Category: Weekly Notes

Weekly Notes 2026/20

  • No rain this week either! And the raw mangoes that I plucked last week are still sitting pretty in basket.
  • [jj](https://steveklabnik.github.io/jujutsu-tutorial/) promises to be a simpler git. I played with it this week but I still don’t get it. I like what they are selling though!
  • At work, I got my first MR merged into the codebase! Totally hand-written code, AI was used for on-boarding and rubber-ducking.
  • I vibe-coded a moderate complexity project — a PCB router like freerouter. I doesn’t work. The UI is excellent and it looks like that it almost work but it doesn’t. Now every prompt is like shouting into the void, things changes but were not fixed at all.
  • The successful vibe-coded projects and web-pages are working fine and looks OK as long as you don’t read the code carefully! I usually don’t notice big issues when skimming but as I soon as I try to understand the code, …!
  • I am going to write write most of the code by hand since it is quite possible at my new job where the codebase is managed by folks that are older and more conservative than me. Each MR goes through 5 to 6 reviews and it is expected that I understand every bit of it. So far, I am not convinced that I can “understand” a AI written code by reading it faster than writing it myself.
  • I love that I can treat AI an average senior developer who is always available to answer anything about the codebase and never judge you. Moreover, you are not scared of asking the dumbest possible question. It can also be used to learn patterns in the code-vase without mastering git grep and other search tools. And get a decent review of your MR.
  • Another good use case: it can copy-edit your first ‘vomit’ draft. Please write you own text. Then ask AI to copy-edit your brain vomit. DO NOT violate the first principle of writing — spend more time writing a text than others are expected to spend reading it. AI can also be used to rewrite your text for different type of users, e.g., add a “KT” focused post for fellow maintainers that highlight “how the code-base story is changing with this MR” (don’t use this exact phrasing in your AGENTS.md).

Reading list

Weekly Notes 2026/19

  • No rain this week either!
  • At work, my week was spent learning codebase and getting access. I finally have required access. I am dealing with a very large Rust codebase which is going through architectural refactor. Interesting times ahead.
    • After working with claude for a month, copilot feels like a little under-performer. Good thing is that I can avoid using AI agent at job if I want to. copilot could not even do a rebase with main!
  • I’ve been learning a bit about investments e.g. PPF, SSY and other fixed rate schemes. HDFC bank keep updating its app. New iteration has more pixel porn, and more stupid notifications over functionality and it requires too much resource. Fortunately, I’ve to use it occasionally. BHIM upi app is also slow and mild mannered as late Mr. Atal Bihari Bajpayee.
  • I plucked a few raw mangoes from the tree outside. Perhaps make some pickle?!

Reading list

  • Why Async Rust is a great post on, well, “why async rust”. It covers a bit of history as well, and talks about the design choices.
  • Zero-cost futures in Rust — why golang like “green threads” were not chosen for Rust. Some interesting bits from the post.
    Things really start getting interesting with futures when you combine them. There are endless ways of doing so, e.g.:
    • Sequential composition: f.and_then(|val| some_new_future(val)). Gives you a future that executes the future f, takes the val it produces to build another future some_new_future(val), and then executes that future.
    • Mapping: f.map(|val| some_new_value(val)). Gives you a future that executes the future f and yields the result of some_new_value(val).
    • Joining: f.join(g). Gives you a future that executes the futures f and g in parallel, and completes when both of them are complete, returning both of their values.
    • Selecting: f.select(g). Gives you a future that executes the futures f and g in parallel, and completes when one of them is complete, returning its value and the other future. (Want to add a timeout to any future? Just do a select of that future and a timeout future!)

