Now

This page is a snapshot in time. The funny thing about “now” is how quickly it becomes “then”.

Work#

Work has not changed much. I am still building backend systems and caring more than I probably should about performance, reliability, and what happens after software reaches production.

Most of my tinkering lately has been around coding agents. OpenCode is my go-to right now. I use Codex too, and spent time with Pi, Cline, and a few others before settling here. OpenCode has the best mix for me: the TUI is good, I can configure almost everything, and it does not force me into somebody else’s idea of a workflow.

Repeated instructions are slowly becoming skills. I have been routing tasks to different models and watching token usage instead of blindly reaching for the strongest model. Markdown files are doing more work in my setup than I expected.

I have not gone all the way into running a factory of agents. I still like seeing what is happening and controlling how the work is split. Maybe I will get there eventually, but for now I am happy tweaking the workflow myself.

Learning#

I finally started learning Rust. I wanted to understand why people consider it both special and notoriously difficult, and how it gets memory safety from compile-time checks without a garbage collector. I am going through The Rust Programming Language slowly, and I am beginning to understand the trade-offs. Ownership and borrowing let the compiler make strong guarantees, but they can also make seemingly ordinary code surprisingly difficult.

Rust also feels a little like a cult. It comes with its own vocabulary: ownership, borrowing, lifetimes, the borrow checker. All of it makes sense inside Rust, but very little of it transfers cleanly to the languages I already know. I am still early, so this may be an unfair diagnosis. It is interesting enough that I keep reading.

Separately, I have been cloning mature open-source repositories and stepping through them with a debugger. SQLAlchemy is the latest one. There is no particular goal beyond following real execution paths and understanding why the code is shaped the way it is.

I am reading Refactoring by Martin Fowler as well.

Chess#

I used to play chess professionally, then stopped years ago. During Covid, I found my way back as a spectator through ChessBase India, comedians streaming chess, and the wider boom around the game.

I kept following after that, though not very actively for the last eight or nine months. The recent Global Chess League and the ongoing Chess Olympiad have pulled me back. For now, I am following games and trying to recover the enthusiasm to play.