Ashok on the Web

I write about Computer Science and Design in the articles section of my website. The four most recent articles are listed below.

1. Introduction to Dired Mode (August 23, 2021)
2. Continuations in Common Lisp (August 17, 2021)
3. Introduction to ASDF (August 13, 2021)
4. Persistent in Memory Data Storage in Common Lisp (June 23, 2021)

I save down useful papers, free books and weblinks in the resources section of my website. Two useful resources are below.

1. Common Lisp HyperSpec - A mirror of the Common Lisp HyperSpec, as kindly made available by LispWorks and the acclaimed Kent Pitman.
2. Common Lisp, the Language 2nd Edition - A mirror of the venerable reference textbook for Common Lisp, written by the acclaimed Guy Steele.

I also blog Medium, where I have roughly 1,000 readers per month. I tend to write first on Medium and later transfer a copy here. Medium helps me gain visibility and some of my articles are top ranked in Google searches for their topics.

I also share some of my open source projects on GitHub. A lot of my work is private, but I try to contribute to open source and the free software movement when I have time. Some of my contributions include:

1. The Common Lisp Cheat Sheet - My ongoing introductory guide to Common Lisp, which is now featured on the Reddit Sidebar for r/lisp.
2. Beautiful PDFs from HTML - My tutorial on using Paged.Js to produce paginated media from HTML. It has been read over 20,000 times and currently has over 250 stars on Github. It is a good read for anybody looking to automate PDF report generation by taking advantage of Chrome's rendering engine (preferably in a headless setup). The accompanying Hacker News discussion can be found here (note that I changed website domains, so the web link on HN no longer works).
3. RPN 30 - My highly rated Reverse Polish Notation calculator for iPhones. It has over 15,000 downloads and counting, together with a 4.8/5 star rating on the Apple App Store with roughly 50 reviews to date. A sample of its reviews can be found here. The full source code of this calculator is available here, and is a useful example for those trying to learn Swift & SwiftUI.
4. Math Hydras - My keybindings for inserting greek letters and mathematical symbols quickly in Emacs.
5. Lisp & the Web - A detailed step through for creating cloud-based web applications through Common Lisp and Google Compute Engine. It has been read over 10,000 times.

You may contact me at email@ashok.jp. If you like what I do and would like to work together on some project, I would love to hear what you have in mind. You can also reach out to me for any technical writing assignments.