I’ve been on a KonMari Method spree lately and I’m enjoying it.
Any entity that doesn’t spark joy – out of my face.
The original draft of this post had a lot in it, but I deleted the whole thing and chose to keep it short. The old draft didn’t spark joy LOL.
I’ve deleted pretty much every social media app from my phone. My twitter account is ghost town. I’ve deleted all of my tweets. I don’t think I’ll delete my accounts. I want them online for the sake of nostalgia.
In order to spark joy, I’ve been essentially using a hybrid of Elon’s algorithm and the KonMari Method. It’s a hybrid, leaning more towards the KonMari Method, but it seems to be helping A LOT. I feel generally less stressed. It’s crazy how many things around me were stressing me out on a daily basis and stealing my attention.
Attention is an asset you’re not flush with.
Mohnish Thallavajhula (2025)
I strongly believe in that. I’ve undervalued and wasted my attention for so long and I’m slowly trying to improve that.
For the past 2 years, I’ve been contemplating updating (not upgrading) my daily use tech and I finally took the leap last month. I’ve come up with a list of items and the first one to go – my Apple Watch Ultra 2.
I started using the Apple Watch since the launch of Series 2. Since then, except for Series 3, I’ve owned and religiously used every other series of the Apple Watch, every day, pretty much 24/7.
Not anymore.
I now use my Apple Watch to track my sleep, workouts, and for my morning wake up alarm.
No more wearing the watch 24/7 to check the Calendar, Reminder, Weather, notifications, unlocking computer, unlocking 1Password, etc. I got my cellular plan on my watch canceled too. I rely way too much on my Apple Watch and without it, I can notice the difference. The most important feature I miss is the Calendar and Reminder notifications, which I rely on heavily. The rest, I’ve already gotten used to.
That’s it. My Apple Watch is now a fitness tracker. A great one at that.
I’ve been meaning to get this off my chest for a while now — TypeScript sucks.
I know this will hurt many passionate opinionated snowflakes out there, but there, I said it. Fuck TypeScript. You love TypeScript? Great. Good for you. I hate that so much of the frontend tooling has migrated over to it.
TypeScript has singlehandedly ruined my love for frontend development. There’re already hundreds of tools for the frontend development experience (DX). Adding one more isn’t the problem. The negative impact it has on the DX is. The extra compilation, the general vibe of coding in TypeScript, the added mental load when starting new projects, the extra language on top of something you could totally code in etc.
If TypeScript were a language by itself, I wouldn’t mind it. I’m ok with the language. But…it’s a language that compiles to another language and that language is what gets used in the browser. Don’t give me the “why bother writing C? Why not just write Assembly?” argument. Shove it up your ass. That’s one of the dumbest, ill-informed arguments ever.
First it was CoffeeScript, then Babel, then TypeScript. They are all different, but have a lot of similarities. One main trait they all have in common is the degraded DX. IMHO, Babel did a lot good in pushing JavaScript and helping keep up with the latest syntax and other good stuff.
TypeScript is more focused on types in JavaScript, but it does add several other language features. Picking up TypeScript is quite straightforward. Barely a few minutes, really. But the dev overhead, my goodness. It’s no fun.
For me, TypeScript doesn’t spark joy. It sparks darkness, misery, self-loathing, and depression. I have to use it at work, so I’ll use it. In my personal projects though, I just won’t.
Japan has always been No. 1 on the list of countries I wanted to visit. I had an opportunity to visit Japan in 2012/13 when RubyConf was organized in Tokyo. Unfortunately, I couldn’t due to some person reasons. Finally, this year, in March, I got to visit Japan and I loved every second of it. Japan is a wonderful country with wonderful people. I am absolutely certain that I’m going back.
The theme of the trip was to checkout the most obvious touristy places and learn about the Japanese culture and history along the way.
Before the trip, I wasn’t doing well in terms of health and I wasn’t sure if I would make it to the trip. Luckily, my wife was there to help out and pretty much planned/executed the trip along with her friend, Chloe.
I’m so happy that this trip happened. Japan has left a wonderful impression on me. I left Japan with nothing but wonderful memories of the country and its kind, mindful, sweet people.
Japan e-Visa application
We applied for Japan’s e-Visa and the process was quite straightforward. We got our e-Visas approved within a week. One thing to note is that Japan requires the dates of your travel and where you’d be staying. So, it’s important to make those arrangements before applying for the e-Visa. The e-Visa website is perhaps one of the best ones in terms of functionality.
Before the trip
Full disclosure, as I mentioned earlier, I didn’t plan the trip. My contribution towards the planning was very little. Klook and Get Your Guide are the apps we used for booking some of the events and pretty much the hotel reservations were through Booking.com. We got a data-only SIM card via Klook. We got the unlimited data per day plan for the entirety of our trip and it was great. The price is not too different from the limited data plans, so we got the unlimited data plan to not worry about running out of data. Japan has excellent cellular data reception all over. Besides, most of the places have free Wifi including the trains and the train stations. It’s crazy how accessible internet is in Japan.
Note: Try not to get influenced by social media’s representation of anything and that includes Japan. It just skews your views and makes everything IRL dull and disappointing.
Things we did
Day 1: Japan, baby!
Landed in Tokyo, Japan at the Narita International Airport.
Arrived at Hotel Sunroute Ginza and settled in. Our hotel was in the Ginza district in Tokyo. The rooms were tiny. This came to me as a shock. I knew and expected the rooms to be small, but damn, they were tiny. Imagine how tiny the restrooms would be in such a tiny hotel room.
I took this picture from their official website. This is literally how big it is. That’s a twin bed.
Took me about 2 days to get used to the size of those rooms.
Day 2: Asakusa & Shibuya
We checked the weather forecast and moved a few things around to adjust to the weather. So, Day 2 was visiting the beautiful Senso-ji temple.
Day 3: Mt. Fuji
We booked a tour to Mt. Fuji. Mt. Fuji was glorious that day. We lucked out with 10 visibility. The day before, the visibility was 4. It’s not that common to get a 10 visibility at that time of the year.
Apparently, people hike to the mountain summit. We didn’t hike, we just went on a tour and it was amazing. Mt. Fuji is massive and you can see it in its full glory from afar. The tour takes you around places where you can see Fuji-san (that’s how the tour guide kept referring to Fuji and I thought it was cute) and enjoy the views.
Day 4: Tokyo Tower, Team Labs
We wanted to checkout Tokyo and its skyscrapers. Tokyo Tower is the best place to do just that. You get a full 360 degree view of Tokyo from atop the tower and you can enjoy the view from there.
Team Labs is a fun place to check out. Would I go back there again? No. It’s a one-time thing and it was definitely fun. They have some amazing things setup and they did a good job at maintaining the whole place in a very clean way.