Weekly Notes 2026/18

  • Two mild shower this week! Enough to clean my car and trees but not enough to clean roads. Still waiting for a proper rain.
  • I’ve to tweak my working setup quite a bit this week. I am working from home at my current role. I don’t/can’t use work laptop for personal stuff. I bought a KVM switch to share the keyboard, a few peripheral devices and screen with both work and home computer. It worked almost flawlessly. On macos, you may have to ensure that KVM is powered either via one of peripheral or via dedicated usb-c cable!
  • I also got a basic Yubi key (finally). I’ve using bitwarden and Zoho Vault my password manager. I prefer Zoho Vault since I can easily afford its paid plan. Zoho Vault doesn’t do well with Firefox profiles. This key is working fine except for GitHub which is refusing to save passkey to this key! Not sure why!
  • I’ve been thinking what side project to do this month. The AI has taken all the fun out of writing code. I hope this is temporary else I am in for a tough time. There hardly any other thing that I enjoy more than writing code with my clothes on. Well, hiking, cycling and cooking are fun but I can’t do them whole day!
  • I’ve been feeling a little low on energy for past few moths. Finally talked to a doctor. Lets see what comes out of my blood tests.
  • The income tax portal still not open for filing ITR. It says it will open “soon” but doesn’t specify dates! Some Reddit post claims that it will open by June 1, 2026! Though I find income tax dept websites and UPI infrastructure to be world class, they can be a little better at communicating changes.

Reading list

Weekly Notes 2026/17

  • I spent this week on-boarding at Toyota Connected India (TCIN) Bangalore office. At TCIN, you are expected to spend 5 days a month in office, either in one go or spread across entire month e.g. 1 day a week. My team prefer to gather in Bangalore office for a week and this was the week. So I went to office all 5 days to spend face-time with each of them even when most on-boarding call was from Chennai office.
  • The on-boarding week is relaxed but packed: meetings with HR, Admin, Finance, Legal etc. Each of them spent approximately an hour with me. Also at least one meeting per day with my team-mates on KT and codebase. I also get to see the hardware that runs Toyota dashboard.
    • TCIN office also has lunch inside the office and that solves a lot of problems for me. I can leave early to avoid traffic without having breakfast and have a light breakfast in office.
    • My experience at TCIN is pleasantly different than my last on-boarding at Veeam where I was mostly on my own to figure things out! I didn’t even know I had an HR at Veeam, he didn’t meet!
  • Ookie switched to a new school this week which has better activities and communication patterns.
  • Rains are still absent and temperature is soaring in Bengaluru. I hope mangoes will be sweater! Every year, in this month, I read about Bengaluru climate and weather and then forget all about it later. What causes rains in April? Returning Monsoon timelines?

Weekly Notes 2026/16

  • Very dry week. No sign of rain. The temperature is high and there is no forecast of rain either. I am hoping for next week to be bit cooler.
  • I gave a talk at a student club at APU.
  • I am joining Toyota Connected India next week. Pretty excited about writing Rust in safety critical systems.
  • I am getting a better grip on AI tools. I am still conflicted if I should continue to use them or go back to good old ways. Lets wait for a few more weeks.

Reading List

Weekly Notes 2026/15

  • First two weeks of April are usually the hottest weeks in Bangalore. Its less dry than the 2025 but only one light shower. The mangoes outside my house are growing nicely though.
  • Its been three weeks since I’ve written code by hand (except for a few tweaks). I am using Claude and sometimes qwen cli. Claude is definitely much better but qwen is quite capable at well scoped tasks.
  • I don’t think AI is replacing programmers anytime soon but sure making me dumber. It is becoming harder to focus, read docs and engage with a linear conversation. Also when I ran out of the credits, I had to push myself to open my editor and look at the code and I found it alarming.
    • My TLDR summary of AI is the following. It generates pig-iron and call it steel. You can build a fun Choo-Choo train with it over the weekend but please don’t build a proper train with it that carries hundreds of people. But can you resist?

Reading list

Weekly Notes 2026/14

  • For last three weeks, I am doing vibe coding for almost everything. It is helping me understand its power and limitation. I feel like everyone is right about AI. This reminds me a saying about India, “Whatever you can rightly say about India, its opposite is equally true.”.
  • Ookie is at her mama place for last two weeks. She will be back this Sunday. She is having very good time in Toranagallu.
  • I vibe coded an app https://github.com/dilawar/trim-dead-area to trim dead areas from a video (auto-crop to most interesting parts). It started off very fast but tweaking is extremely hard with mixed results. Learning about ffmpeg was a joy using Claude. More here https://dilawar.in/2026/vibe-coding-a-gui-to-auto-crop-dead-zones-from-a-video/.

