Tanvi Bhakta

[Blog] Liquid Food Log

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

I had the two wisdom teeth on my right side taken out on Tuesday. There was a lot of unexpected suffering post-facto, which I’m attempting to document here to save someone else from this poor misery (or myself when I get the left side removed).

The food

Day 0 - ie surgery day

Immediately after the removal I went and got ice cream. This was a problem because

I don’t consume dairy.
I hate ice cream But I went to Lick and had their mango sorbet and found immense relief. I also ordered two boxes of Noto dairy free ice cream (French vanilla, and double chocolate) for home.

Meal 1: Tomato Gazpacho. I owe it entirely to Ankur, who, despite knowing each other for seven years and being best friends for three, cooked for me for the first time ever in the making of this.

Meal 2: milkshake - sweet melons, chikoos, oatmilk.

Day 2

Meal 1: Ragi ganji. (this recipe is a little complex, but for my version you just dissolve the ragi flour in a small amount of water and heat it in a large amount of water to create a slurry. Can be flavoured any way you like, similar to an oatmeal).

Meal 2: Ragi ganji + bottle guard juice

Meal 3: Cold miso soup

200ml water
two eggs (slurry)
1 tsp horse gram paste
half tsp white miso (after adding ice)

Meal 4: A strawberry/banana/oat flour smoothie that Devanjal brought me.

Meal 5: The last bits of ragi ganji.

Day 3

I woke up in so much pain and needed to eat something immediately so I could take my meds.

Meal 1: protein powder + water + ice

Meal 2: banana + strawberry + oatmilk smoothie I made for myself inspired by my friend yesterday.

Meal 3: this is where I hit the jackpot. Food is very important to me, and I vary flavours and textures very often in my everyday meals. Not being able to do so has been such a toll... until I made this soup. I’ve been craving khao suey, so I made a broth flavoured like it.

1tbsp mustard oil, heated
1tsp home ground ginger paste I had in the freezer
1 tsp fuckin onion flakes in had in the fridge
100ml water
several drops of Vietnamese fish oil
1tbsp thai pork stock powder
1 tsp haldi
1/2 tsp pepper
three shakes of Singapore-chinese mushroom stock powder
frickin pav bhaji masala from Zoff (the secret ingredient!)
a slurry of 2 eggs
100ml of coconut milk

It look longer to write out the ingredients list than to make this meal! And it satisfied me so completely. I am so proud of this for myself - that when I have a craving I am able to make it happen for me. Past Tanvi did a good job - learning about flavour profiles, stocking pantry, learning to prioritise her feelings. Making this dish, to me, was a radical act of self-care.

So of course I told three friends about it and invited them over for dinner and made real khao suey for them. Substitutions because vegetarian:

vegetable stock powder instead of pork stock
a little more mustard oil because no sub for the fish oil
added frozen veggies
rice noodles (I don’t stock wheat noodles any more)
and I made toppings, frying onions and scallions

While they ate this dinner, I had Meal 4: Half a banana smoothie that Devanjal got me as thanks for dinner

After this meal and this group hang, I had a second wind - so I ended up working from 11pm to 4am, so I needed another snack (and another painkiller) at 1am.

Meal 5: protein shake

Day 4

Also woke up in lots of pain. No new things today - repeats of ragi ganji, banana smoothie, etc. But there were other highlights.

I ate a semi-smushed food! I ate some plain cold oatmeal with (you guessed it) oatmilk. I ate about 1/4th of a cup and mostly smushed it against my palate instead of chewing, but it provided a very necessary boost to my confidence.

Day 5 (the day I published this)

I visited the dentist again today and was encouraged gently to start introducing semi-solid foodsback into my diet. So I'm thinking of doing this via idly dip, overcooked noodles, and more oatmeal. I think I'm still going to avoid anything with hard bits or crunchy small pieces for another week or so. I drank my ragi ganji at room temp and not ice cold today. Baby steps.

The recovery

I was told I could start eating warm and semi-solid food post 24h after the procedure, but I was in too much pain and discomfort to be able to trust that. I’m glad I took it slow. I also iced the side of my face for about 36 hours post procedure, but I don’t know how much good it did me.

Because I was entirely on liquid food, it was much easier to take care of my mouth and the sutures. I didn’t actually brush for the first three days - I could barely open my jaw enough - but I did use a medicated mouth wash on days one, three, and four which helped with making me feel better about infection possibility.

Other things:

I made sure to add huge blocks of ice to every drink.
Nothing I ate had any kind of chilli/hot spice in them.
Because I was eating such light food, I didn’t need the Pan D even though I was on very strong antibiotics.

Shout out once again to Past Tanvi who indulged in a then-partner’s desire to drink lots of ice water and bought this set of silicone trays for large ice cubes. I probably went through 36-40 cubes over the course of those four days. I also have never drank this much ice water in my life (I don’t like the cold! I carry a flask around everywhere! I have a sensitive throat.)

Before the procedure, I didn’t realise how much pain I would be in and therefore completely failed to plan for most of it. Luckily, Ankur and Calra really came through on Day 0 and work was flexible enough to allow for wfh and strange sleep schedules (one of the pain meds made me really drowsy). But this whole experience really made me realise how self-reliant I can be, and how good the systems I've built for my life are. I've always been fairly independent but I've really craved nurturing and care when I'm sick (like most people) - maybe next time I will feel better about taking care of myself. It's also worth thinking about which of these systems are a function of living at home and which of these I can replicate when I'm travelling - for when I spend more time on the road and invariably catch a fever or two.

I do have to get the left side set of teeth removed but I think it’s going to be a while before I schedule it...

[Blog] Your Mac apps have SQLite databases you can just query

Mon, 16 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

I had an unsaved file in Zed - just a scratch buffer with some notes from a meeting. The tab title said "Mon, 9th Feb 2026" but I'd never saved it to disk. I needed that content somewhere else.

Turns out, getting it back was a five-minute SQLite exercise.

What I did

Mac applications store their local state in ~/Library/Application Support/<AppName>/. For Zed, that's:

~/Library/Application Support/Zed/

Inside, there's a db/ folder with SQLite databases:

db/0-stable/db.sqlite
db/0-global/db.sqlite

I opened the stable one and listed the tables:

sqlite3 ~/Library/Application\ Support/Zed/db/0-stable/db.sqlite ".tables"

breakpoints             keybinding_editors      toolchains
center_panes            kv_store                trusted_worktrees
command_invocations     migrations              vim_global_marks_paths
editor_folds            pane_groups             vim_marks
editor_selections       panes                   workspaces
editors                 project_diffs
items                   remote_connections
items                   terminals

The editors table had what I needed. Looking at its schema:

sqlite3 ... "PRAGMA table_info(editors);"

item_id         INTEGER
workspace_id    INTEGER
path            BLOB
scroll_top_row  INTEGER
...
contents        TEXT
language        TEXT
buffer_path     TEXT

There it is - a contents column. Unsaved buffers get persisted here so Zed can restore them after a crash or restart. I filtered for rows where contents was non-empty:

sqlite3 ... "SELECT item_id, language, length(contents) FROM editors
              WHERE contents IS NOT NULL AND length(contents) > 0;"

One result. 3,378 characters of Plain Text. I dumped it out and there were my notes.

What's interesting about this

Most native Mac apps (and Electron apps, and really any desktop app that needs to persist state) use SQLite internally. It's everywhere:

Zed stores editor state, unsaved buffers, vim marks, workspace layout
Safari stores history, bookmarks, and more in SQLite
Messages stores your entire chat history in ~/Library/Messages/chat.db
Photos keeps its library metadata in SQLite
Chrome stores history, cookies, autofill data in SQLite files in ~/Library/Application Support/Google/Chrome/Default/

This isn't a secret or a hack. SQLite is genuinely the most deployed database engine in the world - it ships on every phone, every browser, every Mac. Apps use it because it's a single file, needs no server process, handles concurrent reads well, and is rock solid. Apple even recommends it via Core Data (which uses SQLite as its default backing store).

How to explore any app's local database

Find the app's data directory:
```
ls ~/Library/Application\ Support/
```

Look for .sqlite, .db, or .sqlite3 files:

find ~/Library/Application\ Support/<AppName> -name "*.sqlite" -o -name "*.db"

List the tables:
```
sqlite3 <path-to-db> ".tables"
```

Check a table's schema:

sqlite3 <path-to-db> "PRAGMA table_info(<table_name>);"

Query away:

sqlite3 <path-to-db> "SELECT * FROM <table> LIMIT 5;"

sqlite3 comes pre-installed on every Mac. No setup needed.

The takeaway

Your apps aren't black boxes. Their local state is sitting right there in ~/Library/Application Support/, often in a format you can read with a tool that's already on your machine. Next time you need to recover something, debug an app's behaviour, or just satisfy your curiosity about how an app works internally - crack open the SQLite database and have a look around.

[Weeknotes] Week of Feb 14th, 2026

Sat, 14 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Health

My voice felt better, but my body was clearly still fighting something off. I felt lethargic and annoyed. I spent three separate days rotting, which is a lot, and goes way beyond my once-a-month quota. Something wasn’t right in my brain, but I’ve since figured it out and am taking care of it.

I did start being more physically active.

1.5km run on Wednesday
Twenty minutes of stretching on Thursday
1hour of football on Friday evening

Life

Saturday was Valentine’s day, which I spent by having an extremely mediocre breakfast at Backer&Charlie, working with some friends in the afternoon, watching Wuthering Heights in the evening, and making/having dinner with more friends at night.

I was unexpectedly sad for most of the day. Historically I haven’t cared about the day too much but my last primary partner cared a lot, and it felt so strange not letting myself get caught up in the capitalist frenzy that this “holiday” becomes. There is something to be said about the comfort and ease of following a LifeScript as a stand-in for romance. But this year, instead of spending the day with a primary partner, I met six - SIX! - different friends and had such a good time. Not a party, but six different people who embody some version of home is a good day.

Media Diet

Reading

I was going to read WhatMurdah’s Bloody, Slutty and Pathetic for the THIRD time before I decided it was enough, and asked on groups for similar fic that has excellent character development and political manoeuvring. I was given a few but none seemed appealing until Sahiti proposed a fix trade - they would read BSP if I read a fic of their choosing. Since I mostly wanted to spread the good gospel and to squeal about the fic myself, I agreed. Now I am reading a rewrite of the series and am wondering what I have gotten myself into.

Watching

Wuthering Heights

It is a very 2026 movie
Was it a bad movie? Yes. Did I enjoy myself? Yes.
If you’ve read the book, you should simply forget that you’ve read the book and watch the movie. They closely follow similar plot points... but this could also be a movie adaptation of the princess bride.
This movie is high production value bad Dramione fan fiction.
This is exactly the kind of movie I expect people to make in 2026. This is the kind of movie people are going to take screengrabs of with captions on and tag themselves. This is the kind of movie that people are going to shorten into 180seconds to monetise their shitty YouTube shorts driven channels. This is the kind of movie that exists for people to write about, not for the art of it at all. This is fine.
Give the person in charge of visuals a raise. Starting from the typeface (which is why I went to watch the movie in the first place), all the colors were so saturated. Rich. Evocative.
Give the post-production person a paycut please. I don’t actually know if AI was used it to finishing of this movie, but it felt like it. Some backgrounds were too smooth, others didn’t make visual sense.
It feels like Jacob Elordi has been typecast into playing only Nate-like roles. I’m not complaining, I think.
I don’t get some of the plot. I don’t get it. Why do we start by showing the public hanging? Why do we focus on the dead man’s stiffy? Why is a lady shaking her bosom at him? Why do we never revisit any of this again? Why does the Isabella allow herself to participate in the sexual depravity that Heathcliff puts her through (especially for the times)?
The violence feels gratuitous and uncouth. It’s just plain uncomfortable. The scene with the slaughter of the dead pig, all the jellied things.
The costumes are gorgeous. The set design is breath-taking. The moors are so lovely.
Charlie did a decent job with the soundtrack, but she could have put the effort in to a different album-long music video and it would have been less forgettable. This is classic Charlie. Every time she flips, she immediately has to flop.
At 150ish minutes of runtime, this is not something I will watch again. I don’t even expect to think about this movie again. But I suspect the visuals will come back to me when I least expect it.
I gave up 20% of the way through reading this book when I was very young. It felt too tedious. Now I’m going to have to pick it up again, even if the book has nothing to do with the movie, just because of the visuals it has left me with.
I can’t wait to read some obscure piece of literature 15 years from now that is going to reference wallpaper containing a birthmark from the left cheek.

