It's not often that I wake up on a Sunday and the first thing my brain thinks of is a leetcode problem from two years ago. In fact, it's never. Until today. I woke up and found myself mulling over a "gotcha" that I left unaddressed back in June 2023 when solving a fine little leetcode problem. The tl;dr of the...

One thing I am unnecessarily proud of is my writing on this blog. This is a tale of undoing that pride. Claude Code is marketed as an AI tool that can help you write code, fix bugs, and supercharge productivity as a programmer. It works when you run it in the folder that contains all your "source" files. It is...

"Books that stayed" is (hopefully) a series of brief notes about books, short stories, and novellas that "put a dent", that I think about often and a few that I re-read once in a while. This is the first instalment. The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, John le Carré I picked this from a paper-mart that also sold some...

Every once in a while, my brain decides to remember Irrfan and inexplicably, clouds of grief gather around and I have tears. Five years have gone by since he died, another "gone too soon" artist, and nothing makes sense — neither the grief over a stranger nor the incessant nature of it. For all I know, I would have...

A polarised world is usually a disaster but the entertainment-quotient is enormous. And so, as much as I dislike the kind of polarisation that's happening in my small little world of software developers about AI and LLM-driven software engineering, I tell you, it is incessantly entertaining. On the one hand, the...

And approximately a century later, I have come back to listening to entire albums in a sitting. Or at least, that's how long it feels since the last time I did that. In classic millennial fashion, I blame this period of album-less meanderings of my music-consumption routine on the emergence of a plethora of things...

For reasons unknown to me, Bali feels simultaneously familiar and foreign. As I meander through the roads circumscribing the Ubud Palace and the sprawling central market area, everything and everyone I see is both alien and familiar. It has been a good five days since I checked into this wonderful little place in...

We stopped having family dinners (or any meal for that matter) about two decades ago. I can't remember the last time we all sat down to have a meal together under normal, peaceful circumstances. A vague fog of a memory remains of a time in the early 2000s when my parents and I had dinners together, always filled...

So, back in November of 2023, I wrote briefly about working on a tool that would extract SQL query blocks (from markdown files) and run them in Steampipe to test if they work or not. Typical of side-projects, it got abandoned after a while. Over the last weekend, I decided to revisit it. I considered picking off...

TLDR I built a VS Code extension for the first time using Claude's help all the way. Half-way through this exercise, I wanted to understand VS Code Extension APIs deeper and I realized that grokking the docs takes an order of a magnitude more time than to build a reasonably working extension using LLMs. Plus, a few...