Weekly Notes 2026/13

Growing mangoes in my neighborhood
  • The mangoes outside my home are growing bigger nicely. It’s finally nice to see fruits grow in the neighborhood.
  • It was a tough month at work. After thinking hard about my team work culture, my interaction with my manager, and his un-willingness to find me a new team (unless I am his relative), and consulting two of my manager friends, I decided to submit resignation.
    • I had a narrow escape at Bellary road while coming back from office. That also significantly contributed to the decision.
    • They are also moving office to a new location and that uncertainty also contributed to the decision.
  • I had another interview just after I submitted my resignation. You should not do both things at the same day, please! It went horribly wrong.
  • One Microsoft interview was in pipeline. I failed the fourth round (I guess). I am not keep on giving more interviews this year.
  • I am planning to do independent consultant work. I have already have two clients and it should be sufficient to get started. Lets see how it evolves.

Reading list

Weekly Notes 2026/12

  • All rounds of Toyota interviews are finally over. The HR discussion lasted 90 minutes. I enjoyed most of it.🤞
    • And they rejected! Apparently I am over qualified. Didn’t they know from the resume? The reason is perhaps something else — a wrong pause between sentences! I was under the impression that things are going very well.
  • Early this week, a light shower. The leaves of the mango tree outside my house are cleaned! It wasn’t strong enough to clean the dust from the road and wash my parked car. Two days later, we had a good enough rain that washed my car. The mangoes on the tree outside my home are big enough to pickle :-). This year March is not as hot as the last one. Already a few showers.
  • Due to LPG shortage, the restaurant near my workplace is serving a few items, mostly dosa, tea, coffee! At least they are open. But only a fraction of people are working. Everyone pays for the war expect for people who started it?
  • At work, use of AI tools are now compulsory. I am learning to use them, begrudgingly!
    • I already have a big win. I was given .NET6 codebase with empty readme file — a language I never wrote. I asked Claude to act as a staff engineer/product manager and walk me though the codebase and quiz me later. The purpose of walk-through: I can contribute to the codebase. It did a much much better job than a co-worker would have done. It saved me so many pings and emails.
  • I learnt more about AI tooling yesterday from a talk by a coworker. This blog post was also pretty helpful explaining how context window size impacts the quality of response.
    • When the context is filled, the quality of response suffers. The context size is typically 20,000 to 1,000,000. An archive paper is roughly 10,000 tokens. So its not very large!
    • Either you drop some of the context (loose information) or do compaction (summarize the context) and loose nuance. While compacting, pinning important information helps. Perhaps claude is already doing all that. For a general purpose chatbot, I see why this could be a hard problem to solve. A single word may have the most nuance.
  • In other news, uv, ruff and ty joins OpenAI. These tools are created by Astral. Many AI companies have been buying tooling (especially cli tooling).

Weekly Notes 2026/11

  • Tim Hoare has died. I re-read his Turing acceptance speech. Following paragraph felt poignant.
    “….At first I hoped that such a technically unsound project would collapse but I soon realized it was doomed to success. Almost anything in software can be implemented, sold, and even used given enough determination. There is nothing a mere scientist can say that will stand against the flood of a hundred million dollars. But there is one quality that cannot be purchased in this way– and that is reliability. The price of reliability is the pursuit of the utmost simplicity. It is a price which the very rich find most hard to pay.”
  • I had less than ideal on-boarding at new job. I was reminded some aspects of “Indian Workspace” I often hear people complaining on Reddit. Most of the things are fine but folks don’t care about notification sound being loud, talking next to you or having long and loud meetings. Moreover, everything lives in people head, not in documents. You must have meetings for doting ‘i’ and crossing ‘t’. Daily standup can last one hour!
  • Bengaluru has flower season. Its a pity that garbage on the road kills the view that could be spectacular. The GKVK campus road is blossoming.
  • Ookie can easily make 3-5 words phrases like “how about this one”. She is now 25 months old.
Ookie is 1 month old on March 17, 2024. These flowers were collected from a neighboring tree.
  • It was a pie day this week and I didn’t do anything. Not a single friend left in Bengaluru who reminded me of or would get excited about it. Last year, we had apple pies at 3:14pm.

