Echo Valley
Watched on Sunday June 15, 2025. Rated 3 stars.
Mehul Kar's blog
Writing about frontend programming, mostly.
Latest posts
Managing Humans
My highlights from Managing Humans by Michael Lopp And, yes, that means great managers have to work terribly hard to see the subtle differences in each of the people working with them. LOCATION: 212 In order to manage human beings in the moment, you’ve got to be one. LOCATION: 237 This basic what-do-you-do disconnect between employees and managers is at the heart of why folks don’t trust their…
Inside Out 2
Watched on Sunday January 19, 2025. Rated 4.5 stars.
Don't Use GitHub Composite Actions
TL;DR: I switched one of our Github Workflows from using a Composite Action to using a Workflow with workflow_call to get a better UI in Github Actions, and a breakdown of steps in Datadog. There was 0 downsides. Background Our deploy Github workflow has a Composite Action to share a series of shared steps. The steps include things like: run a smoke build, install some dependencies, build a docker…
How I Do Project Management
What is a project? A project is a known thing you deliver at some point. It is not an ongoing effort or a "North Star". Delivering a project does not mean the outcome you want is achieved (the success of a project determines that), it simply means a coherent set of tasks were finished. You can disagree with this, but you're likely just using a different word for the same thing. At some point,…
Dune
Why didn’t the emperor just tell the Harkonnen to attack Atreides instead of putting Arrakis in play? Rated 2.5 stars.
Margin Call
Watched on Friday November 29, 2024. Rated 3 stars.
Eng Log 0001
One of the biggest reasons I don't write more often is because I have trouble figuring out what to call it. But I want to make more room for just writing things and worrying less about form. So instead of coming up with a title, I'm just going to index it by a number. I've seen other writers do this also. Normally at this point I would try to find evidence of these other writers and reference them…
Christmas in Notting Hill
Bad. Very bad. Rated 0.5 stars.
Paris Christmas Waltz
Watched on Saturday November 9, 2024. Rated 0.5 stars.
A Paris Christmas Waltz
Watched on Saturday November 9, 2024. Rated 0.5 stars.
Miss Sloane
Watched on Saturday October 26, 2024. Rated 3.5 stars.
Gladiator
Watched on Monday October 14, 2024. Rated 4 stars.
Challengers
Good movie about gay techno Rated 2.5 stars.
The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar
Watched on Sunday July 21, 2024. Rated 4.5 stars.
Bad Therapy
My highlights from Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren't Growing Up , by Abigail Shrier We perfected the “time-out” and provided thorough explanation for any punishment (which we then rebranded as a “consequence” to remove any associated shame and make us feel less authoritarian). source: LOCATION: 122 Parents often assume that therapy with a well-meaning professional can only help a child or…
AI as QA Agent
A really useful way to apply AI could be to automate usage of your web app to catch bugs. This is typically something engineers write code to do or humans write test plans to do. But I wonder if, given a corpus of normal usage of your site (via web traffic analytics and client-side instrumentation), AI could simulate a real person using your app. It would arguably be better than hardcoded tests,…
Package Footprint
I've been working in a large JavaScript codebase, and wrote some monorepo tooling scripts to perform some esoteric tasks across across the repo. It got me thinking about the relative importance of code inside a large codebase. Modern JavaScript codebases use Workspace tooling (via package managers like pnpm) to define boundaries in the form of packages. But even with these boundaries, it's…
Baby's Day Out
Watched on Saturday June 1, 2024. Rated 3.5 stars.
A Simple Favor
Watched on Thursday May 23, 2024. Rated 2.5 stars.