• I finished reading रेत-समाधि. It was life-changing.
• Thanks to my regimen of gentle exercise using Ring Fit Adventure, the drowsiness and fatigue I’d been feeling for so many months is all but gone. Nearly a full year after my brush with COVID, I’m finally starting to feel okay. Thanks again, Mario.
• The nice man at the fruit store sold me a Thai guava on Monday, which is just an impractically large version of a regular guava. Almost as large as a melon, it occupied far too much space in my refrigerator and took me an entire week to eat. It was delicious, despite the bad UX.
• I’ve doing an unhealthy amount of frivolous busywork at my computer. In the last two weeks, I’ve cleaned up my contact list, reorganized my notes, tagged all my bookmarks, tried three different notes app, tried a new calendar app, and watched tens of hours of automation videos on YouTube. None of this had an impact on any aspect of my life, yet I couldn’t tear myself away from the screen despite my best efforts.
• I have a history of developing these odd, unhealthy obsessions ever so often. They’re mostly harmless, lasting for a few weeks before disappearing into whatever corner of my brain they sprung from. But sometimes they come at the cost of my health, hobbies, and work commitments. I don’t understand them, and so far I haven’t figured out a way to fight them.
• After months of not drinking, I knocked back a few beers on Friday night. There might have been karaoke and dancing. Wild times.

Weekly Links

• Keyboard shortcuts need modifier keys
• महेश वर्मा की कविताएँ from समालोचन
• on leading a purposeless life by Winnie Lim
• 1942 Letter to My Grandfather from His Father by Brent Simmons
• Your CSS reset needs text-size-adjust (probably) by Kilian Valkhof

• It’s persimmon season! The ones that are in stores now are not great, but I have high hopes for the coming months.
• After being sedentary for months, I’m trying to incorporate some gentle movement into my daily life—walking, household chores, and Ring Fit Adventure on the lowest difficulty. It’s not much, but it’s already had a positive impact on my concentration, energy levels, and mood. I’m starting to think that my health issues over the past few months were only partly caused by COVID; the larger contributing factor was my terrible lifestyle.
• I’ve had an iPhone 13 Pro Max for a year, but I’ve barely used the excellent camera that it comes with. I’ve now set myself a new goal of taking at least one picture I’m proud of each day. I’ve discovered that I enjoy taking photos, but I get embarrassed and self-conscious when I take them in public places. If I stop to photograph something in public, I can’t help but feel that I’m being a nuisance. I’m afraid that somebody will come yell at me any second, shooing me away. Am I being overly paranoid or is this something every new photographer deals with?
• I have once again been peer-pressured into using social media. I’m forced to be on Twitter because that’s where the frontend web community hangs out, and on Instagram because my generation likes to use it as a messaging platform. Contrary to popular belief, I enjoy having a job and friends, so I’ve sucked it up and installed both apps on my phone. Cue shrug emoji.
• As I make my way through रेत समाधि, I’m building up an Anki deck containing Hindustani words that I’m unfamiliar with. It’s a slow, laborious process, but I haven’t found any other method of effectively learning new words. I plan to make the deck public when I have a substantial number of cards in it.
• I love how Sara Soueidan plans her days.

Weekly Links

• The Problem With “Writing is Thinking”
• How to Edit Your Own Writing (I disagree with the bit about dependent clauses being bad, but this is otherwise a good read)
• PersonalSit.es
• Get in Zoomer, We’re Saving React

• I’ll keep this short because I’m still tired from my outing yesterday.
• Dad came to visit this weekend. He enjoys gardening, so we went to Krishnendra Nursery and Indo-American Hybrid Seeds on Sunday. If you love plants, both these places come highly recommended.
• In Dad’s opinion, the nurseries in Bangalore carry a wider variety of plants compared to Delhi. Their quality is better, too. He wanted to take quite a few back home for his rooftop garden, but we couldn’t find a good way of transporting them two thousand kilometers north without destroying them in transit.
• Here are some fun new words for you: in Hindi, anxiety is called दुश्चिंता, depression is called अवसाद, and bipolar disorder is called द्विध्रुवी विकार. Now you know.
• I fell down a familiar rabbit hole this week: watching videos about task management, time management, note-taking, quick capture systems, and apps that enable each of these functions. I hate the part of me that’s so easily taken in by this personal productivity snake oil, but I’m still unable to restrain myself.
• I moved all my email to iCloud+ as an experiment. Pray for me, because this thing does not inspire confidence.

