Week of Apr 11th, 2026

Work

Once again, something that was supposed to take two days to do took a whole week. Reasons? #

  1. It’s always the scope creep that gets you
  2. Give people who might have opinions a chance to cut scope when on a timeline
  3. Invest in a deploy process that takes not more than a few minutes. Ours currently takes 15 to 25; and it is a PAIN.
  4. We are building a product that contains llms doing turn-based conversations; some (local) e2e tests1 therefore necessarily have to be driven by llms (or so I thought, a few months ago). This process also takes about 20 minutes to fully go through. But I’m not giving myself a hard time about this. The whole world is still figuring out best practices around building products that contain LLMS2! I’m so excited to be on the cutting edge; I expect to bleed often.

Also wrote up some reminders to myself while working with LLMs. #

I’m very glad we’re moving to serverless. I’m sure this will come with its own issues that I will bemoan, but for now I am excited about #

  1. Not having to manage my own worktrees
  2. Having exactly reproducible builds
  3. Starting local in under thirty seconds
  4. Having deploys take not more than a minute (we will still have to contend with ci though)

Health

Good week for movement: We played pickleball sometime during the week, and I ran a 1k home after I got tipsy. I also went dancing! Not too intense and not for too long - we danced for maybe 3 hours, but my body is very happy about getting rid of the energy. #

Interesting week for alcohol: I think I drank 4 nights total? Very unlike me; but I didn’t question it, I just went with the flow. #

Bad week for sleep: nights of Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday I went to bed at about 5am and was up by 9.30am. #

Also a bad week for working hours: I basically worked all my waking hours on Thursday (and I was up all night that night, soo…) #

Threw up on thursday morning, which was the first night I didn’t sleep enough - my body basically pushed the panic button. Can’t remember the last time I threw up because headache (though maybe this blog contains details?). #

I truly don’t know how I am still functional. I was this close to leaving for home immediately, but: Goa has the potential to be restful in the way that Bangalore can’t even begin. So I decided to have my quiet weekend and my beach days. #

Life

God, I have underestimated how much I rely on the physical touch and everyday care of my loved ones on tough weeks to get me through it. After I threw up I was miserable. I would have simply flown home immediately if working with the team was not a commitment (and I didn’t have a client-facing timeline to meet). #

I spoke too much Hindi because everyone around me defaults to it. New words: #

Been thinking a lot of the line the resourcefulness of rot3. And also the line tere zubaan Urdu ki tarah4. One boy over 5 years ago wrote me a poem title The Urdu of you after one very intense 3 day date, and only now am I realising the layers in the verse in it. No, I will not be publishing it for you to read. Yes, you can see if you ask nicely. #

In the last two weeks, I ate #

  1. Dinner at Jamun: malai broccoli stole the show once again.
  2. Dinner at Jardin: almond something salad? Excellent entre, excellent concept.
  3. Brunch at Indiroom: A Brocc/water chestnut thing was very good.
  4. Dinner at Sublime: they weren’t kidding with that name. Beef Carpaccio. Rack of Lamb.
  5. Coffee Culture: Had the Barista pick out for me a batch of Columbian beans that he did infusion + gravity in the pourer for, to give it more body. Really enjoyed myself. On a different day, had a matcha tender coconut thing that was dumb af. But the servers are excellent and a doggo here chose me (!), so I will be going back.
  6. Dranks at Pablo’s: The mango espresso martini stole the show (but the other specials weren’t trying very hard). A mushroom thing was also excellent.

Other places: GShot (meh), Avo’s Kitchen (decent), Vinayak (pretty good!), Melt pizza (mixed bag), Baba au rhum (never again), Cream Choc (classic), Papa Oddy’s (homely), Cafe Continga (useful). #

I love the home and the life I have built for myself, but will I ever be able to escape that stifling sense of responsibility? Must I needs to travel to find it? #

I may be more open to social deception games. #

I discovered Daft Punk and had a small meltdown. Random Access Memories is so good? And Shruti has been saying this the whole time it seems, but I haven’t paid attention? Azan made me a whole ass playlist and I didn’t listen to it until now? Serves me right. Also, I might be an elektronika girlie?? #

Scared a colleague into hydrating when they were drunk. Oh noooo my Indiewebclub personality is leaking into work whatever shall I doooo #

Media Diet

lol, as if. #

Footnotes

  1. These e2e tests are different from evals. ↩ #

  2. This is a completely separate discussion from building products with the help of LLMs for code generation. ↩ #

  3. Thanks, Sohom, for the gift that is Becky Chambers ↩ #

  4. Thanks, Ankur and Calra, for painstakingly translating all the verse in Chaiyya Chaiyya for me! ↩ #

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