#personal
47 posts
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8 min read
Zion, part 0: my homelabs before it, from a Pi stack to a Dell R510
X 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.
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2 min read
Labelarium: I kept losing one sheet of paper, so I built an app X My Brother P-touch has 649 symbols indexed on one paper sheet I kept losing. Labelarium is the offline, open-source companion app I built instead, now on Product Hunt and Peerlist.
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8 min read
A year of 3D printing: my giant creative hammer X A Flashforge AD5M, a printed enclosure, a dryer before TPU, a desk mount an LLM helped draft, an STL edited by an AI agent and an NFC tag for my dog.
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11 min read
My desks, 2018 to 2026: Cherry MX Blues, an ultrawide and an Airbnb table X Eight years of desk tweets: a 4K Dell and MX Blues, a 34-inch ultrawide over a walking pad, a vertical monitor, a dog crate desk and a G502 with weights.
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6 min read
I filed my Indian taxes as an NRI with AI agents X My first time self-filing an ITR, done end to end with Grok 4.5 in the grok build CLI. I built a neo-brutalist dashboard and a 158-page audit packet, and still overpaid by ₹5,550.
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1 min read
pmptr: a dead simple teleprompter, with no ads and nothing to pay for X I built pmptr for my wife: a transparent, always-on-top, click-through teleprompter for macOS, Linux and Windows. Open source, one npm install.
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6 min read
Locked out of GitHub for three days over a compromised CLI token X In May 2026 GitHub suspended my account over a compromised gh CLI token. Their explanation pointed back to the stealer that hit my Mac in 2025.
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7 min read
Reading Petzold's CODE as a book club, one Saturday at a time X Six months of Saturday sessions reading Petzold's CODE together, from flashlights and Morse code to operating systems. Over 120 started. 4 of us finished.
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2 min read
I got hacked on X by pasting one command into Terminal X A sponsored Google result, a fake Cloudflare check and a 360-line macOS stealer. My X account posted crypto spam for 12 hours.
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10 min read
From the audience to the stage: how a backend engineer learnt to give talks X In 2019 I was in the audience at Bengaluru meetups. Since then I've given talks in Bengaluru, Delhi, Goa, Pilani and Chicago. Here's every one, in order.
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4 min read
Reading notes: Psychology of Money, Deep Work and two more X What I took away from The Psychology of Money, a second read of Deep Work, a Mark Manson passage on victimhood chic, and my weekend pick, Ego is the Enemy.
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10 min read
Job hunt 4.0: five weeks of senior and staff interviews, and what I got wrong
Obsidian An offer pulled in the crypto winter, a warm-up in November 2021, about 40 companies in one Obsidian note, and my notes on every round I fumbled.
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6 min read
Picking a note-taking app (again): Obsidian, git and a PARA second brain Obsidian After years of notes lost to notebooks, job changes and apps that never stuck, I picked Obsidian over TiddlyWiki and built a PARA vault synced with git.
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3 min read
Millionaire by 12? The WhiteHat Jr ad and India's pressure culture X A WhiteHat Jr ad promising 'CEO at Age 13' got me ranting about a childhood where Maths beat Music, and an engineering batch that mostly did B.Tech for the prestige or because they 'had' to.
- A journey to mystical lands of the homelab: my Lord of the Rings homelab talk
Today I walked colleagues at Uber through my homelab, where every box has a Lord of the Rings name. Pi-hole at 48.3%, RAID 5 and idols as heatsinks.
- The Haswell box: the PC I built in 2015, four years on
The PC I built in 2015: an i5-4440 on a Gigabyte B85M, a GTX 960 a year later, a desk I drew in MS Paint, 16 GB for Chrome, and the dead hard drive that taught me 3-2-1.
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4 min read
Wingify DevFest 2018: a data selfie, emotion detection and a rocket regression X Wingify DevFest 2018, session by session: a keynote, Google Cloud on AI, a data selfie, emotion detection, distributed deep learning, NLP for Indic languages and a Kaggle rocket problem.
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7 min read
Warranty hell in India: a Nexus 5, a Galaxy S6, an iBall dongle and a Sennheiser X A swollen Nexus 5, a Galaxy S6 waiting on a part, an iBall dongle stuck in Mumbai and a fading Sennheiser. Four years of Indian after-sales, and what worked.
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13 min read
Back from Dead | Troubleshoot slow page loads & 503 errors of WordPress blog
BitSnapper How a slow, 503-throwing WordPress blog on GoDaddy shared hosting was traced to a bloated Jetpack postmeta table, and fixed by cleaning up the database.
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7 min read
Post[0] = "why tech?"
GitHub blog I always talk about how I am a huge nerd when it comes to tech. So, what better way to start my engineering blog than talking about "why tech?".
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6 min read
Leaving Adobe, my dream company, without an offer in hand X Nearly three years at Adobe, my dream company. Then a farewell mail on 3 April 2017, no offer in hand, and a few months later the gig I wanted.
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5 min read
Back to the basics + rant against Godaddy! [Comeback] BitSnapper Rant about GoDadday's hosting transitions + detailed stuff I had to do to restore BitSnapper. To infinity… and beyond!
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8 min read
My experience with OYO rooms | Review/Rant BitSnapper Read about why you should never book with OYO rooms. It is certainly one of the worst companies in hospitality business to get in bed with. #SayNoToOYORooms
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6 min read
ONE RIDE 2016 | Delhi Edition | Saket-Faridabad-Kapashera BitSnapper Read my travelogue for One Ride 2016 - Delhi Edition. One Ride is all about One Thought; One Feeling; One Love for the Royal Enfield!
