It all started in the winter of 2024. There was a burglary in our apartment building and we decided we needed to invest in our home’s security. The obvious solution: a video doorbell!

I looked around and ended up buying a cheap Blink doorbell. It worked: we got video clips and everything! However, there was an annoying regression to our front door experience.

Before we had the doorbell, people just knocked on the front door. But now, people would notice the doorbell and ring it instead. This would send a notification to our phones, and then it would also helpfully play a sound on the doorbell itself… outside the door… which we could not hear. 😬

With yet another attempt at using a to-do list, I’m trying out Todoist. Overall, it’s a great app, and I really hope I keep using it (or really, anything at all).

I recently encountered something that felt like a bug, but it turned out to be just a confusing UI.

The FOMO got to me recently, and I decided to finally buy some basic prosumer networking hardware from Ubiquiti. It’s been 2 days since it was set up, and it definitely feels pretty cool. But during the setup of the Cloud Gateway, there was an annoying bug: every time I went through the setup steps and they completed, it would reset to the original stage and I would have to start setup again.

For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been working on a side-project: Niche Experiences (nichexps.com). It has listings of “niche experiences” in UK cities. It all started when I read Marc Lou’s blog post on how to get customers with programmatic SEO and thought I should try it out.

My parents are visiting me this month, and somehow we were randomly chatting about nursery rhymes. There was a particular one that we vaguely remembered but couldn’t recall the lyrics of – “Exercise is really great.” After struggling to remember it for a while, and then googling the name and failing to find anything, we remembered… my childhood audio cassette! When I was a kid, my parents would ask me to recite the songs and nursery rhymes I had learned and recorded them. Well, we did have an MP3 version of the cassette. Alas, my mom said we hadn’t actually recorded this particular song. A few minutes later, while I was annoying my wife with the MP3 of my childhood cassette, my mom jumped up out of her chair – the song was on it!

There exists a fantastic newsletter called Money Stuff by this brilliant writer called Matt Levine. I seriously cannot overstate how much I love reading it – it’s truly amazing. It’s not just me, lots of other people like it too. You should read it!

Recently, I was idly wondering about the topics Matt Levine writes about in Money Stuff. I thought it would be interesting to see because of how they sort of reflect trends in Finance news. I had some free time on my hands in between jobs and I decided to find out!

A few weeks ago, I was watching some informative system design talks at work. One of the topics discussed was circular dependencies in distributed systems. In particular, I learnt something I found fascinating: if your system has a hard circular dependency, you can never reboot it!

A few weeks ago, I upgraded my Linux OS to Ubuntu 18.04 (from 16.04). I did a clean install and overall it’s been nice - some function keys that didn’t work before now work great out of the box! However, one thing that’s annoyed me is the *beep* sounds that the shell makes (both Bash and zsh).

Here’s a puzzle. What do you think this Javascript code does?

f();
var f = 5;
function f() {
    console.log("Hello!");
}
f();

I recently wrote a post about Balloon, a new programming language I’ve been working on. In this post, I’ll try to put down some more of my thoughts on what I want to see Balloon become.

Since February this year, I’ve been working on a project that I’ve wanted to work on for quite some time now - a new programming language. After about 200 commits, things are now in working condition!

I’ve been working with server-side generated HTML for several years now, and the problem of code injection into HTML pages has been pervasive. A couple of days back, I discovered something fantastic that Go has built right into the standard library to help with this: context-aware autoescaping in HTML templates.

“Hello, world.” Words that every programmer first learns how to print (or printf).