Day 5: Shibuya, Shinjuku, & Ginza
Shinjuku station is perhaps the busiest train station in the world. It was fascinating. Also, it’s crazy how good the infrastructure in Japan is. They have malls inside the metro stations and these aren’t small malls. These are huge. They have restaurants, malls, random stores etc, all inside the metro stations.
We then headed out to experience the famous Shibuya Scramble Crossing. It’s the world’s most busiest pedestrian crossing. It did not disappoint.
Shibuya Scramble
It’s like this, all day.
I got to shop around a little in Shibuya, Shinjuku, and Ginza. All 3 places are awesome to shop, but Ginza, the place where we were staying, is a level above the rest. The stores in Ginza are great and you can get a ton of designer wear too. I loved the Hermès store in Ginza.
Day 6: Tokyo to Osaka – Bullet train. Arrive at hotel and settle in. Sumo show at Namba Parks.
The next day, we took a Shinkansen (Japanese Bullet Train) train and traveled from Tokyo to Osaka.
The Shinkansen
Once we arrived at Osaka, we checked out a Sumo wrestling show.
It was fun. They gave us snacks during the show and we could order food to our seats, which made the show even more fun.
Day 7: Nara – Deer park, Budha Temple, Todai-ji temple, Dotonbori night market. Namba, Dotonbori, Nipponbashi
Next on agenda was the Deer park in Nara. I had a fantastic time there. The Deer were so friendly and I had an exciting time feeding them the deer cookies.
Feeding the deer at Nara
As you can see in the video, the deer thanked me. Their way of saying – Deer(wink) Santa, thank you!
The Todai-ji template was beautiful. I got to learn about the history of it and the difference between a Shrine and a Temple. A Temple is Budhism related. A Shrine is Shinto related.
This is what I came to know about Shinto vs Buddhism. While Shinto is associated with this life and celebratory events, Buddhism is more concerned with the afterlife and spiritual development.
That night, we headed out to Namba to head to Dotonbori and Nipponbashi. They had crazy shopping and food places. Got to enjoy the street food there and shop around quite a bit.
Also, I learned that Bashi in Japanese means Bridge.
Day 8: Kyoto – Shrines (Fushimi Inari Taisha), The brownish black shrine check, Kiyomizu-dera, Gion district Geisha event
We checked out Kyoto next. The Shrines in Kyoto were gorgeous. The Fushini Inari Taisha shrine is the most famous one there. There’s also the Hōkan-ji Temple.
Matcha ice cream with Chestnut topping
We then headed to the Gion district to checkout the Geisha event. I enjoyed the event. There was basically the famous tea preparation, a play, and another dance performance.
We got some fragrance oils in Kyoto. I’ve been using them near my desk and in my car and I love them. Unfortunately, they don’t sell them online. I bought like 6 units of them and I’m already out of 3.
Day 9: Osaka – Shopping and exploring
Pretty much spent the whole day shopping for random things.
Miniature trains
Day 10: Osaka – Osaka Castle tour, leg massage
Took a paid tour of the Osaka Castle. It was enlightening. I got to know a lot about the Japanese culture and history, which was one of the main things I was hoping to know from this trip.
Before we went on the trip, I noticed that Tokyo and Kyoto are very similar in their names. I asked the tour guide if there was any significance to it and he explained it. Tokyo is essentially To-Kyoto, which is east capital. To in Japanese means East.Tokyo was previously called Edo, which then became To-Kyoto, which became Tokyo.
I got to learn a ton about how Japan evolved. Our tour guide was a 10/10. The guy was knowledgeable and was very patient with our questions.
Day 11: Osaka to Tokyo. Bullet train Shinkansen. Arrive at Narita.
We took the Shinkansen back to Tokyo since we had our flight the next day. The travel back to Tokyo took up the majority of the time and we just ended up relaxing at the hotel and had dinner.
Day 12: Goodbye, Japan!
The Japanese are very nice people. They’re very kind and patient. They answer in complete and help a little more.
Special Mentions
Tax free shopping
If you plan on shopping, make sure you get tax free goods wherever possible. You’d need to present your passport or you can setup your customs QR code which pretty much works as a Passport when buying tax free stuff in Japan.
Japan Railways (JR)
The Shinkansen lines help you travel from one city to another. We used these to travel between Tokyo <> Osaka. Shinkansen has 2 kinds of tickets, the regular and the Green car tickets. Green Car tickets are the ones with only 2×2 seats per row. The regular car has 2×3 seats per row. We never traveled by a bullet train before, so we chose the Green Car tickets in the Shinkansen train. I’d always pick the Green Car tickets. The price difference is ~$30 and I think it’s worth it.
Luggage storage in metro stations
Metro stations have luggage storage options. These are especially useful if you plan on walking your ass off the entire day while shopping.
Basic words for max RoI
I learned some basic words for communication and ordering food. These really aren’t necessary, but it’s nice to put in some effort. My favorite word is Kudasai, which means Please in Japanese.
Integrated Circuit (IC) card
Japan has a few IC cards for transit. We got the Suica card and it’s very useful. Topping it off can be done from your iPhone Wallet app and it is simple. Suica card can also be used at convenience stores and some other stores. If you have Yen left over on your Suica card, just use your card at those stores.
Google Translate app
Download the Google Translate app on your phone and download the Japanese language in it. If you don’t speak the language, you’ll want to use it. Japanese people are sweet. They’ll patiently work with you as you try to communicate words with them.
Pro tip: If you have an iPhone that has Action Button support, set Google Translate app to it. I used it all the time.
Free umbrellas
We stayed at hotels in Japan and they offer free Umbrellas on rainy days. They just put ’em out at the entrance and you can pick one up and return it after you’re back from your outing. Also, most places offer plastic covers for umbrellas. You go to a store/restaurant, there’s a umbrella cover dispenser that you can use to prevent water spills. Some places even offer plastic covers for your backpacks.
Free shuttles
Most hotels offer free Airport shuttles. We found them very helpful especially with multiple huge luggages.
No tipping culture
The no tipping culture of Japan seemed great. They’re chill and don’t stress you out. I really appreciated it. I’m not against tipping, but I feel pressured into tipping 20% even for an awful haircut. I mean, I don’t have to, but I’d rather do it and not feel guilty later. It’s slightly more than a “me” problem.
OP Toilet technology
The Japanese have the most OP toilet tech. Here’s some of the features you have on a toilet (if you are grossed out by the topic, skip the following points and move on to the next paragraph) –
Privacy screening – plays music when you’re using the toilet to drown out sounds 🤯
Seat heater – every single time I sat on the seat, it was pure pleasure
Insane bidets – now obviously I didn’t use these since they were public but the insane configuration with various styles left me blown away
Auto-flush – when you sit on the toilet, it automatically flushes
Flush length – usually we have 2 buttons on the regular ones. They have 3.