Weekly Notes 2026/10

  • US and Israel are killing children again, in a different country this time! Probably doing its standard “decapitate and delegate”.
    • The way English can be used for propaganda is just amazing. This language has so many rich patterns for making horrible things sound normal. This is now seeping into other languages as well especially among IT savvy politicians.
    • NY Times reporting on Gaza where I often user words “young adults under 18” rather than children to refer to deceased children, is not a lone example but serves as an excellent example. You can’t find those screenshot easily using US based search engines.
  • I deleted my ChatGPT account yesterday. You should too.
  • This week, I traveled to work 3 times! It is quite helpful actually despite hating it. I felt getting back in rhythm in sync with the outside world. My energy levels are slightly better.
    • On the first day at work, I planned to take an auto/taxi and read something on the way to office but had tonwait 10-15 minutes for ride to arrive with multiple cancellation. So I started using my scooty.
      • This weekend, I gave scooty for servicing. It’s been 5 years and scooty is only serviced thrice! Only 3000 Km on it so far.
    • Traffic is typical of Bengaluru. But if I leave early around 7:30 am and comes back around 3:45 pm, avoid worst of the traffic. Yet evening traffic is taking its toll — I’ve been inhaling a lot of fumes. I bought some N95 masks this week. Let’s see how it goes from next week.
  • I read some articles by M. Krishnan again (published in Nature’s Spokesman) while traveling to work one day. Lovely stuff!
  • I need to install some wooden slabs on the wall. Got better drills and I was also out of wall-plugs. Ordered!

Reading list

  • More Cows, More Wives . Some interesting excerpts
    • Margaret Mead’s 1928 book Coming of Age in Samoa depicted a society that regarded ‘lovemaking as the pastime par excellence’ and where young women aimed to ‘defer marriage through as many years of casual love-making as possible’. At the same time Bronislaw Malinowski’s 1929 The Sexual Life of Savages in North-Western Melanesia described trial marriage among the Trobriand Islanders, where young lovers would live together for a few years in the bukumatula – the bachelors’ and unmarried girls’ house. If this relationship went well, it would lead to marriage, but it could also easily be dissolved. In other words, it resembled modern dating.
    • In contemporary Western settings, things seem to have changed once again. Many people are monogamous and have children with a single partner, much like our agricultural forbearers. But others divorce and remarry, similar to hunter-gatherers. Young couples often live together before deciding whether to commit, like the trial marriages of the Samoans. True polygamy is usually illegal, yet some rich divorced or widowed men can attract young second wives, who can bear them a new set of children. Ethical non-monogamists are a growing and vocal minority. To an outsider, it may seem like we have no marriage system at all.
  • The Normalization Of Corruption In Organizations is now 23 years old! The corruption in India has only grown worse. Folks have become quite numbs to it. There is hardly any anti-corruption movement. It felt very different during last Congress government which lost to an anti-corruption movement. Though Arvind Kerjiwal appropriated to his own gain (He is an IITian, they do that!), it felt that country is on the right track to call-out and demonize corruption. All seems to have changed now. Its was always typical of fellow Indian to suggest that they can’t survive without corruption since prices of everything is so high. Lately, I’ve been noticing many have started “valorize” corruption as well.

    Abstract
    Organizational corruption imposes a steep cost on society, easily dwarfing that of street crime. We examine how corruption becomes normalized, that is, embedded in the organization such that it is more or less taken for granted and perpetuated. We argue that three mutually reinforcing processes underlie normalization: (1) institutionalization, where an initial corrupt decision or act becomes embedded in structures and processes and thereby routinized; (2) rationalization, where self-serving ideologies develop to justify and perhaps even valorize corruption; and (3) socialization, where naıve newcomers are induced to view corruption as permissible if not desirable. The model helps explain how otherwise morally upright individuals can routinely engage in corruption without experiencing conflict, how corruption can persist despite the turnover of its initial practitioners, how seemingly rational organizations can engage in suicidal corruption and how an emphasis on the individual as evildoer misses the point that systems and individuals are mutually reinforcing.
  • (Almost) Every infrastructure decision I endorse or regret after 4 years running infrastructure at a startup · Jack’s home on the web is a good summary of various tools and solutions you are likely to encounter while developing SaaS solutions these days.
  • Nobody Gets Promoted for Simplicity was hot on HN last week.

