Notion connected and Albums collected Another week that seems to have finished before it started. I'm sitting here at my computer and can't for the life of me think of what I've done. However, I'm sure my notes will he

A week that seemed to finish before it had started.
Mild panic about 'Everything I Need to Do'
Claude is now connected to Notion (good) & Canva (hmm)
50th article on The Ode Map
A flurry of new album releases to catch up on

"Notion connected and Albums collected": buff.ly/Zc8z7rA
#weeknote

Notes for the Week #10 (2026) This week note covers the week of 2nd–8th March. ## Life# This is another late week note because I was quite overwhelmed to write one yesterday. Life has been hectic, tiring, fun, and anxiety inducing last week. Somehow we march on. I’ve made sleeping on time a priority and I’m getting a full 8.5 hours of sleep now. I’m waking up refreshed and not feeling sleepy during the days. I’ve also increased my walking pace and now I can walk 5km (3.2mi) in 55 minutes! Body has been a little sore, so I’m taking one rest day every week. I’ve started taking A to swimming classes now, so I get to spend few hours in the pool every week, and I really like it. I should definitely finish my swimming lessons some day soon. Holi was on last Wednesday. I took a day off from work and got A home early to celebrate. We (well, mostly A and my wife) played Holi with _pichkaris_ (water guns) and color. I took many photographs. A had a plenty of fun in the first proper Holi of her life. Later we had sweets and fried food to complete the celebrations. Summer is properly here with temperatures reaching 32°C (90°F). ACs are on now for a few hours each day. I hear that this year may be the hottest ever. **Current daily average steps per month** : 10745 ## Personal Projects# In the last week note, I mentioned that I optimized my website generator to reduce its memory use to 2GB. Last week I rescaled my VPS to 4GB RAM, thus saving me some money in server fees. I haven’t notices any issues with the new setup till now. I also deleted my Digital Ocean VPS backups, so I don’t need to pay them anymore. Last Thursday I enabled Cloudflare verification for few more countries for my website, and the traffic to my website dropped by more than half. It made me a little sad, but it’s better to know the truth that I’m not really popular, it’s just bad crawlers. 2025 had been a year of me tying some loose ends. I finished some programming projects, shipped improvements to my website that I’d been itching for, finished writing few blog series etc. Now the time is ripe to get started on new projects! Last week I started on one: writing a Co to JavaScript compiler (or transpiler as some may call it). I did the basic setup and got a pretty printer for Co working. Next is doing some analysis passes. I have some previous experience in writing such compilers so this is mostly about putting things together and testing it rigorously. Once I’m done, I’ll write posts about it to expand the series. ## Watching# I continued watching Lord of Mysteries, though it’s turning out to be pretty gory and is giving me weird nightmares. Frieren is coming along. Last few episodes have amped up the action. Wife and I carried on slowly watching Love Through a Prism. ## Interesting Internet Links# * Mary and Mary * Canonicalize Your Web Identity and Achieve Data Sovereignty with PESOS * Understanding Space Leaks From StateT That’s all for this week. You can subscribe to the feed of my week notes for updates. If you have any questions or comments, please leave a comment below. If you liked this post, please share it. Thanks for reading!

A new #weeknote about celebrations, endings and new beginnings: https://abhinavsarkar.net/notes/2026-weeknotes-03-09/

#blogging #weeknote

Weeknote 6 - a Low-fi Personal Finance App and return of the Reading List I’ve been on vacation this week and spent most of it being at the beck and call of Mishka. She requires a minimum of 7.5 hours of snuggles a day.

#Weeknote 6: this week, 1) the return of the homework portion of these post (a digest of links related to my various areas of interest - data, government, policy, feelings, etc; 2) the first iteration of a lo-fi personal finance dashboard; and 3) varia.

heidi2o.cc/weeknote_6

Weeknote 10/2026 What I've been up to this week.

#Weeknote 10/2026

Lots of chats, projects, and football

blog.dougbelshaw.com/weeknote-10-...

