Essays

New mediums for humans to complement superintelligence 🌳 • 4 minutes read • 19 Mar 2025

If superintelligence has already been commoditized and neatly packaged into the workforce, what would our renewed "mediums of message" look like? To understand the shape + form of medium 2.0, we might need a quick detour through the history of mediums and 'what has been.' We've experienced revolutions and centuries of evolution in how we communicate — In ancient times, communication was primarily...

Virtuoso Guide for Personal Memory Systems 🌳 • 12 minutes read • 17 Jan 2025

Sometimes, forgetting is good for your memory. If you are forgetting the concepts at a 'spaced interval' in a conscious way, you might actually make your memory more concrete. This could be best illustrated by the repetition curve graph below: Our memory is prone to logarithmic decays as time passes by. But as we keep recalling the ideas/concepts at certain intervals, you can see here from the...

Publish Originally, Syndicate Elsewhere 🌿 • 9 minutes read • 16 Jan 2025

Writing for yourself on your personal website is the purest form of self-expression on the internet. It avoids any trappings from the algorithmic maze. And there are no digital echo chambers. It's just you and your ideas in your own cozy little garden. We're witnessing the renaissance of personal websites. As social platforms become increasingly unstable, more creators are rediscovering the power...

Writing is thinking 🌱 • 8 minutes read • 02 Jan 2025

Writing is thinking. My blog has had a median of 0 visitors per day for almost two years (nowadays, it's only a marginal improvement). And I don't care. As Alexey Guzey points out, perhaps the best indicator of your online writing having benefits is when you are not too embarassed to tell people, "Oh, BTW, I wrote about this/collected some things on this topic on my blog", the purpose of your...

Song of Shapes, Words and Paths 🌳 • 12 minutes read • 01 Jan 2025

Three different kinds of humans exist in this planet. Shape rotators, wordcels and journey-shifters. You are usually a mix of one, two or all of these traits. If you’ve been following nerdish and science fiction oriented Twitter and blogs, you might already be familiar with 'shape rotator' and 'wordcels', often in snarky or oblique contexts. In Roon's famous essay — A Song of Shapes and Words, he...

How do we absorb ideas better? 🌿 • 5 minutes read • 01 Jan 2025

The top 1% smart thinkers I've observed have all been very clear thinkers. They could elucidate complex thoughts as they understanding the basics, at a very fundamental level. Sure, you could memorize all kinds of complicated concepts and stitch them together, but you will only get so far. And I feel that cleaner thinking is an outcome of deeper reflection — both reflection in action, and...

Read writers who operate 🌱 • 6 minutes read • 29 Dec 2024

We have more books on birds written by ornithologists than books on birds written by birds, and books on ornithologists written by birds. Taleb eloquently describes this as the key problem of knowledge, or in other words as epistemic arrogance. Strong corollary can be drawn with various disciplines, including entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurs simply spend more time doing entrepreneurship rather...

Brew your ideas lazily 🌳 • 6 minutes read • 28 Dec 2024

Leonardo da Vinci's masterpiece, the Mona Lisa achieved through the painstaking application of countless gossamer-thin layers of oil paint over the course of many years, many months. The sfumato technique which Da Vinci popularised, involved applying more than 40 layers of paint, each only 10 to 50 micrometers thick, using fingers to blend the colors and create the depth of illusion. The creation...

Build with AI 🌳 • 1 minute read • 28 Dec 2024

Build is an online cohort+community for anyone to go from employee to a builder to an entrepreneur. Enabled growth by 4x ($100K+ in revenue) through various monetization strategies by launching various initiatives (Buildcamps, Build Cohort, Build newsletter, Build on Chain, Build Weekend, Build with...

Trees, Branches, Twigs and Leaves — Mental Models for Writing 🌳 • 3 minutes read • 21 Dec 2024

What differentiates a good essay and a bad essay? With a great essay, you can see the larger tree that connects all those branches, leaves, and twigs together into a single unit of a 'tree'. A bad essay is where you only see the random assortment of leaves and branches. You don't see the larger tree among the branches. While listening to one of the podcast episodes from David Perell's Writes of...

Compound Interest of Private Notes 🌳 • 5 minutes read • 11 Dec 2024

Strongly recommend everyone to keep private notes about people. These could even be some random jotted keywords: "served in the navy", "capuccino lover", "biker", "loves going on long walks", and so on. When private notes accumulate over time in the form of a database, they start showing emergent properties. As Derek Sivers rightly points out in his essay: having your own database is one of the...

Conceptual Compression for LLMs 🌿 • 4 minutes read • 07 Dec 2024

Imagine you're building a house. You could break down the act of building into various steps: first comes the foundation, then the framing, then the roofing, and the plumbing, and the wiring, and so on. Or you could try to do it all at once, ordering a jumble of materials and hoping they somehow come together into a structure. When I instructed Claude/Cursor to build an app, I did something...

