Weekly Update: Email Issues, ICSE Memories, and Japan Plans

Last week: borked email, ICSE memories, political compass, and plans for a trip to Japan

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 b0rked my personal email during the website move last week by not noticing that MX records were overwritten with the Hostinger defaults. So for about a week, no email 🙂 This should be fixed now. If you tried emailing me during that time, do send again.

Sooraj had gone to Palani, and decided to do its traditional practice of shaving off their head. Here’s the 3 of us twinning, or rather thrinning?

One of my stealth uses for ChatGPT is in deciphering appliances. This week I used it to figure out why the washing machine door has a lock icon on it even when the child lock option was off, and how to turn that off. You just have to take a photo, ask a sensible question, and you’ll get decent enough ideas.

Ammu was organizing my bookshelf and found some old ICSE textbooks. Here’s one with a lot of shared ownership 🙂 I don’t remember any of the content in the book & that’s not surprising because it was over 20 years ago. We’re having a class reunion this December, and am pretty stoked to see everybody again.

I learnt about the Political Compass quiz from Thejesh, and got pretty similar results. I liked having two economic and social axes, and it’s nice to see that while India has drifted far to the right, I’m still left-leaning:

Ammu is a forward guru on Whatsapp and keeps sending me things like this. Honestly it does describe us to a T.

I discovered Wispr Flow this week through Gautham, and it’s pretty cool how I can just press a button and talk and instantly something appears on the screen. I kinda feel that for products like this, speed is the feature, and it’s pretty amazing how much better it feels than native voice over dictation despite the fact that it’s exactly the same feature. I turned off the on-screen UI as well, so the only indication I get when I press the trigger is the mic icon popping up on the top right. That’s pretty much enough because the instant I let the trigger button go, I get the text up on the screen: it’s invisible UI at its best.

Early thoughts on switching to Cursor: it’s been hard to write prompts first instead of writing code, but I’ve been slowly training myself to build that muscle memory. It’s great for “errand-like” tasks: for example, I extracted out a component to our design system, and then asked it to build a Storybook for it. It got it pretty nice one-shot, with just a few manual edits required. It also seems to be a pretty good way to explore unfamiliar areas of the code: I worked on a sync service this week, and it walked me through the code pretty well. Next week will be a true challenge though as I’m going to dig into widgets, and I wonder how it’ll handle the Yjs and Prosemirror combo that we use.

I’m traveling to Japan July 4-7. It’s the first team meetup I’ll have with Chronicle, and definitely looking forward to seeing everybody in person.

We use Linear at work for project managmement, and their new Agents integration seems cool. We haven’t used any of this yet because the tools we use don’t seem to have agents, but it’s an interesting world we’re going to be living in.

Can recommend Skydo for receiving international payments. Good interface & great value. This is a referral link, you & I will get 1 extra payment for free.

I’ve been buying more bamboo products recently, and it’s nice to see that Zerodha has invested in a company centered around bamboo. It’s a renewable resource that can replace plastic for many use-cases. I also buy bamboo tissues, and they work better than paper (more absorbent power).