Yesterday was a bad day.
3h work - learning,
2h reading up about solid and the protocols surrounding it - pursuit of nerddom,
2.5h talking to some friends who came home about brand strategy - this was refreshing. I haven’t done this in a while. I want to do this for myself but have been procrastinating - doing it for someone else is far easier. I also enjoy helping non-amab people make more money.
But apart from that? Day was a wash. I cooked and didn’t eat what I made. Skipped dinner entirely. Finally gamed for 3hours instead, can’t remember the last time I did that. I didn’t have brain left to pursue on solid or will left to work. Perhaps the siren call of deadlines will be the kick in my pants I need today.

I spent 4 additional hours continuing to prune tabs. I had 400 tabs open total on my phone
~200 read later articles on various topics - ai, tech, culture, short fiction, essays
~150 landing pages - apps to research, understand, try out
~ 50 assorted pages - books to read later, courses to learn from, tasks to do, forms to fill.

I have at this point looked at every single thing! Haven’t opened the web pages of them all, but processed them in my head or out loud. I’ve done the tasks, filled the forms, triaged the libraries, added the categories to my bookmarking tool, added the blogs to my feed reader, updated my learning repository with coursework, sent the books to my Kindle… I am tired.

I was very happy with the work I was doing around going through it until two hours ago, when I picked up the 200 articles list of read later items. I should have stopped when it stopped sparking joy, but instead I was a completionist about it and now I’ve skipped dinner and made myself a little sick.

Going to log everything I do in time blocked chunks per day for the next few days, and log what their purpose is. I am constantly feeling both
- that I’m doing too much and too many kinds of things
- that I’m swimming in place, that I’m not getting anything done
Perhaps understanding where I’m spending my time will help me understand my implicit priorities, and will give me more data to budget better.

5.5h today - work. 2h of that was in a call. For learning and money, 2/5
2h - pruning the infinite tabs I have open on the phone. I have been feeling mentally cluttered, and wanted to get rid of digital detritus to help soothe that. I also have the desire to learn something new, and want to catalogue everything I want to learn so that I may pick what’s most interesting.
2h - chores/book/thinking. Self soothing because some anxiety came up.
1.5h - walking around doing chores in the neighborhood with a friend. Self-care.

TIL that to “left-shift” a problem means to surface the problem earlier in the workstream.

● catch the problem closer to the source
● more root cause solutions, less symptomatic solutions
● fun and profit

The metaphor comes from drawing a process as a left-to-right timeline:

requirements → design → implementation → review → testing → production → support

Crucially, this usage, while widely used in discussions of technical strategy, has nothing to do with bit shifting left.

Further Reading

1. New relic blog: https://newrelic.com/blog/observability/shift-left-strategy-the-key-to-faster-releases-and-fewer-defects
2. Sourabh Hirani’s talk at the Failure Modes meetup on Aug 8th, 2026

Jazz night was excellent. Measured thoughts on it later. I’ve had entirely too much work today, so I haven’t even been able to step out of work to buy milk! Until just now - all the agents have decided to be busy right now, so I’m going to take my ten minutes for chai.

My friend lives next to a market, and it is very happening. There’s places like this all over - thippsandra, chikpete, places in Pune - but I think what is unique about Delhi is that they’re all more planned - so the bazaar is happening in 4 concentric rectangles around a large park. And (perhaps because of the population density?) the incidence of these bazaars (and parks) are much higher here than elsewhere. I love it!

I went to get tea and the man running the shop wasn’t there, so a few regulars colluded to pour me some in the span of thirty seconds. The stall owner got yelled at for not filling the kettle before he left 😁

I’m in an area that is relatively planned - it was built up to accommodate refugees from the partition - so I’m told the cameraderie in the neighbourhood is higher. Most regulars have families who grew up here.

There are so many food places interspersed with the bazaar! I’m holding off on chaat until a friend accompanies me, but I am sorely tempted. I am also told that the standards for all kinds of food is just much higher here than in Bangalore. I feel like the service is definitely much better. At pianoman last night, in a packed house, when I asked for water, the waiter remembered that id asked for warm two hours ago and brought me more of the same. It was a good, surprising feeling.

Encountered the infamous privatisation of public roads right away. Couldn’t find the entrance to friend’s apartment so I went exploring through a gate. Came back to find the gate locked! Was told that the other gate is open so I went around. Interestingly, the “other road” was twice the size of the one I was on, but not actually marked on the gate. I wonder if they had to appeal to get the road unlisted or if gmaps just assumes that a road behind a gate is private andmust be unlisted? But I know of several private roads in small towns that have been listed too…

Anyway, off to a jazz night and then to see the sights. I was complaining about delhi exhibiting bangalore-ass behaviour (25min for 4km!) but it looks like the peaks for traffic in Delhi are much more contained. Got here in 14 minutes instead.

The average man in Delhi puts more effort into their appearance than the average man in Bangalore. And there’s more variety in the style too! The gentleman sitting opposite me looks very much like a smart late eighties hero.

The Delhi metro doesn’t have a ladies compartment?? Is this just because it’s the line from the airport? Wait, I’m trying to remember if there was a ladie’s compartment when I travelled elsewhere. Is segregation on the basis of gender like this a uniquely Indian thing?

Touchdown in Delhi! I’m very glad I picked a flight that let me take the metro from the airport. There’s something about airport <> metro stations the world over that look/feel the same. Taiwan, Singapore (?), Hong Kong, Delhi. It feels like a womb. A cold dark place underground that the sun can’t touch, where you’re safe. Then you board a train and are spit into the chaos of the world (city). Go forth, it seems to say.