Weekly Notes 2026/35

  • I successfully ran Kodagu Marathon 2026! I wasn’t sure if I will be able to finish it this year. I ran my last half-marathon three years ago. I have been feeling completely out of shape for last couple of years: my running pace had been abysmal. But not only I finished the half-marathon but beat my PR by 2 minutes! I should have gotten a hair cut before the run.
    • My manager at Toyota finished with me 💪🏼! He helped me save at least 5 minutes. I saw him after half-way return point. We ran last 4 km together. Fun times!
    • My labmate and friend from Ph.D. times Adiya and his wife Chinmayee joined us for this half-marathon. He finished it in about 2 hours despite not in best of his form. We get to meet his 1.5y old daughter.
    • Kaalu had really good time at homestay near Gonikoppal! She got to eat fresh chicken and eggs which she gulped down like a hungry monster. The homestay manager was extremely pet-friendly and he took extra care of Kaalu (I say almost spoiled her).
  • Kodagu felt very dry this year. The local manager at homestay told me that there is hardly any rain this year. When driving past Brahmagiri range, I noticed no water streams which is a common sight during monsoon time. The Irfu waterfall had very little water.
    • We couldn’t go the waterfall since they don’l allow dogs there. So we played downstream where people come to wash clothes! Ookie loved time in the stream and Kaalu was shirt-scared of deep and noisy water, as usual. But this time, she stood inside the water.
  • Near Mysore, we found a pet-friendly cafe called Queens Coffee. It is ran mostly by women. It had all the good vibes — clean, colours that are easy on eyes, clean toilets, and very pet-friendly. If you pass-by, please visit and support.
  • On lobte.rs, I was complaining about recent increase in LWN subscription prices and how declining Rupee has made it harder for me to continue with “starving hacker” plan. One kind soul on internet bought me a subscription gift. I felt guilty accepting the gift since I can surely afford it. But I didn’t want to threw cold water at the kind gesture. So I accepted the gift whole-heartedly and I donated $35 (starving hacker plan that I used to subscribe) to PARI (https://ruralindiaonline.org).
  • I did some maintenance work for a few FOSS projects especially Smoldyn. The cmake build system major version is 4.x and pybind11was updated to 3.x series. Removed Cygwin support from build system since smoldyn can built on Windows now.
  • I’ve resigned from Toyota this month. I am service notice period. I’ll be joining Progress software from October 1, 2025 as a Principal Engineer on habitat/chef team.

June 29, 2025: Weekly Note 2025/02

  • For the last couple of weeks, Ookie has been going to a day-care for a few hours. She gets to play with other kids there. “Playing with other kids” has been the reason for sending her there. After a few days of fuss, she now seems to be enjoying her time there. My very friendly neighbors think that she is too young to go to day-care!
  • Somehow I managed to run 400 km so far! My pace has been slowest. I still need to complete 600 km in the second half of the year.
    • I’ve started paying for RUNALYZE. It is nice that more and more services are offering purchase-parity plan for subscription for Indian users. I’ve been using jonasoreland/runnerup: A open source run tracker for a long time to sync my runs with Runalyze/Strava. One dollar=Rs 100, but it is roughly Rs 30 in purchase parity, so you have to reduce the pricing by third for Indian users! If you are doing this, I’d be happy to work for you for a purchase parity adjusted salary😛.
  • I added another small tool that generates QR codes with a logo. You can find it here https://tools.maxflow.in/tool/qrcodes.
  • I had a minor meltdown at work 😭. Not proud of it. It’s hard to keep cool when many co-workers write almost empty email without a subject/body to report bugs. I’ve been trying to get them to use GitLab issues for a few months now. Either, I need to disengage from work a little at this workplace, or find a place where co-workers are adults and not only they come to work but also know how to structure and plan it.
  • I read Programming as theory building : Naur.pdf and found it illuminating. I am pretty sure I’d have yawned reading it some 10 years ago. This article — written a year before I was born — put “programmers” at the center of software development. I don’t think I can reduce this article to soundbites. Do read. I learnt about this article from HN.

naur-prog-as-theory-building.png -- Naur - Programming as theory building
– I wrote another small utility to remind me that a LWN article has finally become open. I am not able to pay for LWN subscription due to HDFC Bank related issues and I forget to revisit the link when it is open. Perhaps I can rent a VPS in this money and read the article two weeks later?! LWN is a great resource and I feel bad for not paying for it though!
– My Wallet from Budgetbakers is no longer syncing with HDFC Bank. Their support is working on the issue. HDFC seem to have changed their login flow again! My another bank, DBS Bank, doesn’t have saving account API🤣. I opened account here thinking that they are “tech-savvy”!
– I’ve been thinking about hiring a lot these days. At my current company which is an early stage startup, they have been struggling to hire a dev for the last 5 months! I was part of a few interviews — some went well and most were meh, but not able to hire for 5 months feels a bit extreme!
– Both mango trees in my street has mangoes this year! Here is my daughter Ookie playing with her friend. Fortunately, like many streets in Bengaluru, this street is a dead end and have no traffic.

signal-2025-06-28-192959_002.jpeg -- Ookie trying to convince her co-worker to use Rust while Kalu the fifth doing her stuff