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Created: 2026-05-01 Updated: 2026-05-31 19 min read

TOC

The Context

April 2026

April was not great but not bad either. It was a quiet month for me. The theme of the month for me is confusion. I am just confused, have no idea what to do next, a lot of fear, a lot of self-doubts.

Like I said in my last month’s update, I kept continuing my Kafka and data-driven architecture dump. Whenever I get an idea of a data design pattern or some Kafka-related configuration that I would have arrived at intuitively using first principles before, I am just googling that idea, looking at reference books to know the exact name and implementations and I check what can be improved in my implementation when compared to the pre-existing implementations. I got this new perspective after reading the log. This is a long read (takes roughly 2-3 hrs) to get through, but once the idea that any data can be represented as a log/stream sinks in, it opens up a lot of ways to deal with the data. There are a few primitives that after I understood them like log (don’t confuse with the error-logging log), difference between commands and queries, events, why events should drive an architecture I was able to intuitively arrive at the existing solutions that have been in place over the last decade. Not perfect but somewhere closer to what exists. I implemented transactional outbox, dead letter queue, Command Query Responsibility Segregation (CQRS), event sourcing. Learned about event sourcing and replaying events which I had read about in my Theory of Compilers coursework during engineering. This replaying of events is a very common feature while building state machines and when we incorporate event sourcing coupled with CQRS, the event queue becomes the source of truth rather than the database, so the whole architectural perspective now shifts towards queue replication and queue consistency, just like how we think about the DB staying up. This is still a work in progress and whenever I get some ideas I go and try implementing them.

I was also trying to do a few dumb LLM-related experiments in my free time. There are a lot of use cases where you need to get the same deterministic web search output in your agent. Web searches are tricky because data keeps changing every minute. What if on every web search for the same queries you want the same search result or a configurable search result (configurations can be anything, you configure and expect the web search to behave that way)? I am just having fun and trying to figure out simple ways and see if it is possible to achieve this.

I had a lot of free time but I am slowly getting myself into a slightly darker space. I have a huge hurdle to cross in the next 2 months (54 days to be precise) and it gives me a lot of anxiety throughout the day as well as night terrors while sleeping. I am coping really badly by indulging in unhealthy food habits and doing whatever I can to just get through the days. So on a good day I code roughly 2 hrs, that too stretched throughout the day. Constantly distracted and intense panic attacks. But as usual I will get through it!

As part of coping I took a month’s break from reading fiction and I have again started reading every day before going to sleep. Reading fiction helps me to not think of anything else which is what I need the most at this moment.

I notice that the number of blogs I read every day has drastically reduced. The main reason is my reduced tolerance to AI crap. There is a lot of content out there which dives into different parts of computer science but it takes a lot of effort to get through partly because it’s less yapping and more meat, unlike AI stuff which is more story-like with less content and more selling something stupid which needs very little cognitive load to get through. I need to read more blogs, articles, books on varied topics because I am starting to firmly believe that ideas arise from random places and it is very important to read and conceive varied ideas which will open up my mind to start thinking in directions that I didn’t know existed.

Thanks to this monthly update I at least have track of how awful the month was or how good the month was, but I see a need to have a rough idea of what I will read or work on every day apart from my day job. Not rigid but just a rough idea so that I am a bit more organized. Going to spend 5 minutes before going to sleep to plan out what I am going to learn/code for myself the next day which will act as a blueprint for me to follow and I will fit other things around that blueprint.

Interesting reads:

Books I read this month:

May 2026

My April slump continued in May as well. In fact it got slightly worse mentally. Had constant panic attacks,waking up middle of night drenched in sweat,heavy anxiety. This month I shifted my focus completely towards my day job. Did a lot of cool work this month and starting to slowly find my rhythm on how to pace my day. I accumulated a couple of injuries because of cricket: an ankle tendinitis and pain in my left knee. So I was not able to play cricket which is my only mental outlet, this made my mental health even worse. Started to rehab, hopefully all good in a few weeks. Going to take mobility work more seriously henceforth. This month I wrote 3 blogs: one on why I feel unit testing is not very useful link, one on an extremely basic protocol on strength training link and another rant article on my new schedule and how I am pacing my day this month link. I explored GEPA and DSPy this month. DSPy + GEPA is a lethal combination but I am very unsure how much of existing code is in DSPy structure. I started to work on a cool side project this month very similar to this which got released today. I was figuring out a way to make it work for everyone but multimedia support for Linux and making it work for X11/Wayland systems especially getting help from PipeWire to get what I wanted was a very tedious and annoying task. Now I understand why folks build multimedia software only for Mac and Windows. I am stuck in a place where if I need to proceed I need to go fix their source code to make it work, so it’s on hold for now. I had no energy to do anything after work this month and expect it to be the same for most of June as well. I have a lot of ideas written down to explore will do it step by step. As of now my next focus would be on distributed observability.

