Recent content on Abhirama’s Blog
You are reading this blog on a static site hosted on Cloudflare and built with Hugo. Earlier, it was on hosted WordPress. I have always wanted a plain simple theme for my blog. With WordPress themes and plugins, I tried to mimic the simple static site look and feel. But I was never satisfied. The thought of moving to a static site did entice me more than once. But I stalled each time, dreading all…
I spent last weekend automating a task that would take me five minutes once a week. It reminds me of the classic XKCD comics on Efficiency and Automation . The goal was “write once, publish everywhere.” I prefer writing on my own blog, but once I publish, I want to share that content across platforms like X and LinkedIn. I was curious if I could use AI to automate this—specifically by…
I was listening to 90s Bollywood music. The popular song “Choli Ke Peeche” played. This song had created quite a ruckus during my childhood for its suggestive lyrics. Today, there are songs with lyrics that make “Choli Ke Peeche” look innocent; hardly anyone bats an eyelid anymore. The Overton Window has shifted. The Overton Window is a model for understanding how…
Codex recently coded a browser from scratch. It took a week, but the AI worked solo, with no human in the loop. Could a human parse that code and truly understand it? The bigger question is: does it matter? Have you ever audited your binary’s assembly code? You don’t. You trust the compiler. AI-generated code will head in the same direction, though the journey will take time.
Reimagining an XKCD classic for the AI era.
Speed is a feature. We want our apps and websites to be blazing fast. Multiple studies show that for every additional second a user waits, the likelihood of them dropping off increases. In this post, I’ll explore performance engineering through first-principles thinking—agnostic of programming languages, frameworks, and architectures. This post is not an introduction to performance engineering…
I came across a discussion on Hacker News about John Carmack’s tweet on variable mutability and immutability in programming languages. Reading through the thread resurfaced a thought that’s lingered in my mind for years—how programming language choices evolve within companies. When companies are small, they pick dynamic languages that let them move fast and build without restrictions. They don’t…
I was browsing through a travel booking site. The site already had great filters that covered all the usual booking use cases. Yet, at the top, there was a text box where one could type natural language queries. AI . It felt like some product manager had been handed a mandate to “add generative AI” and this was the best they could come up with. If you are a product builder, you can…
If you are a curious person, it is impossible not to come across Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger. Once you encounter Buffett and Munger, it is impossible not to be fascinated by analyzing businesses. Once you delve into business analysis, it is impossible not to come across Professor Aswath Damodaran. Once you encounter Professor Aswath Damodaran, it is impossible not to discover The Little Book…
I came across this quote from Seneca, the stoic philosopher: Reasons for anxiety will never be lacking, whether born of prosperity or of wretchedness; life pushes on in a succession of engrossments. We shall always pray for leisure, but never enjoy it. We often think, if only I did this one thing or if only I had that , my problems would vanish. And while that might solve one challenge, another…
Recently, we visited Jantar Mantar in Jaipur—a scientific marvel built centuries ago, with life-sized instruments designed to measure time, months, seasons, and other celestial phenomena. As I admired the ingenuity behind these creations, I couldn’t help but think that in those times, ordinary people didn’t have personal access to precise timekeeping devices and had to rely on centralised…
In Nepal, a “mobocracy” led to the government’s overthrow, largely through Gen Z mobilization. This isn’t an isolated case. Similar events have happened in places like Bangladesh and during the Arab Spring. Here are a few reflections on these protests. A Different History Protests start with hope. Crowds believe change is near. They think entrenched powers can be dismantled.…
I use AntennaPod to listen to podcasts. It’s a simple app that does one thing well, without any bling. I usually stream podcasts, but recently I had to travel and started downloading episodes for a long flight without internet access. The download button isn’t directly accessible from the main user interface — it’s a couple of taps away. After downloading a few episodes, AntennaPod pleasantly…
In the 1980s, political scientist Robert Axelrod ran a series of computer-based tournaments to identify the best strategy in an iterated prisoner’s dilemma scenario. The surprising winner of these tournaments was the simplest one: the tit for tat strategy. An iterated prisoner’s dilemma is just the classic prisoner’s dilemma played out repeatedly. In the classic Prisoner’s Dilemma, two players can…
I read something quite a while back that stayed with me: a fit body and a wise mind are the real status symbols. Money can buy a Lamborghini—but not a torso free of sagging love handles. It can buy a Birkin bag with a mile-long waiting list—but not the insight to see through the marketing gimmick behind such manufactured exclusivity.
