Weekly Notes 41/2026

by Thejesh GN · October 9, 2026

This week was good. I got back to my routine after two weeks of travel and a hectic schedule. Work is progressing well; I did two P.T. sessions, a game, and a ~~run~~ walk. I am still away from a five day active week. But I think I am consistently reaching three to four day active weeks, which isn’t bad. We are in the last quarter of the year (actual year?), I have lots of things to close before the year ends. I think it’s going to be a hectic but fruitful year end.

I have been building many of my projects in public for a long time, but not all my work can be public, and not every team I work with works that way. Still, I’ve found a pattern that works for most teams and for me: something like open office hours, except we’re all working. I call it Katte – The Open Desk. We meet online at a specific time, in one or two hour blocks, ideally with 2 to 8 people, and work together or separately, talking only when it helps. It’s mainly meant for teams, but it can also work with strangers as a form of accountability. This week I documented it.
A friend, Bharathi, at NPTEL/CODE turned 50. It seems like she is just getting started, even after achieving so much. She is such an inspiration to me.
I attended a lecture by Peggy Mohan at APU today. It was brilliant and also fun. She is such a brilliant storyteller.
We are making great progress at Dristi V2. The last two weeks were spent designing. It’s been build and build week. The next few weeks will be the same, I guess. Once it reaches some stage, I will share more details.
Uthara and Dave from BuzzWomen wrote a book, The Buzz Way, covering how they work. Congratulations, Uthara and Dave.
Tomorrow, October 10th, is a big deal; I am guessing based on how far the Delhi police will go to prevent the peaceful protests. If they were this proactive in general, Delhi wouldn’t have become the crime capital. I am very optimistic about the protests; they are going to be large, effective, and, above all, peaceful.
NCF is 30 years old now. They are celebrating with lots of programming; attend if you can. Aleph Alpha has built Savanna, a model factory that implements the entire training pipeline in code so that models can be built collaboratively. They have also released their open-weights model, Kolibri. I haven’t tried it yet, but it looks interesting. I came across RoadStr, decentralized road-event reporting using Nostr and MeshCore. Web and Android. It’s very close to the project I had proposed at FOSSHack/2026. I am trying it in a browser now. I will definitely try it on OSMAnd using their plugin. I need to see if I can collect historical data for a specific location for research. Otherwise, it looks great. I am also studying and exploring the Reticulum Network. It seems useful and stable, especially when the bandwidth needs are small.