Links of the Week

• Mentioning the War by Matt Gemmell
• Accent shame by Matt Gemmell
• Using :has() as a CSS Parent Selector and much more by Jen Simmons for the WebKit blog

• All the friends I’ve made in Bangalore in the decade that I’ve lived here are now scattered across the globe—from Delhi, Bombay, Goa, and Ahmedabad to New York, San Francisco, Toronto, Vancouver, and London. Out of the few who still live here, some have already made plans to move away. I feel like Jeff Winger in the series finale of Community, except I don’t have an Abed to tell me that eventually, it all comes back. We’ve reached the end of Season 6, and we’re not getting renewed for Season 7. Dare I hope for a movie?
• I’ve been working on improving the accessibility of this website. Automated tools for accessibility testing don’t always paint an accurate picture of what it’s like to interact with a website using assistive technologies, so I’ve been learning to navigate the web using VoiceOver and NVDA. If you build user interfaces—on the web or a native platform—I implore you to try interacting with your product using these tools. You will be surprised to discover the ways in which your underlying platform exposes your software’s internal structure to accessibility APIs, and how easy it is to accidentally break this built-in functionality.
• The way I listen to music is changing. Instead of full albums, I now listen to curated playlists on Spotify and Apple Music; instead of recent releases, I enjoy digging up older music that has stood the test of time. I can no longer find enough hours in the day to evaluate every new album myself, so I’ve chosen to rely on The Algorithm™ and Father Time™ to help me find tunes I might enjoy.
• In a perfect world, someone with impeccable taste would listen to every track uploaded to every streaming platform daily, lovingly pick out the songs they knew I would enjoy most, add them to a playlist that was exactly forty minutes long, and send it to me along with words of encouragement that would put a spring in my step and a sparkle in my eye. But we don’t live in a perfect world, do we?

Links of the Week

• The government’s silence on Geetanjali Shree’s Booker win reveals the hollowness of its nationalism
• Disabled buttons suck
• Making Disabled Buttons More Inclusive
• Buttons shouldn’t have a hand cursor

• Until last week, I’d never eaten an avocado. I’d devoured salads, burgers, dips, and spreads in which it was a key ingredient, but I’d never eaten it in its stand-alone, fleshy, fruity form. Therefore, in order to expand my culinary horizons, I purchased an avocado last Tuesday. Sadly, not only did the fruit fail to live up to my expectations, it also rocketed up to the very top of my “Do Not Eat” list. Why is a stick of unsalted butter masquerading as fruit? Why are we as a society allowing this to happen?
• After forcing myself to eat a third of the avocado, I could no longer bear the assault on my taste buds. I banished it to the darkest depths of my refrigerator, where it could never hurt me or anyone else ever again. Incidentally, I’m giving away two-thirds of an avocado. Any takers?
• I’m falling in love with रेत समाधि. No, scratch that. I’ve already fallen in love with रेत समाधि, even though I’m only on page eighty seven.
• On Saturday, I went to Church Street to meet a friend. We walked from bookstore to bookstore, ocassionally stopping at coffee shops and restaurants to refuel ourselves. Lost in conversation, we traversed the length of the street several times in the span of two or three hours. We must have walked four or five kilometers in total, which is not a huge distance by any metric. However, when I got home in the evening, I was so exhausted that I felt like I’d run a full marathon. Even after two days of rest, I still feel tired today. Whether this is a result of COVID or my sedentary lifestyle, I don’t know. All I know is that my body feels fragile, as if it will fall apart if something so much as brushes against my skin. Not a great feeling at the young(ish) age of thirty-two.
• To make it easy for my friends to subscribe to this blog, I set up an RSS-to-newsletter pipeline using MailerLite. I plan to expose a subscription UI for the newsletter after I make sure it works as expected.
• When I sit down to write an essay without a good idea of its structure, I get so lost in how I should say something that I lose sight of what I want to say. I find that drawing up an outline before I start writing helps me finish essays faster and with less hand-wringing. It separates the task of figuring out what I want to say from the task of deciding how I want to say it, reducing the number of things I must mentally juggle during each step of the writing process.
• Outlines are not just useful for creating new work, they can also help refine existing work. Last week I took the first draft of an essay I’d been struggling to finish and converted it to an outline. This helped me see the bones of the essay, making it clear that I was obscuring its core message by adding irrelevant details and diversions. Once the problem became apparent to me, I was able to discard parts of my original outline that did not pertain to my core message. I can now use the edited outline to write a more focused essay, a task that I’m planning to attempt this week.