Weeknote 45/2026 TL;DR climbing hills, playing with new tools, and reducing off-system workarounds

#Weeknote 45/2026 | TL;DR climbing hills, playing with new tools, and reducing off-system workarounds @rds-scotland.bsky.social @weeknotes-bot.bsky.social medium.com/@adam.coulso... #Weeknotes

Where mentoring sits & Embarrassing Brits Some weeks go by in the blink of an eye; others seem to drag on for a month.This week has been one of the former - mostly, I think, because I was busy with new things. Lots of rese

Last week went quickly.
Amongst other things, I did some LLM tinkering.
Also watched the Brit Awards, which was, as ever, an embarrassment. (Rosalía, though. Crikey!)

Latest week note - "Where mentoring sits and Embarrassing Brits": buff.ly/vsCoGP0

#weeknote #weeknotes

Notes for the Week #9 (2026) This week note covers the week of 23rd February–1st March. ## Life# This week has been a slow one. Not much to update on this time. Life is moving at usual pace; home-work-walk-build-watch-read. My sleep has improved but I’m still not waking up fully refreshed; at least I am able to drive now. I kept sneaking in walks here and there, even spent some time on a treadmill because the summer is here in Bangalore. I finished February with 10225 daily average steps, which is a tad bit better than January. With the heat increasing, I’ll have to spend more time walking on the treadmill. We got all the ACs serviced just in time. A and my wife made popsicles twice this week with fruit juices, which turned out to be absolutely delectable. Looking forward to more of those this summer. Holi is around the corner, and this year A is old enough to play with water. Got to get her a pichkari. ## Personal Projects# This week I worked on `feed-repeat`, the small tool I made to repeat the posts from my favourite feeds into new feeds so that I can reread them forever. I’m planning to open source it so I added a few features that I felt were missing, and refactored it a bit. In particular: * I added support for conditional feed fetches. * I added a parameter to tune the entry selection probability. I think it is in a good shape now for opening. I’ve been running it for myself for three months and it has been performing as expected. Rest of my free time was spent on an urgent issue. Turns out RAM is very expensive now, causing my VPS provider Hetzner to increase their prices. My VPS that hosts my website and a few more services mostly sits idle, so it doesn’t make sense for me to pay so much for it. The only reason I was using an 8GB server was because my website generator was too memory hungry. I wrote it in a time when memory was cheap but compute was expensive. So I cached the hell out of everything. This worked well for 5 or so years, but now that I have over hundred posts and memory is scarce, I decided to optimize. I moved many caches from memory to on-disk and trimmed down things that were cached. I batched some build targets together. I also reduced the build concurrency. Over 16 