I’m Navendu, and welcome to “The Open Source Absolutist,” aka my brain dump.
I mostly write about my work and life as an open source contributor/maintainer and an amateur policy analyst (what am I doing now?).
If you’re here for the first time, try my featured posts or learn more about me. Make sure to subscribe via email or RSS to get regular updates.
I could probably give solid life advice to twenty-year-olds, right?
A visual and interactive guide to understanding Bayes’ Theorem, a fundamental tool for updating probabilities with new evidence.
Should you build your own reverse proxy to replace Nginx?
Exploring the new Kubernetes Gateway API and comparing it with the existing Kubernetes Ingress API for handling external traffic.
Access to publicly funded scientific research should be ubiquitous. But the current plan to achieve this is far from ideal.
A comprehensive comparison of API gateways, Kubernetes gateways, and service meshes with actionable insights.
It was much cheaper and easier than convincing my family to use ad blockers. And it turns out, a quarter of all DNS queries were ads.
A Model Context Protocol (MCP) server that lets LLMs run code safely in isolated Docker containers.
Notes on using OpenAI Agents SDK’s MCP support to integrate DiceDB MCP.
A practical, hands-on, and interactive guide to Git for new coders and creative builders.
My experience in building an MCP server for DiceDB using the MCP Go SDK.
Insights on active citizenship and governance from “The Nitopadesha.” Part 2 explores the lessons from the second book, “The Thread of the Science of Prosperity.”
Practical, experience-driven, and often-overlooked ideas to improve your next developer conference talk.
A quick guide to using the Hugo Version Manager (hvm) to download, manage, and switch between different versions of Hugo.
The author is clearly trying to channel his existential crisis and crippled ambitions into a blog post.
An interactive quiz to teach the importance of evaluating actions by their consequences and not their intentions.
Insights on active citizenship and governance from “The Nitopadesha.” Part 1 explores the lessons from the first book, “The Jewel of Citizencraft.”
A proper environment is necessary to be productive in any work. That’s why I decided to completely rebuild mine from scratch. This post documents my opinionated setup primarily used for programming.
Exploring new open source licenses that attempt to balance benefits and make open source sustainable.
jq is a powerful tool for working with JSON. This guide teaches you to use jq effectively through hands-on, interactive examples running right in your browser.
Notes on how I added a TIL section to my Hugo-based static website.
Front Matter is a CMS that runs as a Visual Studio Code extension. It’s feature-rich and highly customizable, making it the perfect tool to manage my poorly organized blog.
A guide to using Codapi, an open source, lightweight solution to add interactivity to your technical writing.
An interactive guide to migrate from Nginx to Apache APISIX.
We need to democratize AI to save our democracies.
But here’s another viable Nginx replacement.
A postmortem on the Freenginx announcement.
Fortunately, the external access one has been solved now that we’ve all standardized on the Ingress API. Or is it the Gateway API? Shit.
An exploration of continuous delivery workflows for building and managing APIs at scale.
A better way to think about limits to prevent security issues from resource starvation.
The Kubernetes API was recently made generally available. Does that mean you should switch away from the Ingress API?
A tutorial on using APISIX’s request batching capability in Kubernetes Ingress.
A guide for using SigNoz to collect and observe metrics from Apache APISIX.
A look under the hood to see how Apache APISIX supports WebAssembly plugins.
A tale of how I spent an irrationally long time figuring out why the tests pass on my machine but fail in the CI.
A short guide on why and how you might use APISIX to access external services in Kubernetes.
An amateur engineer’s philosophy on building software.
Converting the “tiny” APISIX plugin to a “tinier” APISIX plugin.
Notes as I learn about WebAssembly by building an open source project.
A guide on using the new APISIX Declarative CLI to manage APISIX with declarative configuration files.
Applying best practices to make new API deployments using the API gateway of choice, Apache APISIX.
Modifying some JavaScript code to add a search feature for the daily logs page.
A guide on using Elasticsearch, Kibana, and Logstash to work with logs from Apache APISIX.