Listening

Mad at everyone that a random running music playlist creator has given me more rock made by women than any person or algorithm has in the last 5 years. Listened to and really enjoyed

We are the Fallen
Sharon van Etten
Epica

[Blog] Lollapalooza 2026

Sun, 08 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

This is the 4th edition of Lollapalooza India, and the 4th time I’m attending it.

Things that will stay the same (aka festival advice from me who has attended ~7 music festivals now):

Never take the metro. And DEFINITELY never take a cab/car. The local trains are brilliant, and you should take it (first class is your friend, as is going early when the crowds are less).
If you’re doing the festival right, you will end up walking at least 20k steps. So it’s okay to walk from the local to the station, budget in two kilometres a piece for the entrance and the exit. Most people walking with you will also be going to the festival, so you will have fun!
Stay hydrated. Take a clear bottle inside, or buy one for Rs. 100/- as a momento of the festival.
The alcohol is NOT worth it. The long lines, it is dehydrating, and costs 1k for a decent cocktail? No thanks.
Skipping the drinks also means you spend little to no time in the lines to the loo.
Festivals, to me, are a place of music discovery. So I will always go at 2pm and I will always attend as many artists as possible. Open your mind, and you might be surprised.

This edition was surprisingly rock/metal heavy - generally Lollapalooza tries to be a little more genre-inclusive. This edition also hit my personal preference of having acts that are fronted by women, so I had a particularly good time in terms of music discovery.

Day 1

Zoya

BRILLIANT indie alt pop vibes. Indian girls can make pop music!!!! The performance was a vibe and a half. Reminiscent of Kayan from a few years ago. Def listening to the new album.

Hot milk

Very rock metal, we only heard the last ten minutes. Fronted by a woman, so they’re going on my playlist.

Mother mother

Alt/rock/folk, TWO front women (and a frontman). We stayed for the first thirty minutes of their set, which included a song that started with the lyrics

I wear women's underwear
And then I go to strike a pose in my full-length mirror
I cross my legs just like a queer
But my libido is strong when a lady is near, yeah
What defines a straight man's straight?
Is it the boxer in the brief or a twelve-ounce steak? Nah
I'll tell you what a woman loves most
It's a man you can slap but can also stroke

Um, HELL yes. They’ve been around for twenty years (!) but seem to be especially popular gen-z music (whatever that means). They’re a little too folksy to be on my regular rotation but I can see that I’m going to have to pick out a few pieces to go in there. Their energy on stage was chill and fun, perfect for the 4pm slot, getting us ready for the rest of the festival.

Fujii Kaze

From the homework I’d done for the festival, I was looking forward to his performance. His album felt like pop from the mid 2015s, which is not far enough away from us that we’re nostalgic for it (yet). He is a very good looking man, but his movements felt like he was still learning them, like they didn't come naturally. I was expecting him to come with backup dancers like Eric Nam from Lolla India 2024 - it definitely felt like the performance was choreographed that way. Nonetheless, he put on such a show! The crowd contained a large number of people from the Japanese diaspora living in India, which was really nice to see. It looked like they had mostly come to see him!

Men from SEA are often mocked (especially in India and other locales with a prominent chauvinistic masculinity) for being effeminate. Fujii took that one step further - the man is NOT afraid of his hip gyrations. This was not appreciated by the set of young 20somethings next to me - they said some pretty homophobic stuff and walked away. I’m glad they told on themselves - more space for me! This didn’t seem matter to the crowd at large, they were charmed and here to enjoy themselves. The crowd for Fujii Kaze was already pretty strong - maybe 30k? I was suprised by how much of the crowd sang along with every word of his set!

Ken Carson, Destroy Lonely, Homixide Gang

They were opening for Playboi Carti on the main stage because they're his labelmates. We didn’t listen to them, because a friend and I had decided to stay on to try and get to the front for the next act, but in the silence between sets we heard some incredible energy and the kind of hip hop I would have enjoyed live. I probably won’t listen to them again but I would like to catch them live.

Yungblud

I decided to prioritise his set purely on the basis of watching his grammy nominated performance of Changes where he played with Nuno Bettencourt of Extreme fame.

Extreme headlined for Bandland in Nov 2024, and is quite possibly the best live performance I have ever seen. They are a very classic rock band. I spent ages 15 to 19 listening to classic rock (I was in my pick-me era). I have since learnt about my own tastes, and don’t waste my time listening to rock, but I do catch it live where I can. There is something about the magical combination of electric guitar, bass guitar, and a classic drum kit that can just take over my body and let me forget myself. Extreme is not the classic rock that the boys I hoped would pick me embodied - they’re the kind of classic rock that pushed the boundaries of genre. They grew long hair, wore make up and sequins. They danced about on stage. They were earnest about the music they wrote and created. They were (I am told) the antidote to the rigid masculinity I’ve grown up with and associated with rock. Also, they’re hot, and they know it. The way rockstars play with their audience is a sight to behold. There is a banter in it that I can’t help but me charmed by, even as I know what is happening.

Yungblud is such a rockstar, except he’s from MY generation. For two straight hours, the man’s energy propelled what grew to be 70,000 people (!!) to sing, scream, and sway with him. One man’s energy pushed us to forget everything except the body we inhabited, the people around us, and the music. Did Yungblud get his start as a cover artist? I’m not familiar as to how he can perform songs that don’t belong to him (what his belonging in music, really?) but his traditional setlist seems to contain a bunch of classic rock songs (fleabag, changes, I was made for loving you) that is designed to endear him to any crowd and showcase his chops as a pure performer. On social media, Yungblud feels authentic, charming, hard working, and embodies a lot of the values rockstars should[1].

I knew from Olivia Rodrigo and Aly & Aj that I could enjoy rock on its own merits. I know from Yungblud that there’s some ways to go before I will let rock die.

Day 2

Honestly Day 2 was fine. Yes I had fun, but after the high (and tiredness) of yungblud I think I just made it through the day and enjoyed myself nominally. I'll fill up this section if I ever feel the need to revisit this day.

Zokova
Callum Scott
The burgers at that stall
Bloodywood
Kehlani
Linkin Park

Outside lollapalooza

Haleem and chai at Good Luck Cafe
Breakfast at the versova place
Breakfast at Bombay Journal
Dinner at Eddy’s Breakfast at Cafe Irani Chai

Bombay through the ages

The very first time I came to Bombay in any meaningful way was also for the very first Lollapalooza. Since then, I’ve been here in Bombay seven or eight times, all with Anu. It was very hard doing this festival, and this city, without the person whose context I know it most in. I didn’t stay in Bandra this time (and I regretted it) - but in some ways, I was glad to be staying elsewhere because I wasn’t confronted with the memories that every single sidewalk held for me. I did finish the festival and enjoyed myself, and now I can go back to Bandra. Shout out to Shruti, the OG Bambai girlie whom I called at least forty times over the course of those four days, who made sure I didn’t have to think one whit about meals and transportation, and reminded me that Bombay doesn’t stay in the past. I grow and the city has space for me and all the rest of the life I have to live.

[^1]: What those values are is a discussion for another time.

[Weeknotes] Week of Feb 1st, 2026

Sun, 08 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Life

I spent last weekend at Lollapalooza, and I wrote about the experience.

I spent Monday in Bombay doing some much needed shopping, and then took the train overnight to Goa, where I’ve spent the last few days imposing on Deepti’s lovely home and hospitality, and overcoming my fear of dogs via proximity to Ira, the ~puppy Dee has just adopted~ smartest bestest puppy in the world!

Goa has changed so much. Most shocking to me has been the outsider sentiment. As early as 5 years ago, when I lived here, I was unable to speak Konkani to anyone because I speak only one of the eight possible Konkanis - and the one I speak is wrong for the region. This time, people were so glad to hear some konkani - any konkani! - that they actively engaged with me, responded with a smile, and made an effort to understand me. Many words have been written about who is allowed to call themselves Goan. I don’t call myself Goan because I’m not, but I am coastal. I so rarely get to speak my language, so I will take the crumbs I am offered.

I have changed so much in the years I have been coming to Goa. Here, in the past I have been

A penitent
A run away
A shut in
A party girl
Adopted by community that is not mine
Gay as hell

Today, I am tired. I was tired before Lolla, I have been tired since September, and I knew I would want to go home immediately after. So here I am, home in weather/clothes/eyes/food/loves. Today, I am tired but I am resting. I still spend ten hours a day working, but when I am done the empty trails and chirping birds greet me. I walked a dog and made small talk with the neighbours, and with the strangers at the tiny places I took myself to. I woke up with a headache for two days straight, and then Dee gave me a massage, I did my stretches, I basked in the sun, and I healed.

I ~published~wrote four posts in three days! I am finishing what I started. After work, when I’m tired, I can actually pause and breathe instead of thinking about the next thing I need to do. I miss my friends when I’m eating a thali by myself, but not enough to go back. I can hear myself think after 5 months of just trudging forward. I think I’m going to spend the rest of this month here - accommodation, transportation, and cat care willing.

I have eaten strawberries and dipped myself in clean salt water. I ran into an old friend of an old friend and we were surprisingly vulnerable with each other. I have taken myself out to write these notes, and to work. I am so content.

Health

This week, I had TWO bad headache days. They’ve become regular again :( But when it was happening, Dee was able to suggest helpful things because I told her to open my care page. That page is WIP, but did the job when it was needed!

Media Diet

No media. I’m just doing my crosswords, reading my rss feeds, and old fanfiction.

Work

So much has changed about how I work in the last six months.

I’m a full time employee instead of an independent contractor.
I’m working closely with a team instead of building things by myself.
I’m doing everything engineering instead of building design systems.
I’m exclusively using LLMs to write code instead of writing any by hand myself.

The consequences:

I’m tired.
I’m having so much fun - I’m learning something massively new (to me) every week. I don’t even have the time to write about it all.
I’m growing as an engineer - and not just technically. How I hold and handle context, how I prioritise product, how I work with people has all changed (for the better).
The minutia of work has taken over all my spare thoughts.

The last one is a problem because in a world where the efficiency of my workflow dictates how much work I produce, any changes I make to my processes will give me an outsized return in the work I do in the next week! The bottlenecks of traditional work are ten times more likely to hurt me because I’m ten times more likely to encounter them. But I haven’t had the chance to sit down and evaluate what I need to do at a meta level to improve those processes because I haven’t felt like I have the time. My hope is that I can use this break in Goa to better my internal workflows - for computer and brain both.

With Claude, it’s easy to just build features, but do that enough and the codebase starts feeling like a heap of barnacles all piled on top of each other, with no thought to design. That is okay to get to production, but is a maintenance nightmare. Can Claude help me tease apart everything that’s going on and re-architect this better?

I’m afraid of doing any kind of rewrite or major feature upgrades because I’m not actually confident in the integrity of the codebase. Yes we have e2e tests but are they good? Are they enough? I am afraid of making changes to this codebase. What do I need to feel better about it?

Claude has been great for me because I have realised that I operate with most things tech from a place of fear. Claude helps get over the starting problem, but it also helps me absolve responsibility (to myself) - I didn’t break it, Claude did! But because I know what’s broken, I can now fix it. Working in a codebase with Claude feels like using a large clawstick to understand the codebase. It’s just too far removed to give me any meaningful texture that I can hook my understanding upon. How can I then build in exploration of the codebase as it is into my reflective process?

