Posts

The traffic argument for developer blogging is weak. The better arguments are about learning, career, and thinking quality - and they work even with zero readers.

Every career advice article tells you to network. Most engineers react to this advice with some combination of reluctance and mild disgust. The disgust is valid - but it is aimed at the wrong thing. The thing that feels gross is not networking. It is transactional relationship-building: connecting with people only when you need something, treating professional contacts as resources to extract value from, sending “just checking in” messages when you actually want a referral. ...

Paying rent to your parents and claiming HRA exemption is one of the most effective tax-saving strategies available to salaried individuals. When done correctly, it is completely legitimate. When done sloppily, it is a red flag for the Income Tax Department. Here is how to do it right. The Basic Rule Under Section 10(13A) of the Income Tax Act, HRA exemption is available if: You actually pay rent You live in a rented accommodation The house is not owned by you Paying rent to a family member (parent, sibling) is allowed. The only person you cannot pay rent to for HRA purposes is your spouse - courts and the IT department consistently hold that spouses living together cannot have a landlord-tenant relationship. ...

Most side projects on resumes are ignored. Here is the difference between a project that hiring managers remember and one that disappears into the noise.

Cashback credit cards promise simple math: spend money, get some back. No points to track, no redemption portals to navigate. It sounds like free money. The reality is more complicated. Here is what the fine print on most Indian cashback cards actually means for your wallet. The Cashback Rates Are Usually Lower Than They Look Most Indian cashback cards advertise rates of 2-5%. The actual cashback you receive after conditions is usually much lower. ...

The symptom was gradual: database CPU creeping from 40% to 60% to 80% over three weeks without a corresponding spike in traffic. We were not under unusual load. The query patterns were not obviously wrong. It took pg_stat_statements and 20 minutes of analysis to find a single query pattern that was running thousands of times per minute - and could be reduced to tens of times per minute. The Situation The application is a content platform. Users visit pages that display articles with author information, tag lists, view counts, and related article recommendations. Load had grown steadily and we were 30 days from needing to scale the database vertically, which meant a multi-hour maintenance window and a doubled database bill. ...

Most engineers treat documentation as a tax - the annoying thing you do after the real work is done. Write the code, ship the feature, then reluctantly add some words to the wiki before the ticket gets closed. This misses the whole point. Writing documentation is not a service to future readers. It is a thinking exercise that makes you a better engineer while it also helps those future readers. ...

Microservices promise independent scaling and team autonomy. The pitch is real. So are the operational costs that only show up after you have 50 services in production.

WebAssembly was announced in 2015, shipped in browsers in 2017, and has spent the years since being perpetually “almost there.” The use cases were always compelling. The tooling was always immature. That is changing fast, and 2026 is the year the server-side WASM story finally makes sense. What WASM Actually Is WebAssembly is a binary instruction format - a compilation target, not a language. You write code in Rust, C, Go, C++, Python, or a growing list of other languages. You compile it to .wasm. The WASM binary runs in a sandboxed virtual machine with deterministic behavior and near-native performance. ...

Filing your own ITR as a salaried employee is straightforward if you follow the right sequence. Here is the exact process, step by step, for AY 2026-27.

Teams that migrated to the Next.js App Router six months ago are now living with the consequences. The honest verdict from engineers who made the jump.

Rust won the systems programming conversation. Memory safety without a garbage collector, a package ecosystem that actually works, and adoption at Microsoft, Google, the Linux kernel, and the Rust Foundation. The debate is over. But a new language is building real momentum, and it takes a fundamentally different philosophy to the same problem space. Zig is worth understanding. What Zig Is Zig is a general-purpose systems programming language created by Andrew Kelley, first released in 2016 and still pre-1.0. It targets the same space as C - low-level systems code, embedded software, performance-critical applications - but with a cleaner model for memory management, error handling, and compile-time programming. ...

You got the offer. The salary number is good. You are tempted to sign. Wait. The salary is the part of the offer you will feel every month. But the team quality, growth trajectory, culture, and equity structure will affect your career for years. These deserve more evaluation time than the number that was easiest to compare. The Compensation Stack (Not Just Salary) First, understand what you are actually being offered. ...

Your terminal is where you spend a third of your working life. These five configurations compound into hours saved per week.

When Redis changed its license in 2024, the community forked it into Valkey. Two years later, there is a clear answer on which one most teams should use.

Every developer says they want to contribute to open source. Most never do. The reason is always some version of “I am not good enough yet” or “what if my code is bad.” Here is the thing: maintainers are desperately overwhelmed. They have backlogs of issues, outdated documentation, and tests that need writing. They are not sitting there judging whether you are smart enough. They are hoping someone - anyone - will help. ...

You have maxed out Rs. 1.5 lakh in 80C. But there are seven more deductions available that most salaried taxpayers under the old regime never use.

Nvidia owns 90% of AI GPUs. AMD is the scrappy challenger. Broadcom is quietly building custom chips for Google, Meta, and OpenAI. Here’s how the AI chip war is shaping up in 2026.

Most Indians buy health insurance exactly once, under pressure from a ULIP-pushing agent, and never think about it again until they need to use it. By that point, the policy has gaps you did not know about, and your claim is either partially rejected or the cover is embarrassingly low. These are the five mistakes that cause most of the damage. Mistake 1 - Buying for Tax Benefit, Not for Coverage Section 80D gives you a deduction of Rs. 25,000 on health insurance premiums (Rs. 50,000 for senior citizens). This is excellent. But many people buy a Rs. 3-5 lakh policy simply to exhaust the deduction, without thinking about whether that cover is adequate. ...

Recruiters spend less time on your resume than you spent on the font choice. Here is what they are actually scanning for and how to make those 6 seconds count.