Beauty of Zettels 🌳 • 4 minutes read • 06 Dec 2024

Zettels are the best way to connect and preserve ideas. I've tried various tools and systems for online writing, but nothing beats the power of Zettels. What are they, really? They come from the Zettelkasten method, developed by Niklas Luhmann, a German sociologist who was incredibly prolific. He wrote around 70 books and 400 peer-reviewed articles in 30 years. That's a lot of writing. How did he...

Exploring "smart connections" for note taking 🌳 • 4 minutes read • 02 Dec 2024

Not starting with a blank slate has been a great productivity boost in my writing. I wrote 50K words in 2024. And I can safely say that these 50K words have been written in a well thought manner, instead of an AI generated word salad. All this, because I've been exploring this neat little plugin called as Smart Connections on Obsidian. It is a tool, and I wouldn't be naive enough to say that...

Deploying Home Cooked Apps with Rails 🌳 • 8 minutes read • 24 Nov 2024

As a Rails enthusiast, I've always wanted a better deployment solution to house my hobby projects. It was not that there was no good solution available: We have AWS, Heroku, Hatchbox, Fly, Render.io and various other such PaaS alternatives. AWS has been too complex personally to build side projects. That, and the +500% markup. All these PaaS providers were ultimately wrappers sitting on top of...

Brand treatments, Design Systems, Vibes 🌳 • 4 minutes read • 20 Sept 2024

The usual approach to building a design system often involves compiling a list of font families, typography guidelines, color palettes, patterns, and similar visual elements. Take Gumroad, for example, one of the best open-source design systems out there. It seemingly covers everything a company might need—color schemes, icons, font selections, even sticker packs, and more. When examining...

How to spot human writing on the internet? 🌿 • 7 minutes read • 20 Aug 2024

In the classic Turing Test, a computer is considered intelligent if it can convince a human that it’s another human in a conversation. At that time, human-generated content dominated the internet. But that was a decade ago. Today, the landscape has shifted dramatically. AI-generated content now rivals, and in some cases outpaces, human-created material. According to the 'expanding dark forest'...

Can a thought be an algorithm? 🌳 • 14 minutes read • 17 Aug 2024

When you actively hold a question in your mind, you start seeing potential answers and questions related to it pop up in your radar. The question and the answer co-evolve in a gracious dance enriching our understanding of the world and space around us. Questions act as your personal radar. > The textbook definition of a question is a sentence used to seek information. But it feels borderline...

Opportunity Harvesting 🌱 • 26 minutes read • 14 Aug 2024

Intended Audience — For those who are in a transitory phase in their careers, looking for their next big leap of faith. This is a guide to harvest opportunies in a systematic fashion In the past seven months since I'd shifted to London, I've been on the lookout for harvesting opportunities around me. I deliberately avoid using the term 'job hunt' here, as I sought to broaden my scope beyond...

How does AI affect UI? 🌿 • 7 minutes read • 12 Aug 2024

Intended Audience — For conversational UI designers in healthcare industry curious about various UI affordances/design patterns in vogue right now Our online conversations have been increasingly life-like, but yet life-less at the same time. The UI of apps have become more conversational and chat-like in nature. Not just apps, even websites have their own chat-like interfaces on the side. And all...

Everything is a prioritisation problem 🌳 • 3 minutes read • 29 Jul 2024

When it comes to building a product, everything is a prioritisation problem. > We might be building things right, but are we building the right thing? The journey of prioritisation begins way before the actual process of prioritisation starts. I would start by asking these key questions to the product leadership team—What does the future state look like? — Vision. What are we trying to achieve? —...

The Modern Startup Stack 🌱 • 7 minutes read • 23 Jun 2024

Choosing a web framework is like choosing your first pokémon. I didn't want to succumb to the 'new hotness' problem with the myriad of JS frameworks to choose from (Angular, Vue, React, Solid). I wanted something that i can choose and stick to for atleast a decade. So I resorted to a Rails monolith for building apps (but with a slight twist) To start with, I chose Ruby on Rails. It's a...

Design that's so bad it's actually good 🌿 • 3 minutes read • 16 May 2024

Recently, a relative sought my help to tweak a badly designed poster on Microsoft Paint. This was meant to be circulated on Whatsapp as an advertisement for the handyman services his friend was offering in his locale. He wanted to ‘jazz’ it up and asked if I could help. I quickly fired my Figma and started working towards revamping the layout. Before pushing some pixels, I took a brief pause—What...

Obsessing over personal websites 🌱 • 6 minutes read • 07 Apr 2024

Intended Audience—For those of us who have attempted to make a personal website of their own and have guilt-tripped over making multiple updates every year I’ve been obsessed with my personal website. It’s not even about the views and impressions which I’m receiving. I have one subscriber on my mailing list from my website, and compared to internet writer standards, I am virtually non existent....

Dear enterprises, we're tired of your subscriptions 🌳 • 10 minutes read • 23 Jan 2024

When you build a SaaS app, how do you price it? The first option which comes to everyone's mind is a monthly/yearly subscription model While building Clarity notes, I was stuck with a usual question when it comes to building a SaaS—How should I price the app? We settled on the usual monthly/yearly pricing structure. It included a free version to allow users to try out the YouTube note-taking...