[Weeknotes] Week of Feb 8th, 2026

Sun, 08 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Work

The three days I did spend this week on work were very interesting, because at some point I gave up on feature/product work and focused on RICEing my setup. This felt good, and like selfcare, and will also compound into efficiency improvements. Primarily, I moved to Ghostty and Zed. I’ve been using Claude to help me set up Ghostty settings (because there doesn’t seem to be a way to discover them outside of the docs?) and it’s been much more satisfying (and faster) than standard RICEing.

I also finally moved beyond the the web app for the prescreen product we built - I looked into Garak, and working with letta memories some more, and post-merge testing.

Life

Aah, the coast. Being away from Bangalore home is excellent when it works, but I haven’t yet figured out my schedules and forcing functions for when it doesn’t work. Ways it doesn’t work:

low excitement about some work thing that means I don’t get it done (as opposed to in Bangalore I would go to a friend’s or something to do it)
no clear routines on sleeping/waking so I spend much longer in the transition period for both But I’m excited about this! It means I rely on myself more.

Goa makes it much easier to exercise. Since it’s hot, it feels better on my joints and I wake up feeling more refreshed. And since there’s always a beach nearby, I can run without causing my knee undue pain.

I took the train to Udupi which picked me up two hours late. Why is even the Rajdhani delayed? I am so mad that this government of the last ten years has somehow managed to make the system worse than it was in 2015 (when I was regularly taking trains).

So Wednesday and Thursday I was in Udupi for a friend’s wedding. I was tired for most of it because I was battling a sore throat, but I still danced, socialised, and even gave a toast to the home my friend had provided for me when I was 17 and desperately in need of one. I discovered that one of her (new) husband’s childhood friends lives 350m from my house (!) so on Friday morning when the sore throat had devolved into full blown laryngitis, we immediately booked flight tickets and flew straight home. I would like to run on Kaup beach and visit the lighthouse another day.

Then I was sick and on voice rest for three days. In 2024 I had acute laryngitis 4 times, and was on voice rest for a cumulative total of 6 weeks. Six weeks without talking! During that time I learnt some ISL, but the person I was living with made no effort to learn it so it was useless (and disheartening). Now I’ve lost most of the signs, but I taught a few to some people, and that was fun.

The weekend ended with a session of IndieWebClub, which was super fun. I felt like almost everyone contributed to the discussion, which is rare.

The last three days I’ve been back in Bangalore I’ve been sick yes but also feeling pretty antisocial. I love my friends and I feel an obligation to them (which is fine) but right now I feel like being selfish. I want to indulge only myself, and the idea of being beholden to anyone or anything else is simply too much.

Big win for the week was that I cut what clothes I want to pack for my travel in half and I actually ended up wearing an even smaller subset of it, so I have more data on packing light (especially if I have access to a washing machine and a warm climate).

Health

I did two runs and a stretch this week! I didn’t track anything about my first run. My second run was 2.2km at a 6.9 pace - I could possibly have gone longer but a rando on the beach challenged me to a sprint at the end and I couldn’t say no! I’ve been putting off figuring out what my ideal bpm is, because I didn’t want to deal with the headache, but at the 6.9 pace which seems natural to me, turns out I’m at a 160bpm which also translates to 160 steps a minute (which means that my stride length is 90cm haha). Experimenting with some rock-heavy playlists, let’s see how that goes now that I’m back in Bangalore.

The Laryngitis was painful. I’ve added a section for it in my care document.

Learning

How can I record/share vocabulary lists? Are they even useful for language learning? I’m guessing no, except as a memory aid for repetition.

Media Diet

Reading

Started The Spear Cuts Through Water. There are two parts of the book and they're both set in a war zone. We live in horrible times and there is strife and injustice everywhere that I work very hard to keep out of my life so I can actually live in it. Reading about it does the opposite, it tugs at my heartstrings too much. For me, reading is for pleasure so I need to be able to stop at any point and not feel a pit in my stomach. Essentially, the book brought up the same feelings I had around The Traitor Baru Cormorant, so I’ve DNFed this one too. That being said, the audiobook version of this is truly excellent.

Also started A Psalm for the Wild-Built. Calm and interesting premise perfect for goa, so when I go back I’ll probably stick to that.

I did restart, and finish Bloody, Slutty, and Pathetic (AO3). Man, I am so done with romances where things are easy, and the MCs get together just because. I want the MCs to fight! I want them to hate each other!! I need to see character growth in fiction to remind myself that it is possible to expect it from real people. A good enemies-to-lovers does that so well. Some choice quotes from the book:

Draco favored Higgs with his smuggest expression. “I’m not the kind of man who feels the need to order his witch around like a house elf,” he drawled. “Tell me, Higgs, is it want of resources or lack of stamina that has you begging off from satisfying your women’s whims? My mother wants me to wear green to her Yule ball, I wear green. My wife wants underprivileged workers to have rights—” He waved his hand dismissively. “I indulge her. It’s no effort for me to do these little things to make her happy.” A derisive chuckle. “After all, I’m merely talking to you.”

The context here is that Draco is continuing to pretend like he has pureblood (ie, bigoted) sympathies so that he can infiltrate (and eventually, betray) their circles; but in the process he checks this one’s misogyny so thoroughly. The charecter equivalent of “why don’t people please their wives? Like it’s hard?”

And another:

He made his selection and kicked his shoes off onto the rug, putting his feet on the coffee table as he sat back. “Malfoy,” she said, “that’s a muggle romance novel.” He looked over at her, an eyebrow raised. “And you think I am sufficiently romantic? I require no further instruction?” Hermione opened and closed her mouth. “Have at it,” she said finally.

I think a big green flag if you’re looking to date is reading romance novels. Just like engineers need to read speculative fiction to hone and develop their imagination, people who plan to love need to read romance literature to understand what it means to grow with another person.

Watching

Staying with Dee and Saket means that we have to watch something together. Alas, high school musical could not happen so we watched two episodes of Derry Girls instead.

I started watching Pose! I’ve watched half the pilot so far, and I really enjoyed it. Maybe this is the show I’ll watch over the course of this year, in ten-minute increments.

Listening

Listening to lots of Lolla favs primarily- yungblud, kehlani, Linkin park.

[Blog] Update on my llm usage patterns (Jan 2026)

Sat, 31 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Since my last update, I’ve gone all-in on git worktrees.

I typically have between 2 to 4 tabs running, one for each worktree. Each tab will have between two to four “sections” running - one plain terminal for commands (I really dislike using the ! thing in Claude because I can't seem to view the complete output), one with Claude for the primary issue of this worktree, perhaps one secondary Claude thing going with me trying to understand how some part of the codebase is implemented or doing a different exploration path of the solution myself. On the base worktree (which mostly points to main) I'll sometimes have a fourth pane doing some larger exploration/some update to the dev experience/some update to the ci etc, but the moment it becomes a change I want to keep an issue gets created and I branch + worktree.

I also have a few instances of Webstorm open, one for each worktree. This (paid) plugin to add worktree switching support has been invaluable, but given how llms forefront worktree-based workflows I think this feature should go Webstorm’s base offering soon. I use the IDE to review changesets, make minor changes, and to store the scratch files... but that’s about it. I definitely don’t rely on it as much as I used to. Colleagues have gone entire days without needing to open an IDE. I’ve had to leave my beloved Github Desktop behind because while I love the intuitive and simple interface, there is simply no easy way to make it work with worktrees.

Here’s a detailed breakdown of how I use worktrees to tackle issues of different sizes.

the small stuff

Spec out a small feature/bug on linear.
Create a worktree using the linear branch name. Since we work with in a monorepo with microservices, we have a custom script that clones the existing directory, and then copies the .env including a port offset, and the .claude folder. We do fresh installs of pnpm for every worktree but we use the same docker volumes and databases to reduce resources needed.
The llm already has most of the context it needs from the issue, pulled out via the linear cli. It knows to use Explore to figure out the relevant parts of the codebase. We have solid Claude.mds and READMEs for our services that the llm knows to use to jump off of.
The llm does the fix. I run claude in yolo mode, most permissions turned on via .claude.settings.json . If it's a UI change, in my initial prompt I ask the llm to take a screenshot of the result via the playwright mcp, and I just check that result before the commit. If it's any kind of backend/api change, I get the llm to use a tdd skill during the implementation. Both of these things get defined in the initial prompt.
~~Review~~, manually tweak/confirm/test, commit + push + merge + deploy (I have a skill called /end that does the last bits automatically and just alerts me if something reds on the ci)

Scope for improvement

At work on a different project we're using beads, which is a cli-first task management tool that claude can use instead of its internal todo list. You can essentially run an agent to automatically pick up and do a lot of the manual stuff I'm doing around deciding to work on a task, creating a worktree etc. I don’t know if I want to go even faster, but it’s certainly an option!

the big stuff

Lay out the barebones with claude. I'm NOT using planning mode. I want it to go explore the codebase, find relevant files etc, and present a high level overview of what we're doing. I might even ask it to explain the problem statement to me/reframe the problem statement so that I can make sure all the initial constraints I have are represented.
Then I'll tweak the problem statement/the general problem area, sometimes with 2 or 3 back-and-forths until I'm happy with the way the question/task is framed at all[^1].
THEN I open a new claude code thread, paste in the refined high level problem statement, and use a brainstorm skill I have to actually think through all of the large implementation details. This is where most of my time goes. I can spend 4 to 6 hours on this step. This brainstorm skill essentially does the work of defining the specifics of the implementation, covering all primary surface areas. The skill tries to be comprehensive and is reasonable, but it heavily relies on the prompt to understand where to go deep. I will sometimes introduce new considerations for it to "think" about, or look up the stuff it's suggesting myself. This step also spawns a few claude on the web sessions in learning mode where I'm trying to conceptually understand something, and some tabs where I’m reading the docs myself to confirm the statements Claude is making.
The brainstorm skill works by proposing a series of decisions, thinking through a few possible paths, and recording that path. When I'm happy with the majority of the decisions I’ve made, the LLM writes it all out in a document in docs/plan/epic-name/YYYY-MM-DD-feature-name-design-document. This is the design doc.
If the task is gnarly enough, I get a writing plans skill to actually do the work of figuring out the implementation. The skill breaks down the proposed solution into very granular phases, and tasks. It finds the relevant files to change, the line numbers to change, the types to add, the functions to call. I only cursorily review the output of this skill/subagent. This work gets written into a much large implementation details document.
Sometimes I'll get a code review agent to go over the plan. Depending on how complex the task is, I might ask it to go over the design decision document before accepting it, or the implementation details document. With the latter, the skill almost always catch functions that have been hallucinated, some esoteric but obvious bug in the implementation details, some security concern etc. The relevant file is updated with these observations.
Then I'll kill the last claude thread and open a new thread, just telling the llm to implement the file we’ve created using the senior software engineer subagent with the tdd skill, spawning them to run in parallel. Then the LLM does its thing! This can take a while. Sometimes it will ping me 1/3rd of the way through to do a manual check of how things are going, but mostly I just let it runbe. The subagents know to commit after they finishes each task.
When it's all done, I get the code review agent to also look at the implementation. It catches some more things, but they'll often be irrelevant or over-engineering.
Then I'll do a manual test, and discover some extremely dumb thing missing - some flavour of the LLM implementing all the individual parts but forgetting to wire it together, etc, so I'll describe the issue and let the main agent fix it. I’ll do a few more manual tests for interactions with existing features that I didn’t talk about during the implementation. There will almost always be three obvious things to take care of. They will go in my scratch file or in new threads to fix immediately.
Then I create the PR, wait for nobody to review my PR for two days, and merge it in!

