Weekly Notes 15/2025

Las week: family from north India, XState musings, small world adventures, and getting fish.

For folks not in the know, this is a weekly stream of consciousness zero-agenda “here’s what’s happening” or “here’s what’s interesting” post.

What’s been happening

My brother’s girlfriend’s family came over yesterday night. They are from North India, and it’s always great to see their reactions to typical South Indian stuff, it’s a mix of confusion and wonder. Malayalam also has a tendency to add -an to every Sanskrit word, so Ram is Raman, and even crazier, Lakshman is Lakshmanan, which always cracks me up. Anyways, we had a great time: the common language was mostly English, but because all of us have a smattering of Hindi in us, there was a lot of Hindi too. Including a Hamare bhi to izzat hai na dialogue from somebody who shall remain nameless ?

I’m thinking of moving away from WordPress.com for hosting. Automattic seems to be imploding, and I’ve seen lots of lag in the dashboard. Does anybody have any recommendations? A fast server based in India would be good enough I think, this blog hardly gets 1000 views a day. I found Miles web, and they seem cheap enough and good.

I’ve been playing around with new commit stacking tools, and Graphite seems to be the best of the lot. I’m convinced that stacking (with its emphasis on smaller PRs, easier reviews, and less rebasing) is the way forward for larger teams. I’m less convinced about how smaller teams will pick it up, but Graphite seems to have added bonuses. Their AI features are kinda cool, but they have a so much better review dashboard. I can’t figure out for the life of me why Github insists on its crazy pane-separation between the code view and the comment view. I’m pitching it to Chronicle folks, and let’s see what they think.

I rediscovered Retcon this week, and it’s such a cool example of a Mac app that elevates a core development experience. Those are in the tiny minority now. I remember when Textmate was the way to code, and I sometimes miss those days.

I think I’ve got a reasonably good handle of XState now. What I love about it is how much is helps to separate control logic from presentation. I didn’t expect that going in, because regardless of what frameworks advertise, the reality is often different, but having built a few non-trivial features now, I love how my logic PRs are free of React, and my presentation PRs include only local state changes. What I don’t like can be another essay, but essentially it boils down to the boilerplate that XState enforces due to its declarative nature. I do wish it had a competitor that subscribed a bit less to “this is the way the standard does it” and explores a bit more DX. Robot seems interesting there.

Just realized this week that one of my good friends (& a senior) in college Hari is one of the co-founders of Great Learning. We’ve been in touch off & on after college, but I just happened to meet another friend who worked in Great Learning and he said the company was started by somebody who passed out of my college. And I was like, “No way”, but small world.

We got some fish (& a pretty bowl) the week before last, and have since killed off half their number. Guppies reportedly survive anywhere, so I’ll report back if this experiment is a success ?

If you use 1Password SSH (and you should use something similar), then this tip to configure your SSH_AUTH_SOCK globally will save your ass a lot.

Found easings.net that shows transition animations, and also how to implement em with CSS. Great tool to collaborate on animations with a designer. I love tools like this that speak both languages and find a common ground. Figma Dev Mode is another example.

The preview prompt API directly in the browser seems like a great idea. Use the browser and local computer’s capabilities to add AI features to your web app.