Hello!
I legit didn't realise how the week flew by. It feels like yesterday I wrote the first edition, and I'm here again, writing this today.
The feedback from last week has been amazing :) A lot of you loved this format, and I think it's a six (for the cricket lovers here). Thank you!
I know I've to work on the audio, and I will. Hopefully, today's podcast version is better.
A friend said "Morning work felt like entering a battlefield" last week. And it made me think about my break (flexing my privilege here), and how amazing it has been. It's been a while since I stood on this battlefield.
The chaos that comes from the lack of stand-ups, townhalls, etc other activities I was once expected to attend, has made me miss the structure and the interactions with colleagues.
Honestly, I miss the pre-pandemic schedule, where you could switch off work mode at 7 pm. And also something about doing things in your 20s vs 30s (maybe a topic for a future edition).
Speaking of colleagues, we're all looking for a tribe essentially, someone to share our journeys with - the highs and the lows. I'll touch upon this later again, but I'm amazed how workspaces enable a lot of this for grown-ups - given that people are willing to spend 40+ hours a week in that context and with very little play involved.
What do you think?
-Teej
🐻 Garadili karadi (Bear in the gym)
One of the biggest things I've been working on this past year is my physical self. I've tried gyms in the past, and it never clicked. I never found joy in lifting heavy things, and given that I sweat a lot easily, I've become very conscious about how I feel at the end of a workout.
When we shifted to Basavangudi, one of the things that immediately popped on maps was a garadimane or akhada - essentially an Indian traditional gym.
This is a community-driven gym, where you show up every day, and someone more senior than you will teach an exercise/movement. What's interesting is the use of a mud-pit, and lopsided/asymmetric weights that change how you train with them. And there's an extreme emphasis on low-intensity-high-repetitions. It's easy to expect someone to do 100 bhaski, but the same cannot be said about deadlifts.
The roots of the workouts stem from our agriculture-based lifestyle of yore. There's a lot of digging, swings, and balancing.
Eventually, some of these garadimane folk train to become wrestlers. Traditional mud-wrestling is a dying art though, giving way to the more popular mat wrestling and other forms like boxing, jujitsu etc.
Have you tried working out in a garadimane? Would you like to try it?
🌿 A pot full of dying curry
We have bunches of mint and basil doing well in tiny posts, and a small habanero sapling too.
There's some new gourd coming up, and I'm not sure what it is. Waiting for it to become bigger, and ripen :)
Our curry leaves though, they look so thin, frail, and almost dead. We got these from our neighbour, and somehow we're just unable to make it thrive.
Please help me grow a better green thumb!
💻 code.with.teej's debut
I started streaming on Twitch yesterday.
It's a little rough, a lot to learn, and needs better audio.
I was quite overwhelmed with how the stream would be, and what I would talk about etc, but then I remembered what I wrote last week, and just shipped it.
The first-ever edition talks about setting up SST.dev, which has a new "Ion Framework" to deploy serverless applications across multiple cloud providers, and using Remix.run with this framework to create blazingly fast websites. I also set up shadcn to help create a good starting point, though I haven't used the component library fully in the project yet.
Now, if any of this didn't make sense, please let me know, and I'll try to make something to convey my passion for code and tech better :)
If something in this made sense, and if you're curious to learn more, go to my Twitch/YouTube; or hit me up here :D
The project itself is about reinventing a very common resource for all Carnatic lovers - Karnatik.com, which has terrible UI but is a goldmine of information. I scraped data (and am attributing it all to the website, don't worry), and we're creating a web app that will work better on mobiles and small screens.
I have some larger plans for this project, and eager to share them with you as it unfolds.
Uff this is getting long. Time for an intermission.
🏔️ Starting the trekking hiking season at Rayakottai
A few of us went on a trek, or what my friends in the west call a hike, to Rayakottai - a small fort between Hosur and Krishnagiri.
It all started on Friday evening, with someone pushing to plan the trek on a WhatsApp group. People slowly trickled into the plan, and we eventually had something to execute.
A long drive to beyond Hosur for breakfast (highly recommend Pongal and Dose when you're away from Bangalore), and a small trek up the hill to a temple.
The route is well laid out, and the weather was perfect - cool breeze, with intermittent sun.
There's a longer route to the top of the hill which we couldn't go for due to the lack of time. I'm stoked for this trekking season, and documenting these routes better!
🫂 Making friends as adults
One of my fondest memories is making a friend some 25 years ago.
It was the day after Children's Day. My class, like everyone else, was at the auditorium, watching the teachers try to entertain us (which was way easier back in the 90s, compared to the lengths parents have to go for their kids now). After all the scheduled programming we headed back to class, and this kid was sitting in my space.
Going full Sheldon on him, I said "That's my spot".
What started as a disagreement, ended up giving me a friend who christened me TJ.
Finding situations like this, let alone finding people, is infinitely harder as an adult.
There was a phase back in the early 2010s when Twitter (currently X) was a haven to find like-minded people. Many became acquaintances. Some friends. Fewer became besties. And one became family.
The same cannot be said about the internet today. The whole space feels like a sticky hot mess that's best avoided. Not that it wasn't so earlier, but our collective naiveté made it a relative "safer" space.
A lot of my friends have had multiple simultaneous changes in their lives - moving cities, changing relationships, new jobs etc. One topic we always end up talking about is this - making friends in a new space, in a new environment.
It's interesting to think about this. How do you make friends as an adult?
Errata
Somehow this link to the #48in24 was messed up in the previous edition: Exercism #48in24 (turns out it’s how substack processes hashtags)
A friend warned me of the Toxic squash syndrome, which stems from the bitter-smelling gourd growing in my garden. Cautiously, we harvested the vegetable and made it into this delicious sambar with sweet pumpkin once we realised it’s not really bitter (but a little sour)
Today’s lunch Made ragi mudde with the sambar. Paired well too. Also, don't yuck my yum.
One was in-house, one outsourced As a backup, we bought one from the market too, and it looks so much different. Wonder what they use to make it so. No points for guessing which is from where.
End Note
Today's theme has been about finding your people. Let me know how you make friends, and how close you become to your colleagues.
If you've liked this post, I'd love it if you could share it with a friend. You can get them to subscribe here
I do my best to have 5 "fun" things I've been working on every week hopefully on Thursdays. I'm stoked you're here on my journey and would love to read/hear about what you think. If you think there are other things we can look at, do them my way!
If you enjoyed this, give the previous post a read too!
Thanks for being here, and reading all this. See you soon!
Teej
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