@jatinkrmalik

Series

Longer stories told in parts. Start at the beginning. 16 series so far.

4 parts 2026

Zion homelab

Before Zion there was a Raspberry Pi stack in Bangalore and a Dell PowerEdge R510 in Delhi. What they ran, what I sold, and what made it to the US.

Start with part 0
  1. Part 0 my homelabs before it, from a Pi stack to a Dell R510
  2. Part 1 one man's trash is another man's homelab
  3. Part 2 about 40 containers and nothing exposed to the internet
  4. Part 3 a dashboard that says 'All good' and a 2015 tablet on the wall

4 parts 2025 to 2026

Things I built

A Wes Bos post, a quick prototype, a friend's Firefox PR, 100 GitHub stars in about two weeks, and the first people trying to sell me installs.

Start with part 1
  1. Part 1 LLMFeeder: the browser extension I built to feed web pages to LLMs
  2. Part 2 localcaption: video transcripts on your own machine, no API keys
  3. Part 3 pmptr: a dead simple teleprompter, with no ads and nothing to pay for
  4. Part 4 Labelarium: I kept losing one sheet of paper, so I built an app

3 parts 2026

AI agents and ADB

60 MB of diagnostics, six weeks of battery history, and a surprise: the “bloat” from restoring my old phone wasn’t the problem.

Start with part 1
  1. Part 1 I Let an AI Agent Debug My Foldable’s Battery Over ADB. Here’s the Playbook It Followed.
  2. Part 2 I debloated my TCL Google TV over ADB, found Samba TV’s ACR inside a system service, and replaced the home screen with a 33 KB launcher
  3. Part 3 Turning a Samsung Foldable into a Retro Handheld: An AI-Agent-Run ES-DE Setup Guide

3 parts 2026

Voca

Introducing Vocalinux, an open-source, 100% offline voice dictation tool for Linux using Whisper or VOSK, with its architecture, features and install guide.

Start with part 1
  1. Part 1 How I Built a Privacy-First Offline Speech-to-Text Tool That I Use Every Single Day
  2. Part 2 Building cross-distro offline voice dictation for Linux (and why it took more than a model)
  3. Part 3 From Vocalinux to the Voca family: a Mac port, a phone app and three app stores

24 days 2025 on X

#DistributedDilemmas

One distributed systems dilemma a day, with a diagram: the hidden complexity behind outages, tech debt and architectural nightmares.

Start with day 1
  1. Day 1 Consistency guarantees become availability nightmares
  2. Day 2 Microservices don't eliminate complexity, they redistribute it
  3. Day 3 Caching accelerates inconsistency
  4. Day 4 Idempotency is a lie we tell ourselves
  5. Day 5 Sharding decisions made today become tomorrow's scaling bottlenecks
  6. Day 6 Leader election creates false security
  7. Day 7 Network partitions heal dangerously
  8. Day 8 Eventual consistency is consistently misunderstood
  9. Day 9 Distributed transactions are a myth at scale
  10. Day 10 Observability becomes obscurity at scale
  11. Day 11 Queue-based architectures hide scaling issues
  12. Day 12 API versioning perpetuates distributed mistakes
  13. Day 13 Configuration sprawl is the silent killer of distributed systems
  14. Day 14 Service discovery often becomes a SPOT (single point of failure)
  15. Day 15 Distributed logging creates more noise than signal
  16. Day 16 Serverless doesn't mean worry-free
  17. Day 17 Distributed cron jobs are a coordination nightmare
  18. Day 18 Microservice authentication is a distributed minefield
  19. Day 19 Database migrations in distributed systems require meticulous planning due to their inherent complexity
  20. Day 20 Distributed rate limiting is harder than it looks
  21. Day 21 Event sourcing isn't a silver bullet for distribution
  22. Day 22 Distributed background jobs need careful orchestration
  23. Day 23 Distributed caching layers often become consistency nightmares
  24. Day 24 Distributed sessions are a persistent headache

21 days 2023 Python

Advent of Code 2023

Advent of Code 2023 is here and I am planning to push code daily this time as the problems unfold!

Start with day 0
  1. Day 0 Advent of Code 2023
  2. Day 1 Trebuchet?!
  3. Day 2 Cube Conundrum
  4. Day 3 Gear Ratios
  5. Day 4 Scratchcards
  6. Day 5 If You Give A Seed A Fertilizer
  7. Day 6 Wait For It
  8. Day 7 Camel Cards
  9. Day 8 Haunted Wasteland
  10. Day 9 Mirage Maintenance
  11. Day 10 Pipe Maze
  12. Day 11 Cosmic Expansion
  13. Day 12 Hot Springs
  14. Day 13 Point of Incidence
  15. Day 14 Parabolic Reflector Dish
  16. Day 15 Lens Library
  17. Day 16 The Floor Will Be Lava
  18. Day 17 Clumsy Crucible
  19. Day 18 Lavaduct Lagoon
  20. Day 19 Aplenty
  21. Day 20 Pulse Propagation

3 parts 2022

Job hunt 2022

My 2022 prep notes for senior and staff interviews: a system design checklist, one Python DFS for seven backtracking problems, rubrics and a STAR story bank.