Interesting reads:

Books I read this month:

June 2026

Just like I said in my May update, since June was a crucial month for me I had no mental bandwidth to put in hours after my day job, so I decided to completely take a month off from personal learning. It was a weird feeling because for the past 3-4 years my schedule has always been jam-packed with what to do in my day job as well as what exactly I need to tinker with before and after work, but since I took a break I had nothing to do indoors. I had a strong urge to get back and push through the month, but my laptop also gave up, so I felt it was the right time to just code only for my day job. Had various new experiences in June travelled to Hyderabad one weekend, travelled to Mumbai just 4-5 days later, and had to figure out a lot of stuff around the travel since it was monsoon season, which all falls under soft skills that I am really bad at (slowly improving but still below average). Now it’s all over and I am ready and replenished to put in additional hours. That’s what I have started doing in July dial in and focus every single day outside work. One way or another, if I have to do a task I am finding the time. Like this past week I’ve been waking up 2 hours early, so an additional 2 hours of personal coding before work starts. All good mentally in a good space, brimming with optimism and positivity to just focus on getting better at CS, and hopefully everything else falls into the right place. The bar I have for myself is really high and I need to work even harder. See ya next month!

Books I read this month:

July 2026

In July I was more productive compared to the past few months. Had a realization that I don’t want to be part of this AI psychosis cult, but I was still consumed by it. I saw that people were either burnt out or had no motivation to pursue and learn new things in CS because they felt coding and CS were done and there was no coming back from it. Even though I didn’t see things that way, the kind of content I was consuming and the projects I was building all still revolved around AI, so indirectly I was also part of that group. Every company is building AI stuff so you can’t run away from it in your day job because it pays, but I felt after work I can still focus and do things I like that are tangential to what’s going on. I just want to learn and have fun forget about job, money, future, etc. because in the end I’m not in this just for the money; I would still code if no one ever pay me again. So I started a devlog (I think I am halfway through that challenge please go read it to know what exactly I did every day). Ventured into newer worlds like frontend performance and the visualization part of observability. Then felt like learning C all over again, so I started brushing up my C concepts from Beej’s C guide and I think I’ll continue into next month as well. This was my last month at this job, so the later part of the month I spent my whole day building AI thingy for work as well as designing what needs to be built for the next 5-6 months for them. That’s done maybe I’ll write a short blog on my last 1-year stint and how I navigated through a mid-sized org breaking existing org/age structures. I started a new personal project. After years of building things for myself I now have clarity on whether I need to build something or not. Earlier I would go attack every single problem I saw. But now I have strict rules for myself to build a project:

  1. It has to be fun.
  2. I should learn something out of it.
  3. I’ll build something only if I have a deep problem for myself and will use it every day. Once I’ve suffered enough, only then will I build it. I don’t like the idea of just building a version of something, dumping it into a git repo, forgetting about it, and moving on to the next one. Code generation is too cheap now anyone can do the same. That’s why I’m hellbent on only building things I’ll use regularly, so there’s constant iteration of bug fixing,satisfaction and adding new features whenever I want.
  4. less grunt work.
  5. If not all 3, it’ll be technical experiment snippets to learn concepts, but I will make sure that won’t take longer than a day’s work. Now I badly need an Android app for myself, so I wanted to challenge myself and take an unpopular tech stack combination. I have never built a android app before,the last time I tried to build one was in 2018 but 10 min in my pc started to cry so I had to give up. hopefully not giving up this time!

