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Good Reads

The books I keep going back to, and what each one changed for me. Mostly psychology, product and design.

Ladakh Itinerary: 10 Days, Leh to Srinagar

Our day by day Ladakh route through Pangong, Hanle, Umling La, Lamayuru, Drass and Sonmarg. What we did, what it cost, and what we got wrong.

Shooting the Milky Way on an iPhone in Ladakh

iPhone 16 Pro Max, a tripod and 30 second exposures at Pangong and Hanle. What a phone actually gets you under a Bortle 1 sky, and what it doesn't.

How to Register a Pvt Ltd Company in India, the Right Way

A founder's plain-English guide to registering a Private Limited company in India, plus the auditor and Form 20-A deadlines that catch first-timers.

Setting Up Mac for Development [May 2026]

The current toolkit and the AI coding stack I'd put on a fresh Mac today. A year after my 2025 setup.

The difference between using AI and giving it a job.

On working with an AI coworker. Four humans, one AI, and the math that changed when she joined.

Roko's Basilisk: The Thought Experiment Gilfoyle Mentions in Silicon Valley

Roko's Basilisk, the strange philosophical idea from Silicon Valley that suggests a future AI might judge whether you helped create it.

Patience, Persistence, Consistency

Most people chase intensity. The real game is quieter.

15 Golden Responses to "Tell Me About a Time You Failed"

Most candidates ruin their chances when asked about failure in interviews. These 15 scripted responses turn mistakes into masterclasses by focusing on recovery, lessons learned, and system changes.

The Long Flight Test

A simple question that reveals the true weight of our relationships: Would you want to sit next to this person on a long flight?

You Are Less in Control Than You Think

What neuroscience reveals about choice, behavior, and the illusion of free will.

The Complete Guide to UI/UX Onboarding: Research-Backed Best Practices

A deep, structured, research-anchored dive into UI/UX onboarding that synthesizes current best practices, psychology insights, expert research, and real product examples.

Part 4: From Retrieved Context to a Grounded Answer

Why good retrieval still produces bad answers, and where most systems actually fail

Part 3: Retrieval Is Not Top-K

Relevance, diversity, reranking, and why most systems return the wrong things for the right reasons

Part 2: How Embeddings Actually Work in Practice

Chunking, dimensions, and the knobs that decide whether retrieval works

Embeddings: Turning Meaning Into Geometry

A practical mental model for understanding embeddings, how they work, and why they matter for AI engineers

The Yearly Review (Simple + Actually Useful)

A simple yearly self-review framework that's easy to do, easy to repeat, and easy to look back on later. No journal habit or fancy tracking required.

My 2025: shipping, signal, and a few uncomfortable rules

A candid review of 2025 into 2026.

WTF is Tokenization?

Everything you need to know about how LLMs break text into tokens - and why it explains most of their weird behaviors.

Building Agent Skills from Scratch

How agent skills actually work under the hood - discovery, activation, and execution explained with practical implementation insights.

Same model, different results across providers: routing, quant, fallbacks, wrappers (and a debugging checklist)

Why the same model name can behave differently across providers, covering routing layers, quantization differences, fallbacks, and hidden wrappers with a practical debugging checklist.

LLM Bit-Rates & Quantization: 32 vs 16 vs 8 vs 4 (what changes, what doesn't)

Understanding how bit-rates and quantization shape LLM deployment, from precision trade-offs to practical quantization methods like GPTQ, AWQ, and SmoothQuant.

I cut my site's image payload by 97.7% (83.57 MB → 1.89 MB)

How I reduced image weight from 83.57 MB to 1.89 MB using WebP optimization and simple automation

Hooked: TL;DR

A clean, sharp TL;DR of Hooked by Nir Eyal. The Hook Model explains how products like Instagram, WhatsApp, and TikTok turn casual users into daily users through a 4-step loop.

Vietnam Travel Notes (Simple & Practical)

A practical travel guide to Vietnam covering regions, tips, must-visit places, and essential information for travelers.

WTF is Frontmatter?

Frontmatter is just metadata at the top of a Markdown file — and once you get it, everything starts making sense.

A simple, no-nonsense explanation of what frontmatter is and why every modern developer uses it.

Export Your Digital Persona: A Simple Hack to Make Any AI Know You Instantly

Your context should be as portable as your email address. A simple persona memo makes any AI instantly familiar with you.

How to generate a portable persona memo so any AI—ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, Gemini, or your own agents—can understand your working style from day one.

Calorie Requirements

A guide to calculating your calorie requirements

How I Got a Professional Email on My Domain Inside Gmail — for Free

A quick 2-minute setup using Cloudflare and Gmail, no paid hosting or tech headaches.

Anatomy of a Prompt: The Complete Guide to Crafting Effective AI & ChatGPT Prompts

Master prompt engineering with the seven-layer framework: Role, Goal, Format, Guardrails, Context, Examples, and Reasoning. Learn how to craft prompts that boost accuracy and reduce hallucinations.

I Tested 7 Python PDF Extractors So You Don't Have To

PyMuPDF, pdfplumber, Unstructured and four more, run over the same documents to see which holds up.

The Power of 1%: Habits for an Entrepreneur-Engineer

Small daily, weekly, and monthly actions that compound into massive growth—tailored for founders and engineers.

Profilebud: My First Taste of Startup Success

Scraper grew to $7K MRR before Instagram shut us down

Rubik’s Cube Solving Guide

Easy step-by-step guide to solve a 3×3 Rubik’s Cube using simple moves and clear pictures.

