Writings

For a long time, my Mac Mini was the unintended backbone of my workflow. What started as a few local workflows, soon blossomed into a workflows for emails, scheduled jobs, Home Assistant alerts etc. It’s a great machine, and it handled my daily tasks alongside a growing list of background services-MongoDB, Postgres, Redis, and n8n-without breaking a sweat. It even ran my local AI models via Ollama. But then came the “lab creep.” I started adding more: a MagicMirror instance for the family calendar, Excalidraw for diagrams, and various utility containers. ...

One of the frustrating thing about being online these days is the obnoxious number of ads that litter each and every website. Some of these sites are so full of ads that it’s just impossible to get to the content. Take a look at Yahoo Finance for example Yahoo Finance Half the page is an ad. There are worse offenders out there. Sites that greet you with a mess of loud, inconvenient ads before you can get to the content. It’s not just annoying; it pulls your focus away from what you came looking for in that website. ...

2025 GitHub Heatmap Looking at a GitHub contribution graph is like looking at a mirror of your year. My 2025 graph tells a very specific story: a quiet first half followed by a second half that was busy, very busy. I did create a bunch of poc-xxxx repositories and frequently updated my personal projects, but the real drivers behind that green heat-map were my website updates and, most significantly, Obsidian. ...

Most of us have played around with prompt engineering by now, experimenting with different ways to get an AI to do exactly what we want. It really comes down to the ‘magic words’-the specific phrases and framing that can either trigger a perfect response or leave the model confused. It’s like the difference between “Wingardium Levi-O-sa”(explode) and “Wingardium Levio-sa”(levitation) Levi-O-sa v/s Levio-sa Jailbreaking Much like finding the perfect prompt to get a high-quality result, crafting specific words or phrases can be used to navigate around an AI’s built-in guardrails - often called “jailbreaking.” It’s essentially the art of finding a loophole in the AI’s logic. These methods take advantage of the fact that human language is flexible and messy, and AI models sometimes struggle to tell the difference between a helpful instruction and a “hacker” trick. ...

I have never been a runner. In fact, before this, I hadn’t run a single mile in my life. If you asked me a few months ago, I would have told you I don’t run unless something is chasing me. Despite my history as a non-runner, I stepped up to the starting line of the BMW Dallas Marathon 10k. I crossed the finish line with a time of 1:14:34 - and even managed to clock a new 5k personal record of 32:00 along the way. ...

This is a late post. Pretty late post actually. I wrote this in November 18th. But got arount to post it only by 24th Dec. Google released Antigravity a while back (quite a while back) and this is the log of how it went for me. Background Most of my personal projects use MongoDB as the database. After a while you start to notice patterns in the way APIs are built for accessing and managing data. The next step in the evolution is to create a library that can quickly create these data APIs for you. ...

I recently had the pleasure of speaking at the Commit Your Code conference, where I presented my talk, “The Modern Full-Stack: Owning Your Deployment Pipeline.” The core idea was to challenge our definition of what it means to be a “full-stack” developer in today’s world. For too long, we’ve defined full-stack as proficiency in front-end and back-end development. But I’d argue that this leaves a massive gap. If you write code but have no visibility or ownership over how it gets to users, you are not full-stack, you are “half-stack”. ...

This website runs on Hugo and is hosted via Cloudflare Pages. The last time I wrote a post and updated this site was almost an year ago. Since then, I have been busy with the book, that I rarely got time to update this site. The book’s done, I now have time to get back to writing and maintaining this site. The first thing I had to do was to upgrade the site. ...

The productivity improvements an AI-assisted code development tool can bring to your workflow are significant. If you are not convinced, allow me to give you one recent experience of mine. Me, like many of you, have a bunch of personal projects that I work on in my spare time. I’m currently building something around AWS, using the AWS JS SDK and Next.js. In one of the pages, I want to list all the EC2 instances in my account. The table should also list the tags for each instance. But the way AWS stores tags is not very convenient to work with when you want to display them in a table. ...

I recently had the opportunity to speak at The Commit Your Code Conference in Dallas. The Commit Your Code Conference The Commit Your Code Conference is one of a kind conference where 100% of proceeds go to FreeCodeCamp and St. Jude. Here’s the excerpt from their website. 100% of all ticket sales will be donated to charity. ...