Splash prevention – the design of these toilets is not the same as the regular ones. IDK what they do but it fucking works
Hotel to hotel luggage transport
Hotels in Japan offer transporting your luggage from one hotel to another. For instance, if you have a lot of luggage and you don’t want to lug it around, you can pay your hotel and let them know the destination hotel address and they’ll first confirm your reservation at the destination hotel and then transport it over there. It takes about a day and sometimes two to transport your luggage. They seem to only accept cash as the payment.
Closing notes
I’m grateful for my wife who made this trip possible. Japan has been one of those places that I’ve always wanted to check out. I am 100% going back to visit Japan. I felt welcomed and special when I was in Japan.
Special shout out to Timmy Lee for sharing some good tips about visiting Japan. Thanks, bud.
I’ve been on sabbatical this June. I feel grateful for this opportunity. It helped me rediscover myself that I lost track of over the past few years.
Usually, when I take some time off, it’s because of travel, be it for a fun vacation, for some unfortunate family emergency, or for some other reason. I never got to take a solid chunk of time-off and do nothing. This time, I did exactly that.
Before the sabbatical, I planned out a ton of things to do during. I wanted to pick up on new technologies, pick up new hobbies, build new projects (I even sketched everything out), and get ripped.
As I got close to the timeframe, I remembered what was more important to me and dropped all of my ideas and stuck to my original plan of doing nothing. It was hard, initially. But, I was able to do it.
I just wanted to do what I used to do – hang out at random coffee shops and read up on random things. I did just that. I had a great time doing that.
During the course of this month, I’ve significantly lowered my consumption of social media. I deleted a ton of apps from my phone. I pruned my desk, and upgraded some of my everyday-use gear.
I didn’t want to keep in touch with anyone during this time and didn’t bother to update any one of what I was up to. I didn’t care much about what I ate. I worked out of various coffee shops and coffeeshop hopped on a regular basis.
That’s it. That’s all I did. It was definitely not bad at all.
This was meant to be posted in April 2025. I wrote it and totally forgot to post it back then.
I’m a Barca fan, I’ve always been – except now, I’m Officially a Barca fan. I’ve always been a member of Barca’s website, but I’m a member of the Penya Barcelonista San Francisco chapter. Here’s my official card.
This basically means that I’m officially recognized as a Barca fan. It may not mean much to y’all, but it means a lot to me. I got my official membership registered on the day we beat Real Madrid.
I was at Mad Dog in the Fog in the City, which is pretty much a bar for the Barca fans. I sported my Gavi 6 jersey (away kit 2024) that my sister bought me for me from her visit to Barcelona last year.
I’ve thought about using my domains MT.CX and CX.MT for various purposes and after thinking long and hard about it, I’ve finally come to a conclusion.
MT.CX will be the official Makers Territorywebsite. I don’t plan on changing that. More on this later. I’ll have a landing page later when I have time. Apps that I host here will be multi-tenant in nature, meaning, I’ll provide access to these apps to the general public.
CX.MT will be where I host apps that I use for my personal purposes. Mostly trivial side projects and personal tools will be hosted here. Nobody besides me and the ones I explicitly give access to, will be able to able to use these.
BAM! Thats’ it. I don’t want to spend another minute on how I’ll be using these domains. I think this is perfectly fine. That’s it. I’ve finally figured it out.
Around 2007, I started building out a collection of RSS feeds to a lot of blogs that I followed. Over the next 4-5 years, this number got past 100. I had them all added to my Firefox Bookmarks Bar and used an extension to fetch the latest updates from those blogs. It was the perfect setup.
Then, Google Reader became popular. I started using it and also tried a few other feed readers. As some of these apps shutdown, I lost interest in keeping track of the blogs and ever since I’ve been lazy to rebuild my RSS feeds.
Fast forward to 2022, I discovered NetNewsWire, an awesome OSS feed reader that I’ve come to love. It’s simple, efficient, and straight forward.
I sync my feeds via iCloud and this lets me access my feeds on the macOS and iOS clients. After using NetNewsWire for 3+ years, I am yet to use most of its features. I’ll have to look into which ones make sense to me.
I’ve been traveling and I need to catch up on the unread posts
Over the past couple of years, I’ve managed to get the number of tracked blogs up to 45. I still have long ways to go, but this is great progress. I plan on publishing these blog links on a dedicated page on IAM.MT. I’m really digging the small web movement.
Fun fact: I wrote my own feed reader before I discovered NetNewsWire. It was via an automated script that’d check for updates at a set interval and push them to folder offline on my iCloud drive. It was simple and accessible across all of my devices immediately. I just killed the project due to lack of time and I didn’t like downloading raw feed files to my iCloud directory. It was meant as temporary solution anyway.
Last week, Adobe celebrated the 35th anniversary of Adobe Photoshop. Unfortunately, due to a calendar conflict, I had to skip the event. But, I’ve been thinking about how Photoshop has affected me over the years.
I first used Photoshop back in 2004/2005, when I first got access to the internet. I had dial-up internet back then and switched to broadband in July 2005.
Photoshop instantly attracted me and I was in awe of how cool it was. I used to design WinAMP skins, posters for my college fest, websites etc. Back then, Photoshop was how one would design a website. It was pretty much THE way to design. I loved it. I got into design and followed hundreds of tutorials to get good at Photoshop. I even started a company and designed a nice logo and cover art for it. That’s a topic for another time.
I’ve been a user of Photoshop for around 21 years. 21 out of the 35 years of its existence. Sure, there have been a few years in between where I briefly switched to using other graphic editors, but I saw myself coming back to Photoshop.
I started using it when Adobe Creative Suite was announced. When I was at WKU, I worked part-time on-campus as a Web Developer for the WKU Office of Diversity Programs. It was quite the learning experience for me, in terms of both culture and tech. Some of my responsibilities included designing their brochures, posters, Annual Black Graduation booklets etc. That was the time I mastered Photoshop in terms of design. I used Adobe InDesign for the books, but the graphics were all done in Photoshop. Up until then, I was learning the techniques of creating various graphics in Photoshop from the scratch, but that was when I learned how to aesthetically create designs.
I followed hundreds of tutorials online. Lynda.com was my favorite source back then. I completed several courses in Design.
After so many years, we now have tools that help fix minor issues in photos with a tap of a finger. I don’t use Photoshop as much anymore, mainly because I don’t take as many photos as I used to or edit any graphics anymore.
I don’t use Photoshop much anymore. I’d say maybe once every 4-6 months. However, it’s always nice to reminisce about its power and beauty.