commits, I brought down the memory use from 7GB to 2GB. It can still be improved but this is good enough now that I can rescale the VPS to 4GB RAM, and save some bucks. Interestingly, this also cut down the run time by about 40%, even when running with 8 thread instead of 50. Turns out, if you reduce memory use, the program will run faster because the garbage collector does not have to work as hard. Here are details for the curious: Before run stats 157,185,195,096 bytes allocated in the heap 87,212,373,968 bytes copied during GC 2,097,087,272 bytes maximum residency (60 sample(s)) 213,954,456 bytes maximum slop 7071 MiB total memory in use (0 MiB lost due to fragmentation) Tot time (elapsed) Avg pause Max pause Gen 0 106 colls, 106 par 301.063s 5.451s 0.0514s 0.2627s Gen 1 60 colls, 59 par 78.511s 24.207s 0.4035s 1.4609s Parallel GC work balance: 93.98% (serial 0%, perfect 100%) TASKS: 216 (1 bound, 215 peak workers (215 total), using -N50) SPARKS: 0 (0 converted, 0 overflowed, 0 dud, 0 GC'd, 0 fizzled) INIT time 0.004s ( 0.003s elapsed) MUT time 0.000s (120.139s elapsed) GC time 379.574s ( 29.659s elapsed) EXIT time 0.181s ( 0.015s elapsed) Total time 200.424s (149.816s elapsed) Alloc rate 0 bytes per MUT second Productivity -89.5% of total user, 80.2% of total elapsed After run stats 86,561,960,248 bytes allocated in the heap 13,599,700,352 bytes copied during GC 885,401,912 bytes maximum residency (45 sample(s)) 71,571,144 bytes maximum slop 2015 MiB total memory in use (0 MiB lost due to fragmentation) Tot time (elapsed) Avg pause Max pause Gen 0 323 colls, 323 par 10.476s 3.928s 0.0122s 0.0667s Gen 1 45 colls, 44 par 8.457s 2.668s 0.0593s 0.2832s Parallel GC work balance: 82.49% (serial 0%, perfect 100%) TASKS: 34 (1 bound, 33 peak workers (33 total), using -N8) SPARKS: 0 (0 converted, 0 overflowed, 0 dud, 0 GC'd, 0 fizzled) INIT time 0.003s ( 0.003s elapsed) MUT time 60.034s ( 82.092s elapsed) GC time 18.933s ( 6.596s elapsed) EXIT time 0.032s ( 0.002s elapsed) Total time 79.003s ( 88.693s elapsed) Alloc rate 1,441,880,584 bytes per MUT second Productivity 76.0% of total user, 92.6% of total elapsed ## Reading & Watching# I’m slowly making headway in reading _Proto_. It’s not going as fast as I’d like but it’s better than nothing. Wife and I started watching Love Through a Prism and I stared watching Lord of Mysteries. Still unsure about both but let’s see. ## Social Media# I see that I’m almost at 1000 original posts on my microblog. I also crossed 500 followers on Mastodon. I posted a new photo that I took on the day of my wedding. I’m not passing much time on social media these days 🤷🏽‍♂️. ## Interesting Internet Links# * How far back in time can you understand English? * Four Kinds of Optimisation * 10 Commandments: Compiler in Haskell Edition That’s all for this week. You can subscribe to the feed of my week notes for updates. If you have any questions or comments, please leave a comment below. If you liked this post, please share it. Thanks for reading!

