I run 19 instances of a C program that fetches RSS feeds on a 1vCPU VPS. Each run is short, but over time, the CPU profile felt off – spiky, higher than it should’ve been. Turns out, the fetch loop was subtly blocking. No threads, just enough delay to cause churn. I rewrote it to run on an event loop – non-blocking I/O, no busy waits. After the change, CPU usage dropped by half. No infra changes, no concurrency hacks. Just better rhythm. ...

For nearly two decades in tech, I’ve quietly built things that mattered – writing bash scripts late after class, and later, quietly rebuilding Crisp’s infrastructure almost from scratch and at near-zero cost. But as a CTO and solo builder, I’ve realized that quiet craftsmanship alone keeps your journey and your impact invisible. Invisible work doesn’t build community, influence, or the momentum needed to lead and inspire. After years of encouraging founders to “share their process,” I knew it was time to walk the talk. ...

A quick nod to my October 2024 post where I wrote about a resurrection; a spark of revival just a week before I joined my current role. After that, almost a year of quiet, no major moves, just the hum of the background. But now, here I am, with something serious finally done. This post is the story of that journey: from stillness to momentum, from a borrowed MacBook Air to a fleet of blazing-fast containers. It’s about persistence, evolution, and the indie CTO spirit that never quits. ...

[tl; dr] I spent some time in the recent past weeks to pull crisp back up, to the extent possible and incrementally adding back more from its older avatar. All that’s below is a brain dump of whatever has encountered over the phase. Something a long time due has been crisp's resurrection; or what it looks to be today. The wonderful thing about a boring job, a boring persona, and any such is the element of surprise that it throws to those that never saw things coming. The attempted super-villain-esque jot as a joke aside, it has always been a focus to build things that people don’t generally associate me with. Be it picking the mic up for a sort of impromptu singing at work, or over a few nights rebuilding some parts of crisp from memory, this has been snarky to the insider. ...

This evening has been a good one. A welcome break if I may, from a few weeks without enough to feed the brain. Of course, a minor detour existed with refreshing logarithms and some trigonometry. Cutting back, stumbled upon some excellent content on Distributed Hash Tables almost by accident. The Kademlia DHT is just about old enough for its first job post a bachelors. The genius of the trick lies in the binary of XOR for distances and a sort of binary tree space for retaining information about neighbouring nodes. Considering Kademlia focuses on distributed hash tables, one of the first concerns is about calling back and identifying nodes prior to fetching data. ...

Found the image thanks to Abhishek Nayak on LinkedIn. This one did remind me of something that I’ve been pondering about for some time now. Some ramblings, on that note. – Developers’ apprehension for no/low-code tools: A denial of agency? As developers, we tend to get wed to our code, solutions, and the nitty gritty. We take pride in our craftsmanship and our ability to solve complex problems with elegant solutions. But this can also lead to a denial of agency when it comes to no/low-code tools. ...

Made some incremental changes over the last couple of days. We have a new PM who I work with on our order APIs and there’s been some discussion we’ve had about making the system not just robust, but accountable and actionable. While we’ve had a bunch of chaps who focus enough on the former part, the latter I’m glad there’s at least one soul that does think of. This time around though, unlike the previous two iterations in the last year, didn’t give up and spent some time post the time off at Boss’ place on Friday. Not bad I should say, on two counts. ...

After ages together, an update here. Not that there has not been enough to write about, but there has not been enough discipline to. Painful as it is, here goes. The last few months have been rather on and off with trying to reining in the way work gets done, not to mention the way planning happens. In a perhaps inane manner, started rewriting some parts of the stack after a major concern during Deepavali. Long story short, the crud of neglected codebase does come back hard with a strong stench; the stinker an orphan everywhere. ...

And another fortnight passes, almost. A bunch of firefighting and a lot more that elevate the carpet later, some time to spend on things that keep the brain functional. Restarted work on separating our current order system into functional, event-driven components. Even as certain teams express discomfort regarding the delays with refunds, the tunnel vision or the lack of any to begin with at the other side seems only to push further towards a scalable solution. ...

One of the good things that I picked up during my short but eventfully learning stint at Simpl was how long a well thought about domain data model can go. The one that I couldn’t for my life, was tests. Jokes aside, this has been one healthy learning that has taken a while now to put into some practice. Yes, we did have something that nominally resembled this at crisp, but the constraints did prevent us from going all in. ...