Yesterday, I finally got the Shapes release on my reMarkable Paper Pro. It’s a nice feature. But what’s more interesting is how it came to be.
A user on the reMarkable sub-reddit posted a feature request for Shapes in reMarkable. For the next 46 days, pretty much without skipping a single day, they posted about drawing a circle. It sort of became a thing on that sub.
I followed this everyday. The first few days, it seemed unnecessary and even mildly annoying. However, a couple of weeks in, I noticed more and more people joining in the discussion and I started to see the value and liked how the community was coming along.
They actually listened to the community and shipped the feature. The fact that they shipped the beta in 46 days is amazing. They included a bunch of other features, but this one in particular is something that stemmed out of the community. This shows the power of community and how rM did a fabulous job at listening to the community.
reMarkable added a nice touch by sort of mentioning the Circle Guy‘s daily template in their release notes.
rM using Circle Guy’s template in their release notesCircle Guy’s daily template
Programmatic usage of LLMs has gone up astronomically over the past 1 year. There are so many startups that are mere LLM wrappers. It’s the latest tech hotness and I get it.
Ever since 2007/08, tech has seen the most innovation.
Explosion of socials
Modernization of web
8 million new JavaScript libraries
Mobile Apps
No-code
Crypto
Machine Learning
and now, LLMs
The only difference LLMs have with the others is the learning curve. The others, one could easily hop on the trend. With LLMs, before being able to understand what everyone’s talking about, there’s a lot to know. There can be a sense of being left out. I think that can be demotivating.
I don’t know about you guys, but I’m exhausted by all of the tech feeds being filled up with the same topics around LLMs.
To add to it, I’ve been seeing CEOs saying “it’s so over” while in reality, that’s far from being true. Also, it’s always the CEOs and not the actual engineers behind these LLMs making such claims.
It’s toxic af. It really is.
I get it though. These CEOs need to sell their products and that’s one way to sell it. Fucking with mass paranoia is one way to get the needed publicity for your product.
I’ve seen CEOs claim that their AI is going to overtake the world. Years later, we are still here. ChatGPT launched in late 2022 and pretty much their CEO has been claiming that their AI is going to overtake the world ever since, once every month. In reality though, the damn thing can’t generate a basic fucking test case even when it has access to the entire code base.
As a person reading news and being worried, you’ll continue to worry. You worried in 2022. You worried in 2023. You worried in 2024. You continue to worry in 2025. These CEOs know that you’re worried and continue to make claims that it’s GG for everyone.
First, it was AIs replacing junior roles. Now it’s the mid roles. Again, all of this while the damn turds can’t code a test case.
I’ve seen CEOs claim that a significant percentage of the new code is being written by AIs. Tell you what, before that, how much of the code was copied from StackOverflow? These CEOs claim AIs are writing the code. Who’s reviewing it? Who’s rewriting it? Humans. Then, would it really make sense to claim that the code is AI generated? See how it’s always these CEOs, selling such tools, making those claims?
I’ve been saying “CEOs” instead of being specific about a single CEO ’cause it applies to a broader category of the tech CEOs right now.
During the pandemic, most companies over-hired. They laid them off later. If a company had layoffs during the same period as the other companies, they’d be fine in the public eye. If a startup isn’t doing well and needs to layoff their employees, they’d want to control the narrative and they’d say that they’re laying off the staff because they’ve been replaced by LLMs. This is what some startups did.
A tech company (read LLM wrapper) launched last year, claiming that it’d be a software engineer. After their early beta proved to be bad (I was gonna say dogshit, but I chose to be polite :D), it’s now been demoted to a “collaborative AI teammate”.
At one point, for a very very brief period – 1 day – I was worried too. I even told a couple of my friends about it. Then, I snapped to reality. I’m embarrassed.
AI exhaustion is real. Don’t get caught in it. Do what you enjoy and try to have fun. Use LLMs and build cool shit. Just don’t worry about AI taking away your jobs. 🤙
After using Terminal.app for over a decade, I recently made the switch to Ghostty, a terminal emulator, and I love it.
For a few years, I used iTerm2 and dropped it to switch back to Terminal.app as I never liked how sluggish it felt. Now, I feel the same about Terminal. Terminal feels sluggish compared to Ghostty. This thing is blazin’ fast. It uses GPU to render and IT SHOWS!
Ghostty is a new side project from Mitchell Hashimoto, the guy behind a ton of high quality software and a company named after him, HashiCorp. If you use the Infrastructure-as-Code method, you’ve probably used their tools or at the very least heard of them. I’ve been following this project since he announced it on Twitter in 2023. He’s apparently been working on it since 2021. The moment he announced that it was available for public use, I jumped on it and started using it. After a little over a week of using it, I can say that I love it. I’m very impressed and truly inspired. This is a very well done.
It took me two days to switch from Terminal.app to Ghostty on my work computer. I vetted it for two days on my personal Mac and I loved it. I played around with a few configurations and it’s been exciting.
Configuration
Out of the box, you barely need any configuration changes. Maybe the theme. You can preview them using the following command –
This file contains hidden or bidirectional Unicode text that may be interpreted or compiled differently than what appears below. To review, open the file in an editor that reveals hidden Unicode characters.
Learn more about bidirectional Unicode characters
Ghostty’s configuration is stored in a separate config file. I love the fact that I can finally have my terminal configuration stored in my dotfiles repo. The Ghostty docs aren’t the greatest, given how new some of the syntax is, but it’s thorough. You can either check the docs online or the CLI using the following –
This file contains hidden or bidirectional Unicode text that may be interpreted or compiled differently than what appears below. To review, open the file in an editor that reveals hidden Unicode characters.
Learn more about bidirectional Unicode characters
If you’ve used something like iTerm before, you probably know how panels can be resized using the keyboard shortcuts. Ghostty has the feature too.
Configuring the key bindings is pretty straightforward. You can put them in the same config file.
Quick Terminal
Ghostty, like iTerm, has the Quick Terminal feature where you can bind a global shortcut to quickly dropdown a terminal window for you to work off of and once you’re done, send it away.
Custom Shaders
Ghostty supports custom shaders and it actually performs well with them. I’ve seen some crazy ones out there with water, fire, confetti, fireworks, etc. I will NEVER use any of these besides the default one. I just like to keep it minimalistic. That’s how I’ve had my Terminal.app configured too.
Search
One of the key features that Ghostty lacks is Search. For now, you’d have to rely on a terminal multiplexer like tmux and search through the buffers. However, this is something that’s being worked on and should drop in one of the later releases.
Performance
In terms of performance, it is faster than Terminal.app. It feels snappy and my god, tailing logs and printing text from query logs is mind blowingly fast.
I haven’t yet tried vim/neovim on Ghostty. I will give it a try later.
