Top all-time · #1162
Blogs on Zerodha Tech Blog
Company blog · zerodha.tech/blogprogrammingbusiness
Blogs on Zerodha Tech Blog is the company blog at zerodha.tech, writing about programming and business. Since 2020, 60 different Hacker News readers have linked it 79 times, most often “Hello, World – Zerodha, India's largest stock broker”. The last post was in 2024, but the archive is still widely read.
Too few sampled comments (20) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
Linked as a tech-team write-up: the hello-world post on how a 30-person team built India's largest stock broker, plus posts on Typst PDF generation, Postgres, Prometheus monitoring and Flutter.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 20 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Technology blog of India's largest stock broker
Most-linked posts?
- Hello, World – Zerodha, India's largest stock broker14 people · 15 mentions · first linked 2020-04-07
- Scaling with Common Sense10 people · 12 mentions · first linked 2020-06-14
- The Remoteness of Remote Work6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2024-04-01
- Working with PostgreSQL6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2021-04-22
- From Native to React Native to Flutter6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2022-01-17
- 1.5M PDFs in 25 Minutes5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2024-02-14
- Logging at Zerodha4 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2023-03-24
- User Disengagement4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2022-05-06
- Scaling with common sense #2: Being future ready4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2021-07-28
- Alar: The making of an open-source dictionary4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2020-09-27
What Hacker News says?
It's great to see Typst getting more visibility. We migrated a real-world workload to it a couple of years back: generating and e-mailing 1.5M+ PDFs daily at my org, Zerodha. Our previous pipeline was LaTeX-based (first pdflatex, then lualatex), but we were constantly fighting cryptic memory errors on large documents and huge Docker image sizes that slowed down boot times of our ephemeral workers. Switching to Typst…
Comment linking /blog/1-5-million-pdfs-in-25-minutes
on “Typst: A Possible LaTeX Replacement”Submitted Hello, World – Zerodha, India's largest stock broker as a story · 244 points
HN discussionTypst has been pretty amazing, and at my organization, we’re very happy with it. We needed to generate over 1.5 million PDFs every night and experimented with various solutions—from Puppeteer for HTML to PDF conversions, to pdflatex and lualatex. Typst has been several orders of magnitude faster and has a lighter resource footprint. Also, templating the PDFs in LaTeX wasn’t a pleasant developer experience, but with…
Comment linking /blog/1-5-million-pdfs-in-25-minutes
on “Typst: An easy to learn alternative for LaTex”Submitted India's largest stock broker has 30 devs (2020) as a story · 183 points
HN discussionIf you should decide to go inhouse, I can warmly recommend checking the *frappe framework*, with which the open-source ERPNext was built. Compared to other such things this is truly open source (not like odoo and others, which really try to catch you in with being "open-source" and then let you pay up for the features you really need). It is very powerful and comes with so many batteries included and is actually qui…
Comment linking /blog/being-future-ready-with-common-sense/
on “Ask HN: Should we bring software dev in-house?”Submitted User Disengagement as a story · 172 points
HN discussionHere's another - https://zerodha.tech/blog/working-with-postgresql/
Comment linking /blog/working-with-postgresql/
on “My notes on Gitlab's Postgres schema design (2022)”Submitted Alar: The making of an open-source dictionary as a story · 126 points
HN discussionAn amazing blog in this context written by the Zerodha (a stockbroker in India) tech team: https://zerodha.tech/blog/from-native-to-react-native-to-flu...
Comment linking /blog/from-native-to-react-native-to-flutter/
on “Flutter is the most popular cross-platform mobile SDK”Submitted Infrastructure Monitoring with Prometheus at Zerodha as a story · 124 points
HN discussionFolks looking for a solution to storing Prometheus metrics from multiple places, definitely consider exploring Victoriametrics. I'm running a single Victoriametrics instance which has 230bn metrics, consuming ~4GB of memory and barely 200m of CPU utilization (only spikes to ~1.5cores when it flushes these datapoints from RAM to disk). I've previously[1] shared my experience of setting up Victoriametrics for long ter…
Comment linking /blog/infra-monitoring-at-zerodha/
on “Grafana Mimir – Horizontally scalable long-term storage for Prometheus”Submitted Zerodha Tech – Hello, World as a story · 118 points
HN discussionHere's story for you A team of 30 works at zerodha for serving 6.2 million users. They are largest trading broker in India. There story is worth a read https://zerodha.tech/blog/hello-world/ Edit: Apparently they have 1200 employees for operations and everything else. Thanks to child comment for pointing that out.
