About me

I have been a reader for far longer than I have been a programmer. In the first grade, my dad came home from one of his business trips with a massive encyclopedia for me. A few years later, I had moved on to the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew, followed eventually, as I grew up, by novels with more pages and more complexity. In between, I managed to go through about a dozen more encyclopedias.

Programming entered the picture much later. I began teaching myself Python in 2021, mostly by building small things that I wanted to use myself. Once those things worked (or worked well enough to be shared), I would post them on Reddit or in Discord communities, see what people made of them, and return to the code with a bunch of new learnings, and suggestions to make the app better.

One of those projects was spoti-dl, a command-line tool that I kept returning to over the next few years — earlier on, to iterate upon, fix bugs and improve the code, and later on to do a complete rewrite of the core business loop in Rust. The Rust rewrite happened in 2023, when it was picking up steam within developer communities, and I saw a shiny new tech to play around with. I started off with small toy projects to learn the language semantincs and wrap my head around some complexities such as memory management. Eventually, I decided to rewrite spoti-dl itself, particularly as it was synchronous, and needed an async overhaul anyway.

That left me waddling through FFI, concurrency, and Rust lifetimes. I really really disliked this part. Because Rust lifetimes 😾, but I overcame it, and was proud to have done so.

At that time, I did not think of any of this as things a DevRel would do. I simply enjoyed the feedback loop that came along with building stuff, looking at the libraries I used under the hood, and writing about the things I'd learnt or experienced along the way. Plus I knew that OSS communities loved proof of work, and I knew I loved the feeling of seeing GitHub stars or Reddit upvotes or viewer numbers on my website go up.

Some stuff I'm interested in

Before pivoting to tech, I spent a fair amount of time learning Spanish and a touch of French during the COVID lockdowns. It has now been years since I actively studied either language, but Spanish music remains in my regular rotation. I keep looking for new releases that strike a chord in my brain, or that I simply find really catchy.

Finding new music is always a bit of a hassle for me. I find a bunch of songs with a similar style, listen the hell out of them, and then stop listening to much music for a time. Rinse and repeat.

More recently, I started running, albeit slowly in Odisha's hot and humid weather, and it has changed my life for the better. There's this wonderful park near my home that I started going to — which resembles a nature park more than it does a typical park, really — and occassionally started jogging after seeing other folks do the same. Eventually I got the hang of it, improved my technique, and started targetting longer jogs. I've been building on it ever since :)

reading

I've stuck to reading far more persistently. I often find a book (or, if I'm lucky, two!) whose premise I like and/or that I've heard good things about, and dive into its world, letting it consume me for days and weeks on end.

I recently finished the first three books in Sanderson's Stormlight Archive. It is a brilliant series, but it still does not top the pacing and sense of wonder of either of Mistborn eras, IMO.

Some of my favourite fictional worlds are those of the Mistborn series, A Song of Ice and Fire (call me when The Winds of Winter finally comes out, please 😭🙏), and The Witcher. All of 'em engrossed me, devoured my thoughts long after I had finished the novels, and sent me down Reddit lore and conspiracy theory rabbit holes at three in the morning.

It would be unfair of me to talk about favourite series and exclude the standalones juggernauts that are Shogun and Tai-pan, two books that are part of the larger Asian saga by James Clavell. I absolutely adore both the stories and their various characters, but Shogun takes the cake. Why, who can outwit Yoshii Toragana-sama, who was based off of the real-life Tokugawa Ieyasu.

Currently, I'm enjoying Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove series in the logical order.

and previously, a lot of gaming

When it comes to video games, I have poured more than 5,000 hours into Path of Exile, split between Steam and the standalone launcher. I spent most of that time playing on less-than-great hardware, before finally getting a genuinely good PC recently. The mechanics are the same, of course, but it feels like a different world.

Five thousand hours in Path of Exile might seem crazy, until you find out that I probably have twice as many in Dota across multiple accounts and more than a decade of playing the game on and off. I never got really good at it, though, reaching Archon 3 (or was it just Archon 2?) and staying there for some time before dropping down again.

Although I have mostly lost the all-consuming passion I once had for gaming (I converted it into a passion for programming once I started learning Python, and I'm glad I did!), an undercurrent of passion for audio gear has stayed remarkably consistent for about half a decade now.

tech gear

My desk has a pair of Creative Pebble V3 speakers, while my Kefine Klean IEMs handle dedicated listening sessions. I also have a pair of Truthear Zero Blues that I rarely use anymore. The Kleans, while lacking the bass power of the Blues, make up for it with a much richer sound signature. That same sound signature has made me appreciate mainstream music a tad bit more, and my song preferences have taken shape accordingly in recent years.

The rest of the setup is an M1 MacBook Air (16 GB + 256 GB), a BenQ 24-inch monitor, and an RK84 V2 keyboard with brown switches. It all works perfectly well, which has done very little to stop me from wanting to upgrade every part of it :P

What I do these days

Today, I work in DevRel and technical content at SigNoz, an open-source observability company. This was not a career path I had mapped out in advance. Before moving into DevRel, I worked as a software engineer, before which I was pursuing an arts degree with few particularities in mind. In hindsight, the change felt less like a clean break and more like finding a job around things I was already doing for fun.

Most of my work now revolves around OpenTelemetry and observability. Both can become abstract very quickly, so I often prefer to begin with working code and a concrete problem, and then figure out how much context is actually useful. It is roughly the same process I followed with my own projects, except I now spend far more time translating that context and experience into a more digestible format for the developers who read my blogs.

Python was the first language I learnt and remains the one I reach for most often. Rust still calls to me sometimes, usually into the more complicated rabbit holes around instrumentation rather than lifetimes (thankfully).

Occassionally, I also spend pockets of time reading discussions on Reddit and Hacker News. They are hubs of developer activity and help me keep up with latest developments and what folks think about those developments.

Some things I've worked on