Recent writing by Ratik
Marcin Wichary: Five moments in snapping history In Figma, building atop regular snapping, we introduced something I awkwardly called “self-snapping”: if your objects are inside a container, the container will snap its padding to whatever it sees on the other side, without any explicit auto layout/flexbox: Figma's snapping mechanics have always stood out to me. Their UX feels just right . No other…
Craig Mod: Software Bonkers It’s strange times. Anyway, I’m mad for software right now. Bonkers. I can’t stop thinking about things to make, things to make better. And then I go and make them. There’s an energy around all this that is — truly — epochal. If you’re not playing with models like Claude, you should probably take a peek. It’s the time of building. Same, Craig. Same. Bonkers is just the…
2026 is upon us. 2025 will soon be over. As I've done for the past six ( !! ) years ( 2019 , 2020 , 2021 , 2022 , 2023 , 2024 ), it's time to look back and reflect on the year gone by. I like the restructure I did for these reflection essays last year . Instead of rigidly reviewing my goals for the year, I examine the different realms of my life to assess what went well and what did not. Welcome…
Email : Spark Mail Notes : Apple Notes To-do : Linear Photo shooting : Fujifilm XE-4, iPhone 16 Pro Lenses: XF 35MM F1.4, XF 27MM F2.8 Photo management : Apple + Google Photos (Experimenting with Ente!) Photo editing : Apple Photos Calendar : Cron (I still refuse to call it Notion Calendar) Cloud storage : Google Drive Search engine (new category!): Kagi RSS : NetNewsWire Contact management :…
Life update: I joined Kagi as a Flutter engineer last month! I've been an admirer of Kagi's work and philosophy since 2023. I strongly align with their vision of building a friendly version of the Internet. Over the years, the Internet and the ecosystem around it has enshittified . Kagi wants to fix that, and I'm going to be a part of that journey with them. At Kagi, we envision a friendly version…
June was my last month at Fueled. I spent close to five years at the company. I joined as an entry-level Android engineer and left as a Lead on the mobile team. I joined Fueled seeking two things: Making Android engineering my sole focus Learning from experienced engineers Looking back at my time at Fueled, I've managed to accomplish both these objectives and topped it up with a lot more. Android…
2024 is finished, and I'm very late to publishing my yearly reflection piece. The writing process for this year is starting after midnight on New Year's Eve. India is already in 2025, but the rest of the world is not. Thanks to timey-wimey loopholes, we still have time to get this published! If you're visiting this blog for the first time, hi! If you're a returning reader, welcome back! I'm Ratik,…
Email : Spark Mail Notes : Apple Notes To-do : Linear Photo shooting : Fujifilm XE-4, iPhone 16 Pro Photo management : Apple + Google Photos Photo editing : Apple Photos Calendar : Cron (I refuse to call it Notion Calendar) Cloud storage : Google Drive RSS : Readwise Reader Contact management : Google Contacts Browser : Arc on macOS, Arc on mobile Chat : Discord, WhatsApp, Instagram, Signal (in…
What a solid, well-rounded week. A lot happened, but it wasn't overwhelming. I managed to make progress across all my ongoing projects. I watched some great movies, listened to nice music, and got back into my reading habit. Weeks like these rule. What's been happening? I finally updated the work section on my website. I added two - ̗̀ new ̖́ 'professional' projects and created an 'other' category…
Life happened and I missed writing these for the past six weeks. I'm back now, trying to get back into a weekly cadence again. Instead of catching you up on every little thing that happened over the past month and a half, here are some highlights. What's been happening? S was back in India during October. We got to spend time talking, relaxing, or simply existing together. I made her try my matcha…
I discovered the rabbit hole of collecting vinyl this week. Oh no. What's been happening? After months of toying with the idea of buying a vinyl player, I finally decided to take the plunge last weekend. I went for the most popular recommendation for beginners: Audio Technica's LP60X . Conventionally, people pair vinyl players with wired speakers. To save space, I chose a different approach. I…
My bestie Harjas was staying over last week. So, I decided to skip writing last week's note, and focus on spending time with him. As a result, this week's note is a mixture of happenings from the last two weeks. What's been happening? I added a tiny feature to the website to let readers navigate back and forth between blog posts. I wanted to add this feature to help readers navigate between…
After a busy last week , I started this week off by spending a day doing absolutely zero work. It was glorious. What's been happening? Taking Monday completely off work reminded me that I need to do this more often. I'm usually pretty disciplined about taking time off. However, it has become harder to do so since I've been taking on additional work outside of my full-time job. The increased…
Busy, busy, busy week. Got lots done, but at what cost? What's been happening? I wrote a lot of code this week. We wrapped up a project at work on Friday. I spent the week finishing last minute tasks and bug fixes. Outside of work, a side gig I'm engaged in picked up pace. I spent my nights work on it. Both these projects required me to be heads down, typing away. I've been feeling confident in my…
I first learned about weeknotes in 2018. One of my Twitter follows Ankur had posted his first weeknote. On reading it, I instantly developed a liking for the format. I've kept up with Ankur's notes since then. Recently, another cool-person-I-follow-on-the-Internet Pooja started doing weeknotes . She writes and posts a link to them on her Instagram story each week. I've been enjoying reading them…
