today was my last day in cloudflare (again). the best career and opportunity in my whole life, and the closest friends I would die for. thank you to everyone who made it all so special. I had an incredible time. 🧡

The thing I learned this year is that when engineers say they like working on “hard problems”, they actually don't. What they like is puzzle solving, and having a repertoire of patterns that they can pattern match onto traditionally hard problems, usually involving databases or something with scale, etc. And they know that the industry used to pay you a lot for how deep and broad this repertoire was. Unfortunately, in 2026, well, you have a cheat code machine that has infinite breadth and depth for pattern matching. So the question is, do you actually like hard problems? Because there are now hard problems that are a complection of engineering, product, society, culture, politics, and they are fairly intractable, probably unsolvable! Because if you do want to work on those actually hard problems, there is so much money that people will pay you for it. But you’ll have to face that truth about yourself first.

Circa 2014 I had started a smalltime consulting business with 2 acquaintances. Started off as “let me design a website for your saree and bed sheets shop”, and then one fine day we were a critical part of entire APAC retail banking of a major overseas bank “digitally transforming” some of their core processes and workforce management. Somewhere between those two days, was my 4-week mini-sabbatical. A friend was building a large guest house in Ranikhet and called me because the “weather was nice and he had supplies (iykyk)”. Those 4 weeks, he insisted that I participate in his day to day work, and I humoured him. We woke up before sunrise every day, lugged lumber, chaffed, chopped, melded, load-tested, sampled wood, the whole shebang of carpentry. I realized what it takes to build a GOOD table, a really good one, which looks unremarkable, but lasts generations. I’d like to believe I came off the mountains as a better builder of digital products as well.

I made a techno remix out of a song I recorded with an acoustic guitar in 2011, and asked Opus 5.5 for a music video with a JavaScript-forward art style. (It’s DDR optimized. Anyone else here plays DDR and is interested in steps?) 🧵

*deep breath* people think I'm joking when I tell them that to develop taste for software they need to have brunch with their friends, watch old movies and find old records, walk around metropolitan cities and observe how the building styles lend to the personality of the people around them, but I'm so fkin dead serious. where else is this mythical "taste" going to come from? what are you doing to parse the human condition? mf you can barely decide what discomfort you're subjecting yourself to in finding out what you like/dislike, and I'm supposed to trust you to make decisions for millions of people? go do some pottery and come back to me and describe the joy you felt without faffing about curves or whatever, I need you to feel the clay under your fingernails and fall in love with mud. even steve had the decency to drop acid on a sweaty beach in goa to find himself, the least you can do is listen to your friends talk about their lives over a meal without getting distracted by your phone. *exhale*

We rewrote an internal thing from Zig to JavaScript and it got faster and more reliable. The obvious conclusion is that language doesn’t matter. Rewriting does. You should be rewriting everything all the time.