Scope for improvement

I feel like I could be defining much better tests but I don't understand enough about how to do that yet, soon inshallah. I want to go through the learn tests with book but I’ve also been saying that for a bit now.
Ideally I also define the e2e playwright test in the design doc stage so that the llm can do it itself, but right now we have auth that doesn’t work with worktrees that blocks it, and I know I'll need to build some scaffolding to handle it that I don't have the time for rn.
Personally, I don't remember streets that I don't walk on - even if I've (been) driven around them many times. Similarly, I've noticed that details and context for the things I've worked on using the llm flow slip away from me much faster week-on-week than it used to. There are several possible reasons - I am working on a much larger surface area, I’m simply working on more issues than I normally would, I'm not having to figure out how the internals of something are to be able to use it - but it's still an issue. I'm going to have to figure out how to do a big-picture review and small-picture review for myself - or figure out other ways to revisit small systems within my codebase.

More general notes

I think skills were the game changer for me. They're essentially just markdown files with some frontmatter that contain all those "You are a Senior Software Engineer" prompts we used to keep around in the clipboard from a few months ago.

I know a lot of people use workflows, which are essentially more invokable versions of my ten-step program from above. A workflow allows one to attach a type of subagent and a type of skill to every task, and is often used to set claude loose on the codebase overnight. At work a colleague uses them extensively but they're a little to out of control for me right now - or maybe I'm not confident enough in my ability to spec a problem out well enough without oversight :)

More general improvements I want to make

I feel like I need to move to ghostty because I hear it's much better with the flicker issues than iterm is. But claude has gotten a lot better about that in the recent updates, from what I can see. I don’t know what iterm features I’m locked into (probably just keyboard shortcuts?) but I’m loathe to make too many changes to my workflows as is.

I feel like I also need to move to Zed over Webstorm because, unfortunately, Webstorm just takes up too much RAM, and I can’t justify the cost (of losing memory). I really don’t want to do this though. Most other IDEs are horrible at implementing JetBrains shortcuts and no, I don’t want to learn ~~VS Code~~ ~~Sublime Text~~ ~~TextMate~~ keybindings. I also fundamentally have a problem with an editor that prioritises putting me in an audio channel with every other current user of their product over letting me talk to the robot the editor was built around.

Addendum

I was recently made aware of skills.sh which is a good place to start exploring available skills. Right now the leaderboards are full of the anthropic base skills + obra's superpowers, but it will be good to keep an eye on this over the next few months.

[^1]: I’m almost always working with a scratch file here, with a todo section and a list of problem spaces I am not yet ready to tackle but need to make a note of.

[Weeknotes] Week of Jan 23rd, 2026

Fri, 23 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Woah! I knew I’d skipped two weeknotes but I didn’t realise my last one was from last year. Yes, I was dying and it was a cause for alarm, but the chaos was planned for (as much as one is able to, really) and I... well, I survived.

Work

The big thing at work is that we released prescreen.alt.inc! It’s an interactive, hard screener for people applying to full stack roles with us - hyper specific, but the experiment was primarily around figuring out how we can get an LLM to be stern, bossy, and sound like a real person. For the launch, apart from writing front end code stitching our agents on letta and our agent service together, I

learnt about working with pixel art, and prompted various robots of various kinds to create it for me (a surprisingly involved process! Blog post coming soon.)
visually designed the interface - colors, fonts, spacing, placement.

The process of getting here was stressful. For a month leading up to launch date we prepared for a showcase demo, and then on the Wednesday before the launch date (when I’d already been working ten to twelve hour days for a week) the decision was made to do a private beta kind of launch instead... which meant we had to think about a mobile interface and a freeform agent experience post-screening - both large features in their own rights. To say that weekend was hard would be understating it. Jan 2nd to 12th was crunch, but instead of crashing after launch day (like I had expected to) the momentum carried me through that whole week... and then I crashed this week instead.

Health

For the first time in a long time, I feel like I worked myself into a flare, rather than the flare showing up and then affecting how I work. Somehow I made it through the flare? But now it’s the week after launch, and my body is taking revenge. I am so sleepy and tired all the time, and the knots are BAD, friends. There is only so much a tennis ball can do.

I have

Gone to the immunologist, because my reactions to the cats have only gotten worse. Blessed to have Dr Meghna, who is willing to work with me and my inability to stick to any kind of twice-a-day routine instead of giving up on me. But that did mean 3ish hours of driving in the sun, which rewarded me with a headache for the rest of the day.
Napped because cramps were bad.
Ate so poorly during crunch because I NEEDED SOME JOY OKAY. And now my body feels bloated and ick. I am actually looking forward to starting GF/DF again. Who am I? I am a tired girl with an unhappy body, willing to throw things at the wall to see what sticks.
Been seeing my therapist much more regularly. The last eight months involved lots of change and upheaval in my life but I did great! And I got an A in therapy! So now I’ve been moved to the advanced track where we’re talking about my childhood, my core values, and why I am the way I am. It’s hard work!!! So good but it takes a lot out of me. I’ve been having to schedule recovery time after sessions again.

Life

In this period of intense strife, what’s been keeping me sane? Other people, and having things to look forward to.

Azan emotionally blackmailed me into doing a social thing for new year’s eve. It was a long drive, so obviously I kidnapped Ankur, but I got a brilliant black sesame chicken out of it.

The girlypops did a fantastic drunk dinner at Dolphins, and I discovered that I might like having a neighbourhood bar I go to, and that I enjoy ginger in my cocktails.

I did one (1) session of football which was too little! I need to get running again, bad knee be damned. Desperately looking for groups in central Bangalore who will take a bad but enthusiastic player into their regular rotation.

Makar Sankranti was excellent. The carrom board I gifted dad earlier has become a regular fixture at any events happening at home.

Shruti has been working from my office - and more importantly, she’s been driving me to and from work, and keeping me hydrated and focused in the space. Offices are nice, but if you can? Work in physical spaces with the people you love.

The parents have been staying at mine the last few days. It’s meant that I have had to do a little more caregiving than I usually would, but I think it’s paid of. The goal was to show mum that I’m not alone, and that I won’t ever be alone in my everyday life (she would know that if she read this blog but it’s probably a good thing that she doesn’t haha). I gave friends a heads up that mom would be here, but otherwise didn’t change plans in any way - people came over and coworked, we had meals and gossiped and made impromptu plans, I went out for the things I was scheduled for and came back late, I did all my phone calls to catch up... I think mum finally understands what I mean when I say I have community. She says she trusts that I can take care of myself, but I hope she can now trust that I can find peace and joy in the doing.

All of my community in the last few years has hedged on physical presence. The few friends I have that I /don’t/ hang out with at least once a month I have because they put in the effort to text me or engage with me online. I’m not going to blame this on no social media any more - yes, it helps, but a lot of the friends I want to talk to more aren’t on social media (or aren’t on it in a vulnerable way) anyway. I want to believe that time out of touch doesn’t nullify the depth of a friendship, it doesn’t mean we’ve grown apart... but as people change, the growth apart is only natural. I’ve tried putting recurring tasks on my todo list to call X, Y, and Z, but that makes the relationship feel like a chore! How can I build lasting relationships with people I don’t see (and therefore don’t think about because my brain works this way)?

Media Diet

Reading

I thought I’d read a lot in the last three weeks but turns out it was only one whole book?? I am very confused.

Read The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi - started with the audiobook, and finished with the text. I honestly enjoyed the audiobook a lot more, but I needed to tear through it somewhere around the 50% mark. This felt like a book written for Very Mature twelve year olds. I initially disliked it but as the pacing picked up, so did my interest in the shenanigans. I will be reading the next instalment. This book has also made me want to rewatch Life of Pi.

Listening

I’ve been mostly listening to albums, and then listening to autogenerated playlists containing various tracks from those albums.

Nessa Barrett’s AFTERCARE: sad dance pop and excellent for the evenings. Fuji Kaze’s HELP EVER HURT NEVER: jpop that feels like pop. A clean sound that reminds me of 2007. The Kid LAROI’s Before I forget

A friend introduced me to The Favors, and I’ll probably add them to the rotational playlist but not care about the album too much.

I continue to listen to a LOT of all the pop and alt girlies - Lola young, Aubrey Hobert, Olivia Dean, RAYE, etc

[Blog] What do you want from your website in ten years?

Sat, 03 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Henrik Henrission has this celebrated essay: A blog post is a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people and make them route interesting stuff to your inbox

(At the time of posting, this was one of an infinite number of tabs languishing half read in my phone browser. I’m not referring to the contents of the blog, but rather responding to the title alone).

I've been posting on this website for a year now, and I haven't actually had interesting things in my inbox as a result of my blogs. However, this HAS been my experience with social media. When I was active on twitter (2018-2020) I was constantly getting DMs from people I didn’t know, with opinions or solutions for things I was curious about. I didn’t have to think about a posting schedule the way people do with SEO. I was just active, and consistent, and like magic I had an audience (and people in my inbox).

There are many things wrong with twitter (when people would tell me they know me from twitter I would instinctively apologise!) but that feeling of access, and knowing someone, is undeniable. Community is very important to me, and I feel like I’ve been fairly successful in building it over the last few years - physically. When I got off twitter mid-pandemic, I lost that online community and without it, I feel a little incomplete.

I was able to build community physically by being very intentional about it. In my home, I made spaces for people to sit, and to work from. I put out an ashtray even if I don’t smoke. I put guides for the shower and spare toothbrushes in the other room. I stock oatmilk I don’t drink. It’s easy to make a home inviting because I live there! But I don’t live on this blog - I live in my website framework and my writing app and my linear board. Other people visit this blog, sure, but they mostly see me in their emails or their rss feeds.

I didn’t have to think about building community with twitter - I just posted! Consistency is easy when you’re doing drugs. I was young, dumb, and inflammatory enough that I didn’t need to think about “best time to post” because the algorithm always worked for me. I suppose, when there’s no algorithm, I am going to have to be a lot more intentional about how I create online community.

To do with my website so it becomes more like home

(links go to my linear board)

[ ] better typography so people are invited to take a seat and read
[ ] a dark mode so people can do this where they want
[ ] comments
[ ] a footer!
[ ] more experiments, and things that bring joy. Audio on clicks, and cursor magic, and sunset backgrounds.
[ ] respond to the emails people send to me (sorry Mihir and Anik 😅)

I can’t go back to using social media the way I used to because it is simply unhealthy for my brain. But I enjoyed so much about it - the joy of posting, not having to introduce myself, having an archive of silliness, and even the parasocial relationships.

In ten years, I want people to open this website to develop a relationship with me.

[Blog] Define: partner

Fri, 02 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT

I used to think that if someone was my partner (or I was someone's partner) there was an obligation. And that the difference between a friendship and a partnership, no matter how strong the friendship, is that with the partnership, I would be obligated to say yes. I would owe it to my partner to stretch myself to show up for them. And I think this definition worked for a little bit, but not for very long. It breaks down in all kinds of social constructs where your friends show up for you and your partners aren't in a place to do so.

In a world where sex is not exclusive to partnership, and the distinction between romantic love and platonic love are just getting more blurry, I have never been able to — and I continue to not be able to — explain the difference between my closest friends and those I would call my partner.

For a while I thought it was about role. My partner is someone I can refer to in society as a romantic partner, and since they fit the definition and they play all the parts of the role that society expects, they are my partner. It's a circular definition! I live with someone, and I have sex with them, and I claim to love them (in public), and I stretch myself for them, and I show up with them in social situations, and I introduce them to my family, and I lean against them when I'm tired, and I expect them to skip work to take care of me when I'm sick, and I do the same for them, and I let their fights affect me, and I let my fights affect them. Then we're partners, right?

But I do most of these things with my friends anyway.

A friend quoted an Urdu poem that I don’t remember the exact words to, but it went something like this:

Burn all the letter I’ve written to you, read and unread
For they contain the evidence of my love
You can extinguish that flame of the letters with some water
But how can you extinguish the one in my heart?

And my answer immediately was indifference.