I’ve also been playing around with the font features offered by Ghostty. I’ve configured it to pretty much mimic my VS Code setup.
You can actually look at the Ghostty console, like the one you have in a browser. You use the `CMD + SHIFT + I` keyboard shortcut to open it and it looks something like this –
Ghostty with the perf console
My recommendation
Ghostty seems quite stable. It’s not as feature rich as iTerm, but it’s a great replacement. iTerm has some crazy features like the time travel, password manager, etc, which I’ll never use. It just feels out-of-place having those features baked into a terminal (emulator).
From my 10 days of experience, I highly recommend Ghostty as a terminal replacement. In the recent times, I haven’t been as excited using a piece of software as I’ve been using Ghostty. Check it out!
Okay, I’m gonna spill the tea — last year, I picked up a new habit and it’s drinking Herbal Tea every night before going to bed. (Sorry, couldn’t resist :D)
So far, I’ve been enjoying it. It’s now become a proper night time routine for me. It’s nice and calming.
Over the course of a year, I got to try a lot of brands and flavors. There’re a few that I like more than the others. I enjoy trying out new flavors.
Thanks to this new habit, I’ve cut down my caffeine intake from 3-4 cups/day to barely 1 cup/day. To me, that’s a major win 🫡 *hehe*
How it started
Leo 🐐 drinks Mate all the time and I wanted to give it a try, just out of curiosity. Knowing this, back in February 2020, right before the pandemic hit, my wife gifted me a Mate Gourd (the cup) and a Mate Bombilla (the metal straw) along with some Mate leaves. I liked the beverage. It was great, but the maintenance of the Bombilla and the Gourd was too much for me.
My Gourd with the Mate leavesThe Gourd and the Bombilla
I enjoyed the drink, but didn’t like the maintenance aspect of it. I didn’t want to drink it in a plastic or stainless steel tumbler either. They just don’t have the right feel and you lose the essence of the whole Mate consumption. Also, look at the Gourd and Bombilla. They look wonderful. Who would want to drink Mate in a different container?!
I didn’t know which brand or flavor to try and bought 5-6 different kinds to try them all out. To my surprise, I pretty much liked them all. Soon, this evolved into a habit and I started trying out various options available at Whole Foods. Now, I have 4 different flavors of Herbal Teas in my Tea drawer in the kitchen. At any given time in my Tea drawer, I have a safe bet plus a few new flavors to try.
At work, I have access to these –
Depending on my mood, I pick a flavor. Usually, I mix the Chamomile Citrus with Mint Melange. It’s a heavenly combination.
At home, this is what I currently have (as I mentioned earlier, these keep changing) –
The Tulsi Ashwagandha (yellow one in the above pic) has a fantastic fragrance. It’s very relaxing.
Common Herbal Teas
Over the past year and a half, I’ve tried a lot of flavors — so many that I might create a page on my blog to keep track of. For those starting out, I recommend this article for a list of the most healthy ones. The only one I haven’t tried from that list is the Rooibos tea. I haven’t been able to find it at Whole Foods.
These teas have a lot of benefits as presented in that article. I’d like to believe I’ve benefited from these teas. At face value, sure, I’ve replaced my caffeine consumption, but I also think there are more benefits I’ve reaped from these teas. I can’t seem to point them, but I can generally feel the difference.
Getting Started
I think the best way to get started with Herbal Teas is by trying a bunch of ’em. Each to their own taste and you might like a few. So, try them out and see which one sticks.
My favorite ones are –
Combo: Chamomile Citrus + Mint Melange
Standalone: Echinacea (sometimes with lemon or elderberry)
If you’ve never tried a Herbal Tea before, give it a try.
You can look them all up easily by searching my blog for the phrase happy new year.
Writing my yearly roundup has been a tradition here on my blog. I enjoy doing it ’cause it gives me an idea of how my year went by, forcing me to think about all the things I did over the year and to actually focus on and appreciate things that I didn’t, during the time. Typically, the way I gather this info is by going over the following –
My RoamResearch Achievement Log (this is relatively new to the list)
Apple Health app
Health
I think I was doing well in terms of health until August. It’s pretty much been downhill since then. I had a severe episode of BPPV that lasted for about 1.5 months. I hated it and it really fucked with my head. It ended up being a very low time for me in terms of self-confidence. Physically and mentally, it was taxing. I can say that I’m over it now. I’ve gotten better and currently still going through rehab. I couldn’t have done it without the love and support of my wonderful wife. I’m extremely grateful for her presence in my life.
I lost some weight but that requires a separate blog post.
Sleep
I really messed up my sleep this year. When I fell sick, I was forced to get some rest and that in a way, put me back on the right track in terms of sleep. I got my average sleep time up, but it was still behind 2023.
Because my sleep was so bad, I had a sleep study done to see why I wasn’t able to sleep well.
Me with the sleep study equipment. I requested the lady monitoring me for a photo.
As part of the study, I was put in a hotel room and hooked up with a bunch of sensors. It was a fascinating, awkward, and expensive (it’s not covered by insurance). Having someone watch you sleep is a very weird experience and trying to fall sleep knowing someone is watching you is very hard. Anyway, the results were clean. Turns out, I just needed to calm down and meditate.
Fitness
I was very good in terms of fitness this year — *drumroll* — till August. In spite of me exercising only till August, my numbers were still comparable and better in some scenarios compared to my previous year’s numbers.
I ran only one race this year. It was a 5K.
Career
At work, I got promoted to a Lead Software Engineer.
Megadeth ConcertMe working my magicThe Potato Chip Rock hike
I think 2025 will be an exciting year and I can’t wait to see how I evolve as an individual and take on what’s ahead. I’m excited and looking forward to it.
Last week, I committed a code change that pretty much looked like this:
if (expr1) {
if (expr2) {
// logic here
}
}
My code reviewer pointed out that this could be changed to –
if (expr1 && expr2) {
// logic here
}
I read their comment and stared at my PR in disbelief for the next 17 mins.
The original code isn’t incorrect. It’s just a poor style of coding, a style that I would never prefer and yet, I committed it. I started thinking about why I committed such low quality code into a PR and then remembered that it was generated by GitHub Copilot.
However, that didn’t make me feel better ’cause I knew I dropped the ball on reviewing the code quality of the Copilot generated code. I was so busy checking for the correctness and making the code work, that I forgot to check for quality. Sure, I had a deadline, but that’s no excuse to check-in poor quality code. This is just one example. There were a few other similar trivial issues in my PR.
Most times, the code generation by these copilots is counterproductive. I know I can write better code than the copilot suggestions.
This is the major downside of using copilot too much; it puts you on an autopilot and that’s not good at all.