New #weeknote about summer, feeds and optimizations https://abhinavsarkar.net/notes/2026-weeknotes-03-01/

#blogging #weeknotes

Weeknote 09/2026 What I've been up to this week.

#Weeknote 09/2026 is out.

Work: things winding down and spinning up, and progress on AI-assisted projcets.​

Writing/reading/listening, plus a bunch of new Thought Shrapnel pieces (including a pretty angry one about Iran/US/Israel)

👉 blog.dougbelshaw.com/weeknote-09-...

Business topology & poised creatology I signed a client NDA on Wednesday - it’s always great to take on a new client and this one is really interesting. A start-up with a great ambition and a worthy cause.I spent some

A week with a bit of everything.
NDA signed, couple of articles out in the world, & my brain deciding to spend time thinking about how the shape a company already has can make or break a strategy.

Read all about it (belatedly) in 'Business topology & poised creatology': buff.ly/eUFwmSz

#weeknote

Notes for the Week #8 (2026) This week note covers the week of 16th–22nd February. Lake After Rain ## Life# Back-from-vacation week is never a great one. This week we struggled to settle back in our daily routines. Our sleep schedules were out of whack. I, in particular, slept pretty badly till Friday. Only yesterday I was able to sleep well. Being sleep deprived most days caused me to be working in a low-energy state, just getting the minimum done. I had to resort to take auto-rickshaws to pick up A from school as I didn’t feel like driving. I forced myself to go on walks to complete my steps. Somehow we all made it through the week. **Current average steps per month** : 10162 ## Writing# I’ve not written anything in the last one month except these week notes. Some ideas have been brewing in my head, but I’ve been too out of energy to write about them. Hopefully, things will improve. On the bright side, my note A Short Survey of Compiler Targets was published in the February issue of the PagedOut!. The process of writing, editing, and publication took three months. This issue is full of interesting articles. Go check them out! Or subscribe to the feed of individual articles (created by me). ## Personal Projects# ### stic.earth# I improved the RSS to newsletter automation I set up last week to support sending digest emails with multiple posts. Which I then used to … ### IndieWebClub Bangalore# … set up the weekly digest newsletter for IndieWebClub Bangalore. Subscribe to it to receive a digest of articles every Wednesday. I also got email working for the website. Now the admins can be reached by email. I wrote a simple Cloudflare email worker to forward all incoming mails to the admins’ personal addresses. It was hard to test and debug but I got it working in the end. Unfortunately, I missed attending the technical session of IWCB yesterday. If you are interested in creating and running a website of your own and are in Bangalore, I highly suggest attending one of these sessions. ## Watching# This week I watched The Residence with my wife. We seriously couldn’t stop watching it. Some people may find it too verbose but I like the rapidly-talking protagonist and the chain of mysteries. I also finished watching Tatsuki Fujimoto 17–26. It was exactly the kind of quirky anime I like. Too bad, most of the anime these days are drab Isekais. ## Interesting Internet Links# * Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers * What is a build system, anyway? * Query-based compiler architectures That’s all for this week. You can subscribe to the feed of my week notes for updates. If you have any questions or comments, please leave a comment below. If you liked this post, please share it. Thanks for reading!

New #weeknote, this time about sleeplessness, newsletters and murder mysteries: https://abhinavsarkar.net/notes/2026-weeknotes-02-22/

#blogging #weeknote

As a public servant, I'm trialling writing weekly notes to let people see what I do. This week: Realistic antonypoveda.design/weeknotes/22...
#govdesign #weeknote

Just a short, personal post this week. #weeknote #campervan www.benjystanton.co.uk/blog/getting...

Weeknote 44/2026 TL;DR User interviews, sprint planning and a team day out in Glasgow …

#Weeknote 44/2026 | TL;DR User interviews, sprint planning and a team day out at The Social Hub in #Glasgow medium.com/@adam.coulso... @rds-scotland.bsky.social @weeknotes-bot.bsky.social

AI choices and Nostalgic voices I've been doing more work on implementing the outputs from COOPilots’ ”AI for Ops” course. Specifically, I've been thinking about how to turn my business filing system into someth

Last week:
I published 2 pieces: The difference between unclear & undecidable work; How constraints can be creative allies.
OpenAI Codex or Claude Copilot? The jury's still out.
And Banco de Gaia's latest has been keeping the mood nicely nostalgic.
buff.ly/4dTPS9N
#weeknote #writing #AI #operations

The week I turned 4 | weeknotes 16 Feb 2026 | Neil Williams I write these notes to reflect, remember (because I don't), compare scars with fellow digital pros, and for public accountability. Read more here. 🎂 It's my 4th anniversary at the BFI. It was exciting...

Another little weeknote from me. On the occasion of my 4th work anniversary at the BFI. Borrowing from Darwin for some light / lazy reflection... neilojwilliams.net/the-week-i-t... @weeknotes-bot.bsky.social #weeknotes #weeknote

