Tensai Sensei

Wisdom #1 If you want to live a peaceful and happy life, automate/delegate/eliminate things that don't really add any value to your life. This will help you muster time for things that you want to do in your life. Always remember, time is your only asset that you cannot produce more of. Examples Automate - Your investments using SIPs Delegate - Hire a maid or a cook to do the chores Eliminate - Taking a bath every single day

The Angular Ecosystem Angular is an amazing framework. It enables us to build modern web apps easily. Yes we can build a modern web app with just HTML + CSS + JavaScript, maybe with a dash of jQuery 😉 But Angular just makes it whole lot easier. Users today's web apps to be fast, well designed, offline-capable, secure and a delightful. Since Angular is a opinionated framework, it forces you to make the right choices. Today Angular is not just a web framework. it has created its own ecosystem. As you might have guessed, I am a Angular fanboy 😎. But one thing I'm not a fan of is writing test cases 😛 I started learning about software testing in late 2019, because I asked to setup unit + E2E testing for one of our projects. What I learned was, Angular come with Karma + Jasmine setup (for unit testing) out of the box. But it has built a specialized E2E testing framework called Protractor . But I couldn't figure out why they called it Protractor of all things. Later it dawned o...

Introduction The National Pension System is a great financial product for creating your retirement kitty. With contribution of just ₹5000 per month, you can accumulate more than a crore! I am a NPS subscriber (through NSDL eNPS) myself. If you have read my previous post  regarding EPF you know I like NPS for the following reasons. 60 year lock-in period Additional tax exemption under section 80CCD (1B) Choice of various assets classes Choice of pension fund managers Option to change your asset allocation or pension fund manager Low cost of fund management Transparency & organization structure Good customer support Online account opening and management Multiple exit options at retirement Screenshot from  Pension Calculator | NPS Trust Some Not So Great Things NPS is...

Like every employee who joins a company in the organized sector, I too was forced to open an account under the Employee Provident Fund scheme. So far I've had a pretty bad experience with the scheme. Over the years I have faced lots of issues with it. This post started as an investigation on EPF. It started more like weekend project to check if EPF still has value in today's day and age where employees are financially educated and better retirement products exists. Let's start from the beginning... What is EPF? 🤔 The Employee Provident Fund (EPF) is a scheme that helps people save up a sufficient corpus for retirement. The plan was introduced with the Employees' Provident Funds Act in 1952 and is today managed by the Employees' Provident Fund Organisation (EPFO). Source:  ETMoney As per the law, every employee has to put 12% of their salary (=Basic Salary + Dearness Allowance) in their EPF account every m...

Open up any e-commerce website and you’ll be bombarded with No Cost EMI offers. On the surface it seems like the merchants and the banks have tied up to help you buy your favourite products on installments, without paying interests. But this is far from the truth. They will trick you into believing you are buying the product at 0% interest but you'll end paying more than the original price. Just as there's no such thing as a free lunch, similarly there is no such thing as a No Cost EMI. It’s all just predatory marketing. Let me explain with an example. First off let me tell you, according to RBI's regulations a lender cannot lend money on 0% interest. So banks use different tactics to make it seem like the effective interest rate is 0%. Now let's assume you want to buy a product worth ₹3599. If you bought it using regular EMIs, the bank will charge you ₹133 as interest. So the effective price would be ₹3732. Now if you opt for the No Cost EMI scheme, the merch...

Dear edX, I was in my 2nd year of college when you came to life. And I was ecstatic! No, not to be in college (LOL) but to have finally found my calling. Computer programming. I was browsing through all the resources I could find. Codecademy courses mainly. And right at that moment, you arrived. Your parents hail from the Harvard University and from the MIT. So of course you received my attention. Also, you had an unique selling point: free certificates. This was huge! No one else was doing it. It seemed you were actually trying to help students learn new skills and show off to the world. I was stoked to enroll into the course developed world's top professors. The free certificates were a big motivator to complete the courses. The first course I enrolled into was developed by The Linux Foundation. I have taken several courses since then. Some were on computer programming, some were about a country's history and some provided advice on career growth and personal finance. 2 ...