The opposite of love is not hate, it is indifference. I didn't break up with my most recent partner because I hated him. I broke up with him because I felt like I stopped mattering to him.

A partner, then, is someone that you cannot be indifferent to, someone who sticks around, whose every action, opinion, and thought changes the way you exist. It affects your comport, and any decision you can make. That's a big responsibility. This definition feels lofty, but it makes sense as a descriptor to the relationships I’ve seen around me. It is something I can align with in my existing relationships. So I think for now, that's the definition I will go with.

Obviously there are a lot of fallacies here. There's lots of people who I cannot be indifferent to. My boss, for example, or the Prime Minister. But maybe your partner is someone who you don't let yourself be indifferent to, who you commit to hearing and supporting, or who you commit to letting influence you. I think that's my definition for now.

[Weeknotes] Week of Dec 27th, 2025

Sat, 27 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Work

I am in the enviable position where I’m building a game for work! The goal is to make the conversational experience we’re creating feel more engaging, so the idea was to build a memory palace of the character the user is talking to, that the user accompanies the character around. This character is controlled by an llm, and the experience is supposed to be a reflection of the conversation and not the other way around... so I built a system where the location of the character and its movement is controlled entirely by the LLM. It was so much fun, and the first time that a demo I did for work elicited joy :) We have to abandon it because we got rid of locations entirely to cut scope (product iterations amirite) but I am really proud of what we came up with in the first place. Maybe I can use this elsewhere.

Since my last weeknote (two weeks ago) where I was stressing about interviewing people, I have interviewed exactly zero people. I will do more this week, I promise!

Life

The BIG thing that happened this week is that I finally threw a Christmas party. Lots of new friends showed up, and I did feel a little overwhelmed, but more people than I expected came early and really made themselves at home. I loved having people in my house, and I loved that my house could hold so many people. I think this is going to be a biannual event - the next one will possibly be in May :)

Some data
4: days to plan party
9: instamart orders made during the course of the party
16: bottles of wine mulled
29: Number of people who showed up (including me!)

Parties need

A theme
People with clear responsibilities
A quiet room
Someone to run a group activity
Some kind of make your own food station and everything else will get figured out eventually.

Dec 13th to 14th was the Echoes of Earth festival. I’ve always thought I won’t enjoy it because it felt like a combination of woo and electronic music, both of which are not my thing... but I decided to check it out anyway to accompany a friend who was doing festivals after 7 years and wanted the company.

Highlights

The festival as a whole was well managed. This is absolutely something I will go to again, especially with a group, and go early to check out the exhibits.
I really enjoyed Graysokker’s set - a one man band with like 12 foot pedals, and an electric accordion/synth. He was having so much fun! And the sound was experimental enough that we couldn’t help but have fun too. His set on both days was the highlight for me.
Other artists I enjoyed: Manu Delago Trio, Jatayu, Vilnius Jazz Ensemble, Earth Jam, Bedouin’s more experimental stuff.

Lowlights

Stage management was a problem at multiple places. On day 1, the smoke being let out on graysokker smelt like piss! And on Day 2, the sound for the f16s was unfortunately very very bad.
The festival takes place in a eucalyptus forest... lots of people are very allergic to eucalyptus, and the first aid tent didn’t have an antihistamine on hand. Thankfully we went there early enough and they were able to source it for us from someone coming in later. The underbrush is also very prickly!

I’ve gone to a few concerts alone now, and it’s a very different experience from going with people, or even a group, so I was pretty nervous about going with a friend. I had fun, but I do think that if I had stronger opinions about what artists I wanted to see or experiences I wanted to have, I would have been frustrated. I am the most extroverted/group hang person I know, so this is a surprising development. There are eight of us going to lollapalooza next month and eleven of us going to bandland, so how this plays out remains to be seen.

The week after echoes was packed. I had a social obligation every single evening (and I went to the office a few times). At some point my brain said “no more!” and stole alone time from sleep time. It was holiday season the week after so that week was mostly about catching up with everyone who was leaving town. And thankfully this week has been much better with the lack of social obligations. I only have the hangs I’m making happen myself.

In the last 14 days, I’ve slept over at other people’s houses for three nights! This was overall a good thing because these people live halfway to the office. But it did illustrate that I need to leave more clothes in my car.

I’ve been trialling fractional EAs since that’s a service that seems to be popular and available. The problem with both Crew and faff is that they take too long to do the tasks you want them to, and it’s truly another task to manage them. With faff in particular, there’s too much noise, not enough synchronosity and urgency when necessary, and simply not enough things get done the way I expect them to. I expect an EA to add to processes in my life, not replace them. So far, this is not happening.

Last Saturday at indie web club, we had nineteen (19!) people show up, even though it was a technical session! I’m so proud of everyone who shows up and makes an effort to be a part of this.

Last Wednesday, all of the Obvious alumni in Bangalore met up! It was so cool seeing people I haven’t spoken to since the pandemic. In a way, we’ve all done very different things after moving on - but in other ways, we’re doing very similar things. Lots of people discovered they live in the same 800m radius around Indiranagar. I want to be friends with some of these folks again.

Health

No major updates to report, except that after the party I remembered what a hangover feels like :)

[Weeknotes] Week of Dec 13th, 2025

Sat, 13 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Work

Video generation is expensive! What is the stack people typically work with, how do they prompt their models, how do they store and access memories for those models, and how do they not burn hundreds of dollars a day in the process?

We’re also actively hiring for a few engineering roles, and this means I’m interviewing people for the first time. How does one develop taste and judgement while interviewing? Apart from all the stuff I have to do for my software engineering job this week, I will

read up on the ask a manager tips for interviewers
figure out how to codify “taste” in people at the org by talking to the founders
create a “bank” of questions to ask people (and understand the reasons for asking them)

Things I need to read up on:

How SSO works under the hood

Health

The flare is still around, but not terrible this week. I made a mistake - I slept for less than 5 hours on both Wednesday night and Thursday night, and come Friday afternoon I had a splitting headache that no amount of ORS/bananas/warmth could solve. Some diclofenac finally helped, and a friend helped relax my muscles enough that I was able to power through the pain and take a nap.

I was woken from the nap by reports that Jamun had puked and was terribly low energy. One quick vet visit later, he has had an antacid injection and is on a probiotic schedule and a special diet. Monitoring remains.

I was reflecting with a friend that while my health has been pretty shit for the last year or so, and will continue to be shit for the foreseeable future, it isn’t actually volatile. I’ve gotten to a place where I know and am familiar with the rhythms of my body. I’m not healthy but my health is stable. That is very important and comforting to me.

Life

I cooked a lot this week. It helped that I was working from home, and that I wasn’t very tired from my work.

On Thursday night, I had a small sleepover because on Friday morning a bunch of us watched The Game Awards Show! I am in a long term, monogamous relationship with Hades 2, but it was fun to watch and learn about all the different kinds of experiences out there from my friends. I did watch Ankur play the opening sequence of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 last week, and it gave me chills, so it makes sense that most nominated game ever (in 12 categories!) swept at least 7 of them, including the coveted Game of The Year.

The Game Awards are the pet project of Geoff Keighley, who just had some money and decided to make this happen. We need more rich people to effect more societal change (like if Elon Musk actually followed through on his promise to donate 6B to end world hunger). The Game Awards has done a lot in the last few years to legitimise gaming as an art form. I, for one, am very grateful.

Last weekend at Indie Web Club we discussed footers, and designing our personal spaces. Design language can tell you a lot about how to read the intent and nature of the website. I’m pretty unhappy with the aesthetics of this website, but it’s hard to figure out what to change it to because I don’t have very string opinions on that front.

I have been chugging away at my home decor project for a while, and I struggle with figuring out an aesthetic for that too. My living room has copper, wood, and orange accents, but most of them came together by virtue of accident. I’m going to have to use some kind of bookmarking/pinning product where I curate pictures of what I like and don’t like - for websites and for homes. Pinterest would have theoretically solved this problem, but like everything else, its enshittification has been hard to see - even if only from afar.

Over the weekend, some old friends from a hyper specific lifestyle group I joined in 2019 met up at a farmhouse two hours outside Bangalore. On the drive there, I reconnected with Sreechand, a friend from before the pandemic. Only over the course of that conversation, and that evening, did I realise how influential his opinions have been over my own personal value system. We live very close by and have two overlapping friend groups so hopefully we can hang out more often.

Media Diet

Reading

I’ve been really enjoying Chip War. It feels like a detailed account of the first 4 pages of the first chapter of every computer science textbook I’ve had.

For the first time in a while, I don’t have a book of fiction that is going on in parallel - not even fan fiction! I just haven’t had the time. Maybe I need to get back into Romantasy.

Listening

I really liked the new Jessie J album! The first half is stronger than the second. Other artists whose albums I enjoyed this week: Olivia Dean, Audrey Hobert, Jane.

I’ve been casually browsing r/popheads for the better part of a decade, but I think it’s time (especially since I almost never reddit anymore) that I include the weekly FRESH newsletters into my workflow.

[Weeknotes] Week of Dec 6th, 2025

Sat, 06 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Work

I integrated a text-to-speech(tts) model into a chat interface for work this week. The challenge was not in working with voice, it was in the infrastructure that connects the llm(s) to the chat interface. The model we wanted to integrate didn’t have a native provider with vercel's ai sdk and for some reason I decided that I will simply write my own. So I wrote sentence buffers and I wrote semaphores and I wrote media players.

My Claude Code burn in the last three months has been in the $250-$400 range. My Claude Code burn in the last two days has been $250. This is because

We’re using subagents and skills a lot more.
We’re defaulting to Opus for everything. As a result of these two changes, I feel a lot more structured about the way I’m writing code, and it’s true that I’ve caught things I wouldn’t have been able to in my traditional Claude Code flow... but at this burn rate, it is not like having my own junior developer, it costs the same as hiring my own junior developer. Yes, human junior developers take longer to train and are riskier to hire but give better returns no? I’m not sure how to feel about the bottom line impact on this. I suppose this will only matter after the credits run out.

We have week-long sprints at work now. It’s been good to be really focused, but having demo days on Friday is stressful and unpleasant, and I’ve done this two weeks in a row. Ideally we have 4 day cycles and day 5 is for polish/nits/tech debt/experiments with users. Last month it felt like I was paddling water in place. Now, it feels like I am running a marathon by sprinting. Will the ebbs and flows of work seasons fix this feeling of sustained exhaustion or will I have to make it happen?

Every time I have been employed, I have burnt out. Burn out is not a function of overworking, it is a function of putting in energy and not seeing movement, of caring too much and not being acknowledged. This time, I’m trying to channel my energy into the things I know I can do sustainably, and I’m telling myself that it’s okay for other people to do the other things even if I don’t always agree with how it’s done. This time I will build sustainable care patterns into my work, the way I have done so in my life.

Life

(in reverse chronological order)

A friend has been staying with me and it’s been strangely infuriating. Luckily, our friendship has roots too far in the past and we talked it out. Also luckily, they refuse to read my weeknotes so they will never know I feel this way. 😈 (that is a joke and a lie, if you are my friend you will hear about my feelings)

I had a puzzle emergency (don’t ask) and Rosh and Pranav showed up beautifully to make it happen <3 I’m pretty late, but I made an advent calendar of sorts for the New Year Puzzle Along event Asma is running this year!

I enjoy going to Seedhe Maut concerts because the number of gaalis[^1]/minute increases exponentially in that crowd. The innate dilli will come out from even the mallu fellows. Rap fans are like metal fans who missed the memo. They want to mosh but don’t know how, so they’ll mosh anywhere instead of asking for consent. But because these are Delhi rap fans, the moment they see that you are a woman they have accidentally pulled into the mosh pit they will grovel to apologise and shut all the swears deep where the sun don’t shine. It’s great. The concert was in the Phoenix Mall back area which I hadn’t yet been to. The sound was shit but the act was excellent and I continue to look forward to the next one.