Notes for the Week #7 (2026) This week note covers the week of 9th–15th February. OUTSIDE ## Life# I was on vacation this week. We had been vacation-starved for last many years, so, now that we can, we are trying to fill the gap with consecutive vacations. However, I think there will be a while till I take the next vacation. A and I spent a lot of time in parks running around chasing squirrels, and just idly walking on grass. As a child I used to spend a lot of time on grass that grew pretty much everywhere not road or buildings, but we don’t see much of it anymore. Only parks in our neighbourhood have large grassy patches, but most of them prohibit walking on them. It’s a bit sad for me to see A preferring to sit on benches than grass. My wife is healthy again, though she has some leftover weakness from the antibiotics course. I’ve been finding it hard to take out time to go out for walks. I’m still trying to do enough to stay above 10k steps average per month, which is currently around 10180 steps for February. Summer is almost here in Bangalore. That means heat and sun and dust everywhere. It feels like this year will be really hot. Reminds me that I need to get the ACs serviced. ## Personal Projects# ### My New VPS# My new VPS setup is chugging along well. This week I fixed a minor bug in the backup script that was causing old Gitea dumps to be not deleted daily, leading to the backup increase in size over time. Other than that, I’ve not touched the setup, and I don’t have any current ideas or plans to do anything new. I’m just going to let it keep running. The Cloudflare proxy that I set up in front of my website couple of weeks ago is still blocking ~30000 attacks every day. I have no clue why the crawlers find my websites so lucrative, but I don’t intend to let them get to it. ### stic.earth# This week I finally spent some time working on the stic.earth infrastructure, the community hosting platform that I moonlight sysadmining for. The outgoing mails had been broken for months since our Sendgrid account died. I switched it over to use Mailgun, and now I’m getting the various notifications again. I used the momentum (and the free time) to set up Listmonk, a newsletter and mailing list manager for stic.earth members1. This had been number one feature request for quite some time by our members who have blogs and want to build a newsletter audience. I have been using Buttondown for my own website’s newsletter, and it has been really solid. But it’s expensive and not everyone is willing to pay to send their blog posts to thirteen subscribers. Thanks to open source software like Listmonk (and NixOS that we use to run our server), we can now host such services for our community at a minimal cost. I also adapted the listmonk-rss script to add automation for sending new mails by following the feeds of the blogs. I’m yet to switch over my website’s newsletter to Listmonk because I found some issues in my feeds. ### My Website# While testing the Listmonk mails using the feeds of my website, I found that sometimes the hero images (like you see at the top of this post) were shown twice in the emails. This sent me on a yak-shaving chase the resulted in: * Redoing the photo publishing pipeline of my website, moving it from thumbnail-plus, which uses the native GD Graphics Library and has not seen a release in the past 11 years, to JuicyPixels, which is pure Haskell and well maintained. * Adding progressively loaded hero images for my posts, which start with low-res images and are upgraded lazily to their high-res variants. It was harder than expected because my VPS does not have enough RAM to transcode hundred of images in parallel. The code worked on my laptop but was killed by the OOM-killer on the server. With some old-fashioned elbow grease, I figured it out in an hour. I also added two new features: * Nerd sniped by Jatan, I added a “On This Day” feature that shows posts published on same day in previous years on the homepage. It has not triggered yet because I have so few posts, but as I write more often, I expect it to be a useful and interesting feature. * I added support for scheduling posts to be published at a future time. I originally thought of this idea to publish my pre-written weeknotes automatically when I don’t have internet access to push the post files. It turned out to be pretty difficult because: 1. My post publish date format did not support specifying the time of day. 2. I use the Shake build system as the foundation of my static site generator, and build systems do not take time as an input when deciding what to build, only the files present. Since I’d pre-write and push the scheduled post to the repo, Shake would just not built the pages even after the post’s publish time came to pass. I tricked Shake by adding a file that tracks the posts scheduled in future, and making it a dependency. The file changes after the post’s publish time passes, causing a build to be triggered. If everything goes well, this very post should be published automatically 1½ hours after I push it. Fingers crossed! ## Watching# I’ve been watching Tatsuki Fujimoto 17–26, a series of anime shorts by Tatsuki Fujimoto, the creator of the popular Chainsaw Man anime/manga. It is really wacky and weird, sometimes a bit too much, and I’m loving it. Season 2 of Frieren is progressing slowly, as expected, and I’m here for it. ## Interesting Internet Links# * The only correct recipe for making chai * Stop generating, start thinking * Towards Fearless Macros That’s all for this week. You can subscribe to the feed of my week notes for updates. If you have any questions or comments, please leave a comment below. If you liked this post, please share it. Thanks for reading! * * * 1. stic.earth services are invite-only and paid at-cost. If you are interested and know an existing member, please reach out to them for an invite.↩︎

A new #weeknote about grass, emails and build systems: https://abhinavsarkar.net/notes/2026-weeknotes-02-16/

