On Camus' "The Stranger"

This blog post tells my reflections on reading Camus’ novel The Stranger. I reference the content of the novel and it is unlikely to make sense to you if haven’t read the novel yourself. For a tl;dr of the novel, I would recommend reading the Wikipedia entry. I’ve never read a novel like this before. There is only a series of events, narrated with a hint of indifference. The murder of a man, Mersault’s separation from his fiance, his death sentence, and of course the death of his mother. None of these incidents were profound enough to throw the man into some odd kind of reflections on his life. He never regretted any of his actions, and as he proved to the chaplain towards the end, he didn’t change his religious beliefs despite much attempt. ...

October 6, 2022

Dead simple SMTP server for development and testing

Local development setup When we have some code that sends emails, we probably also want a stub that we can use locally – which won’t send actual emails, let us inspect the content of each outgoing mail, and let us conduct tests. I needed something like this when we were building the skeleton of a guided project for a training [1]. One of the tasks was for the students to send an email notification upon some action. ...

September 21, 2022

Writing an SMTP Server from Scratch (WIP)

A few months ago, I wrote an SMTP server from scratch to learn about the protocol. It soon came to me that the knowledge of SMTP internals is not as common as it should be. Upon not finding a satisfactory blog on the topic, I read through the RFCs and tried to create my own server. I am writing this blog as a relatively concise summary of that. Before we go on to writing our server, I want to give some context that should be treated as a prerequisite. ...

February 14, 2022

<!DOCTYPE html> objects-and-types-2 Objects and Types in Python¶Blog post: https://kaustubh.page/posts/objects-and-types-in-python/ ...