Feb 21, 2026: Weekly Notes 2026/08

Weekly notes 2026/07

We celebrated Ookie’s second birthday on Feb 17. I found an excellent place for cake, Chiris Patisserie. Pretty costly, Rs. 1700 per kg but totally worth it! For birthday food, I ordered food from Chetty’s Corner from the neighborhood. Decent food. The kids loved the pizza and burgers. As expected, only folks who stay in the neighborhood showed up. Anu sent some gifts for daycare — rainbow pencils and pouches for kids. People shouldn’t send food to the daycare on birthdays especially chocolate or other sugary stuff. I don’t like Ookie eating chocolate at daycare at this age!

Ookie’s second birthday.
  • I had a mild runny nose the whole week! It was very hard to sit at the desk and do any work for a long time.
  • This Friday was my last day at Dognosis. I’ll probably engage with them as consultants occasionally. Before starting my next job, I’ll spend some days at Puducherry this week. I’ll be meeting Somya, her husband and possibly a few more friends. It will be the first time both Kaalu and Ookie will both see the beach and the sea.
  • I am collecting reading materials to prepare for my new job. Mostly about microservices, API design and related DevOps.
  • Someone from datameet group cleaned up data of the Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS). It is available at https://india-plf-survey.pages.dev/. The average earnings are still pretty bad <Rs 20,000 per month! Much touted IT/Software doesn’t even break into of professions that employ more than 0.3% of workforce.
Software/IT doesn’t even show up in the top contributor (>=0.3%) to employment in India.

Feb 14, 2026: Weekly Notes 2026/07

Weekly notes 2026/07

  • My second round at Fortanix was a failure!
    • It was a medium leetcode question to be solved inside a browser. Yes, a leetcode for senior roles and that too in a browser! I mostly use vim with a buttload of plugins. Maybe I should start asking if leedcode in browser would be used for evaluation and just say no.
  • Review article of a very interesting book. Here is a mindmap from Reddit.
  • An old friend, Somya Mani and her husband John, came to visit Monday morning. Flight from Vienna to Bengaluru took almost half day and both of them super tired. Both slept after having breakfast. I got busy with office meeting and they went to their hotel. We may have dinner sometimes this week.
  • The engineering workflow that I designed for my current employer might get adopted this week. One of the founders is very interested in it and we refined it over the weekend. Tomorrow I need to sell it to the team. Ideally I should practice the presentation. I will if I get some time in the morning before I drop Ookie to the day care.
  • Many of the street lights in my neighborhood don’t have a proper switch. I’d loved a light sensor based but a manual one is also fine since labor is cheap. But the current way is monumentally bad and pretty dangerous. 
  • I opened account on to learn trading! My niece has been sending me screenshots of how much he is making every day. I made 2500 in half an hour from 10k investment and lost 8k next day. This platform requires constant attention which I don’t have. I’ll probably learn a few more things with very little amount of money and move on. Its not for me. It is pretty addictive though.

Feb 07, 2026: Weekly Notes 2026/06

  • I am getting frustrated with a car mechanic for not fixing my Tata Nano’s gearbox. It has been with him for four months now. Unless I call him, he doesn’t provide any updates. I ended up pinging the person who recommended him who is a genuinely a very warm and nice guy!
    • Apparently (he told me), all car mechanics do this. They never proactively update you unless you ask.
    • He reassured me that the mechanic is very good at what he does and that the car should be fixed in a few more weeks.
    • I felt bad about involving him.
  • My impression of the mechanic is that he’s a good guy and understands what he’s doing, but he doesn’t keep me in the loop.
  • I’ve started migrating away from Notion to other open-source or self-hosted tools. For example, WordPress (this site) is now my platform for blogging. My notes are in Joplin now. I still need to find a good tool for to-do, web clippings, and task management—perhaps Zoho?!
  • Yesterday, we went to Aditya’s place to meet a common friend. The “Hound of Madurai” was in town and feeling extremely lovey-dovey about meeting old friends. Why not? It took only 90 minutes to drive 20 km.
    • Kaalu was so tired after the whole “meeting friends” affair that she slept the entire night in one position. Usually, she keeps changing her sleeping spots throughout the night!

