Oct 2024
I’ll miss you dad. I’m not able to get over this shock. Even today, I tried calling you on your phone, even though I knew deep down that you wouldn’t pick it up. I’ll miss the fact that I will not be able to call you again and share my heart out.
Losing you has been the single most point of concentrated pain that I could recall. Perhaps this pain is a vestige from the love I’ve received from you.
I’m supposed to ‘man up’, cope with this pain and grief and not cry as much. After a few days of barricading my emotions, and to act strong in front of others, I let myself cry my heart out. Crying has been my emotional release valve and I’ve had enough of this pretense of ‘manning up’. I’m annoyed by the fact that you are now not around.
As I see myself circling around the five stages of grief, I’ve started to accept the situation (slowly). You’ll continue to live with us in our memories, dad. They are as ‘real’ as it can be, and you’re very much alive this way. Like you always used to say, I’ll continue to see ‘education as an investment’.
I’ll continue to make you proud, dad. We’re still one, just you and me, one mind, one soul, one being.
July, 2024
On July 19th, everything, everywhere, went haywire, all at once.
Two weeks prior to this day, the student protests in Bangladesh had just started. The controversial quota system for government jobs reserved 30% positions for descendants of those who fought in the 1971 Liberation war, 10% for women, and 10% for residents of specific districts. These sparked a huge round of debates around meritocracy in the country, and it was at this junction that I landed in Dhaka.
I had come here as a part of my work at Noora Health. We were gearing ourselves towards a launch of a national health program centered around patients with hypertension, stroke and diabetes.
After arriving in Dhaka, I was situated close to our office at Bonani, and wasn't really moving around much. In my first week, I didn't really feel the effect of the protests happening around me in my vicinity. It was only in the second week that I started 'feeling' the reverberations of these student protests in and around Bonani. I wanted to order food from Foodpanda, but the restaurants were all closed. Even private caterers were not serving food then. When I tried having a meal at a neighbouring restaurant to the hotel, my card stopped working. I thought it was some glitch with the payment processor. Realised later that a nationwide shutdown had just started. There was no internet.
I was advised to stay indoors for the time being. I still had my flight back to India, and was thinking of a way in which I could reach the airport. The roads were all blocked, especially the ones to the airport.
For my flight at 9 PM that night, I got a cab to drop me at 4 AM in the morning. As the protests usually started earlier in the morning, I had to leave earlier than the earlier morning to avoid any road blockades and reach the airport safely.
Once I reached the airport, I just raw-dogged the whole day. It was then that I observed a lot of flights getting cancelled left and right. One by one. I was counting sticks every time a flight was terminated, and my total count for that day in the airport was around 10. I still had my Air India flight later that night, and I was still optimistic about the flight not being delayed (After all, it was the same Air India flight that had rescued Indians from Ukraine during the recent crisis)
Why were the flights getting cancelled though? My first instinct would have been to 'Google' why this was so. But I didn't have internet. Not having internet was a relatively new phenomenon that I was experiencing.
And as you might have expected, my flight had also got cancelled that day.
In hindsight, this was the same day when the entire world witnessed one of the biggest IT disruptions in recent years due to the Crowdstrike error. Corporations worldwide reported outages and disruptions, with Windows computers displaying the dreaded Blue Screen of Death. The outage had impacted sectors such as banking, trading, media companies as well as hundreds of airliners (which included my cancelled Air India flight)
While all this was happening around me, the airliners responded with— 'All flights are getting cancelled, (perhaps), the only way to make it to India is to travel by road and cross the Bangladesh-India border...'.
I got a second opinion from my work colleagues on what I could do next. Apparently, the violence and protests had also reached the airport vicinity and it was not advised to step out of the airport. So, I just sat down and waited. Thinking of what I could do next.
After a period of confusion and chaos, and in my second day at the Dhaka airport, I secured an alternate flight to Chennai, and landed home the day after that.
I somehow reached home safely, and I sincerely pray for the safety of my friends and colleagues in Bangladesh during this period of emergency. Hope normalcy is restored soon.
UPDATE (5th August)—Ms Hasina resigns as prime minister after weeks of student-led protests - which left hundreds dead - escalated and culminated in calls for her to stand down.
UPDATE (8th August)—Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus has been sworn in as Bangladesh's interim leader, vowing to "uphold, support and protect the constitution".
Jun, 2024
I made my first software-related open source contribution! I specifically mention 'software-related', as I'd contributed to the open-source hardware movement during the 2020 pandemic. Making my npm package publicly accessible for anyone to use did hit me differently.
To give you a bit more context, I was recently debugging a Rails codebase by talking through the challenges with GPT.
It was however facing the 'blind man touching the elephant' problem—It was not accurate in its debugging as it was not able to see through the entire directory I was working with. I had to share individual files separately for it to better understand.
This was a huge point of annoyance, and I was looking at smart approaches to share file tree structure, and that's when I discovered tree command which helped me create simple unicode formatting of my file structure as follows:
├── README.md
├── components
│ ├── Bookshelf.tsx
│ └── Layout.tsx
├── content
│ ├── books
│ ├── engineering
│ └── writingHowever, I wanted a bit more granularity in terms of what I wanted to communicate. So I forked this package, and created a version of my own which also communicates the # of visible, hidden files under each level as well as the overall file size under each folder as shown below:
. (17 visible files, 0 hidden files, 16 visible directories, 0 hidden directories, 8.34 MB overall size)
├── Dockerfile
├── Gemfile (3 hidden files, 7 visible files, 1.00 KB overall size)
├── Gemfile.lock
├── README.md
├── Rakefile (4 hidden files, 2 visible files, 8 MB overall size)
├── app (8 hidden files, 2 visible files, 8 MB overall size)
│ ├── controllers (8 hidden files, 2 visible files, 8 MB overall size)
│ ├── models (8 hidden files, 2 visible files, 8 MB overall size)
│ ├── views (8 hidden files, 2 visible files, 8 MB overall size)
│ └── ... (additional subdirectories)
You could install this npm package here, let me know your thoughts :)
May, 2024
Build School is live—One-month sprint on Framer is finally complete. The Build School website is finally live.
As a rebranding exercise, it did stretch my grey cells to push the limits and make it match with the right vibe: professionalism with a powerful vibrant punch. These were the only two keywords that were mentioned to me for the rebranding exercise, nothing else. This gave me enough room to creatively unfurl, and to finally arrive at a version that just 'clicked'.
The process reminded me of Christopher Nolan's approach while collaborating with composer Hans Zimmer for the Interstellar soundtrack.
Zimmer was just given two lines of a dialogue: "I'll come back" and "When?"(source) instead of the entire film's plot. Zimmer then went on to write a four-minute piano and organ piece representing his idea of fatherhood, which became the heart of the film's score.
Sometimes, less is more.