Comment linking /blog/hello-world/
on “Twitter to start layoffs -internal email”Submitted 1.5M PDFs in 25 Minutes as a story · 63 points
HN discussionAt work we recently switched from Wkhtmltopdf to Typst, which is a breath of fresh air. It is very fast and generates PDFs from scratch without needing to involve HTML or a browser engine. It is implemented in Rust and distributed as a self-contained binary. This blog post convinced us that the switch was worth it: https://zerodha.tech/blog/1-5-million-pdfs-in-25-minutes/
Comment linking /blog/1-5-million-pdfs-in-25-minutes/
on “Show HN: Vaev – A browser engine built from scratch (It renders google.com)”Submitted Scaling with common sense #2: Being future ready as a story · 38 points
HN discussion* ~1200 staff, ~10 years * tech team is 30 members (two mobile developers, two designers, two frontend developers, one test engineer, one devops engineer, and one department liaison, the rest fullstack developers). Nobody had any background in finance, and most had no prior work experience either. Everyone has been a hacker or a hobbyist straight out of college. * became the largest stock broker in India in January…
Comment linking /blog/
on “India's largest stock broker has 30 devs (2020)”Submitted Scaling with Common Sense as a story · 15 points
HN discussion1. I think AGPL is a good license for web apps that can also dissuade Elastic/Mongo-like fiascos. Mastodon, Metabase, Grafana, Minio etc. are AGPL and are widely used. 2. We see ourselves as a group of hackers and not really as a corporate entity. Many projects that come out of our team are largely individual efforts. For instance, I have spend considerable personal time working on listmonk over the last couple of y…
Comment linking /projects
on “ListMonk – High performance, self-hosted newsletter and mailing list manager”Submitted Hello, World – Zerodha, India's largest stock broker as a story · 12 points
HN discussionThis was a really good post. Their first blogpost is also amazing; https://zerodha.tech/blog/hello-world/ They have basically self hosted almost everything with a team of 30
Comment linking /blog/hello-world/
on “Infrastructure Monitoring with Prometheus at Zerodha”Submitted Working with PostgreSQL as a story · 11 points
HN discussionmore than the details on the blog, love their FOSS https://zerodha.tech/projects/
Comment linking /projects/
on “Infrastructure Monitoring with Prometheus at Zerodha”Submitted Scaling with Common Sense as a story · 10 points
HN discussionwas reading your first blog post ( https://zerodha.tech/blog/hello-world/ ) and amused that your tech team is only 30.
Comment linking /blog/hello-world/
on “Infrastructure Monitoring with Prometheus at Zerodha”Submitted From Native to React Native to Flutter as a story · 9 points
HN discussionTypst[1] is another tool which implements document generation from the ground up. Zerodha had a great article [2] how they migrated from LaTeX based pdf generation to Typst, which ended up saving time and compute. [1]: https://typst.app/ [2]: https://zerodha.tech/blog/1-5-million-pdfs-in-25-minutes/
Comment linking /blog/1-5-million-pdfs-in-25-minutes/
on “Is there a BNF grammar of the TeX language? (2010)”Submitted From Native to React Native to Flutter as a story · 9 points
HN discussionJust want to say thanks for creating Vector. We use it heavily at Zerodha and wrote about our setup here: https://zerodha.tech/blog/logging-at-zerodha/ It replaced both Filebeat and Logstash for us with a single binary that actually has sane resource usage (no more JVM nightmares). VRL turned out to be way more powerful than we could imagine - we do all our log parsing, metadata enrichment, and routing to different…
Comment linking /blog/logging-at-zerodha/
on “I built Vector. Now I'm answering the question your observability vendor won't”Submitted 1.5M PDFs in 25 Minutes as a story · 6 points
HN discussion
