Greetings, Earthling 🖖

I’m Shantanu, aka Shaan.

Your friendly neighborhood co-inhabitant of this tiny speck of dust, I maintain this site as a stochastic log of my calculations towards the futile aim of weeding out the anomalies from the equation that gives me my “42”.

In my Clark Kent mode, I spend my day at The Trade Desk, trying to crunch through petabytes of data and trillions of queries every day to understand the human behavior and make the advertising technology world a little bit better.

Before that, I spent a couple of decades in the Semiconductors world at Qualcomm and Google, building processors and AI accelerators, tinkering with chips, operating systems, device drivers, human interface devices, security et al.

When the lights go out everywhere, I like to don my maker hat and build stuff that no one wants.

I like to make and break things around me ranging from my smart toaster/TV to my web and phone apps to my car, strumming a bit of guitar, 3d printing stuff, and of course, shit-posting on twitter @shantanugoel.

Sometimes I post some of my travel and 3d print outputs on instagram, because I’ve been told by my gen-z interns that that’s a thing to do.

Do check out some of the other subdomains that I run.

3dprinting Changes Lives

Shantanu Goel

Imagine that you wake up one day and discover that you have the power to bring your ideas to life! You think of something, design it and it appears in front of you. Wouldn’t that be life-changing for you?

If you can imagine it, you can have it

In the sweet monsoons, some 25 years ago, a lot of Indian kids started dreaming of this when the show Shaka Laka Boom Boom went on air. It had a magical pencil that the show’s protagonist Sanju could use to draw anything, and it became a reality. Now, I didn’t really watch the show because I was already in my 20s by then and it felt too childish to me at the time. But the kids around me could not stop singing praises about it and how they wanted to be the lucky Sanju.

Job Offers as an Optimization Problem

Shantanu Goel

1) What?

A classic debate that keeps erupting now and then is whether it’s ok or not to continue to look for other jobs after signing an employment contract with a company, to get potentially a better offer.

There are good arguments from both sides. Employers expect you to commit/be good to your word and not continue shopping around a signed offer letter. Candidates believe that this is unfair since companies typically have a much heavier side already in the employment power equation.

Letting go of headphones to save sanity and health

Shantanu Goel

I love listening to music (mostly rock and metal), and I’m in meetings, A LOT. So, naturally I use headphones a lot, especially due to the video calls situation forced by the pandemic. Now, I’ve been having this uneasy feeling for a long time which is sort of like a headache but not really and it’s been gnawing at me. I attributed this to lack of sleep, stress, etc early on but then recently realized the main culprit for this is headphones that’s constantly keeping my ears busy. I used to use mostly IEMs for their better sound and isolation. Tried over the ears headphones but it didn’t really help much. People suggested using open back headphones and those helped but not much.

Pradyumn’s got a website

Shantanu Goel

My 10yo (Pradyumn) got interested in coding last year. I wasn’t so sure about it in the beginning since I didn’t want to force my career choices or interests on to him. But I realized that he wanted to do it of his own accord, so I agreed to help him. But our deal was that I will introduce him a bit to the learning resources and help him out with his doubts here and there, while he will peruse all the learning material and build his things on his own without much interference/interaction with me.

A nifty window layout switcher for macOS using Hammerspoon

Shantanu Goel

I’m a sucker for screen real estate, and thus I use 2 32" 4k monitors so I can see most of my apps’ windows simultaneously, instead of switching back and forth between them.

I use the awesome Rectangle app that provides shortcuts to move/resize an app window to my liking. However, this goes for a toss whenever I disconnect my laptop, or reboot it. macOS can’t seem to reliably remember where to put the windows at such events and I’ve to keep playing this game of doing a lot of alt-tabs and rectangle keyboard shortcuts to get my app windows back where I like them. So, I spent some time recently to whip up a short hammerspoon script that allows me to do this easily.