Pluginisation of Modern Software 🌱 • 2 minutes read • 22 Jan 2024

Transitioning from Adobe to Figma was a big change for me in my design journey. At that time, the whole design ecosystem was revolving around Adobe. For image manipulation, you had Photoshop, Illustrator for vector graphics, Indesign for reports, XD for website or app prototypes and so on. When Figma first started it was competing to disrupt this ecosystem for UI/UX Design. As the adobe ecosystem...

Let's make every work 'strategic' 🌱 • 5 minutes read • 22 Jan 2024

A 'strategic' wrapper can turn a $100 work into a $10,000 work. Thinking 10,000 ft. above sea level pays more. It's a win-win for both sides. If we take a look at the field of writing, the standard rates in this profession, as well as what writers do, usually the rates border around: Writing content: $200 / article Style guide: $2,000 Content strategy: $20,000 Drafting a content strategy is a...

Methods are lifejackets not straight jackets 🌱 • 3 minutes read • 27 Dec 2023

Design methods are life jackets. Not straight jackets. Structures, whether they're processes, frameworks, or plans, are excellent tools to navigate complicated problems. They bring efficiency, reduce ambiguity, and offer defaults. However, when dealing with fundamentally complex problems, applying structure too early can lock in outdated notions. Because structures tend to ossify. As more team...

Digital Products built like physical artisanal tools 🌱 • 4 minutes read • 18 Dec 2023

Tobias Van Schneider in his blog talks about a new way to think about building modern software— The advancements of our modern world mean there’s generally more of everything. The streaming age has led to a proliferation of low-quality content, churned out to satisfy the binge-watching masses. The ever-scrolling audiences and their short attention spans require news sources to up the ante,...

How to arrive at on-brand colours? 🌳 • 9 minutes read • 14 Dec 2023

While creating a brand, one of the hardest things to do is to arrive at the right set of colors. Colors are a tricky subject—when done incorrectly, the emotions get mismatched, and in the worst of situations, the brand might just seem all over the place. Think of the last time you went to a fast food joint. What was the color of the brand? Most probably, it might be a combination of red and...

Why I prefer indie softwares 🌳 • 5 minutes read • 01 Dec 2023

The greatest consumer software tools that exist out there are built by hobbyists and indie makers. I prefer to write my notes on Obsidian. For scheduling tweets, I use Zlappo and Typefully. For creating AI interior renders, I use interior.ai. One thing which is common among all these examples is that they are all built by hobbyists. I would like to call them “indie softwares”. These are...

Use code only if no code fails 🌱 • 7 minutes read • 22 Nov 2023

Use code only if no code fails. It is that simple. I can assume that there might be counters, attacks and pushpacks to this heavy statement. Bear with me on this. Before we address the house on fire, let me take you on a quick detour. This was my first day of a new semester while doing my Master’s in design studies at the Delft University of Technology. My professor at that time started the...

Design Manifesto 🌱 • 11 minutes read • 10 May 2023

This thought was inspired by the book Design Expertise (Lawson & Dorst, 2009) which includes an interview with the architect Ken Yeang where the author mentions: “I give every new member of staff the practice manual to read when they join. They can not just see past designs but study the principles upon which they’re based”. In other words, what would be the ethos behind your own unique design...

How might we enable patients and caregivers to overcome preventable health conditions? 🌳 • 18 minutes read • 16 Jun 2022

For MCH, a study we conducted in 2021 observed strong evidence that the health messaging service (RES) improved maternal knowledge and infant care. It observed significantly higher rates of breastfeeding, safe infant-feeding practices, and skin-to-skin care among the intervention group, as well as greater knowledge of maternal nutrition, breastfeeding, and cord care best practices. Intended...

How might we disinfect COVID wards? 🌳 • 3 minutes read • 16 Jun 2020

Despite stringent hygiene protocols, hospitals remain a breeding ground for harmful pathogens due to the constant influx of patients, visitors, and the intricate web of high-touch surfaces. Conventional disinfection methods like UV-C robots and fumigation necessitate clearing entire wards, disrupting patient care and straining already overwhelmed medical staff. The pressing need of the hour was...

Preventing hospital acquired infections 🌱 • 8 minutes read • 16 Jan 2020

What if you visited the hospital for a routine health checkup and ended up contracting an infection that required hospitalization? Sterilising high traffic hotspots within hospitals was the need of the hour. With a shortage of masks, PPE, and a lack of effective disinfection systems in place, the hospitals in India were facing a massive challenge. COVID was rapidly spreading in hospitals, and 14%...

How might we assist deafblind runners to navigate? 🌳 • 5 minutes read • 16 Jun 2019

Equarun is used to help deafblind people (especially those suffering from Usher Syndrome, a progressive disorder affecting more than 400,000 people worldwide) and their guides engage in safe and comfortable long-distance running. This device is capable of transmitting complex instructions on road conditions, striking a good balance between freedom and safety. Equarun being used across running...