Last week: migrating vishnugopal.com, book quotes, reading glasses & AI and React stuff.

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

• I moved vishnugopal.com over to a Hostinger plan yesterday. Switching away from wordpress.com is bittersweet since I used to work on the team that handled migrations to Dotcom, but frankly I can’t afford the cost of a plan at WordPress.com that supports plugins now that I don’t get Automattic freebies. Hostinger is 1/10th the cost: I wasn’t oblivious to this the entire time I was working at Automattic, but while building pricing may be an engineering function, deciding on pricing is not. I’m still sticking with Jetpack, but that plan hasn’t expired yet, and the documentation does say that Jetpack free supports newsletters (which is really the only feature I really use from the Jetpack suite).

• Aruna from Second Design sent across this wonderful book called A Programmers Introduction to Mathematics by Jeremy Kun. I’m slowly working my way through Chapter 1, and here’s a couple of quotes from the preface that stood out, the latter especially counterintuitive to how I think of maths and rigor.

• Another quote, this time from the fiction series I’ve been reading (& can recommend) called The Path of Ascension

• I got reading glasses this week. I’ve been noticing the increasing distance I’ve been holding my phone to read for about a month now, and finally decided to go to the eye doctor after some bout of headaches. The biggest difference is how much clearer the phone screen is: it’s like it suddenly became 4K and HDR all at once. It’s +1 power, so I sprinkled a bunch of cheap reading glasses throughout the house, and use the one nearest. The worst hassle is actually reading on the toilet ? now I have to remember to carry the spectacles in there too, and that’s an accident waiting to happen ?

• In the vein of technology can solve technology’s problems, I loved this approach of AI-driven claim verification for AI-generated text. The disambiguation step especially is so useful for rigor, and I would love this to be integrated into our writing tools: can avoid so many weasely sentences.

• I’ve been working on a branch to upgrade React at work. It went surprisingly smooth except for a few incompatible packages, and I think that speaks to the stack that Chronicle has. Running the E2E suite on the branch is the next step, and I’ll try to get it pushed in before our next feature push. Chroncle is now live btw, you can go to app.chroniclehq.com/start to signup!

• I was building workspace membership management at work this week, and the number of edge-cases you have to think through is just crazy. What if a user removes themselves from the workspace, and they have no other workspaces? What if a user removes another user, what happens to their documents? I think it’s high time that somebody standardized all of this into a higher-order library, something like Clerk Billing but for user management.

• I spent yesterday configuring Cursor, and also upgraded to the Pro plan. I want to try writing code AI-first, and Cursor seems to be the most popular of these kinds of editors. I’ll report back on how this goes. It’ll also be cool to collaboratively develop Cursor rules as a team. I heavily personalize my editors, and this is how Cursor looks now:

• Our IVF embryo transfer is tomorrow. We’ll be in the hospital around 10AM, and should be back by evening. The procedure itself is a short, painless, non-invasive 5 minute process, but Ammu will be on rest and observation for the next week or so.

Links of the Week

• Loved this article about the CSS height enigma. There’s a bunch of things I don’t understand yet in CSS, but good writing like this makes at least this bit clearer.

• Sonner seems like a cool toast component. We use react-toastify at Chroncle though.

• This project to code electronics with React is just crazy.

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