25 — A Quick Reflection

A quick reflection on my journey from 18 to 25.

The Evergreen Launch & Growth Checklist for Start-ups and Side-Projects

A living, repeat-able playbook you can reuse (and expand) every time you ship something new.

High Agency: The Trait That Sets Top Performers Apart

High-agency employees are rare but invaluable. Here's how to know if you're one—and how to become one.

ChatGPT GPTs: The Rise of AI Micro-Apps

GPTs are the new plugins—lightweight, personalized AI tools you can create and share instantly.

Discover how GPTs are becoming the building blocks of a new AI-native app ecosystem, where to list them, and how to get featured.

Setting Up Browser Instances for AI & Scraping

My go-to setup for spawning and managing browser instances at scale for scraping or AI agent use.

UI/UX Design Resources

Curated UI/UX resources to save you time and spark inspiration.

The Ultimate SQL Cheatsheet

Master SQL with this essential cheatsheet of commands, joins, and best practices

A comprehensive guide to essential SQL commands, joins, set operations, and best practices for efficient database querying and management.

Setting Up Mac for Development [2025]

My go-to setup checklist for a fresh MacBook dev environment — tools, configs, and personal tweaks.

Next-Gen UI/UX with AI

How AI is reshaping interfaces—from rigid flows to intuitive, adaptive experiences.

The AI Internet Protocol Stack

llms.txt and MCP are forming the foundational layers of an AI-native internet protocol stack

From llms.txt to MCP, we’re witnessing the early layers of an emerging AI-native internet protocol stack.

Engineer vs Entrepreneur

A short story and reflection on builders vs visionaries — and figuring out where you fall.

My Handy Zsh Aliases for Faster Dev Work

Cut typing. Save time. Get more done.

Simple, effective zsh aliases for npm, git, and terminal productivity.

Must Watch

Must-Watch Movies & Series for Tech, Innovation, and Philosophy Lovers

A collection of must-watch movies / series.

Devs AI Tools to Use

Keep this list handy. Will update as tools evolve.

A live list of AI tools that developers should bookmark and use.

Building a Local PDF RAG Chat System with DeepSeek-R1

A fully local retrieval setup over your own PDFs, running DeepSeek-R1 through Ollama.

Public Datasets for LLMs, AI and Machine Learning

Open datasets to draw on when you need training or evaluation data.

Understanding Brainwaves and Their Applications

Delta to gamma, what each brainwave band is associated with, and where EEG gets used in practice.

Website Polish Checklist

A priority ordered list of the small things that make a site feel finished, from favicons to empty states.

Laws of UX

Rules that UX designers should consider when designing user interfaces.

A collection of the key maxims that designers must consider when building user interfaces.

Why Product Vision Should Trump Market Demands: A Contrarian View

People don’t know what they want until you show it to them.

In the dynamic world of product development, there’s a counterintuitive truth that many of us learn through experience: sometimes, less feedback is more. As a product engineer and ex-founder in the thick of development cycles, I’ve realised that while customer input is valuable, it shouldn’t be the sole driver of product development.

The Developer's Guide to SEO

A step by step pass over a portfolio site: metadata, structured data, sitemaps and internal linking.

How to Do Great Work: Insights from Paul Graham

Ambition and curiosity are the cornerstones of great work.

Paul Graham's insights on achieving significant accomplishments provide a structured yet flexible roadmap. By combining ambition, curiosity, hard work, and a keen eye for opportunities, anyone can elevate their work to new heights. Great work is not about following a rigid formula but about adapting these principles to your unique path and continuously striving for excellence.

Getting Started with Finger Drumming

What finger drumming is, the gear you need to start, and a set of beat charts to practice from.

The 80/20 Rule

The Pareto principle, and how to apply it to work and life instead of just quoting it.

Public APIs

Discover 10 essential public APIs for your tech projects, covering everything from global data and music to space exploration and more. Enhance your apps with APIs for countries, plants, NASA, Spotify, news, sunrise/sunset, Pokémon, movies, and pet facts. Ideal for developers seeking to add unique data and functionality.

Essential Books for Aspiring World-Class Programmers

To become a world-class programmer, building a strong foundation of knowledge and skills is crucial. Here are some essential books that can help you achieve that goal.

A Support Bot based on your company's knowledge base and powered by ChatGPT

PageSpeed Insights from 2,500 Shopify Stores

What 2,500 Shopify storefronts score on PageSpeed, and what the slow ones have in common.

Road Trip to Gokarna and Chikmagalur

1900 km through the beaches of Gokarna and the coffee hills of Chikmagalur, over a long weekend with five friends.

Postgres Cheatsheet

Common Postgres commands: psql basics, inspection, roles, backups and maintenance.

Listing Your App on the Shopify App Store

The review requirements and listing details that catch you out the first time you submit a Shopify app.

How to Install TIG stack (Telegraf, Influx and Grafana) on Ubuntu

Creating a Chrome Extension with React

52K+ Views | 300+ Claps

A step-by-step guide to building a Chrome extension using React

Working With Cookies and Creating Cookies in JavaScript

Session Management across Subdomains: Localstorage vs Cookies

Integrate Facebook Pixel and Fb Pixel Events in GatsbyJs

Link Your Form with Google Form for Responses

Setting up CORS for Rails API App