Tag Archives: tata-nano-xta

September 27, 2025: Weekly Notes 2025/15

According to https://plantaddicts.com/are-lantana-poisonous/ and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x0Ecq1O_lzM and seeds and other parts as well are poisonous.
- This plant is now ubiquitous — its everywhere in my neighborhood. Kaalu likes to eat its leaves. Ookie is fond of its green berries. Now, I am alarmed and thinking of cutting down most of them in my neighborhood.
Replacing the AMT unit of my Tata Nano XTA will cost me :rupee:1,30,000 which is a bit crazy. A local mechanic Gajendra (Vinayaka Motors) seems to found a cheaper solution which is affordable. Let’s see how it goes.
- Nano is getting a bit smaller for me now. I usually travel with 3 people (including me), one medium size dog and luggage. Nano is barely enough. I am looking for spacious car with good safety rating. Looks like Tata Tiago may be a good candidate.
- I did some browsing on https://www.spinny.com/ and OLX for comparing prices of second hand cars. Spinny is a good place to buy a car but for selling. I’ll probably sell Tata Nano XTA using the mechanic and buy one from Spinny. I am still not buying a new car!
I am at age when the proverb “can’t teach an old new tricks” is more and more applicable. Also working with a different age group is becoming a challenge since weights on values changes with age. The young can spend 10x time on the a task due to bad planning or execution, redo is four time, waste a lot of time and still declare it a “win”. I guess it is what is it 🤷🏾.
How can you judge a programmer from her resume? Its not hard.
- Lemma: How you do anything is the way you do everything!
- Means carelessness you show in your resume will also be present in the code you are going to write. If your resume is careless written, has typos, and handing sentence, your code will have similar bugs. It shows you don’t care about your work!
- If your resume is verbose, disjointed and have bad formatting, means your code will also be similar. It also shows, you don’t think about “why”. If you write and send your resume without asking “why” this resume for this job, you are going to do the same thing at job. You will write code without every asking “why”. If may be fine for some people!
- I personally give a lot of weight to formatting and presentation, perhaps as much as I give to the content. If you don’t format and layout your resume neatly, that means you are not into UX or DX. Working with you is going to be a lot of pain. You code will probably work but a few folks will be able to read and understand it. You lack empathy! Be kind to your reader. Make your resume easy on eyes — pick right font, use non-hostile layout and keep is short.

September 20, 2025: Weekly Notes 2025/14

The automatic gear shift of my car Tata Nano XTA is bricked. My local mechanic at Carz Tec made it worse. Today, I managed to send it to the nearby Tata Service Center Adishakti Cars using TVS Roadside Assistant service.
- The first person TVS Roadside Assistant assigned the ticket didn’t show up at my place. He would never tell me the time. He supposed to come at 5pm. But at 11:30pm he was still 20 km away but claiming to be at the shared location😠. Finally they arranged someone who can read the map.
- Install a tow hook in your car and/or find out where it is. Also keep a small cable with you.
- I still don’t have experience with Adishakti Cars. Let’s see how it goes.
I found BBC Radio 4 – In Our Time podcast. So far, I am really enjoying it. I listened to a few old podcasts. Work in 20th century was excellent. I like the soft spoken host and his style. He invites a few experts to the studio and discuss a grand theme with them. The town square of European and American public discourse seem to be so vastly different. While intellectuals seems to be more common in Europian public discussions, no one seems to give a shit about what they think in the USA! By no mean, I mean to suggest that it a bad or a good thing.
When you onboard a new member to your team, how long does it take for them to become productive? Especially when they are not familiar with tooling. I suspect the negative compounding effect to be very strong. They will spend a lot of time dealing with papercuts from not knowing tools, frameworks and possessing tribal knowledge of the codebase. Also the story of the codebase is not an easy thing to acquire.

August 23, 2025: Weekly Notes 2025/10

Context switching is very hard. I feel it. And everyone seem to agree. Apparently, it takes roughly 23 minutes to recover after “hey, got one minute?” interruption. Surprisingly, there is very little in written literature to back this “23 mins” number https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44999373.
My car (Tata Nano XTA) refused to start a couple of weeks ago. I thought old battery but turns out broken rubber pipes, rusted and leaking metal pipes causing engine to go “cold”. Until a few years ago, Tata cars used to suffer from metal rusting, but according to r/carsindia, they are much better these days. Anyway the car spent a week in garage and I spent roughly 14,000 (Car Didn’t Start) to fix it. The car being out in the open is also making things worse. I don’t park it inside the building since rat chewed wires a couple of times.
I learnt about “Residuality Theory” in software architecture on GOTO Tech Podcast. I kind of like it. I did more digging and found Residuality Theory: A Rebellious Take on Building Systems That Actually Survive.

Tata Nano XTA

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Tata Nano XTA in Kerala

Tata Nano XTA in Kerala

I bought this 10-year-old car from a local person (advertised on OLX) in 2024 for ₹230,000, when my wife was pregnant. I was also learning to drive at the time, so a small second-hand automatic car felt like the right choice.

This car has served me very well. It’s better than you’d expect it to be, though not as great as you might imagine. It’s a great car for driving within Bengaluru. It does well on long trips as well. I’ve taken it from Bengaluru to Mangalore and back, and driven it through the Western Ghats (hilly areas).

On the highway, the pickup isn’t great, so you need to plan your overtakes. If you’re comfortable driving at speeds between 60 and 70 kmph, this car is great.

Cabin AC is good. The suspension is fine but if you are not careful on speed brakers, you will feel the pain! The braking is good enough.

Inside the city, I typically get 15 to 18 kmpl mileage which go up to 25 to 28 kmpl on highways.