Tag Archives: book

Feb 21, 2026: Weekly Notes 2026/08

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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

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  • 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.

September 6, 2025: Weekly Notes 2025/12

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  • I ordered https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/typescript-cookbook/9781098136642/ early this week. The packaging smelled like kerosene so I returned it. Today, I got a less-stinky replacement. Whey did they wrap the book in such a stinky paper! The book is great. Its my second book on TS after https://effectivetypescript.com/ Can’t wait to read it. Already referred to it on Enum which are pretty finicky in TS.
    • It’s very impressive how much typescript can do while maintaining such a great compatibility with JS.
  • I am more and more concerned about stability of OS on my laptop. Which is funny because during my college days, I’d spend whole week on installing different login manager, window manager and OSes. I had Gentoo on the lab desktop and a Puppy Linux pen-drive with me all the time. These days, if anything is slightly different than muscle memory, I gets annoyed.
  • I am very close to replace my OpenSUSE TW with Debian 13 today. I want a robust base. Appimage is pretty good these days and I don’t see any reason for using a bleeding edge OS. OpenSUSE is a great OS but I wish zypper ref was faster and parallel download is available a year ago.
    • I may have to install Windows on my laptop since a few software (like Notion) has no good app on Linux. Also some of the consultancy work I do needs Windows e.g. kernel mini-filter etc. Also the sound quality in meetings is not very great on Linux. Not really a fault of Linux when vendors don’t spend anything on Linux.
  • Are there startups where folks worked 9 to 5 and succeeded?

August 9, 2025: Weekly Notes 2025/08

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  • August 9, 2025 is Rakshabandhan which is a big festival. For many years, it has stopped being exciting for me, just like Holi and Diwali. When I was a kid, Rakhi used to be an exciting day. My three buas will visit us, stay over for a day or two and bring sweets and of course rakhi for their brother (my dad). The sweet of the season was ghevar. I don’t find that kind of ghevar here in Bengaluru. Perhaps you won’t find it in any big city unless you search for it. The sweets made in the villages and town are cheap. There is just not enough margin for shopkeepers/online platform to sell them.
  • I finally got a hard copy of one of my all-time favorite book. When I read this book last time a few years ago, I had no strong feeling about project management. This time the intentions are different. The reread is a very different experience.
  • https://pocketcasts.com/podcasts/9d4880a0-6a51-0139-3424-0acc26574db2/8c1458b3-3c4c-4be5-9429-5eb681d41172 was a good podcast. It resonated with me quite strongly.


    Ninety-five, [perhaps] 99% of the applications on the planet are and should remain monoliths. Full stop, end of story… I mean, I love distributed systems. I’ve lived in it for about 25 years, and, like, I just get joy from doing this kind of thing. And I read the papers, and, like, I find it super exciting… The vast majority of you should only be dragged kicking and screaming into distributed systems rather than starting from the beginning.” — Randy Shoup


    image.png -- A Classic Book: The Mythical Man-Month

  • I need to plan my weekends a bit more seriously. Last three weekends were not very productive.

  • I wrote a few (wip) design docs at work. Doing a good job at them is really hard and time-consuming! Totally agree with Writing a good design document and many comments on HN on this topic.

    > Think of a design document like a proof in mathematics. The goal of a proof is to convince the reader that the theorem is true. The goal of a design document is to convince the reader the design is optimal given the situation. The most important person to convince is the author. The act of writing a design document helps to add rigor to what are otherwise vague intuitions. Writing reveals how sloppy your thinking was (and later, code will show how sloppy your writing was).

August 2, 2025: Weekly Note 2025/07

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  • My energy is coming back after a couple of weeks of mild flu like symptoms. I still have occasional cough. I have 500km left to run to complete 1000km of run this year i.e. 5 months and 500km. Not bad!
  • This week was pretty boring, work-wise, routine CRUD stuff. Creating a UI that can CRUD a database properly turns out to be much harder than I expected. I am not yet sure what I did wrong. This maybe in the nature of the problem. I’ve selected a few courses/reading material on database design in hope to discover more. My working hypothesis is that it was inevitable because we simultaneously build and used the portal — waterfall model is from the days when web-development was mostly about this kind of work.
  • Software Radio had a good podcast https://se-radio.net/2025/07/se-radio-679-wesley-beary-on-api-design/ this week. It covered API design in many other episodes. Also learnt about Zalando RESTful API and Event Guidelines
  • I did a couple of interviews at work. One candidate was passable, but his CTC demands were way too high. Can’t blame a guy for trying!
  • Please keep your JD to the point and “boring”. If you add fluff, you invite fluff! I imagine a very few engineer who enjoys development getting excited about other things. You can mention anything else at the end. Especially if you don’t want to read unrelated things in a resume, keep them out of JD as well.
  • While reviewing a candidate profile, I ended up logging to leetcode after so many years. One this led to another, and I ended up doing a few problems this week. Not gonna lie, I thoroughly enjoyed it. I won’t be surprised if I end up spending more time there! That mean my project of writing a parser for netlist file will get delayed a bit.
  • Read A Group is Its Own Worst Enemy by Clay Shirky, an old classic. I learnt about this article from crell blog.