Starting over
2013.036Ditching WordPress for a custom Node.js blog engine powered by libgit2 -- git as the content store, markdown as the writing format, npm for everything else.
Writing
2013
2012
Running two systems at once
2012.325Replacing an e-commerce frontend without turning off the old one -- carving over layer by layer while the store takes orders.
The host came back, nginx didn't
2012.290Some paths proxy to another host. It went down, came back -- and nginx kept failing until I reloaded it.
The dispatch desk
2012.264A basement, a barcode scanner, and the moment the dispatch desk stopped waiting.
A fifty-line rate limiter
2012.249In-memory rate limiting as Express middleware. No Redis, no external service. Fifty lines, one file.
Connection pooling
2012.202The Node.js MySQL driver doesn't pool connections. Under load, you run out. Fifty lines with generic-pool fixes it.
URL mapping in Redis
2012.162Loading every product, category, and brand URL into a Redis hash at startup, and a middleware that rewrites requests before Express sees them.
Rolling your own search
2012.074Building catalog search with flattened MongoDB documents and application-side scoring when the proper tools don't exist yet.
2011
The catch that never fired
2011.317Reading the parent frame's URL throws in Firefox and returns undefined in WebKit. The defensive catch I wrote never fired.
Flying Thru the Motions
2011.101Three months into the startup. From the outside, chaos. From the inside, flight.
Tangled Up in Blue
2011.100Dylan, and the artists who orbit him.
Naagin
2011.087Decibel made Indian rock that sounds Indian. That shouldn't be rare, but it is.
Chandigarh
2011.065Chandigarh was beautiful. I couldn't feel it. I don't know why.
Ping from Noida
2011.007An arrival note. The cold, the office, the exhale that took five days.
The Cosmic Drummer
2011.004A late-night conversation about why Lord Shiva might be the original rock star -- and what the third eye might actually mean.
Goodbye 2010, Goodbye Hyderabad
2011.001New Year. Half-packed boxes. The city I'm leaving is the city I learned to be free in.
2010
Rare Pictures of Hyderabad
2010.350Old photos of a city I've lived in for two and a half years and mostly walked past.
The Chaos
2010.338An 800-line poem that proves English pronunciation has worse consistency than most legacy codebases.
Fast Car
2010.325Tracy Chapman wrote the only song about leaving that gets it exactly right.
Counting malloc
2010.318Everything else was tuned. The wall was the one function I never wrote -- malloc. A dtrace one-liner showed the paths in.