https://shashanksharma.xyz/posts/Recent content in Posts on Shashank SharmaHugo -- gohugo.ioenSun, 15 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://shashanksharma.xyz/posts/the-axioms-of-self/Sun, 15 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://shashanksharma.xyz/posts/the-axioms-of-self/"When you are lost, where you stand is the right direction." I wrote that line in my notes at some point. I don’t remember exactly when, somewhere between my college years in Indore and the early grind of a software engineering career. I didn’t fully understand it then, but I think maybe I do now. These are my thoughts about something I’ve been working through for years: who do you trust, and why, and what happens to you when that trust keeps getting tested?https://shashanksharma.xyz/posts/evolution-of-my-blog/Wed, 03 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000https://shashanksharma.xyz/posts/evolution-of-my-blog/Introduction I’ve been thinking about how vision drives evolution, even when technology can’t keep up. For example, early video games designers in the 2000s envisioned characters with complex abilities and unique interactions, but they were working with primitive graphics engines. They couldn’t show you detailed animations or flashy effects, so they had to distill their ideas down to pure mechanics and imagination. Players had to envision how cool it would look or maybe it was cool at that point in time, even when it was just basic sprites and simple animations.https://shashanksharma.xyz/posts/hidden-cost-of-container-zombies/Thu, 03 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000https://shashanksharma.xyz/posts/hidden-cost-of-container-zombies/Introduction You might have seen problem statements where the user is expected to execute SQL queries based off problem statements and check whether the query output is correct or not. During my work at HackerRank, one of the use case which I was assigned was to figure out, why database query execution takes more time and how we can further improve it. Now obviously, whenever user input execution comes into picture, it’s better to take precaution and containers are usually the best tools for this job and this brings many complications.https://shashanksharma.xyz/posts/year-in-review-2024/Sat, 22 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000https://shashanksharma.xyz/posts/year-in-review-2024/Introduction Server Status As of now all my server/services status can be seen at self hosted status page This year has been exciting wrt me joining at Coursera, learning java as a completely new languague, which I never thought I’ll be making use of given I have been priamrily working with Python and Golang. Besides that, I did enjoyed picking new hobby, which in this case was is selfhosting. I finally made use of my raspberry pi and deployed couple of useful tools and taking first step towards homelab setuphttps://shashanksharma.xyz/posts/dota-compendium-2024-quest/Fri, 25 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000https://shashanksharma.xyz/posts/dota-compendium-2024-quest/Introduction I have been playing games for a while, and it has been usually FPS games, where it started from CS1.6 to CSGO for more than 3,000 hours and playing Valorant for 2 more years, and a couple of other ones, and at some point I realized I need to try some new style and started playing dota 2. My first-ever game of Dota 2 was at around May 2022, where I had no idea what I was doing and why I was doing it, those 5 games I remember closing them in between and had no idea what to build by looking at the items in the shop.https://shashanksharma.xyz/posts/building-live-device-feed/Tue, 20 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000https://shashanksharma.xyz/posts/building-live-device-feed/Introduction One day, I had a thought, why is it that other organization can track all my stats and not share those raw data with me, even though I am the one who is generating it, obviously few of the services do allow sharing some insights like Netflix watch history or google activities (limited), but it has its own issues like they are not detailed, or some histories are not persistent. For me, It all started with my obsession with generating and tracking data, and also in school days when I used to track my day-to-day activities manually whenever I unlocked my phone, but obviously such manual tracking is far too irritating.https://shashanksharma.xyz/posts/how-vulnerable-was-rgpv-exam-2020/Sun, 30 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000https://shashanksharma.xyz/posts/how-vulnerable-was-rgpv-exam-2020/Preface The main reason behind this blog is to understand the seriousness of mistakes that were made without any proper arrangements and the impact of such mistakes. In this blog, I’ll be covering how the RGPV Exam portal was so vulnerable that it exposed around 49 thousands of students’ private data/submissions publicly and how it could have ruined everyone’s exam without any authentication. Impact of given vulnerabilities include: 49,000 students of RGPV student data leak which includes all possible PII data (like: phone number, email, etc) Question paper leak Submit exam for any other student Unlimited image upload to their server LFI Exploit which allows you to see file content from their server View all student submission like question answered from final exams which held during 24th Aug - 27th Aug 2020 Introduction After Covid-19 pandemic started, RGPV University announced that for final year students, they are planning to organize an exam which will consist of MCQ questions (total 40 questions) and it will be an open book exam as mentioned here.https://shashanksharma.xyz/posts/smart-india-hackathon-experience-2018/Thu, 15 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000https://shashanksharma.xyz/posts/smart-india-hackathon-experience-2018/Introduction To promote the Digital India movement, our Hon’ble Prime Minister, Shri Narendra Modi, took a significant step and introduced SIH 2018 so that young people could participate and help solve major issues in India using their technical abilities. We didn’t know anything about SIH, but we learned about it on the MyGov website, where they mentioned that we could participate in the hackathon and contribute by solving problems. We were really excited, and after forming our team, we submitted our idea proposal on their website, as it was mandatory for selection.https://shashanksharma.xyz/posts/india-mp-transportation-analysis/Sun, 16 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000https://shashanksharma.xyz/posts/india-mp-transportation-analysis/Introduction Python is really a powerful language and with proper use of it anyone can make beautiful things. After studying Python I was really impressed by its power and to be more specific I really love how we can scrape any website easily with the help of python. Scraping is a process of extracting data from website by their html data. So I learned its basic and started scraping many website. Recently I thought of creating something big through scraping but I was having no idea what to do.