btbytes

Pradeep Gowda · digital garden & commonplace book
Software engineer, lifelong learner, Kannada speaker. Born in Bengaluru, now in Carmel, Indiana. MS from Purdue. Pythonista at heart, polyglot by curiosity. This site has been online since 2003 — originally an open-source CD shop, now a garden of notes, posts, talks, and curated references.
🌱 About

I'm Pradeep Gowda — a software engineer who fell in love with programming in college, just as the open-source movement was taking off. I've taught myself many languages, but Python is my goldilocks language. I earned my MS in Computer Science from Purdue University / IUPUI and have been building software ever since.

I've given talks on Python, Flask, Erlang, Kafka, ReasonML, and data science at PyOhio, IndyPy, and Linux Bangalore. I wrote for DeveloperIQ magazine back in 2005. I designed a REPL t-shirt that said (love (print (eval (read)))) — because love is what makes the world go around.

I care about programming languages (I've studied dozens), data systems (Kafka, DuckDB, SQLite, Postgres), AI & LLMs, Kannada language & culture, personal websites, and writing to think.

🌿 Digital Garden Highlights

✍️ Blog Posts

109 posts spanning 2020–2025. Python workflows, LLM experiments, web frameworks, Nim, D lang, Go, and more.

Latest: REPL t-shirt, Monotyper Manifesto, Gemini CLI

📓 Weekly Journal

Life, code, and thinking — weekly entries since 2023. Also yearly journals going back to 2014.

117 entries · 2014–2026

📝 Commonplace Book

233 notes on everything: programming languages, databases, AI, health, philosophy, farming, typography, and more.

A Zettelkasten-style knowledge base

🎤 Talks & Presentations

From SQLite at Linux Bangalore 2004 to "Does Python have the secret sauce to be web scale?" at PyOhio 2012.

2004–2019 · 10+ talks

🔗 Curated Links

Yearly collections of interesting links — a personal web index of the best stuff found online.

2014–2025 · 2000+ links

ಕನ್ನಡ ಸಂಪರ್ಕ

Kannada language resources, grammar, fonts, poetry, and cultural references. A bridge between tech and heritage.

ಕನ್ನಡ ಕಲಿಕೆ · ಸಾಹಿತ್ಯ · ಛಂದಸ್ಸು
📜 Notable Essays & Posts
🧰 Tools, References & Curations

🛠️ Software Tools

Command-line tools, Chrome extensions, Pandoc workflows, data cleaning utilities, and more.

📚 Reading Lists

Meta-list of book recommendations — from Taleb to Taleb, ML reading lists, and personal libraries.

🌐 Interesting Websites

A curated collection of hand-made personal websites — the small web, the indie web, the beautiful web.

📖 Essays by Others

A growing collection of essays worth reading — AI, culture, work, self-improvement.

📄 Bibliography

Papers and references cited across the site, generated from BibTeX.

📕 Books with Small Chapters

A curated list of books built for quick pick-me-up reading — small chapters, big ideas.

🧠 Deep Dives & Knowledge Areas

🐍 Python

Goldilocks language. 11KB of notes on Python — from data science to web frameworks.

📘 Programming Languages

37KB of notes on languages: Lisp, Haskell, OCaml, Rust, Nim, D, Go, Erlang, Janet, and more.

🤖 LLMs & AI

19KB of notes on large language models, RAG, embeddings, fine-tuning, and the AI landscape.

🐘 PostgreSQL

8.7KB of PostgreSQL knowledge — the database that keeps on giving.

📨 Kafka

Notes on event streaming, Kafka's architecture, and real-time data pipelines.

🔧 Emacs

15KB of Emacs notes — the editor that's also an operating system.

❄️ Nix

Reproducible builds, declarative configs, and the Nix package manager.

🐳 Docker

Containers, images, orchestration — 6KB of practical Docker notes.

🔧 About This Site

Built with Quartz (a static site generator), written in Markdown using Obsidian, deployed via Cloudflare Pages. Static files served from Cloudflare R2. The site has been online since 2003 — originally an open-source CD shop that mailed GNU/Linux CDs to people in India when dial-up was expensive. Now it's a commonplace book, a blog, a journal, and a digital garden.

858 markdown files · 109 blog posts · 117 journal entries · 233 notes · 2000+ curated links · 15 years of archives

💬 Contact & Elsewhere

✉️ pradeep🌀btbytes.com (replace the cyclone with @)