$cur_year = date("Y"); // PHP. This returns the current year.
$age = $cur_year - 2000; // Forget the month and the date
Hi ! I’m Subin
Hi all,
I am Subin Siby, a self-taught programmer who loves to make & tinker with things. I was born in the year 2000 (And that’s how I got the username). I am currently $age years old and lives in Kerala, India. Malayalam (മലയാളം) is my native language. I learnt English from school and by watching a LOT of tv shows and movies.
I started programming in 2011 when I was 11 years old. I love FOSS because of the collaborative nature and the freedom to hack the software to our needs. I support Free Software, Open Knowledge & Sharing.
I’m a very curious person. I try to learn new things and love doing interesting stuff, like the one time (2018) where I tracked rainfall for a week and made a chart with ChartJS.
I love reading history, going through many Wikipedia pages, reddit and all things internet :D
Profiles
You can find me on sites with the username subins2000 or SubinSiby.
- GitHub
Has most of my FOSS projects. Plus contributions - GitLab
Has my relatively new FOSS projects. Plus contributions - Wikipedia
I contribute to Wikipedia and its sister-projects - OpenStreetMap
I sometimes map, upload traces to OSM - Telegram
I share interesting things I find on the web & sometimes my original content in this Telegram channel - Mastodon : @[email protected]
Toots in മലയാളം or English or both :P - Twitter
My Mastodon & Twitter is bridged. - LinkedIn
I don’t use it much - Instagram
Is a reminder of the places I’ve travelled. I post interesting stuff as stories too.
If you’re a curious person like me, you’ll like my stories on Instagram, my toots and things in my Telegram channel.
Contact
See /contact.
Projects
I’ve made a lot of free & open source software which you can find in this blog and in my GitHub and GitLab profiles.
See /projects.
Legacy
I’ve made more projects that I don’t maintain anymore. You can find them on my GitHub or GitLab.
- Lobby : A framework/platform for running web apps in localhost
- Open : An Open Source social network in PHP
About this blog
- When I encounter a problem during programming or while making something and find a solution, I post it in this blog.
- When I participate in tech events, I share about the experience here
- When I feel like writing something, I share it here
- Some stories like this one
I started this blog when I was 11 years old. This blog shows how I’ve grown as a person. I cringe myself seeing my old blog posts 😬, but I don’t delete em. It’s history and nostalgic 😁🌟.
A lot of people were kind enough to donate money to support my projects. You see, as a middle class kid growing up in a rural part of India, these donations, feedback and appreciation were a huge boost for me growing up. Besides, seeing the donations, my parents were quite surprised and that helped in their support towards me.
Subscribe
There used to be email subscriptions before. But it’s too hard to manage. Instead better follow my Telegram channel or Mastodon or Twitter.
Stats
Google Analytics was used at first for pageviews count. Then, StatCounter was used. Then again, it was switched back to GA.
Since 2019 July, I’ve been using a custom hit counter. The pageviews from this is shown in the header of posts. The count was reset to zero at the beginning of 2020, so that a better analysis is obtained. This custom hit counter doesn’t track users.
Since the stats measurement tool was changed between years, it was hard to make an overall total. But I did it with some effort.
Stats till 2020-01-01 :
- Users:
2,400,000+ - Pageviews:
4,266,068+
I wonder how many people around the world I’ve made an influence on, even in a small way. Feels good :)
I encourage everyone to start a blog, write stuff. When you face a problem, fixes it, and there’s no docs on it anywhere, blog about it. It might help someone else, maybe even after 10, 20 years :)
Your writings may influence others, perhaps someone who came across your blog while wandering through the internet. Hey, I still remember some things I read in random blogs I came across when roaming around the world wide web and that have influenced me, yes ;)
Blog’s History
2011 - 2013
This blog was first created as “Science And Games” (SAG) in Blogger.com. My neighbour and good friend Simrajettan (Simraj KS) introduced me to blogging. He was a physics school teacher at the time. He has a blog named “scintillla” from which I drew inspiration.