Something similar happened a couple of weeks ago. I was trying to build a component using React Spectrum and was using GitHub Copilot to help me through the building process. After 2 days, I made very little progress and that too with low quality code. I got frustrated by the development pace, dropped using Copilot and switched to checking the documentation. It took me less than 20 mins to implement what I was trying to.
Before these copilots, I would typically refer to the official documentation as the first approach. Not StackOverflow, but the official documentation. Thanks to these copilots, I’ve stopped doing that and instead started over-relying on them.
After using these copilots for a considerable amount of time, I can say with certainty that my cognitive thinking ability has taken a hit. I’ve also become mentally lazy. I’m a very enthusiastic learner and enjoy exploring new avenues in my fields of interest. For the first time, I’ve noticed that I’ve been offloading a lot of the creative work to these copilots and this to me, is very bad.
I’m grateful to the fact that I realized this relatively sooner. I love being creative and the reason why I love coding is because it’s one of those areas where I get to be creative and create something.
Moving forward, I will drastically minimize the usage of the inline-code-suggestions and just use these copilots as a substitute to looking up approaches or even doing the mundane stuff like filling out patters and such. I think that’s good for improving my coding and thinking ability. I strongly urge my blog readers to review their reliance on these tools.
Over-reliance on copilots will put you on autopilot and that is very bad. It creates mental laziness and that is something to avoid.
I just finished watching Tesla’s event where they unveiled a bunch of things like the Robovan, Robotaxi, and bunch of other things. They all looked fun and nice. Elon, as usual, sold hard. Why wouldn’t he, he’s the CEO of the company.
One thing that really caught my eye and freaked me out was the Tesla Optimus.
Look at that thing yourself. That is scary. Before I get to why I think it’s scary, let me explain something.
Tesla’s Optimus
Here are my concerns –
What if the bot trips and falls on your infant child?
What if it accidentally knocks someone out?
What if the bot gets hacked and goes rogue?
These bots should 100% be regulated. There should be a spec to comply to for manufacturing these bots. Some of the regulations that I can think of for safety –
They shouldn’t be able to overpower a young adult. They should be weak.
They should be short.
They should have very limited battery power and should require human intervention to charge them.
They should have limited memory.
I think there’s a real need to regulate these bots early on. Elon can absolutely not be trusted. He’s a quite smart and cunning person.
Recently, I got back to frontend development after almost a year. I’m working with React, TypeScript, GraphQL, and a bunch of other tools to support building and maintaining some frontend components.
It was all going well until my text editor of choice, Sublime Text 4 (ST4), popped a notification asking me to upgrade my license. I bought the ST4 license back in 2021 when it was released. I’ve been a paying customer since 2011. I’ve switched to other editors in between and even toyed with the idea of writing my own, but I always saw myself come back to ST. Anyway, back to my original point – when I saw the pop-up, I started to wonder if it is indeed time to explore new editors.
After ST4 notifies you about the license upgrade, it shows the text on the window as highlighted in the screenshot
In the recent times, Zed has made major strides in developing a fast editor. There are several drawbacks to it IMO, but it shows promise. With the latest tech and tooling available, I want to be able to leverage ’em all.
One of the main things that led me to believe that ST4 is not the future is the lack of support for it. For instance, there’s no official Copilot support for it. I’m fairly certain the Product team at several of these projects did their research on text editor usage and decided to support the ones that are used the most. It looks like ST4 didn’t make the cut.
Lately, in terms of text editor support, it has been either NeoVim, Visual Studio Code, or IntelliJ. IntelliJ is proprietary software and they have the resources to support every tech out there even if the tech doesn’t their official support. I’ve used IntelliJ for Scala development and well, it’s an IDE, so, it was okay I guess.
I am a strong believer that if you use a IDE (not a simple text editor), you can only maximize its capabilities if you have a good dev environment. If it’s configured poorly, even the best IDE can’t help you stay productive. Similarly, if you have a great dev environment setup, even the worst IDE with a basic configuration can help you stay productive. It’s a fact that not all dev environments are well setup. I’ve worked in fantastic dev environments and horrible ones. It all boils down to the engineer(s) driving the setup effort and it’s of utmost importance that they have taste. It is one of those things in software development that most tend to not prioritize.
Long story short, I’m currently doing some research to pick my next text editor. I know exactly what I’m looking for:
Support all of latest tech and tooling, at least at a basic level.
If there’s something basic that I don’t like, I want to be able to customize it or change it.
It should be fast. Performing text manipulations with multiple cursors shouldn’t be slow or sluggish.
No noticeable typing latency. I cannot stand typing latency. I have a gift and curse to notice typing latency.
Lower priority: It should exude aesthetic value. When I use it, I should know that someone put in a lot of thought into why a feature exists. This is what I feel when I use most off Apple’s products.
Over the next few weeks I will try out a few editors and try them out and see what I pick. I will report back my selection and my findings.
Update 11/12/2024: After using most of the available editors, I chose to go with VS Code due to the sheer amount of extension support available from a very healthy community.
When reMarkable announced their new product, the Paper Pro, I immediately jumped on it and placed the order.
reMarkable Paper Pro
If you know me, you know how much I love and use my reMarkable 2. I’ve been a user of it since the past 4 years and well, I love it.
I use it primarily for writing down notes from my personal projects, work, and reading books and white papers. I love the device and was planning on getting a tiny light to read on the rM2 in dark conditions. The very week I decided to get the reading light, rM announced the Paper Pro.
After I got the Paper Pro, I really noticed a few things right off the bat.
The gestures are so much faster. If you’re a regular rM2/rM user, this’ll be the first thing you’ll notice.
The backlit display is great, I don’t mind the color of the display. It’s perfectly fine for me and I use it mostly with 0 backlight. I just use it for times when there’s very little light. That’s why I was planning on buying the tiny light for my rM2. Now, I don’t need it anymore.
The latency is quite evident too. It is so little that you’re going to really like it.
The writing feels new, in that, the surface feels new. The rM2 writing felt amazing and soft, this feels amazing too, but it feels like I’m writing on a harder surface. It just needs some getting used to, no complaints there either.
For me, the colors were never a priority and having them is great. I like ’em. I also understand why there’s a lag in the refresh and it doesn’t really bother me at all. The black ink doesn’t have that affect obviously. The colors look great when used with a thicker pen. If I use colors with my pen of choice (the fountain with medium thickness), they don’t look that good. Then again, that’s just an added feature that I wasn’t looking forward to in the first place.
The contrast levels are just fine. It took me literally 2 mins to get used to the new levels.
My biggest concern is the weight. On paper, it’s very little, but, for someone like me, who cares a lot about lighter products, it seems a bit more than I had wanted. I will try to use it more without the book folio to reduce the weight. This is only an issue for me when reading, ’cause I hold it upright in front of me while reading. For those who rest it on a desk/table/lap, you’ll not even notice it.
