Zephyr

In 9th grade, when I first learned about Lenz’s Law1 in Physics class, I was fascinated by its implications. It states: The direction of an induced current will always oppose the motion causing it. In simpler terms, imagine you have a hoop and a magnet. If you move the magnet close to the hoop, the hoop generates a magnetic field that pushes the magnet away. Conversely, if you pull the magnet away, the hoop creates a magnetic field that pulls it back. This occurs because the hoop aims to prevent any change in the surrounding magnetic field. That’s Lenz’s Law: the hoop consistently acts to maintain the magnetic field’s status quo, reacting against the motion that’s the cause of the existence of the magnetic flux in the first place. Generators leverage this principle to convert mechanical motion into electrical energy. ...

When I started my career in a tightly-knit team of six engineers at a small e-commerce startup, I was struck by the remarkable efficiency of having a centralized hub for all the documents used for planning. We used a single Trello board with four columns—To-do, Doing, Q/A, Done—where the tickets were grouped by feature tags. We’d leverage a dummy ticket as an epic to sketch out the full plan for a feature and link related tickets to it. The rest of the discussions took place in Slack or GitHub Issues. ...

Despite being an IC for the bulk of my career, finding my groove amidst the daily torrent of meetings from the early hours has always felt like balancing on a seesaw during a never-ending earthquake. Now, pair that with the onslaught of Slack inquiries and the incessant chiming of email notifications, and you have a front-row ticket to the anxiety circus. There are days when carving out a single hour of focus time is a wild goose chase, pushing me to work after hours to get stuff done, followed by a guilt trip about screen-gazing my life away. ...

Ever been in a situation where you landed a software engineering job with a particular tech stack, mastered it, switched to another company with a different stack, nailed that too, and then found yourself in a third company that used the original stack? Now, you suddenly sense that your hard-earned acumen in that initial stack has not only atrophied over the years but also a portion, or all of it, has become irrelevant, making it a bit of a struggle to catch up with the latest changes. ...

Adopting existing tools that work, applying them to the business problems at hand, and quickly iterating in the business domain rather than endlessly swirling in the vortex of technobabble is woefully underrated. I’ve worked at two kinds of companies before: One that only cares about measurable business outcomes, accruing technical debt and blaming engineers when no one wants to work with their codebase, ultimately hurting the product. Another that has staff engineers spending all day on linter configurations and writing seldom-read RFCs while juniors want to ditch Celery for Kafka because the latter is hip. ...

There are a few ways you can add URLs to your Markdown documents: Inline links [inline link](https://example.com) This will render as inline link. Reference links [reference link] Define the link destination elsewhere in the document like this: [reference link]: https://example.com This will render the same way as before, reference link. Footnote style reference links footnote style reference link[^1] Define the link destination using a footnote reference: [^1]: https://example.com This will render a bit differently with a clickable number beside the origin text that refers to the backref at the bottom of the document. Like this: footnote style reference link1. ...

Every once in a while, I love browsing the Wayback Machine1 to catch a glimpse of the early internet. I enjoy the waves of nostalgic indie hacker vibes that wash over me as I type a URL into the search box and click to see an old snapshot of the site frozen in time. Being a kid of the early ’00s, I missed the spectacular cosmic genesis of the ’90s internet in its entire nascent glory. However, I did briefly get a coup d’œil of the raw, untainted web 1.0 right before SEO firms, ads, pop-ups, modals, autoplays, and heavy frontend frameworks started prowling and gentrifying the whole space into an anxiety-inducing corporate circus. ...

I enjoy writing about software—the things I learn, the tools I use, and the work I do. Owing to the constraints of the corporate software world, more often than not, you can’t showcase your work or talk about them. At least that’s how it always has been throughout my career. At the same time, as you grow older and start having a life outside of the computer screen, you realize that working on OSS at the tail of a 40+ hour workweek is hard, and maintaining consistency is even harder. On that front, how do you keep track of your progress without losing your sense of purpose as the years fly by? ...

If you’re a manager, then there’s no shortage of information for you on how to conduct exit interviews. But there aren’t many resources that focus on how to handle them from an employee’s perspective. I’ve been meaning to write a quick piece that isn’t biased by anyone else’s experience and is short enough so that I can quickly jog my memory in the future should the need arise. While I’ve participated in a few of them over the past five years, this text doesn’t attempt to combat the inexorable recency bias that may have seeped into the writing. ...

Around a year ago, I ditched my fancy Linux rig for a beefed-up 16" MacBook Pro and ever since, it’s been my primary machine for both personal and work stuff. I love how this machine strikes a decent balance between power and portability. However, I often joke that this chonky boy is just a pound shy of being an ENIAC1. It’s a beast of a machine when you need all that power, but certainly isn’t the most convenient contraption to lug around while flying. I work fully remote, but can’t get any work done while traveling and rarely ever need to tap into the full power this thing offers. ...

Up until now, I’ve always preferred Title Case to demarcate titles and section headers in my writings. However, lately I’ve realized that each time I start writing a sentence, I waste a few seconds deciding on the appropriate case of the special words like—technical terms, trademark names, proper nouns, etc—and how they’ll blend in with the multiple flavors1 of rules around title casing. Plus, often time, special casing of selected words makes title-cased sentences look strange. ...