It's been almost a month since I last wrote. I had a week of strict just WFH in between, which gave me some much-needed rest. Commute to workspace and Bengaluru heat had been taking a toll, and the week at home gave me some much-needed time to rest and recover. Feeling much better now and getting back to things.

Inktober is already over and I had been active in the initial days. Made upto 12 sketches but couldn't continue anymore. Maybe I will complete the rest next month, its fine.

I'm still not much of a phone-call person. I'm comfortable talking when there's a topic, but increasingly find myself avoiding small talk. I seem to be growing distant in general. I am also excited to meet my niece Ana next month. Since I don't video call, I haven't bonded much yet, but hoping to spend enough in person time with her and sis-in-law.

For this birthday, I got so many gifts from just one friend - Ram (one after the other) and I haven't thanked her enough properly or have had a chance to read or use them all yet. Apologies but I am duly grateful for all that she is and does to me! I was also gifted a coffee maker by Hemanth with few outings and movies. Unfortunately, the maker isn't working (his gift is due by next month :eye:) . Thanks everyone for remembering and wishing me too.

Boring life is much more peaceful at this stage of my life. Having a plan and executing it on time gives me a sense of completion and closure. As I get older, I appreciate predictable days more.

Work & Projects

  • Have been doing a mix of project management and learning. Adaver-Nuvai is nearing its completion, right now only available to a closed group. Although seems like a deviation, the core stays intact. One at a time is now the set goal and all the good wishes and hope is on its way by end of this year for my cousin.
  • Built pugmarks for the community I live in. Being a pet parent myself, I find it difficult to seek help at-times. South city alone hosts about ~200 pets, comprising dogs, cats, birds, rabbits & (snakes?). I was surprised to learn that they had been managing all on paper so far. No harm, but info gets clogged at one end and not evenly distributed. So built a small tool / distribution platform so it can be self managed by any pet parent. I got so many sign ups today and I am happy.
  • At Quilt, I do more project management than actual coding these days. Got a chance to build quite a few custom tools to ease up my day to day work and somehow ended up connecting it with my weekly notes. I hope to write a separate post on it when I find time.
  • Have been using Opus 5.5 to automate most of my tasks and also learning to build my own LLM. Interestingly, a lot of tools that didn't make sense to me earlier started making sense once I began building one myself. I incline towards the idea that a tool is suppose to solve a particular user flow. It is meant to be customisable. It doesn't have to accommodate everything.
  • I'm exploring between Codebase Memory MCP and Graphify to figure out what works better. Also getting curious about B-trees, LSM and database fundamentals. After developing so many tools over the course of years, somewhere along the way, I think I seem to have stopped understanding the fundamentals underneath them. So its fun to also accomodate some of my time learning.

Hobby

  • I met Syamanthaka through GW meetup, the author of The Darker New Moon. I quite like her interests and the things she explores. She got me thinking about reviving my homelab. Budget is still a bottleneck, but I borrowed some of the breadboard, resistors, capacitors and Ammeter from Yash to explore. Will hand him back maybe next month.
  • I finally attended an event after a long time along with Yash. An Atomic View of Spacetime, a lecture by a physicist Sumati Surya. It was nice to attend a lecture by someone from the field. It was quite refreshing.

The mystery to my laziness to collate both worklog + weekly notes is solved using a custom built menu bar app built in swift - I call it worklog. It sync's to my Apple notes for now. After months, finally, in the last couple of weeks, I manage to close my days early. That's something.