and it'll get louder, but turn it up too far and you'll start to notice audible clipping. We only increased the input amplitude and it was still bounded by playable range. VLC is a software using official OS APIs - it can't push your speakers beyond their maximum output.

So VLC just amplifies the input sound above what it was originally encoded. It cannot boost your speakers’ capability itself.