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7 min read
Classic 500 Ownership Experience : Part 4 | One year later BitSnapper This is the Part 4 of my Royal Enfield Classic 500 ownership experience series. Discover my love/hate relationship with the Bull in the first year.
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17 min read
Classic 500 Ownership Experience : Part 3 (After Sales Service) BitSnapper Read third part of my Royal Enfield Classic 500 Ownership experience about how this machine is ageing viz. riding, maintenance & after sales service.
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9 min read
Every phone I've owned, 2009 to 2015: from Nokia fanboy to a Galaxy S6 X Six years of phones: FoneArena reviews in Class 12, Nokias, a Galaxy S2 I had to fight for, a pile of free Lumias, an office iPhone 6 and now a Galaxy S6.
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13 min read
BitTorrent is dead, Long live the BitTorrent! BitSnapper Do not judge me from title! BitTorrent is the second best thing ever happened to me after Internet, but read on to let me rest my case and then we can talk!
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9 min read
An Open Letter to DEN Boomband | Delhi BitSnapper This is an open letter to DEN Boomband signifying about how discourteous they treat their initial customers & how they couldn't care less about customers!
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4 min read
Google Chrome! Stop eating my RAM :( BitSnapper Discover the behind-the-scenes reason for Google Chrome's memory leak which gobbles up your ram in background like a troll feeding up the attention on web.
- Two websites I let die: TechSalvos and EventShare.in
A post-mortem of my first two sites: a gadget blog that outgrew its cheap hosting, and a tech-events site whose domain I let lapse, then tried to buy back.
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3 min read
"The Cockroach Theory for Self Development" by Sundar Pichai BitSnapper Incredible fast rise of Sundar Pichai, SVP, Google, piqued my curiosity which led to my discovering of his own "The Cockroach Theory for Self Development"
- Forty Windows Phone projects as "Jaykay", and the one that stuck
Hanuman Chalisa, Imaging SDK filters, a wallpaper factory and the one app that hit 1.5 million downloads: two years of Windows Phone apps as Jaykay.
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5 min read
My Experience with UBER [Delhi/Bangalore] BitSnapper My hate affair with Radio Taxi/Cabs was long lived until I tried Uber. Read my experience with Uber and also grab your free first ride upto ₹600 as a bonus.
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14 min read
Classic 500 Ownership Experience : Part 2 (Booking/Waiting) BitSnapper Read second part of my Royal Enfield Classic 500 Ownership experience about booking with unintended waiting period & how I got it financed from HDFC bank.
- Three dead Flipkart vouchers, nearly 40 emails and a DVLUP refund
In August I spent 3,000 DVLUP points on three Rs 1,000 Flipkart gift cards. None of them worked. Five and a half months later I got my points back.
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3 min read
Why Amazon has the best customer service ever! BitSnapper We all know about how Amazon has the best customer service but today I will share my personal experience that how I got my Kindle replaced for my own fault!
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7 min read
Classic 500 Ownership Experience : Part 1 (Prebooking/Test drive) BitSnapper This is an Unbiased post about my Royal Enfield Classic 500 ownership experience, Part-1 (Pre-booking & Test drive) & what made me finally bite the Bullet!
- From zero campus placements to Adobe: my 2014 job hunt
No company came to my college. A 2am mail to Wingify, a TCS offer at someone else's campus, three offers in one morning, Webyog, and then Adobe.
- My Lumia 1520 has a ghost, and I want a replacement
Two display faults in two months on the Lumia 1520 I earned on DVLUP: a violet streak, a screen swap, then ghost touches. Last night I took it to @lumiaHelp.
- The Windows Phone apps I'm not proud of: a 3G booster that was just a progress bar
Four of my Windows Phone booster apps passed certification as a progress bar and a random number. Eight more were App Studio apps on other people's brands.
- DVLUP, Nokia events and freebie #12: my Lumia tally so far
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.
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3 min read
My solo ride to Dharamshala ended 200 km in, with a snapped clutch cable Obsidian A 4 am snapped clutch cable on my Pulsar 150, a 10 km push to a gurudwara and a ride home. Then I learnt my bike properly and rode to Bir Billing, this time with spares.
- Everything I learnt outside class at GGSIPU
Four years of B.Tech CSE at GGSIPU: 9% attendance, a 2,800-fan Facebook page, Baja, DRDO, a one-night call-centre job and 70-480 in 18 minutes.
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6 min read
A year on the Galaxy S2: running a one-man ROM help desk for my friends X Odin, rooted kernels, a Rs 200 USB jig and Siyah undervolting: a year of flashing my Galaxy S2 and walking my friends through theirs.
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4 min read
Two Saturdays, two meetups: Delhi User Group and BarCamp Delhi 9 X Delhi User Group at Microsoft in Cyber City, then BarCamp Delhi 9 at SAP Labs: the line-ups, the sessions I sat in, and what I live-tweeted from both.
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7 min read
Samsung shipped me an I9100G in an I9100 box. Six weeks later I got the real one X My Galaxy S2's box said GT-I9100, the phone inside was the weaker I9100G. A refusal letter, 16+ mails and an Akosha complaint later, Samsung swapped it.