Last weekend was Ankur’s birthday extravaganza! Ankur, Shru, and I did a brunch on Monday morning to celebrate his actual birthday and it was so lovely. We ate too much excellent food at BrezelHaus, opened day one of an advent calendar, laughed too loud, sobbed a little (it was me I had a small breakdown), and felt seen by each other. With work taking up all of my time and enforcing good sleep etiquette, we don’t have our late night kitchen floor conversations as often as I’d like them. Friends, if you take any advice from these weeknotes take this: find people who will fight you in their love for you and hold on to them tight.

Health

Day 8 of latest flare. I have been in so much pain this week. I’m really proud of myself because despite the pain I

Worked 10 hours each on Monday and Friday
Went for a long walk on Thursday, maybe 3k steps
Ate only two meals of pure junk, and in fact had 4 meals of homecooked goodness.

The major symptoms this time have been the pain and appetite. I am not doing as much as I should to deal with the pain, but I am doing as much as I can. Give me the strength to do more.

Media Diet

Reading

I finished reading Dead in the Water: A True Story of Hijacking, Murder, and a Global Maritime Conspiracy.

What a trash book. The whole narrative is built the outrage one is supposed to feel upon hearing that ~~someone died~~ a British National!! was Murdered in Yemen!!!!! This book reeks of the kind of racism that is so routine in the Middle East it is overlooked as normal. The Yemenis and Filipinos, of course, are in the same tier as dirt. The filipino informant who corroborated most of the story (shows up about 70% of the way through) was paid a “few hundred dollars for his time”, but his name was not worth protecting one whit. Who cares if the mob kills his family? The Eastern European was allowed to negotiate, though not nearly enough, and even then his right to keeping his identity private was stripped (and it is unclear if he was compensated or not). The Englishmen, of course, were the best and most deserved and everyone should drop everything to bring to justice the entire mechanism surrounding one man’s murder.

Maybe it’s just because I was brought up in Dubai and witnessed so much of this inherent elitism but I cannot stand even a whiff of it. There is a difference between acknowledging the realities of a situation (like the authors themselves did when talking about the (lack of a) presence of women at Lloyds) and baking their version of a skewed reality into the narrative. The latter is not forgivable in a work of non-fiction. I am sorry I started reading this, sorrier that I didn’t have other audiobooks downloaded on my phone at the time, and wouldn’t recommend the book.

The narrator of the audiobook did a great job.

Listening

It’s Wrapped time! Interesting facts: I listened to 336 genres this year (but Spotify won’t tell me what that means or how it defined a genre), 33 albums this year (but Spotify won’t give me the list of all of them), and my Spotify age is 20, so I can no longer drink alcohol in Bangalore and should be ashamed of the skinny pants in my wardrobe.

[^1]: swears in Hindi

[Weeknotes] Month of November, 2025

Sat, 29 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMT

It’s time for a month note!

I didn’t have the energy to reflect every week this month. This weeknote is the canary in the coalmine for me, so I was concerned. But for the first time in a long time, the culprit wasn’t purely shit mental health. It was exhaustion. Not bone deep, but of the mind. I have been spending so much time doing so many things at work that my brain didn’t want to do anything else except stay home and play video games, or consume narrative. I didn’t even want to meet people! That’s brand new for me.

My reasons for writing these notes today are not what they were when I started, a year ago. Now, I’m writing this to keep a record of the things my brain thinks of. I love the idea of pointing someone to something I wrote instead of ranting (incompletely) into their chat windows. And I want to spend more active time with myself, bathing in the clarifying waters of creation.

Work

At the beginning of this month, I had spent two months building lots of things, but no one was using it - I was just immediately moving on to build other things that no one was using either. In the middle of this month my team acknowledged to each other that it felt like we’ve been paddling water, and then... the last week’s momentum has been so good to feel on my skin. I finally feel like I'm part of a team[^1], and not just a cog or a code monkey.

In the last three months I

Architected several systems
Failed to correctly architect one of two front end services I built, but in ways that I know I can fix, and in order to let the codebase grow naturally
Learnt so much about testing
Tried three or four different ways to use the power of codegen. I think I have a better understanding of what techniques to use for what scenarios now.
Realised I know so little about testing
Got better at stating my opinions in front of people I think are intimidating
Got comfortable with releasing unpolished work, taking criticism, sitting in discomfort, and (most importantly) figuring out who to talk to in the friend group when I was tired and needed to be taken care of.

I need to

Get better at reading code
Get better at writing tests
Get better at talking about code and systems, as a proxy for understanding it better. I think over the next month Jalebi is going to learn so much. He can be my little rubber ducky.

I know now that I need to follow my own processes no matter what. People like me have been socialised to change how we do things for fear of fitting in and not drawing attention - but my processes have been built as a result of years of mistakes and stress. I am going to continue to honor that.

Aaand... I’m going to go off contract and join these folks. There is a lot of competence available in the rooms I’m in. I want to be there, have a stake in building a good product, a good team, and take the energy of enjoying Friday evenings away but also Monday mornings back into work with people.

Life

Highlights reel

Did one (1) 1km run, acquired headache the next day. Was put to bed by friends and reminded of the power of potassium.
Hosted the loveliest Nats and Rudi for three whole days (!!) and witnessed the joy of watching friend groups mix again (Ankur and Shru met them). Had such a lovely evening of just hanging out in the house. Was reminded of the joy of travelling for work after looking at Rudi’s mini server set up. I’ve done enough of that in 5years of being remote, but maybe it’s time to try again. Especially given that they have an empty house in Goa....
Speaking of, my own home is coming together nicely. More decor pieces, more cute furniture. More people have come to stay over. More people come home now than ever before. I’m no longer puzzled when the door rings and I’m not expecting anything - I’m just curious. Because people drop in! And fill my heart with warmth.
I resolved a bitter conflict with a dear friend. There was anger and snot and tears, but also laughter and ease, and the weight of being perceived. I've decided that it's not a friendship if space isn't made for the imposition of ourselves on the other.
I went to two different concerts by myself and had such a fantastic time. I made friends with lots of people at the venue. I like knowing that I can take care of myself. I like going and losing myself in the music while completely sober. I like driving to and from far off concert venues, taking my dabba along for dinner instead of having to stand in line for food. I am so good for me.
Please don't ever let me be in charge of physical things. I forgot that kolorkode was shut on Sunday and has the most stressfull three hours of my month trying to reprint stickers that were already printed and just needed to be picked up in time for an event later that day.
Indie Web Club has been good. This is because Ankur has been doing most of the work. I have been enjoying being able to show up and just participate. I know I'll need to take up most of the work again in Jan/Feb when work doesn't feel as overwhelming, so I'm just enjoying this for now.

Health

I took exactly one day off of work this month, for a horrible migraine. I think this is some kind of record. I have been in pain - this has been a bad month for pain - but I’ve still been able to function, push through, and rest later.

I work eight to ten hours a day during the week, but I still meet people after work for dinner or have people come over to cowork. The company forces me to eat well. The weekends, or when I’m working alone, however, is a different story. On two different occasions, my meal has consisted of a large bag of chips. This will not do! I did a long, involved, quiz thing with Rosh to figure out what kinds of food might suit me best. Some of the results were surprising, but they also made sense. Spicy, salty food is good for me! And I need to make more of that available to myself.

I want to go back to being dairy/gluten free, because it felt so good, but I don’t know how to time this. I want to be able to eat cookies, and I’ll be travelling in January. I did want to go on a rice elimination diet, but that feels wrong.

Media Diet

Reading

This has been a good month for reading. This list is evenly split between audiobooks and words on a screen.

Dracula (The full cast version is your best bet here)
This is how you lose the time war
Everything is tuberculosis
Make Room for love
Turn back time
Gender Queer
about 350,000 words of fan fiction
It has no name

Some reviews on my goodreads profile!

Around the web

My rss feed reader has been broken for a while. I sorely miss my feeds. This website’s RSS feed is broken too, I’ll fix after posting this!

[^1]: Here, team means a thing that's bigger than the sum of its parts. Often teams are just collections of people and those are nothing to write home about.

[Blog] Deepawali 2025

Sat, 25 Oct 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Deepawali has always been the biggest festival my family and I have celebrated growing up. Traditionally,

We would wake up early in the morning to get oiled rubbed into us, and then we'd have to sit around trying not to get it everywhere. If I was in Sringeri for Deepawali, all the children would be oiled, then made to stand in a row at the bottom of the bathroom for Ammama to fling scalding water at us straight from the handi. In my mother's house, things were a little calmer - though the water still had to be very hot to get the oil off.
Then we’d breakfast. There would be 5 types of poha (why? There just were). Daat phow, mirasangi phow, kalayl phow, Dheya phow, and god phow. That's thick poha, chilli poha, mixed-with-hand poha, curd poha, and a jaggery one to cap it off for you heathens.
After that it gets a little fuzzy. When does the Pooja happen? Unclear, I didn’t care too much and our poojas growing up were small anyway.
In Dubai, after breakfast we’d all get dressed up and give our neighbours little sweet boxes made with things that my mum and her friends made by hand! I loved all the attention I got for my dresses back then. When I moved into the apartment I live in now, 4 years ago, I did this too. My neighbours were very surprised, and didn’t seem to particularly welcome it. Cultural fossilisation in NRI families strikes again!
There would be a giant lunch with many courses. The dishes wouldn’t be “special” though, just lots and healthy. The joy of the lunch would be all of us sitting down to eat together, something we rarely did as a family.
There would be some kind of lights in the evening. No firecrackers at all, but always diyas and maybe another pooja/bhajan thing, more new clothes.

I’m not religious, but festivals aren’t really about religion. I deeply believe in the need for people to have rituals around which they organise themselves and their loved ones together. I have family, and I also have chosen family.

I want to focus on what rituals can mean for chosen family. Shru has always done Christmas, Akila has always done new years. We all use our birthdays as an excuse to bring people together. There are other yearly things - an annual event some friends do for fun, there’s pride and the festivities that surround it. We all show up to BQFF and Maya Bazaar. I started this post writing about wanting to create new rituals - and I still do! - but I realised that I have built so many for myself already. Now I just need to make them contagious, so that the friends I have in other cities will fly down for them some time :) I do Lohri in Jan with and for Dee, and then Lolla in Bombay for the magic of festivals, and to honor joy in someone I love. I do Tuesday dinners for ranting and just to show up with friends. There is a book club. If you are reading this and you know I love you (and you should!) then please, know that you are invited to all of this and more.

Deepawali is already pretty overloaded for most people with natal family obligations, but I hope that there is some space for it every year to do a shindig at mine.

This year, I hosted lunch on Sunday, I didn’t really have a plan. But people showed up and we cooked. I put flowers in my house, lit candles, and felt loved.

Then on Monday, I went home with trepidation but was pleasantly surprised. Things didn’t change too much - my father and brother continued to do their own thing. But I didn’t pressure myself to look good or cook, I just showed up. I am tired of being the good daughter, so I just sat with her while she did things, chattered a little bit, and brought out some carrom and Hanabi. When it was time to leave, there were fireworks on the street, so when mu asked me to stay until they passed I was so relaxed I actually agreed - on the condition that I could just do my own thing instead of interacting with anyone. I think it really helped that we were hosting a fifth person, a young cousin of mine convalescing from Dengue. He hung out with mum and brother playing yet another game of Hanabi while I sat in my corner playing video games.

I can’t remember the last time I felt this relaxed and restored in my parents’ house. I let go of expectations of myself, and my parents let go of expectations of me too. Most importantly, I was able to just exist, doing my own thing. When I went back home I realised I’d actually enjoyed myself, in a quiet way - and I was looking forward to visiting my parents again soon.