The Marker feels sharp. IDK why, but it feels so much sharper than the rM2. It could be the surface of the Paper Pro that’s giving the illusion, but it just feels like I’m writing with a sharper nib (it somewhat is relatively sharper)
I absolutely love reading on the Paper Pro. The text is bigger and reading White Papers so far has been delightful. The scale of the text is just perfect.
Overall, I like the device. I haven’t yet decided what I’ll do with my beloved and very highly used rM2 yet, but I am definitely going to replace it with my Paper Pro.
Over the past few years, I’ve massively switched my Playtime from coding and working on side projects to gaming. I think I’m close to hitting the saturation point.
Playtime for me has evolved over the years from binging TV, to working on side projects, to gaming. It’s been part of my personal evolution. I don’t mind switching my recreational activities, but I do mind hitting a saturation point, ’cause that means that it’s time for me to find something new.
I think it’s time to switch it up a little.
Maybe, I could pick something new and cut down on my gaming time slowly. I still do want to play video games, but I just don’t want to play as much. I have a ton of things I need to learn and there’s a ton of other side projects lying deep in limbo. Some projects are complete and just waiting for their corresponding blog posts. Some, I’ve dropped the idea of open sourcing because they missed the perfect rollout time.
Anyway, you get the idea. It’s just that there’s too much going on and I am thinking of not doing too much and just allot my recreational time to a focused hobby. I miss working on creative things, so that is something I’m craving right now.
I will try out various things over the coming couple of months and see what sticks, in that, what I enjoy as a sustainable hobby. It doesn’t have to be forever, I just need something new for a good 1-2 years.
I will report back here in a couple of months. Maybe by mid or end of November. Fingers crossed!
My Chrome extension, Rearrange Tabs, has had great success over the years and I noticed that the user base hasn’t been growing over the past few years. It seemed like the user base growth plateaued initially and now it’s slowly going down.
Chart showing Weekly users over time
I never bothered to actually find the root cause for this, since the project itself is open source, it’s actively updated and I never intended to push it to users or market it. I just thought others might find it useful.
Anyway, a couple of weeks ago, someone opened a discussion saying that Chrome added basic support for tab reordering in April 2022. Sure, it doesn’t have the support for customizing the shortcuts yet, or at least that I know of, but it still has the basic support.
That’s a huge win for me. The functionality of a project that I created ended up landing in Chrome. I’m very happy about it.
Now, I can actually make the extension thinner and maybe even add more custom features to it. The best part is that the name of the extension is generic enough to include more features around rearranging tabs.
I will update the future path of the extension and publish it sometime on GitHub <3
A couple of days ago, Apple announced Math Notes. Perhaps, their most innovative software feature in a while. It is brilliant. I mean, look at this video –
It just blew my mind at how brilliantly Apple executed this within the Calculator app on the iPadOS. Apparently, it’s also available within the Notes app on iOS and I can’t wait to play around with it.
Last year at the WWDC 23, I got a chance to talk to Phil Schiller. Apple didn’t announce anything AI related and I actually appreciated that. I asked Phil why that was the case and he said Apple doesn’t work on technology just for the sake of it or to hop on the hype train. They do it to create meaningful experiences. This year’s WWDC proves that. All the features around Apple Intelligence were great, while keeping everything private.
Apple just redefined the future of note taking tablets. All of this is only possible due to the on-device Machine Learning (ML) model.
Apple also announced the new handwriting correction feature and the copy paste feature that copies text and pastes it in your handwriting. These are not just fancy looking features, but also, quite powerful and helpful features.
Any new handwriting tablet that ships without these powerful features is doomed to fail. It’s clear that the future of handwriting tablets is features like these that assist you while you write, making it such a nice experience. I mean, if reMarkable 3 ships with these features, with the on-device ML and the e-ink display…oof! It’s going to be so good.
Personally, I’ve never found a use case for the iPad in my life. This won’t change that, but I do want these in the tablet I use.
This is clearly a guidance to these tablet manufacturing companies. I’m excited to see what reMarkable 3 has in store.
Recently, I was thinking about how we are already in the middle of this decade and had an epiphany – most of the people who’ve inspired me over the last decade don’t seem to inspire me anymore.
TJ has been very quiet. I respect the guy a lot. I reached out to him on Twitter to see if he was doing okay. He’s doing fine and confirmed that he was taking time off from social media.
Coming to Dwayne Johnson, DHH, and Casey – I am not inspired by them anymore. I liked them for the most part of the last decade, but now, it looks like they’ve changed. Each have their own weirdness taking over them and I don’t like that.
Dwayne just feels very fake and artificial now. It’s like he does everything for the visuals.
DHH has started acting like a Elon wannabe, which is just sad and lame.
Casey seems to be in a different stage of his life. IDK what’s going on with him but he feels very unrelatable now.
I guess that’s the process of evolution. You find new sources of inspiration and move on.
Today (March 20th) marks the 15th birthday of my blog. It has been the only and the most consistent place that provided a creative outlet for my thoughts over the past 15 years. I have, for the most part, only used it for long-form writing.
15 years ago, after trying various platforms and techniques, I chose to run my blog on WordPress. It’s crazy that I’m back on it after switching to multiple other ways during this time span. I’m not going to say that WordPress, the CMS, is great, but the CMS + their hosting offering is definitely a solid package. I’m grateful for all the work that’s being done by the open source community around WordPress.
I used to run my own instance back then on Rackspace, but then I got tired of maintaining it. I felt like it took my focus away from writing. It’s crazy that I still feel the same about hosting my own blog after all these years. I tried it and I didn’t enjoy it.
I have been a very happy customer ever since I settled in on WordPress.com. Now, I am able to focus on the writing and not the non-fun aspects of maintaining a blog.
One of the reasons I got my first professional opportunity was my blog. Ever since, I’ve gotten a lot of recruiters reach out to me after reading my blog. This is why I tell others to start their personal blogs. You don’t know how it might help you. Also, it’s a great way to express yourself.
Anyway, here’s to another 15 years and more. Cheers! 🍻
While I was trying to figure out how to attack my problems in 2023, I devised a technique to help with exactly this. Even though this is only a part of my effort, it played a significant role in helping me achieve what I wanted to.
The Achievement Log
The idea of using Done lists have been around for a while now. You can search for it and find a lot of high quality resources to know their usage. My idea is based on Done lists.
I maintain an umbrella list of 12 Achievement Logs for the year, one for each month. Each of these logs contain events that I consider an achievement, during that month. This helps me review my achievements later and motivates me to be consistent.