I’m not a content creator. I do not know much about video creation. I am not known for being particularly funny. I was watching an Instagram reel from Fauxy (an account known for juxtaposing the absurd with deadpan, news-like delivery). It reminded me of a meme: I quit my job; it was interfering with my workout. That sparked an idea—to make my own Fauxy-like video based on that meme. I…
It has been some time since Elon Musk’s dramatic takeover of Twitter and the aftermath. Musk laid off a good portion of the Twitter team. A refrain I commonly hear is—see, Twitter seems to be running fine with a lean team. Everything is great Just because you anecdotally see nothing wrong with Twitter does not mean everything is fine and dandy with the product.
As usual, I opened Hacker News to get my daily fix on the tech world and the esoteric. I was surprised to see a post titled: A case for toe socks on the front page. There was a lively debate in the community on this post that had garnered three hundred-odd comments . I was surprised that something as mundane as toe socks could spark so much interest.
As you age, you become a skeptic. Everything feels like re-runs of the past where something or the other has gone wrong; déjà vu. You are steeped in confirmation bias; you would have had enough time to search for evidence that confirms your priors; you become inflexible. Life would have punched you hard many times over.
Whenever we hear a life story packed with wisdom, our reaction oscillates between two extremes. Either we go—oh man, this is so true; I can completely relate to this. Or, we say—there is no way this can be true; there is this one instance in my life that negates this story. We take the story literally. We either agree or disagree wholesomely; there is no middle ground. Check social media. People…
https://twitter.com/austen/status/1328374281588273152?lang=en One way to get extraordinary outcomes is by being consistent with the mundane. It may sound easy, but it is not. Everyone knows what it takes to keep one’s weight in check. But, if you see around, every other person is overweight. Doing the mundane once in a while is easy, but consistently doing it is hard. And, if you can do the…
You have to write a document. You have a rough idea. You do not have the exact structure. You procrastinate, waiting for the ideal form to emerge. The deadline arrives. You are still not done. We have all experienced this. It could be a document, a report, or a presentation. We believe we have to do things linearly, from start to finish, beginning to end. That is not the case. If you have the end…
All startups are dysfunctional. To some extent. Some more. Some less. As a founder, one should always be striving to reduce this dysfunction. It is a journey, not a destination. There is no end to it. Two young fish were swimming in a stream. They see an older fish coming towards them. The older fish passes them, greeting, how is the water, boys? The young fish look at each other and mutter, what…
There is an expectation in startups that once a leader joins them; they should have a big win in the first 90 days. I believe this is a wrong expectation to have and to set. A new leadership hire in a startup should be spending their first couple of months in learning and assimilating the org context, not in making an impact.
There is no one best way to learn. The best way to learn is what works for you. For some, it is visual, and for others, it is auditory. For some, it is long hours of focussed study, and for others, it is tiny bite-sized sessions. For some, it is reading text, and for others, it is watching lectures.
In a startup, there is an emphasis on creators and builders. This stems from the fact that a startup attempts to challenge the status quo, and hence you need innovative thinkers and builders who can do more with less. This line of thinking is right in spirit but can derail your execution if taken literally.
W hat is a store of value? A store of value is an asset that does not lose its value over time. Take, for example, gold. Pure gold does not lose its shimmer as time goes by—it retains its gloss and quality. Contrast this with iron that rusts with time and becomes unusable.
Tips and tricks to write resilient batch jobs. You have a database table. At the end of the day, you want to copy all the records for the day from this table to another table. Let us assume that you use the second table for generating reports. You want to do this quick and dirty. So, you write a batch job to do this. You script your job. You schedule(probably using a CRON) the job to run a couple…
How to proliferate best practices in an organization without slowing down the pace of doing things? As an organization grows, so do the checks and balances to do things. When you were a five-member company, provisioning a server was a click away. Not so when you are a 50 member company. There are processes to follow and permissions to take.
Three things that first-time managers wrestle with. There is no I in team Even though the above is cliched, it is packed with wisdom. When you are an individual contributor, it is about you. Your effectiveness is measured by your contributions. Not so when you are a manager. It is no longer about you. Your effectiveness is measured by your team’s output.
The software world is moving away from specialist roles to generalist roles. When I started working, the term “Full Stack Engineer” was not to be heard. Today, everyone knows the “Full Stack Engineer.” What gives to this trend? Better abstractions. Economies of scale. Market forces. Better abstractions Software abstractions are getting better day by day. You can do more…
What is your edge? Conventional wisdom says there are qualities that make one successful—hard work, persistence, curiosity, attention to detail, yadda, yadda. All these are good. No doubt, one has to imbibe these. But, these are table-stakes. If you know them, so does every other person. If you do what everyone else does, at best, you can be average.