[Blog] Conflict is a valuable relationship metric

Mon, 20 Oct 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Some friends and I have a standing dinner hang every Tuesday evening, the location of which changes often. This week, we were supposed to meet at my place so I could get some long-standing chores out of the way. But some wires were crossed, two friends unwittingly staged a coup, and we had to meet at a different friend’s place. Ordinarily this would have been fine but having to go in to office + flare being generally bad this week meant that I was Not Happy with the turn of events. By the time I met my friends, it was clear that the whole location change was unnecessary. So what did I do? I had a tantrum.

I was mad at my friends and I made it clear. They let me rant, validated that my irritation was warranted, acknowledged their respective parts in it, and fed me chai and biscuits to make me feel better. We ended up having a good evening regardless (and I secured an IOU 😏).

Conflict is hard to deal with for most people, even those of us who have lots of practice at it. My personal metric for how reliable a relationship with someone is, is the way I have been able to resolve conflict with them. Conflicts are also inherently harder in groups because there are just more forces on the playing field. I’m not saying you should have a fight with someone to make your relationship stronger! I am saying that despite this particular group of friends being newer to me, I feel safer in my dynamic with the group than I did before my tantrum because I know there will always be space for me.

[Blog] Rebase doesn't work for modern development teams

Sat, 18 Oct 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Note: this is an opinionated post I wrote to try and understand my own thinking. I welcome opinions. My own as held here are subject to change.

I don’t think teams should standardise on using git rebase. I think it’s a fantastic idea in theory, but most teams shouldn’t use it.

1. Rebase rewrites history.

This is fine if you’re merging PRs every 4 hours - but the moment you’re doing things that take even a day or two, you lose context and it’s hard to redo conflict. This gets much worse if you’re doing feature branches. Often, a few different developers are working on a feature branch and it’s one developer who is responsible for rebasing on main every few hours. But that developer might not always have context for the (large!) changes that are coming in. I don’t think developers should be given the power to lose history in a workflow that involves multiple people.

2. Rebase isn’t built for codegen practices.

Rebase optimises for code preservation - but with Claude code and the ilk, code generation is cheap. We should be optimising for reduced code management time instead.

3. You cannot confirm the atomicity of a commit.

Since a merge commit is a new commit, you can run precommit hooks and other validators and confirm that your merge works as intended. That’s not true for rebase (precommit doesn’t run after every conflict fixed). It’s hard to fix conflicts correctly when you have 112 commits in one branch and 52 commits in the other and they touch a lot of the same services. (This commit flow seems to be normal for teams heavily relying on codegen practices!). What this means is that you’ll often have a commit at the end anyway that “fixes something” - yes you could track down what commit the issue originated from and do a fixup, but how likely are you to to this at 8pm before your kid’s birthday party and you want to just get the PR in?

I suspect rebase can work well if

Developers work in different parts of the codebase with very little/no overlap
Or if developers work in highly synchronous teams where people know what’s going on in all parts of the codebase
Or if people are truly able to have very short-lived branches.

Associated material

This is a bit of a hot take at work, and I want to know that I’m wrong. But I have spent at least 30 hours from Sept 1st to Oct 15th rebasing branches so I keenly feel the pain. What did I do wrong? I would like to change my mind. Here’s some material I have found that I need to respond to, to finish the mental model in my head.

Julia Evans on What can go wrong with Git Rebase
https://graphite.com/blog/why-ban-merge-commits

[Weeknotes] Week of October 18th, 2025

Sat, 18 Oct 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Work

I spent lots of time rebasing things and I was very annoyed by it, so I wrote a mild flame about it.

Health

Had a flare all week, and since this week was in-office with the team I made the excellent decision to get a driver for the mornings. My arm was thankful.

Life

I had a tantrum on Tuesday, dinner with Chandra, a call with a Goa-based cat behaviorist who seemed very helpful (for litchee x jamun fights), and indie web club’s tech session on Saturday where as per usual I didn’t get as much done as I would like.

[Weeknotes] Week of October 11th, 2025

Sat, 11 Oct 2025 00:00:00 GMT

No real weeknote this time. Litchee continues to recover well (so many of you asked! Thank you ❤️). He's still on the liquid diet but has stolen some dry food when I wasn't paying attention, and the others are scheming to get at his wet food, so all's well in the world, really. I was WFH most of last week so it was chill, but this next week the team's in office so it's going to be tough - esp with deepavali and crackers coming up. If you're reading this, you probably don't need the reminder, but here; please don't burst crackers that make loud sounds. They're horrible for anyone easily startled, your own hearing, and all animals everywhere.

There's supposed to be a very nice meteor shower next weekend but I can't drive out 8 hours to a dark spot, so. :(

I am tired. I'm not doing much except care for the babies, work, and play Hades. Hades 2 is brilliant. It's hard to follow up a perfect game, but Supergiant did it! The sequel feels like a sequel in that it pays homages to the orginal storyline and extends ot so beautifully, but it's much bigger - in terms of story, scope, and ambition. I'm finding myself relating to the character of Melinoë much easier than I did Zagreus. Perhaps it helps that she's a first-bencher kind of character. Maybe it's just that she's a woman.

I am tired because it's strange to be an employee. When you're contracting, deadlines are important. But you're also mostly working by yourself and you're in control of how work gets done. With teams, a lot of the time your work is dependent on other people's. And timelines get pushed but people don't seem to talk about it. I think I have work to do to get comfortable with ambiguity and uncertainty. This is actually a call i need to make - as a consultant, my ability to clarify ambiguity and hedge uncertainty is an asset. As an employee, it feels... annoying. How do I marry the two?

I'm also tired because it's back. The flare is back. What else to say?

I have placed an order for running shoes. Very very excited. Also my most expensive shoe purchase to date. In keeping with my small movements philosophy for this year, I'm going to attempt to do about a 1 to 2km run every other day. Here's my to-do list from when I was running last:

Figure out my bpm (mostly so I can find music to go along with my run)
Actively breathe in rhythm with the steps and the beats
And do this so naturally that it feels like this is easy.

I wrote most of this weeknote at a concert - I went to Glass Beams all by myself. I have attended so many gigs in the last three or four years, but this is the first time I went by myself. It was an incredible experience. I got there reasonably early and was sorry of doing my own thing. I ended up sitting next to some folks who looked loud and boisterous and in a tight group - i realised later that I probably gravitated there because they looked different from all the heterosexual couples I was seeing around me. But also because they looked chill... And then while eavesdropping i discovered they were gay. Of course I would gravitate towards the gayze. We wouldn't have spoken to each other except some dude came and caused a fight - and he threw a slur at one of the people!! The way we instantly became best friends to ward off this asshole, I'm telling you us minorities have got each other's backs every where. Of course I had matched with at least one of them on Bumble haha. The queer community everywhere is incestuous, and Bangalore/Goa cross-pollination is strong. I'm wondering if Bombay/Goa is similar?

I really enjoyed going by myself and making friends there. Surprisingly, I would also have been okay if I didn't make friends! This is brand new. My new friends also added me to a few gig and ticket resale groups for Bangalore, so I suppose I will do this some more. I was considering doing Lollapalooza alone (managing a large group is hard, and without some regulars showing up this time will be harder), but I don't know if I'm brave enough to do a whole festival by myself.

[DigitalGarden] AI Analogies

Mon, 06 Oct 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Analogies are powerful learning/thinking devices that shape popular opinion. I'm attempting to collect the ones that pertain to the AI phenomenon that started sweeping the world about March 2024 that particularly tickled me.

This list is in chronological order.

Ai is like plastic (Sohom)
Cursor proponents as drug addicts (https://read.readwise.io/filter/has%3Ahighlights%20AND%20last_opened__gt%3A%221%20week%20ago%22/read/01jzqtw14thk8jtcm62pyfexwt)
Chatbot users as psychic marks (https://softwarecrisis.dev/letters/llmentalist/)
Ai is a microwave https://www.colincornaby.me/2025/08/in-the-future-all-food-will-be-cooked-in-a-microwave-and-if-you-cant-deal-with-that-then-you-need-to-get-out-of-the-kitchen/
Ai is blue food coloring https://blog.foxtrotluna.social/theyre-putting-blue-food-coloring-in-everything/
AI has become the Ozempic of the corporate world https://www.profgalloway.com/the-end-of-the-blockbuster/

[Weeknotes] Week of October 4th, 2025

Sat, 04 Oct 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Work

Work this week has pulled me in a lot of different directions. I am working very closely with a colleague on building a platform for an experiment. In a fast paced environment, I see the value of being able to build across the stack more than ever. My colleague primarily writes python, so maybe I will be able to get more familiar with it over the next few weeks/months.

“Came for the language, stayed for the community” is a common slogan on t-shirts at python conferences. Some of the kindest people I know in programming circles write python. I ran Pyladies Bangalore for about a year, but stopped as it became less relevant to my everyday work. Bangalore is bursting with communities and with tech communities but there still isn’t an active Pyladies event that happens here. Maybe one day in a few years I’ll support efforts to run it regularly again.

I took two days off this week so I didn’t get as much done. I also spent a lot more time than I should have debugging some issues with deploys. Maybe I need to watch senior frontend engineers debug things more on some livestream? Taking recommendations. What are other ways I can get better at debugging systems?

Also; with fast-paced jobs, how do people make time to learn about entirely new concepts? I really need to understand service-to-service auth better, but I simply haven’t found the time. I think I should be taking advantage of llms and their study modes here.

Health

Wednesday morning was Litchee’s schedules dental scaling. Halfway through the scheduled time period I got a call from the doctor saying that some of his teeth were so rotten the roots were exposed. They had to be taken out. He’s lost six teeth in total, mostly molars and premolars, and one incisor. Recovery was hell - so much worse than his last stint with general anaesthesia. Perhaps it’s because he was in a lot more pain, perhaps it was just a fluke, but the poor boy just kept yelling unhappily all night, insisting on going in and out of his litter box when he could barely lift his legs. Last time, it was funny and cute and I took a few videos and was generally in good spirits. This time I was worried and on edge. I didn’t sleep at all on Wed night or Thursday all day. I had a bad back from lying on a shitty floor mattress. I was distracting myself by drowning in narrative (again).

A friend put me to bed on Thursday night and since then I’ve been relatively more stable, but it has not been a good week for me or the baby. After the first two days post surgery he has thankfully been alright. He’s been sleeping a lot more and less social, but he was curled up with Jalebi when I left the house today morning. Most importantly, him and Jamun haven’t fought yet (that I saw). I hope it stays this way.

Litchee is on a slop diet for the next three weeks at least. I have three cats and they all have different diet requirements. I don’t work from home any more, so this is going to get a little challenging to wrangle. I am also on the lookout for easy to make liquid food diets so I don’t rely on wet food packets all the time. Please tell me about what your pets ate and went through so I feel less alone in this.

Life

I am finally getting my Nothing Day tomorrow. I’m really looking forward to it. I did work from home this week but since all of my time was spent in caregiving my home feels like an even bigger mess than usual. It’s smellier, and more things are out of place, and there’s medication everywhere and split shelving that I need to fix.

I don’t see myself getting a roommate. Maybe I should downsize.

A friend earlier this week sat me down and talked to me about how they are sad I don’t spend time with them any more. I started blaming on work, but then I stopped. I was on the other end of this exact conversation last year, and I know from experience that the response I was going to default to feels like bullshit. When someone is telling you they miss you, it’s not to force you to reprioritise them. It’s to bring attention to a lack. Then, after acknowledgement, the thing to do is figure out ways to be able to fulfil that “lack” even if you don’t have the same time/energy wells any more. Of course, the nature of the engagement will change, but the feeling of the engagement doesn’t need to. I don’t have 5 hours to work on my friend’s couch any more, but I can still rant in their DMs about a specific git thing or react thing and they will feel close to me.