How I added a list of articles in the same series at the beginning of each post.
A guide to using the rate limit plugins in Apache APISIX with some practical examples.
Adding a new layer of validation within your API gateway can be a useful design practice for a myriad of reasons. This article explores how you can configure this in Apache APISIX.
A tutorial on creating a custom Apache APISIX plugin in Lua through a real use case.
My recent experience in using regular expressions to automate a menial task.
A “tiny” example to demonstrate how Apache APISIX supports Wasm plugins.
A guide to using Apache APISIX as an MQTT proxy to connect IoT devices to the cloud.
What can the Indian Government do about artificial intelligence?
Apache APISIX is generally used to manage north-south traffic in Kubernetes and often sits at the edge of a cluster. With Amesh, APISIX is now a service mesh.
Taking a look under Apache APISIX’s hood to understand how it achieves ultimate performance.
Semi-ordered thoughts on the new Digital Personal Data Protection Bill by the Indian Government.
An amateur policy analyst attempts to explain why (disregarding controversies) installing AI traffic cameras in Kerala was a bad idea.
What do the recent advancements in generative AI mean for APIs?
This article is about a project I built and open sourced three years ago and our journey to make it uzhunnu vada (UV) profitable™.
Someone tried to open pull requests to open source projects with AI-generated code.
A hands-on tutorial on using custom APISIX Plugins in Kubernetes environments with APISIX Ingress.
Writing as a way to think clearly and articulate your thoughts.
A hands-on tutorial on using the new Kubernetes Gateway API with Apache APISIX Ingress.
A note on the role of communities in open source.
A conversation with ChatGPT about ChatGPT. Who are you?
A hands-on tutorial on leveraging the full features provided by APISIX in Kubernetes Ingress.
This tutorial walks you through setting up monitoring on a microservice application using Prometheus and Grafana.
Exploring how symmetric-key and public-key cryptography works by using GPG keys to sign commits and send encrypted messages.
A complete tutorial on how to set up RetroPie and play retro games on a GPi CASE 2 with a Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 under the hood.
Cryptocurrencies are trying to be a solution to a financial problem that does not exist. UPI solved digital payments years ago.
Evaluating where I am and deciding where I want to be next.
Learn to get up and running with the microblogging platform everyone is talking about.
Many companies and tech gurus claim you don’t need a college degree for a programming job. But here’s why you might want to get one regardless.
A hands-on, from-scratch tutorial on setting up canary releases in Kubernetes with Apache APISIX Ingress.
Insights from my three year journey as an open source contributor.
I’ve been writing blogs for almost three years now. Recently, I’ve been putting a lot of effort into building and maintaining my blog. This article documents my blog setup and my writing process from idea to publishing.
A tutorial on using Ingress in your Kubernetes cluster with Apache APISIX.
Sharing how I got involved in the LFX Mentorship Program and its life-changing impact on my career and personal life.
This article shows how you can add diagrams to your Hugo site with Mermaid.
As the size of your APIs increase, the need for making them reliable and robust also increases. This article discusses the best practices for designing reliable APIs by introducing you to a special kind of reverse proxies called API gateways.
This blog is now deployed on Netlify. Here is how and why I did it.
I have been blogging ever since I started out as a software engineer. Here is why you should do it too.
Key takeaways from Morgan Housel’s international bestseller “The Psychology of Money”—brief and to the point.
I ask a lot of questions to my peers and to strangers on public forums in the internet. This year, I have been trying to improve this process to ask better questions. Here is how I do it.
Google Summer of Code (GSoC) is a great way to start contributing to open source while getting paid to do so. This article dives deep into everything GSoC from the application procedure to tips from real experience on being successful
Contributing to documentation is really impactful for an open-source project. It can also be a stepping stone to make code contributions. Learn how.
As open source becomes the default way to build software, contributions required to create, manage, and sustain projects go beyond code. This article teaches you to make non-code contributions.
Tips to make High-Quality Pull Requests.
A curated list of open source internship/mentorship programs with all the necessary details.
A template for writing useful READMEs.