Someone had already took sag.blogspot.com, so I registered with sag-3.blogspot.com. I took the number 3 because it was me, my brother Simrin Siby and Simraj KS who were at the time I thought would contribute to the blog.
The initial posts were about some tutorials, Wikipedia copy-paste articles and stuff. Some of these posts were deleted later. You can see the entire post list here.
Archive.org snapshots of the site sag-3.blogspot.in
2013
In September 2013, after constant begging to my parents, appa (dad) finally gave me his debit card to buy a domain. Online transactions weren’t common at the time and appa was suspicious of me using it. Thanks to GoDaddy’s $0.99 domain offer, it was cheap to buy it.
$0.99 != 70 Indian Rupees
I chose subinsb.com. It stands as an abbreviation of SUBIN'S Blog. It can also stand for SUBIN SiBy :P
I mapped my blogspot domain to the new one and old post links were all automatically redirected. The blog used www.subinsb.com.
Archive.org snapshots of the site subinsb.com
2013 - 2017
In November of 2013, the blog was moved from Blogger to WordPress. The hosting was provided for free by RedHat’s OpenShift platform which had a special free tier.
The redirection of old links of Blogger to WordPress was done possible with a small WordPress plugin I made.
I made a custom theme called Brenton for the blog.
Meanwhile, the site demos.subinsb.com was started to showcase examples of tutorials in the blog. The entire transition process is also mentioned there.
One huge influence of my blog and work were Srinivas Tamada’s 9lessons.info.
Archive.org snapshots of the site demos.subinsb.com
2017 - now
RedHat discontinued OpenShift platform in favor of OpenShift 3 which had no free tier plans. So now I was troubled with another “movement”.
Looking for a free alternative and low maintenance, I found Hugo. I made a custom theme called Brenton which was a near reimplemtation of the old WordPress theme.
The blog is hosted for free thanks to GitLab ❤️.
Stories
These stories will be completed later
The Internet
Appa (dad) was the one who introduced me to internet. It was in the year 2008 on a GPRS enabled phone. The goal was to download games. How expensive internet and small games were back then !
The Samsung flip-phone we had supported Java games. To download new ones, there’s a store called GameJAR or something. GPRS internet was billed on bandwidth usage from prepaid balance (100KB was 1Rs IIRC). When me & my brother get bored of games, we would reluctantly ask Appa to get us new ones ☺️. Since the whole procedure was expensive, we only get to do it once or twice an year. We had to patiently wait for Appa to do it for us. Ahh, the power he had over us then 😂
We bought a computer in 2010. In 2011, we got a 156Kbps Tata Docomo mobile internet connection (USB). I used this internet till 2016. It was using this poor connection that I learnt programming,
How I chose the username subins2000
How I started programming
Linux
The first GNU/Linux distro I got to interact with was Fedora around 2007/2008-ish. It was my uncle’s computer and when we visit during vacation time, we’d play games on it. Fedora was the way how our uncle prevented us from using the Windows OS in it, so that we don’t mess things up. I remember playing Nibbles very often.
I got seriously introduced to GNU/Linux from school where the Information Technology textbooks were all in GNU/Linux software. Kerala schools have a custom Ubuntu based distro, called IT@School Linux. The shift from Windows XP to Ubuntu happened in textbooks when I entered 5th grade (2009).
When we were able to buy a computer (2010), we made sure that the IT@School distro came with the computer. I explored Ubuntu further, because I liked tinkering with it, the terminal, installation, software and all. At one point, I formatted the entire system which my dad absolutely didn’t like :P
I still have that IT@School Ubuntu 10.04 CD with me. Should frame it and put up on the wall someday !
Kerala, that has a population of 30 million still continues to use & promote FOSS in school. I often see kids making cool stuff with tools they get. Kids in school these days get to play with Raspberyy Pi & Arduino, wish I was in school now !
Copyright Notice
All content of this site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.