When you read the history of humankind, you can see that our advancements have come from exploring(and conquering and inhabiting) novel lands and exploiting (the newly found) natural resources. This is illustrated in books like Sapiens and Guns, Germs, and Steel . Until the 19th century, the pace of these explorations was slow and gradual—there were still lands to be found and resources to be…
What can you learn from Bitcoin, GameStop, and Tesla stock? Bitcoin price has been going up like there is no tomorrow. Financial experts have opined that Bitcoin has no intrinsic value—it is a fad. A group of nerds in a Reddit forum got together and drove up a lumbering video game retailer’s stock price by buying the stock in a frenzy. They did it partly in jest and partly as socking it to…
Simple yet powerful product development framework. A simple yet powerful framework for life is: Do many small experiments. Double down on the wins. Ruthlessly cull the failures. Rinse and repeat. As long as your experiments do not entirely wipe you out, you are on the right path. Borrowing the above philosophy to product development .
Tips to get into the habit of writing regularly. You want to write regularly. You sit down to write. You are blank, bereft of ideas. We all have ideas, but the problem is—the ideas do not surface when we want them to. Start an idea-list. Whenever something crosses your mind, note it down. Google Keep does the job for me.
How to think while designing the architecture of an application. Lagom is a Swedish word that translates in spirit to “just about right.” I came across this word while listening to Tim Ferriss’s conversation with Daniel Ek(Spotify founder). The design phase of an application is a stressful time. Developers have to grapple with unknowns and make assumptions. While designing…
An effective way to coach and give feedback. What is the sound of one hand clapping? The above is a Zen kōan. Kōans are open-ended, short, pithy statements(questions or riddles) that one reflects upon. Kōans do not have an accepted answer. The idea behind kōans is that the act of contemplating(journey) on the kōan is more important than the answer(destination).
I love listening to podcasts. I started three years ago, never looked back. Thanks to podcasts, reading books has taken a backseat. Authors appear as podcast guests when they launch their books. Podcasts seem to be on their way to becoming the primary marketing platform for book launches. During the show, authors highlight the big ideas from their books. One can get a concise book summary by…
During pre-historic times, when going to the office was a thing, there used to be a traffic policeman in my commute route. The archetype of a police person is someone who is grim, officious, with a no-nonsense attitude. This policeman was the opposite. He was well-groomed, neatly dressed, fit, had a big smile on his face, and used to greet the passersby. I could not help but think—wow, must be a…
Sobering take on the future of work. By now, you must have read many radical takes on the future of work. Whenever I read these extreme predictions, two things come to mind—regression to the mean and Amara’s Law. A layman’s translation of the statistical term regression to the mean is—what goes up comes down. Regression to the mean is not directly translatable to the remote work…
Practical tips for identifying when you are over-engineering. A simple way to think about over-engineering is—are you wasting your today for an unknown tomorrow? “Unknown” is the keyword here. Are you building for a million users—at a time—when a couple of hundred users use your application? While building features, are you trying to accommodate fictitious(assumed without any basis)…
Tips and tricks gained from experience to scale your tech stack really, really fast. Your company has planned a massive marketing campaign. Millions of households are going to view the company’s advertisement during a prime time television show. An enormous number of users are expected to try out your company’s application. You, the engineer, has been given a couple of weeks to scale…
Pet projects that I worked on over the years. Ghost Ride GhostRide is a browser automation tool that uses Claude’s Computer Use capability to automatically create social media drafts from blog posts. One command extracts the blog content, captures a screenshot, and creates drafts on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook. https://github.com/abhirama/ghost-ride Kwery Kwery was my attempt at a…
Giving everyone their due There are charismatic people in your team. They know how to talk glibly and build a reputation in the organization. They excel at the art of self-promotion(intentionally or not). Senior leadership knows them. When you, their manager, makes a case for their raise or promotion, it smoothly goes through. Then, there are those in your team who silently excel at work. They are…
Cocksure: confident in an excessive or arrogant way. Skeptical: not easily convinced; having doubts or reservations. You cannot go through life cocksure of your ideas all the time. You cannot go through life skeptical of your ideas all the time. How does one resolve this dichotomy? Being skeptical of your ideas makes you open to change. It forces you to re-evaluate your beliefs. It pushes you to…
This post is not about F1. It is about process. When you mention the word process, it invokes dread in software engineers. I, too, used to be in that group. But, years of experience has turned me over to the other camp—the one that appreciates the right process. Software engineering is a team effort. For a group of people to succeed, the essential requirement is that they must trust each other;…
When someone explains the CAP theorem , they do it in the context of distributed data stores . But, if you understand the CAP theorem’s essence, you can use it in your day-to-day application design. Nowadays, most applications(even rudimentary ones) are distributed applications—they invoke external APIs and services. Hence, understanding and applying the CAP theorem to application design is…
Below tweet appeared on my timeline. https://twitter.com/therealfitz/status/1301278933497909248 The tweet brought back a quote(paraphrased from memory; I do not know the author). Every employee does two jobs. The job and the job to prove that they are doing the job. Arduous performance reviews, stakeholder management, timeline-based project management , long term project planning , justifying…