I think it also helps to know there is an end date to these kinds of things. I firmly believe that romantic monogamous domestic long distance relationships (LDRs) shouldn’t be attempted unless there is a clear plan or date to “closing the distance”. LDRs are a good example of something that is universally seen as a thing to be sad about and gets understanding from society at large. A similar feeling exists in society when you have a (romantic monogamous primary domestic) partner that works long hours such that they no longer have the time/energy to put into the relationship, but I’ve found that the solutioning of this problem is just “oh, one has to deal with this” or “oh, what can you do, such is life”. I find this so frustrating! And utterly useless. I feel like this generic social messaging also validated my then partner’s relationship to the problem and the approach they took to it.

For platonic relationships? The social understanding of this messaging exists even less (or not at all). I think as more of us live in found-family like communities we have to internalise how to talk about these problems. And I refuse to be the person to blame a situation for a “lack” that someone I love is feeling. This might be a reactionary bout of idealism from me. I might be setting myself up for burnout or failure. I hope I’m not. We’ll see.

Media Diet

Reading

I am finally moving on from Dramione - into rarepairs. That’s Neville/Pansy, Harry/Pansy, Theomione, Wood/Flint for some reason, and other various permutations.

One of these days I have to break down why, after a decade of not wanting to do anything with this fandom, I am back and consuming things with a vengeance.

[Weeknotes] Week of September 28th, 2025

Sun, 28 Sep 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Work

I deployed a service I wrote, architected a bigger service (but didn’t get to implement it yet) and architected another experiment that will be my first one working with a proper team in a year or two. We also finally have an issue tracker and a general everyday tracker! I get so much energy from being a part of things just starting out, and the momentum on this feels bigger than the other things I’ve been a part of.

I’m focusing on familiarising myself with the breadth of deep tech over the next few months. I don’t have the time or energy to spend on honing my product building intuition (yet) but I’m part of product discussions every day and I’m learning so much about it just by listening and osmosis.

We already have a 7 person team! The whole team was in Bangalore for the week, and that in-person momentum was also very energising. By Friday everyone had left and the office felt a little dull. I am not very happy with my commute but I am not going to stop going to office for as long as people are around.

Health

I fixed my ergonomics set up, which meant I moved a lot more this week in the day to day. My wrists are very happy. I need to buy a high chair, with cushioning, a feet rest, swivel, and possibly a back rest - am open to recommendations.

My flare from last week went away by Monday but was back on Wednesday, and I’ve been a little more fatigued this week than the last. Saturday was especially bad, but that is because I stayed up late and did a small house party at a friend’s on a whim. I was working in their living room! But then Ghalib was playing and one thing let to another... This weekend wasn’t super restful either, but we have a Thursday holiday this week and I’m wfh WedThuFri so let’s hope it doesn’t get worse.

I spoke to the vet at Casper yesterday. After looking at Litchee, they said the gingivitis is definitely bad but we can give dental scaling another go before the teeth removal - yay! We also need to up his teeth brushing regimen. The scaling is scheduled for Wednesday.

Life

Self-care consists of two things for me - movement and people. I’ve fixed the former for my self at work, so the latter had to happen post work. The batteries need social hangs to be recharged, even if it’s an alone-together kind of presence. That has meant I’ve been spending a lot of time with friends at the cost of sleep. I have spent not more than an hour each day at home alone - and it shows! I am really looking forward to getting that time with house and self during WedThuFri - and maybe even SatSun given that this is festival week, I’m unlikely to do social calls.

[Blog] OLE Automation Date

Mon, 22 Sep 2025 00:00:00 GMT

TIL about the [Excel serial date number](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/date-systems-in-excel-e7fe7167-48a9-4b96-bb53-5612a800b487) format.

They’re also known as an OLE Automation date - which, I assume, is how mechanical bulls track their calendars.

The date is present in the format 45911.32361 where

The integer part 45911 represents the number of days since the epoch date.
The decimal part .32361 represents the fraction of a day, ie the time of day

I had a zap populate a google sheet with “current time”. The formatting helper in Zapier shows the current time in a specific format but either

google sheets automatically converted it to the excel format (for some reason?!) when it saw the date from Zapier OR
The web hook from squarespace is hooking into a db/csv/something that is optimised for excel, as opposed to coming from the form directly (which makes sense).

[Weeknotes] Week of September 20th, 2025

Sat, 20 Sep 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Work

I have done so many things in the last two weeks that I have never done before.

Wrote an api surface for a form
Set up a database and worked with Prisma
Set up a Zap
Worked with webhooks
Worked with some version of TDD
Worked with micro services. This one was the hardest thing and broke my brain a little bit ngl
Set up a slack bot
Git rebased 42 commits over 216 commits in a codebase with broken builds, tests, and everything

Things I have done before that I did again

API calls to llms
Used ngrok
Set up swagger UI (But I was under the impression that it was auto documenting? Is that only with specific languages? Given that TypeScript is... well, strongly typed, wouldn’t that give swagger more information to work and auto build with? Why the over-reliance on jsdocs? Need to investigate.)

Things I learnt about

OLE date format
Git worktrees
!fixup command (and the flow in which to use it)

Concepts I learnt about

Server-client architecture
Dependency injection

Things I need to look up

Understand evals better
Figure out why localtunnel was crashing when I used it to execute api commands via swagger

codegen practices

I’ve found that I have significantly better results when I ask the llm to create a plan in an .md file than to use the plan mode. For one, it’s much easier for me to go in and edit the file than get the llm to understand exactly what change I want. Then, I can keep clearing context while holding important state in the file.

It’s also been easier to do TDD if I describe the feature, spec the file, THEN write the test and implement the feature (rather than the other way around).

I went in to the office all week, after about 5 years of no physical space. I really enjoy the energy I get from building from the same space as other people. The face time, the quiet understanding you build with your team over shared fruit etc is unparalleled. I just wish I didn’t... have to be there physically.

Health

My biggest issue with the office has been ergonomics. Some of this is fixable: I took in my monitor, I’m getting a desk converter next week, I might have to buy a new (higher) chair. But my biggest issue has been movement. I gave up on spending chunks of time in the gym a few months ago because it just didn’t fit with my lifestyle, but I still get in lots of movement during the day. This is because I am a fundamentally active person - I move a lot every day, I do chores that require bending and effort, I work when standing, and when I feel like it I move! All my friends’ living rooms have footmarks from my handstands. I will break out into a down dog if my body needs it. Except now I work in an office filled with people in finance, with completely transparent walls, and I feel horrible about even stretching! The desks are small too - 1.5x3 as opposed to the 2x5 that I’m used to at home. And this means that I feel conscious of myself even when I’m standing and rotating my shoulders. I feel awkward about taking up the space I need to fold my body. I hope that as I get more familiar with my colleagues, and my workmates, I will feel better about taking up the space my body needs.

The result of the last week on my brain has been incredible. I am not very thrilled about my speed (even though I did so much!!!!), but that’s a micro adjustment I will make in the course of knowing my client and their priorities better (and being able to decipher better what they say vs what they want) but physically I am exhausted. Apart from the minimum eight hours I am spending in office, I am spending two hours in commute, and at least two hours pre-and-post commute. The kittens are BIG MAD, and they have every right to be!

My life feels very full, and there’s barely any time for anything else I want to do outside of work. But it doesn’t feel hectic. It doesn’t feel overwhelming. This is what I signed up for, and it’s glorious.

Life

Outside of work? Mum had a birthday, and it was nice to spend time with her. I haven’t been able to head back to RC Tuesdays (and I don’t think I will anytime in the next month or two, big sads) but Tuesday evening dinners with the subset of RC folks has still happened this week and I’m grateful. Despite the packed schedule I’ve been able to have a conversation or three with friends. I continue to slowly make changes to the home. I still haven’t potted the plants I made naked ten days ago but it feels like I have a handle on the house.

Media Diet

My only media consumption has been albums listened to in the office or via commute.

Listening

I didn’t like the new Sabrina Carpenter on first listen, possibly because it was someone else’s car and I was distracted (and also there were skips). I deeply dislike looking at the album cover (enough ink has been spilt on the optics of it) but the album itself sounds decent to listen to and hilarious to sing along to.
The new Lola Young album I’m only F**king Myself feels like the breakup album I didn’t know I needed. If you only know her via her megahit single Messy, you won’t be disappointed with this latest offering - and you might even find that you recognise a bop or two in there.
Aly & AJ were Disney twins who appeared on the popular TV show Phil of the Future, as elder sisters to the eponymous Phil. As a preteen, I enjoyed their role in the quiet unassuming way it was impossible to enjoy Cyrus in Hannah Montana, or Gomez in Wizards of Waverly Place. As a teen, the lead single Potential Breakup Song off their album Insomniatic was perhaps the first instance of breaking the fourth wall (“This is the potential breakup song/Our album needs just one”) that I remember. Their latest EP, More Silver, feels like a decent outing with more country than punk influences compared to their usual, but a smooth 16 minutes nonetheless.

[Weeknotes] Week of September 13th, 2025

Sat, 13 Sep 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Work

This week I’ve spent most of my time at work architecting things I don’t understand. The work I’ve been doing has been either

Think very hard about how to best do X
Spend very little effort babysitting an agent implementing X

I have a very strange relationship with the code I’m “writing” now. I wrote a little about it earlier in the week.

The folks I’m contracting with are getting an office! I’ll be in the CBD area of Bangalore very often for the next few weeks, please DM me if you want to catch up in the area :)

I’m strangely excited about the office space. I’ve been enjoying the perks of remote work for a good 5 years now (thanks pandemic!) but I recognise that there are some kinds of work, and some kinds of teams, that just need to meet regularly and in person for ideas to be brought to life. I think it also allows for passive learning a lot more, and I’m so ready for it.

Life

It was my birthday yesterday, and it was an excellent ~~day~~ weekend. I (like most (depressed?) people?) have had a complicated relationship with my birthday, gift giving, obligations etc. Three years ago I met someone who insisted on not only giving gifts but also receiving them, and that forced me to confront those complicated feelings. Also shout out to adult friend groups for remembering birthdays but not going overboard.

This year, I did something radical (for me). I didn’t do a party. I wanted to spend time with my friends, but I didn’t want to plan, and follow up, and stress, and worry, and organise, and handle shit. So... I didn’t. Quite a few people asked me what I’m doing, and I told them I’d love to spend time with them but I wasn’t planning a party, they were welcome to my house but could they please bring their own dabba, figure out party planning etc?

No one figured out the party planning, but that’s because no one else is me, and that’s fine. Some people showed up, and it was excellent. Several people could not, and that was alright too! I felt very taken care of by people all around - and most importantly, I didn’t really base any of sense my of self worth on the events or outcome of this day. I also now know what it’s like to have 15 people in my house. Maybe next year I’ll throw a thirty person party :) but I know I’m not going to stress about it.

This weekend is also Maya Bazaar weekend! It’s a carnival filled with queer businesses, queer performances, and queer people strutting, trawling, or fading into the background. I did so much shopping! Some highlights - a handloom sari in a beautiful rare light purple, binders!!!!!!!!!!!!! from the very excellent Black Eagle Binders, a gorgeous cotton-linen tank dress with deconstructed element accents, a few gorgeous vases. Some things I wish I could have bought except no budget - corsets from Ashutosh who makes them from waste scraps, candles from Good Conscience Co. I feel very satisfied with my haul.

This has been a very queer week for me. Fighting some uhaul stereotypes, fighting some airhead stereotypes. Find myself being desired. It’s a heady feeling.

Health

I’ve had a cough left over from last week’s fever that just won’t go away. Sipping hot water regularly is the only thing that seems to help, so I’ve been doing that. I also have a fatigue cycle that’s led to me having some very strange working hours and sleep cycles. I deeply dislike this. I’ve slept at 5am 4 nights this week! to wake up at 8/9am and go about the rest of my day. I’m hoping the office routine is a forcing function to fix that.

Media Diet

Reading

I’ve read all the dramione, so now I’ve graduated to anypairs with Theo, and Pansy/Neville. I think I will soon be doing anypairs with Pansy.

Listening

King Princess’s new album is pretty decent!

Around the web

I paid very little attention to my feed this week :( more in the next one!