20 km in just 90 minutes. Driving in Bengaluru!
  • I have interviews scheduled for a senior role early next week at Fortanix. I had a manager screening yesterday which I think went well. I felt alive talking about security and the SaaS services built around it. I liked that they started with manager screening for a senior role. So that we both could easily decide if we want to invest further time in the interview process. I had to say no to the HP Enterprise interview because they start with a technical interview first and I am not feeling motivated to prepare for it without knowing what their plans are!
  • I bought this saw for pruning branches. It’s a good saw—very sharp. The pole is quite long and the overall build is fine, but it could be much better. In particular, the grip on the loosening/tightening joints isn’t great. The saw also didn’t come with a safety cover.
  • I used it to cut most of the lantana trees growing in an empty plot next to my house and trimmed some branches from the mango and Jamun trees that were blocking light. My neighbor also enjoyed trimming branches that were blocking his security camera’s view. All in all, a good purchase.

February 01, 2026 – Weekly Notes

  • I spent last month (Jan 2026) interviewing and job hunting. I have one offer that feels good, and I may receive another by the end of this week. I also have one interview left that starts next week.
  • I really enjoyed Veeam’s interview process. The Toyota interview went great as well. I was a bit disappointed with Cloudflare’s process—I was expecting them to reschedule after I missed the second round.
  • Kaalu is now officially overweight. She weighs 25 kg; her ideal weight is 20 kg. Dieting doesn’t work since the whole neighbourhood feeds her, and she eats competitively outside.
  • I’m thinking of migrating from Notion to WordPress. Notion is great at what it does, but the publishing options are less than ideal. I’m also reluctant to pay $12 per month for it. They should bring back the $5 personal plan! It feels like they’re moving more toward enterprise users.

January 10, 2026: Weekly Notes 2026/02

  • I’m trying to set up an engineering workflow at Dognosis (my current employer). After brainstorming with ChatGPT, I ended up with a template: Engineering Workflow Rhythm for a 20–100 Person Startup.
  • I clearly spelled out what I was looking for in the prompt—and what I didn’t want:
    • The first thing in the week is a short meeting; everyone should know they’ll work independently for the rest of the week.
    • Every Friday, we review work, update status, and report to stakeholders.
    • During the week, no cat herding. Each engineer acts like a professional and is treated like one (I don’t ask for updates).
    • Write before talking. Every meeting must have a written agenda.
  • I did the same exercise with Gemini. The results were not to my liking. ChatGPT’s responses were short, pointed, and—most importantly—felt implementable. Gemini, on the other hand, used language I don’t usually hear from good engineers. It added phrases that would make a PHB from Dilbert proud.
  • You may also like this post:Small projects, clear scope | Swizec Teller, along with his other posts on related topics.
  • I used to think std::move was C++’s way of implementing Rust-like move semantics. Turns out it’s another confusing monstrosity created by the committee that doesn’t do what it sounds like (f**king RAII?). std::move doesn’t move anything: A deep dive into value categories. Academic-type people should never be in charge of a language—or anything used by many people. Get a few normal programmers onto the committee, you C++ 😡.
  • 💡 Suddenly there’s a lot of incoming interest in my resume. Either the job market is heating up, or my resume is finally making sense to people. I spent over three months tweaking it (revisiting once a week). Talking to AI about my resume helped a lot.
  • 💬 I gave a few interviews this week.
    🚗 Toyota Connected is almost done. It’s Rust + firmware + software-defined vehicle work, which I’m pretty excited about. The interview itself was very pleasant: the technical team asked relevant questions and were very friendly. I felt comfortable after the first five minutes and didn’t suffer from brain fog.
  • Another interview was with a seemingly good company working in the secure computation domain. Senior leadership described the role one way, while the interviewer described it differently. The interviewer was very focused on dotting i’s and crossing t’s on a LeetCode question—and asked me to write code in Google Docs! I’m not really sure what he wanted to see. You meet every kind.
  • I had a first round with Cloudflare. I applied for a zero-trust and data-protection–focused role. They have the network, they have the edge—I wouldn’t be surprised if they start offering secure enclaves and other services where “trust” is explicitly computed.
  • A few surprising moments in the first round: I wasn’t expecting a technical screening but rather a discussion about the role and engineering problems with a manager. It turned out I’m in their general hiring pipeline, which means a phone screen by a manager first. Perhaps I’ll talk to the relevant team later. Not great, but not a deal-breaker.
  • I went through the round and felt I did average. I said a few very dumb things and had some brain fog. We finished early, which I really liked. +1 to the manager for keeping the agenda tight and being professional. I wasn’t very surprised when I was moved to the next round.
  • After that, I did something embarrassing. I made an off-by-one error in real life and ended up missing my second round 😢. I scheduled it for early Saturday morning (00:00 hrs) but marked my desk calendar for Sunday morning. Strong DND settings on both my phone and desktop made it impossible to error-correct—there was no persistent notification. Very unprofessional on my part, though I’m not mad at DND at all.
  • I sent an apology to the interviewer and asked to reschedule, but I’m not sure if this error is recoverable. Let’s see.
  • Three more opportunities are in the pipeline—all incoming interest, and all pretty interesting: hardware/algorithm development for space satellites, Windows security kernel development, and a data backup and protection SaaS.