Interesting reads:

If you notice, even last month I didn’t update any blogs in the interesting reads section and it’s almost the same story this month. My SSD gave up last month and I had to reset it. Because of this I lost all of my RSS feeds which I had collected over the last year. My main sources of blogs are my Twitter for you feed and RSS. Twitter feed is full of slop or AI bullshitting. I don’t remember the last time I saw a genuinely good blog on core CS, distributed systems, compilers, personal finance, deep insights, etc. Most of what I read this month on my Twitter feed was pure slop or random AI advice. Need to recreate my RSS feed.

Books I read this month:

YNAB I have close to 0 financial literacy. I understand concepts at a high level but to kick things up I need to start budgeting and understand my spending patterns. Read this book, created a Google Sheet, and customized it for myself from the core learnings. Will update if I stick to it after a few months.

Overall good progress compared to the past few months, but still need to put in more hours. I’m excited to go on a week-long break (first in 5 years) something I didn’t plan but I am forced to, I won’t have my laptop and I need to travel. Once I settle down I’ll lock in next month.

August 2026

August is a busy non-coding month for me. I moved to America for my grad school, so I had to start figuring out everything, set up my room, and get acclimatized to the country. Whenever I could find time, I continued doing my devlog. Focused more on revisiting database internals this month. Also continued revisiting Beej’s C guide, and I am currently in the 12th chapter. Hands down one of the best no-bullshit C guides out there. It helps me a lot to brush up my C skills before the start of the fall semester, which I anticipate will revolve a lot around C. I am slacking off a bit while at the same time doing all the basic errands which I never had to do until now, since I was living with my mom, so that’s taking up a huge chunk of time. But as usual, the more we do it, the better we get at it and build our own process, so I have started optimizing what to cook, how to choose items to cook that can be made within 10-15 min max. Started hitting the gym again after a 3-month break. As much as life is getting harder, I clearly understand that if I eat good comfort food, do some physical activity at least thrice a week, and prioritize sleep, I will be able to withstand any hardship and workload. That’s my secret sauce of happiness and hard work, so to find time and give priority to these three, I had no other choice but to cut other entertainment. I also did a couple of grad school teaching interviews and got great feedback on how I pitched myself to them. Thanks to the cold emailing I have been doing for over a year to all my favourite people I find on the internet. My no-bullshit, honest, pure proof-of-work approach is working, and I think I will keep following it for the foreseeable future. It also reiterated that quality beats quantity. A very focussed, well-researched pitch would go a long way compared to spraying and praying with random AI-written generic crap. It’s going to be an intense semester as I decided to pick as many hard technical courses as possible, but I am really excited and looking forward to it. I took the easiest possible route to graduate in undergrad without working hard, and I still regret it to this day, and I had to work doubly hard to catch up on what I missed, so I am not going to make the same mistake again. My September goal is to find the right research lab for me and tackle the problems I am interested in. Also, as the devlog is about to end, I want to spend more time reading papers and engineering blogs on distributed systems, which I will also explore academically, so I am thinking about starting a new series where I could post the link of the blog/paper I read and found interesting so that I am consistent with my exploration. Do let me know in my DMs if you’re interested in reading one. More importantly, it’s sad but inevitable that I should start doing LeetCode. I don’t enjoy it much, I am not a competitive programmer anymore, but that is the system we have in place, and to find a place for me to work next summer I need to clear interviews, so I have to start doing LC. Nobody is going to give me an opportunity for free just because I go to Columbia. The way coding agents are integrated into workflows now, I feel coding puzzles are still a good measure of raw algo implementation skills for early careers, along with proof of work. At least for me, I am thinking about how to solve these puzzles, so at least one hour a day I will use my brain to think purely algorithmically, like sudoku, which I think I will enjoy.

Interesting reads:

Books I read this month:

heart lamp by Banu Mustaq. This Kannada-translated book is one of the finest works on Muslim women’s oppression. Muslims are a minority in India, and their rights are slowly sacked off, so we are obligated to stand for them, which is the right thing to do. But it doesn’t mean that these lads are correct. Just like how we have a crazy lot of problems with Hinduism, Islam is equally bad. In fact, any religion that becomes a majority is problematic. It’s not about the holy scriptures, it’s more about how rules in these holy books are bent according to their needs and wants. Phenomenal book, must read.