Start with part 1
  1. Part 1 Interview prep, senior edition: a system design checklist, one backtracking template and what loops grade on
  2. Part 2 Two system design problems from my 2022 interviews, worked with real numbers
  3. Part 3 Job hunt 4.0: five weeks of senior and staff interviews, and what I got wrong

5 parts 2019 to 2020

The Delhi homelab

I finally set up Pi-hole on my old Raspberry Pi 2, powered off the modem's USB port. A month later, 24% of the DNS queries on my network were ad-related.

Start with part 1
  1. Part 1 Pi-hole on a 4-year-old Raspberry Pi 2: no ads on the whole network
  2. Part 2 The Haswell box: the PC I built in 2015, four years on
  3. Part 3 A journey to mystical lands of the homelab: my Lord of the Rings homelab talk
  4. Part 4 A rack server with no rack: my Dell PowerEdge R510
  5. Part 5 My new hard drive ritual: badblocks, TLER and the SMR check

4 parts 2015 to 2016

Raspberry Pi 2 projects

Planning to buy a Raspberry Pi 2? Or have a spare one lying around? This is the Wiki post for you. Learn how to set it up & make interesting DIY projects.

Start with part 1
  1. Part 1 Raspberry Pi 2 - Model B 1GB | All you need to know
  2. Part 2 Project #1: Create a Network attached storage | Raspberry Pi 2
  3. Part 3 Project #2: Create your own LAMP web server | Raspberry Pi 2
  4. Part 4 Project #3: Create a PirateBox (BitTorrent) | Raspberry Pi 2

4 parts 2014 to 2015

Windows Phone years

Twelve DVLUP freebies by my own count, from a Lumia 625 in January to a Lumia 1320 yesterday, and the Nokia and Microsoft events along the way.

Start with part 1
  1. Part 1 DVLUP, Nokia events and freebie #12: my Lumia tally so far
  2. Part 2 The Windows Phone apps I'm not proud of: a 3G booster that was just a progress bar
  3. Part 3 My Lumia 1520 has a ghost, and I want a replacement
  4. Part 4 Forty Windows Phone projects as "Jaykay", and the one that stuck

7 lessons 2014

The JavaScript Journey

Lesson 0 of my live journey to learn JavaScript from complete noob to ninja: what you should know before starting and the tools you need to follow along.

Start with lesson 0
  1. Lesson 0 Prerequisites
  2. Lesson 1 Hello World
  3. Lesson 2 Comments and Statements
  4. Lesson 3 Variables
  5. Lesson 4 Variables (Advanced)
  6. Lesson 5 Using Variables with Strings
  7. Lesson 6 Fucntions

10 shorts 2025 YouTube Shorts

Pointer Case Files

A pointer goes around the house finding life's annoying little problems, and each one gets fixed with a bit of creative thinking and a 3D print.

Watch the playlist
  1. Case 0 The Birth of The Pointer
  2. Case 1 The Battery Chaos
  3. Case 2 The Frustrating Galaxy Watch Charger
  4. Case 3 The Gamer Fuel Mess
  5. Case 4 The Thumb Drive Disaster
  6. Case 5 The Clutter Crisis
  7. Case 6 The Toolkit Tangle
  8. Case 7 The Sticky Situation
  9. Case 8 The Humidity Horror
  10. Case 9 The Finishing Touch

25 videos 2024 YouTube

Advent of Code 2024

All 25 puzzles of Advent of Code 2024 as spoiler-free video walkthroughs: how to think about each problem before you write any code.

Watch the playlist
  1. Day 1 Historian Hysteria
  2. Day 2 Red-Nosed Reports
  3. Day 3 Mull It Over
  4. Day 4 Ceres Search
  5. Day 5 Print Queue
  6. Day 6 Guard Gallivant
  7. Day 7 Bridge Repair
  8. Day 8 Resonant Collinearity
  9. Day 9 Disk Fragmenter
  10. Day 10 Hoof It
  11. Day 11 Plutonian Pebbles
  12. Day 12 Garden Groups
  13. Day 13 Claw Contraption
  14. Day 14 Restroom Redoubt
  15. Day 15 Warehouse Woes
  16. Day 16 Reindeer Maze
  17. Day 17 Chronospatial Computer
  18. Day 18 RAM Run
  19. Day 19 Linen Layout
  20. Day 20 Race Condition
  21. Day 21 Keypad Conundrum
  22. Day 22 Monkey Market
  23. Day 23 LAN Party
  24. Day 24 Crossed Wires
  25. Day 25 Code Chronicle