January 3, 2026: Weekly Notes 2026/01

December 27, 2025: Weekly Notes 2025/28

  • This will be the last weekly notes this year. I started writing them this year about 29 weeks ago.
  • I’ve been living by “If I am not doing it the rest of my life, I am doing it a few times” (professionally). Let’s see how it stands up to the midlife crisis I am supposed to get in a few years.
  • I had to drive to Hyderabad and back to Bangalore this week because of a semi medical emergency. Kaalu The Fifth did well in the car. My No access also did very well. It gave me ~19 km/l mileage on highway. Driving experience was much better this time. This time I drove 90-100 km/hr speed during night without any issue. Though I prefer day-time driving, but two-wheeler and auto-drivers make life miserable on the highway since they can come from any-side anytime.
  • 🏃🏾I missed three days of running because of driving, but I’ll manage to finish 1000km in a couple of days 🎉.
  • Three months ago, I won a 1 gram gold coin from Spinny when I bought a car from them. But it’s not enough motivation to drive to Tanishque store. I won’t be surprised if I won’t collect it in time. Why can’t these people just transfer the money! Who has time to run around for gold?
  • I used to complain to my co-founder about something similar a lot, who’d have preferred to hire someone “senior” who doesn’t use their hands on the code-base. It’s really sad how many “senior” folks you meet during interviews who really don’t really “work on” the project they “manage” or “lead”.

December 20, 2025: Weekly Notes 2025/27

Last week I did not write my weekly note December 13, 2025: Weekly Notes 2025/26

  • 🏃🏾 I am well on track to finish my 1000 km run this year.
  • Some good reads over last couple of weeks.
  • 📗 Misconceptions about rust lifetime was a good read.
  • I need to read Good conversations have lots of doorknobs a few more times.
  • Found author’s draft on domain driven design Microsoft Word _ Book_AfterFinal_doc – Evans03.pdf
    . Domain Driven Design brings team communication to the center. I am a sucker for any idea that improves communication across teams.
  • 🤯 TIL that you can use either public or private key to encrypt/decrypt message.
    I used to think only private key can be used for encryption. I know, I know, LOL indeed.
    Since certificates contain the public key of a CA, you can decrypt encrypted messages sent from them using it.

December 6, 2025: Weekly Notes 2025/25

  • 💻I migrates some more code to HTMX — really enjoying working with HTMX.
  • 🔐I was curious if anyone is using Probably Approximately Correct Learning (PAC Learning,
    PAC: Valiant84.pdf ) in cyber-security. Its not yet mainstream but some folks have been proposing it as an alternative to classical ϵδ
    ϵδ-differential privacy
    [2210.03458] PAC Privacy: Automatic Privacy Measurement and Control of Data Processing (summary in
    Trip report: ‘CWI Lectures on Secure Computation’ (Amsterdam, NL) | Roseman Labs Tech Blog). I liked it! PAC gives you lower bounds for free so in many situation, you don’t have to assume or compute the worst-case scenario youself which are great for proving guarantees.
  • 🦀 I also bookmarked 🦀 Patterns for Defensive Programming in Rust | corrode Rust Consulting​
  • 📝Found a another good piece by No access E.W.Dijkstra Archive: The undeserved status of the pigeon-hole principle (EWD 1094)
  • 📕Beej has a new book Beej’s Guide to Learning Computer Science