It was my birthday a few weeks ago. The day ended with two of my closest friends paying me a surprise visit. They brought a blueberry cheesecake along. We cut the cake, shared a couple of slices, talked, and watched football. It was a fun night. During our chat, I told them about an upcoming milestone in my life: "I am going to buy myself a new car, my first car!". I continued and gave them more…
Over the last four years, I've been able to build a tradition of doing yearly reflections. As part of this tradition, I start each year by coming up with a list of things I want to do during the year. Then, as the year is coming to a close, I look back at how I fared and write about the whole experience as a blog post. Welcome to the 2023 edition of my annual reflection! I'm so excited working on…
Everyone around me is making lists of their default apps. As a self-proclaimed lover of apps , I thought I'd jump on the trend too. Email : Spark Mail Notes : Apple Notes To-do : Things 3 Photo shooting : Fujifilm XE-4, iPhone 12 mini Photo management : Apple AND Google Photos (yup...) Photo editing : Apple Photos Calendar : Cron Cloud storage : Google Drive RSS : N/A (want to try Reeder in 2024)…
Hello, hello friends, family, colleagues, and whosoever else decided to click on a blog post titled “Reflection” by a random dude on the Internet. Welcome all! I’m Ratik — a software engineer at Fueled by day, and artist-person-type-thing by night! Four years ago I started doing yearly reflections as an experiment and ended up really liking the process. What started out as an experiment has become…
Hello, hello friends, family, colleagues, and whosoever else decided to click on a blog post titled "Reflection" by a random dude on the Internet. Welcome all! I'm Ratik — a software engineer at Fueled by day, and artist-person-type-thing by night! Three years ago I started doing yearly reflections as an experiment and ended up really liking the process. What started out as a test run has become a…
We're gonna try avoiding the "C" , "P" and "L" words in this, okay? Okay. What can I say about 2020 that hasn't already been said before? An unprecedented (ugh) year, a year like no other, a year where the word "normal" lost its meaning entirely. Sitting here writing my yearly reflection piece (a practice I started last year ), it's hard to even recall everything this year threw at us. It's safe…
I've officially taken the next step in my career. I'll soon be working at Fueled as an Android Engineer! I'm so excited for this next chapter and wanted to write a quick post talking about my thought process behind this change. My hope is to provide a little look into how I've come to think of career decisions for those who might be curious about this stuff. Before we jump into the thought…
31st July, 2020 was my last day at Meraki . My first job, first team. My first product(s) launched, first crashes in production. And most importantly, my first lives impacted. The word bittersweet keeps coming to my mind while thinking of the current transitional period I'm in. Bitter because it is extremely hard to leave something you've spent 3 years of your life working on and sweet because of…
A few years ago, I was showing code I'd written to a friend in order to get feedback and one of the things he pointed out to me was that a function I'd written had side effects. This was the first time I'd heard this term. After the call with my friend, I googled around to try and understand what he had meant. I started with the Wikipedia page and followed that up with a few blog posts. Nothing…
Functional Programming (FP) is often described using a lot of jargon. A lot of fluff and no substance. I struggled with understanding FP for quite some time because of this. Even after understanding the concepts and principles involved in FP, I never really knew what FP was. What is the philosophy behind FP? How does thinking functionally differ from thinking in an OO-way? These are the questions…
Disclaimer: We are all on different journeys and progress looks different for everyone. No Gregorian calendar can determine your self worth. I've never been a new year resolutions kinda guy. I've always believed that you don't have to wait for a certain day of the year to make a change in your life. But, 2019 was different. 2019 was the first time I made resolutions for myself and I don't see…
Google's Android 10 dropped recently and I've been using it for the last two days on my primary phone. One of the features I was excited about with this release was the updated gesture navigation. I had my fingers crossed for Google to finally get this right. So, did they? In my opinion, yes, they did! View Tweet However, while using my phone over the last two days, I found an annoying this Google…
My name is Ratik and I am Software Developer working at the intersection of design, technology and social impact. I've been a creative individual interested in technology for as far as I can remember. In fact, the reason I taught myself how to write code was to build out ideas that came to me. These days, I am working at Meraki , a non-profit working to solve India's growing education crisis with…
Automatic running can be achieved on macOS (and Linux) by creating cron jobs! Let’s make an example job. Suppose you want to run a script called work.sh which does some work for you — doesn’t really matter what the work is. You want to do this "work" every fifteenth minute of every hour, every day. Here’s what I would do to achieve this. Step 1 Make sure work.sh works properly and is in a place…
On the 29th of September, 2016, I launched a product I had been working on for over six months: Uttam . Uttam is an Android app that gently refreshes your home screen each day with perfectly crafted wallpapers. Here's how I built and launched my most ambitious project till date. As a creator, I like to make things I want to exist in the world. These are things I personally want to use. Uttam is…
This past September, I went to my first ever developer conference: PyCon India. It was an amazing experience. I came across so many amazing people doing amazing things. Here's a list of five such people. 1/ Baishampayan Ghose (BG) BG was one of the three keynote speakers at PyCon. His keynote was titled ‘The postmodern programmer'. He talked about how a programmer in 2016 needs to be more than…