I journal on a daily basis. While I do, I just log my achievements. The log is populated over the month and I soon understand what I’m doing right and where I need to improve. This doesn’t put any pressure on me. Instead, it helps me get better at the things I don’t do.
Achievement Log
This is especially more useful if you use a Personal Knowledge Management tool that supports backlinks. You can add achievements in a more seamless way since you don’t really have to go to the log to add the entry. You can just backlink the entry to the log from anywhere in the knowledge graph.
I’ve always been interested in monitoring indoor Air Quality. I think the itch to monitor indoor Air Quality grew over the years as the wild fires started getting worse, here in California. I even have a dedicated Watch (Apple) face that includes the Air Quality Index (AQI) complication.
Indoor Air Quality
Monitoring air quality typically includes monitoring Carbon dioxide (CO2), Particulate Matter (PM2.5 – represents particles that <= 2.5 microns in diameter), Temperature, Humidity, and Total Volatile Organic Compounds (TVOC). Some monitors include a few other stats, but these are more common.
There are many monitors available online that monitor these. Most of them are either bulky, wired, fugly, or just inaccurate.
After some research, earlier this year, I found 2 very good indoor air quality monitors.
One is from Awair, called the Element. It monitors all of the above, but it’s wired. Even though it looks cool, it’s slightly bigger than what I wanted. So, I went with the other one that I liked, the SAF Aranet4 Home.
This one is wireless, replaceable battery operated (2 AAs), has a cool E Ink display but it doesn’t include PM2.5/TVOC monitoring. It’s apparently quite accurate and the best part is that it’s tiny.
My palm for reference.
The moment I switched it ON, I was shocked at the initial reading!
The first reading at my place.
To give you context on why this value is shocking, here’s list of the expected CO2 levels –
420 ppm – fresh outdoor air
< 1000 ppm – indoors
1000 ppm to 1400 ppm – brain cognitive function decreases by 15%
> 1400 ppm – brain cognitive function decreases by 50%
CO2 levels are expressed in ppm – parts per million
So yeah, I was shocked to know we were living in conditions where we had 50% less brain cognitive function. Maybe this explains all the dumb shit I do ☺️
One way I could think of lowering this number was by improving ventilation and that’s by opening up the windows and doors. This improved the CO2 level very quickly. After monitoring it for a couple of days, I’ve gathered the CO2 data and how proper ventilation affects the value.
Green to Red
Closed the windows @ 22:30Peak CO2
The above is data from my bedroom, with two people sleeping (no, I don’t go to bed at 22:30, I just closed the bedroom windows at that time).
Red to Orange and then to Green
Opened the windows at 11:00The moment CO2 dropped to < 1000Green readings while the windows were open
This morning, I opened the bedroom windows at 11:00. As you can see from the above graphs, it took about 55 mins for the CO2 levels to drop from 1670 ppm to 999 ppm.
The green region shows an uptick and that’s because I moved the monitor into the hall. Opening bedroom windows seemed to lower the overall indoor CO2.
Possible ways to improve indoor CO2/Air Quality
There are a number of solutions to fix different aspects of indoor air quality.
Improving ventilation – Simplest way is to open the windows and balcony/patio doors to let the air circulate around. I’ve been using this technique and it has been working wonders.
Air Purifier – These are not cheap, at least the good ones. These are great when the outside air quality is poor or during winters, when you can’t really open your windows while it’s cold outside.
Indoor Plants – Plants need CO2 to function. Naturally, these are great to help improve indoor CO2 levels.
Replace AC’s Air filters – Replace air filters to improve your indoor air quality.
I suspect my home AC’s air filters. They might need to be replaced. I will monitor the data from my sensor for another week and see if it indeed does require a replacement. I will report back my findings soon.
In the past, I tried using a PM2.5 monitor with my Raspberry Pi. It worked wonders but having the Pi run all the time seemed like a hassle for this use case.
I’m starting a new series called Taming Computers. It’s my new side project. It’s a little meta, in that, it’s a side project for a few other side projects. I will be blogging Computer Science concepts varying from basic to advanced. I’ll try to include my Banksy-esque artsy illustrations.
The main purpose of this effort is to create a collection of content that I’ve learned while researching my side projects. It’ll also be a channel for interesting stuff in the world of Computer Science. This is me, sort of applying the Feynman Technique. I hope to make it fun and interesting for myself and for anyone reading them.
I originally drafted this post to be posted around late January. I had to undergo a surgery in January and ended up finishing it late.
There I’ve finally said it.
I’ve been rooting for Twitter (I refuse to call it by its new name until they stop redirecting to twitter.com when I type in x.com in the browser) to get better under Elon and now I’ve completely given up. I backed Elon and thought he’d improve it. I was wrong.
It’s been buggy. Look at this one for instance –
An 𝕏 spam/scam bot accidentally flagged many legitimate accounts today. This is being fixed.
I never received these spammy mentions or DMs before. Now it has become so bad.
Quantity over quality
The New Twitter tried to compete with Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube to draw content creators to the platform. For this, they created premium subscriptions. In this process, they made the platform so bad that the emphasis is now on quantity than quality.
Open any random tweet that has over 100 likes and check the replies. It’s filled with random users posting unrelated content to drive up their tweet’s engagement. I find it so annoying seeing people use these lame tactics for their benefit. All the top replies are from other premium users trying to hijack the popularity of that tweet.
Removing limitations
One of the things that I enjoyed about Twitter was its character limit. It forced people to think and articulate better.
I am a big fan of journaling and I use Roam to track my Daily Notes. I also track my mood using Roam’s hashtag feature, which is another way of backlinking in Roam.
Last year, right around this time, I learned that Roam has a command called /Streak and I never found a good use case for it. A year later, last week, I was looking back at what I had written the previous year that day (I love doing that) and found my notes on this command. As soon as I read it, I got an idea on where I could use it.
Streak command
The Streak command lets you pick a page and tracks how often you’ve updated that page. The cool thing is that Roam considers references to the page as updates. So, whenever you backlink or use a hashtag of that page, Roam tracks it as an update to the backlinked page and updates your streak.
This gave me an idea. The way I track my daily mood is by using Hashtags. Let’s say one of the hashtags I used to describe my mood today is Relaxed, I can just do the following to see how many times over the past year or even overall, I felt relaxed.
I first trigger the Streak command by using /Streak. Roam then replaces the text with this text: {{[[streak]]: [[$]]}}. I put a $ to denote the cursor position. Now, I just put in the name of the page I want to see the streak of. In this case, {{[[streak]]: [[Relaxed]]}}. That’s it. Once I hit enter, Roam displays the streak for the page/hashtag Relaxed.
It’s embarrassing how few times I felt relaxed over the past few months
I use it with various other pages too, but this to me seems like one of the best use cases for me.
