Weekly Notes 43/2025

We are back in Bengaluru. We drove back on Sunday, so traffic would be light since it was in the middle of the long weekend. The drive was comfortable. We took three breaks, primarily for me and Echo to stretch.

Back from a slow Deepavali weekend, work is getting hectic as we approach the end of the year. According to my estimates, it’s going to be a hectic couple of months at work. I am preparing myself.

• 🪔 Happy Deepavali! May good thoughts and bright moments light up your life.
• 👩🏻‍🎓 Uma is back to school this week after a long Dasara and Deepavali holidays. She is still dreaming about “big water“.
• 🏋 I went back to Stairs Physiotherapy and Fitness this week. During the break, I took some online sessions and some on my own. I am happy that I didn’t stop. Given how the rest of the year is going to be, I think this is a must. I am also enjoying the challenge and progress.
• 💬 My migration to the XMPP network is going well. Even though there are fewer personal contacts there, I have enough groups/channels that I am spending more time there. On mobile, I use Snikket/Cheogram as the client. On Linux Desktop, I use Dino. It works well. My next step would be to write a simple bot using Slixmpp or aioxmpp.
• 💻 For a long time, I had this idea of building a “buy me coffee” kind of service for myself, with some return gifts. But I don’t want to get a merchant account. I wanted to use my existing UPI. This week, I built a PoC with UPI and no external dependencies. It works. I plan to implement that on this site sometime. I will keep you informed.
• 🤖 If you haven’t noticed, I have an “Assisted by AI 🤖” tag to indicate which posts were assisted by AI in writing, coding, etc. I mention the model names and sometimes even the prompts when it makes sense. I try to use AI thoughtfully, avoiding slop.
• 💻 Interestingly, NSDL’s CAS monthly holding reports now value equities by face value rather than market value (as they did until August/2025). That change makes it hard to track portfolio variations. I am not sure if it’s intentional or just a mistake. If you have scripts based on this, you may want to update them.
• 🌐 If you have time, read this conversation with Ted Chang titled Life Is More Than an Engineering Problem. I kind of agree with him. Another helpful post to read this week is Ben Werdmuller’s advice to technologists on using technology skills for positive change. At this point, given that both India and the USA are at the same level. Everything he says there also applies to technologists in India. Talking about politics and tech, data seems to be vanishing from government sites. It has happened before in India as well. There are efforts to archive them in a distributed way. Sciop is an experimental federated BitTorrent tracker designed for survivability. The project looks useful and is already archiving datasets from USA. It’s different from archive.org as it’s a distributed system. In the good news category, Gubbi Labs released long-term frog observation data based on their annual Bisle Frog Watches. I love citizen science projects. Hopefully, I can participate one day.