What it takes to write a Big Blog Post

Slightly meta post today. Posts of the Day are easy. I just spend 5 minutes on them and that's it. But bigger posts, they take a lot more effort. I first do rough drafts, then I created a post outline, write down the post, then I design the graphics for each of the elements in the post, combine it together in a post, create social media assets, and then publish and share it with folks.

It's a lot of painstaking effort and usually with minuscule rewards. But I am determined to share my learnings.






The Post in Question is published on my other blog here.

TIAT Place is a fun event to attend

Attended a Creative Technologist's meetup yeesterday, it's called "TIAT place" short for the Intersection of Art and Technology. Fun event with a lot of cool design / maker-ey stuff presented. I loved how each person went through their design process in detail for projects that were side hobbies at best.

The Event happened at the Internet Archive (yes! It's a physical space), which in itself is a fun venue. The central auditorium feels more like a church(!?). I find the whole event fascinating.

Creative Technologists are a small clique in the Bay Area, they don't advertise about the events much, but once you get in, they seem generally cordial and everyone kinda knows everyone else. What's interesting though is that these people aren't really pursuing creative technology in their day jobs, which makes me wonder how many Creative Technologists are actually working as creative technologists; and why then is this such a clique. One of the most annoying habits of Silicon Valley designers is just how performative their "attitude" is. They'll intentionally be hard-to-grab attention, hyper confident in their own work, and follow a "I will only really listen to you if you're a proven designer" attitude to conversation. The nice ones happily strike up a conversation; and they're the ones staying in touch with.

Some pictures from the event:

The feeling of nothing is sufficient

In the last 8 months, job hunt has been stressful yes, but it’s the feeling of “no matter what I do, no matter how hard I try, it’s just not enough” that’s stuck with me and it’s soul crushing.

There's always a deadline, I am always last minute to it, because I have been doing so much else, yet at the end of the day, It seems like I am not doing enough to fulfill my goals.


P.S. Attended the second tiat place event at the Internet Archive today, and it was refreshing to go out and meet more creative technologists. But more on it later. This is foreshadowing tomorrow's post.

Movie Recommendation: Elevator Pitch by Alexx Zaki

Alexx Zaki's debut short film Elevator Pitch is a timely take on the process of job-hunting. The process is robotic, de-humanising and soul crushing. Alexx does a great job representing it in few words. The actors are terrific, they show a range of depth in such few words. Watch out for the "hip-VP", that person conveys so much in a single dialogue.

Highly recommend spending four minutes of your time on this terrific short film.

P.S. I must disclose, Alexx is one of my best friends, so I am inclined to enjoy everything they make; but even so, this is an unbiased, honest take. I have already seen this short twice.

Sunsets

Just some beautiful sunsets with the Golden Gate Bridge in the distance.

Music I'm listening to in 2025

With good Hindi and Tamil music in short supply these days. I have shifted to listening to more Punjabi music in the last couple of years. Really enjoying the works of Sharry mann, Amrit Mann, Prabh Singh, and Zehr Vibe apart from the usual suspects.

Here's my playlist:

The Illusion of a good Pizza

Went to Doppio Zero, one of SF's only few AVPN certified Pizzerias, basically one of the few Pizzerias in SF that can claim that their Pizzas match the Italian standardization body's strict requirements for what's a True Neapolitan Pizza. I have my doubts on that.


This Pizza looks great. It looks like a true Neapolitan Pizza. The Cheese and the preparations are on point, the pizza tastes great too, the sauce is balanced (just crushed tomatoes) and flavours on point. But it's a heavy pizza, in fact too heavy for what a 12" Neapolitan Pizza should be. The after-taste is not great at all. It's not easily digestable, the crust is too doughy and not fun to eat.


Look at the gluten net, it's too dense! This isn't a great pizza at all!

How do I know this? I made a very similar mistake about a week back. The Pizza looks great. But does the Pizza have the right impact on our stomachs, maybe not.

To be fair, this is nitpicking and I am a bit of a Pizza purist here. This is a practice popular across SF, and Doppio Zero is one of the better ones. But I believe a good traditional neapolitan pizza is the one that's easy to digest, not the one that looks the part.

Go small and build communities

Philz is about to be sold to a private equity firm and this is not a one-off occurance. All popular local-coffee roasters from SF in the last two decades that raised a bunch of money, have met a similar fate. They were great, they became popular, they grew, they raised money and then couldn't grow enough so are now being sold to bigger more evil companies.

This is what I call the indie to medium sized sell-out arc. It doesn't just happen in the world of coffee, it happens everywhere there are indies. Indie software comes to mind, which has the same arc. Food is the other obvious one.


To me the problem exists with the notion of infinite growth. This very American idea of "Go Big or Go Home". What if that's not the right approach. Not everything needs to keep growing to the point where it either controls everything or sells out to someone else who does. I also hate this phrase because it's often used as a way to tell me how my own work as an indie is insignificant and will never be as big as the likes of big players. So what do we do to fight the demon of "Go Big or Go Home"?

We "Go Small and Build Communities". What does that mean. Here's my proposition: