Vishnu Gopal

Weekly Notes 16/2025

Last week: Talekat, visit to Jatayu Park, Pravinkoodu shapu & side projects.

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

  • We came to stay at a place called Talekat (near Chadayamangalam) for the long weekend. This was an absolutely zero-agenda trip, and we just wanted a break from the daily grind. I recommend this place ?. It’s run by Pirkko, a Finnish lady who somehow settled in tropical Kerala, and it’s a wonderful retreat with bird sounds everywhere. We spent most of the time just lazing around reading books, and I just loved this cozy place.
Two women smiling while sitting at a table in a cozy indoor setting surrounded by greenery.
A stone pathway leading to a cozy house surrounded by lush greenery and tropical plants, creating a serene and tranquil atmosphere.
A serene pathway surrounded by lush greenery and tall trees, with sunlight filtering through the leaves and illuminating a stone path.
A cozy retreat house nestled among lush greenery in Talekat, Kerala.
A view of a cozy retreat surrounded by lush green trees, with a mountainous landscape in the background.
Green!
  • Jatayu park is nearby, and since both of us hadn’t visited, we decided to go. The journey up and down by cable car is nice, and the facility itself is one of the best managed tourist attractions I’ve seen in India. It’s also wheelchair-accessible, which is super rare. Here’s a few more photos:
A cable car system with yellow cabins traveling over a lush green landscape under a cloudy sky.
A large sculpture of Jatayu, a mythical eagle, located at Jatayu Earth Center in Kerala, India, with a cloudy sky in the background.
A couple posing together in front of textured stone-like background, with one person wearing a yellow dress and the other in a color-blocked shirt.
  • We watched Pravinkoodu shappu this week, and while it’s a decent movie, the ending is kind of a let-down. Malayalam has so many good movies now that it’s easy to find fault with even good movies, and this one is good, but not the best this year.
  • Partly because we watched that, we also found a pretty cool kallu shap (toddy shop) on the way back from Jatayu park: Ellam. It’d been a while since I had toddy, and what can I say: it’s good for the body, mind and soul. After a while though—at least for me—the body starts throwing up through the rear end ?. I didn’t want to have a lot, but the smallest portion they have is a liter. And it comes in multiple flavors too: the one I had was the spicy kanthari.
A green glass bottle filled with a beverage next to a glass of a cloudy drink, set on a table with blurred figures in the background.
Yummy!
  • Liked this Posthog article about developer documentation. While it’s a little bit focused on developer tools, I think a lot of it applies to any consumer product, and even internal documentation. I’ve been a big champion of internal docs in every company I’ve been in, and I’d like to contribute to it at Chronicle too.
  • Came across a pretty concrete implementation of my story idea at Infinite Worlds. It’s pretty long-form and while I didn’t find the stories themselves engaging, the execution is pretty good!
  • On the topic of our guppies: we have managed to not kill off any more, but our fish bowl is a bit sad with just the fishes and water. As usual, I turned to Youtube for inspiration, and found something decidedly overkill:

Links of the Week

  • Loved this article about side projects. I’ve not been able to do much of them when working. I stop using the computer after work nowadays, but I loved this sentiment in the article: Enjoying the freedom to explore possibilities, and happily follow any compelling whim—that’s the blissful zen of a good side project.
  • I’ve long been fascinated by tmux, but the key combinations were inscrutable. Enter zellij: I’ve started using it (inside the VS Code terminal) and can wholeheartedly recommend it. It’s super easy to get started.

Subscribe

In

Leave a Reply