• First things first: I’ve reached the end of my sabbatical, and I’m itching to start working again. If you’re looking for an experienced frontend engineer to help you build complex React applications, please reach out to me over email or my Twitter handle!
• Eagle eyed readers will have noticed that I’ve given this website a facelift. This was long overdue, since the previous website had been carelessly slapped together without much concern for readability. I’ve tried to rectify that mistake with this new design. Its large serif fonts, ample whitespace, and reduced visual noise should make it much more pleasant to read. However, since I’m not a designer, there’s certainly something important that I’ve overlooked. If this is the case, I would love to know so I can fix the issue.
• I was sick again last week. Throat infection, from the looks of it. With COVID and the flu and allergies all making the rounds right now, who even knows anymore?
• I’ve always been a slow writer, but only recently have I started to see this as a problem. Writing an 800-word blog post can take me nearly three hours, which is three times slower than my ideal writing pace. At this pace, researching and writing a blog post of 1000–1500 words would take me several days, and a medium-length post of 2000–3000 words post would take me more than a week. I’m not happy with this state of affairs anymore.
• Part of the problem is that I’m out of practice, but the bigger issue is that I just can’t help myself from writing and rewriting the same things over and over again in an attempt to get them just right. To counter this tendency, I’ve made some changes to my writing workflow. I now write with a timer running, setting limits on how long I spend on each part of my writing process. I’ve also started writing from an outline, which means I can do the hard work of putting my thoughts in order much before I start polishing them for public consumption. I’ve already noticed a considerable improvement in my writing speed. I’m hoping to get to a point where I can write a medium-length post in under two hours (assuming my research is in order).
• I finished reading Issue 47 of Uncanny Magazine. Some of the stories it contained were not for me, and some I simply didn’t understand, but the overall package was hugely entertaining. Left to my own devices, I would never have had the chance to read such an eclectic and diverse set of tales. My favorites were Bramblewilde by Jordan Taylor and To Hunger, As With Perfect Faith by Radha Kai Zan. If you enjoy them, I encourage you to purchase the full issue they appear in from Weightless Books.
• I’m now reading Geentajali Shree’s Booker-winning novel रेत समाधि, available in English as Tomb of Sand. I’m also reading Issue 132 of Apex Magazine.

I’m too exhausted to write today. Staring at this document for three hours hasn’t helped, so I’m going to give up and go to bed. See y’all next week.

In the meantime, please enjoy this song about gators who like to party.

• Life advice: if the product is called “family-sized papaya”, it might be a bit too large for you to consume by yourself.
• A mysterious illness forced me to be housebound for the entire week. I perpetually felt like I was on the cusp of coming down with a terrible fever, but despite the exhaustion and body ache, my temperature refused to stray from 98.6F. If it had gone up by a single degree, I could have taken my rotting carcass to a doctor; if the body aches had disappeared, I could have gone about squandering my life as usual. But nothing happened, and all I could do was stay home and rest until I felt better.
• What eats at me in times of illness, more than whatever affliction might be plaguing me at the time, is that feeling of soul-deep dissatisfaction brought on by my inability to do productive work. I need lessons in how to be properly sick without losing my mind.
• Thanks to Weightless Books, my Kindle now holds the latest issues of Uncanny, Apex, Nightmare, and Lightspeed magazines. This is the first time I’m reading a fiction magazine, so I’m excited to dig in!
• I received an invite to try out Arc, a new Chromium-based browser by The Browser Company. When I installed it, I expected to see yet another Chromium clone with a few extra features bolted on. Instead, the UI I was greeted with made me question the fundamental design choices mainstream browsers have made over the last two decades. I’m already finding it hard to go back to Firefox, Edge, or Safari without feeling irritated by their UIs, which are entirely antithetical to how humans use the Web in 2022.