#blogging #weeknotes

#Weeknote 5 is posted. This week: taking better care of myself while taking care of a partner with Long Covid. heidi2o.cc/weeknote_5

A mockup of a poster for our proposed competition. The 4 hosts and judges of the original 'bakeoff' TV show are behind a table covered in a blue and white checked table cloth. On the tables are various incredible cakes and fancy looking buns. The faces of the hosts have been covered by the logos for GOV.UK, DWP, Scottish Government, Home Office and Ministry of Justice. We've clumsily edited the original bakeoff logo to read 'Great Design System Bakeoff' by pasting over the word 'British'.

As a public servant, I'm trialling writing weekly notes to let people see what I do (while learning how to build a website): antonypoveda.design/weeknotes/14... #govdesign #weeknote

Weeknote 4 (Feb 2 - 8) This is going to be a short one1 because I’m a bit under the weather and I should be studying for my French class test on Wednesday.

#Weeknote 4 is posted. This week: a perfect month, making friends internationally, and sharing a tool for generating a stakeholder map.

Read here: heidi2o.cc/weeknote_4

Notes for the Week #6 (2026) This week note covers the week of 2nd–8th February. Boat ## Life# My wife’s sickness continued into this week. The doctor did not prescribe antibiotics on the first visit last week, so we visited again this week and finally got prescribed some. I’m so thankful to scientists and medical professionals for inventing antibiotics. She is recovering well. The fatigue of illness kept us mostly doing bare minimum, no outings or events this week. I missed walking 10k steps a few days, and I had to walk 13–14k on few other days to compensate. My body has adjusted to this routine of exercise now. I’m hoping to move it up a notch in the upcoming weeks. The weather has been somewhat treacherous of late, with days reaching 30°C and nights at 15°C. The large variation has been the cause of the spreading viral sickness, or so our doctor told us. Houses in India do not have insulation, so we are layering up or down depending on the temperature. ## Work# Google renamed the ZetaSQL project to GoogleSQL last week. So now I’m working on GoogleSQL within-and-out Google. I need to do some configuration so that my name starts showing up in the commits in the Github repo. ## Personal Projects# I mentioned in my last week note that I moved my websites and services to a Hetzner VPS. After running it for a week, yesterday I shut down my Digital Ocean VPS for good after a run time of 12 years! This week I mostly worked on the IndieWebClub Bangalore website. I added: * a webring for the club members, * the member directory page, * light mode CSS styles, and * an ad-hoc build system to simplify and optimize the website build. Unfortunately, I’m missing today’s session. This is the second writing oriented session I’ve missed in a row, and I’m sad about it. ## Reading & Watching# I’ve made it through the first chapter of Proto by Laura Spinney despite being tired and distracted. I hope to finish it this month. Wife and I watched the entire season of the new Marvel TV show Wonder Man. It was refreshing to see a show not about superpowers (mostly), but instead focusing on characters’ lives and aspirations. I went in not knowing what to expect, and was pleasantly surprised to find it a drama-comedy. We need more Trevor in Marvel. ## Social Media# I literally did not post even a single thing on social media this week (not counting replies), so that’s new. ## Interesting Internet Links# * Breakfast dishes of Karnataka beyond Idli Vada Dosa * “Five-Point Haskell”: Total Depravity (and Defensive Typing) * What is the best pointer tagging method? That’s all for this week. You can subscribe to the feed of my week notes for updates. If you have any questions or comments, please leave a comment below. If you liked this post, please share it. Thanks for reading!

A new #weeknote about sickness, IndieWebClub and TV shows: https://abhinavsarkar.net/notes/2026-weeknotes-02-08/

#weeknote #blogging

Weeknote 06/2026 What I've been up to this week.

It turns out I write a longer #weeknote if I'm watching football on TV at the same time

blog.dougbelshaw.com/weeknote-06-...

Weeknote 43/2026 TL;DR Chatting to the Singapore Biomedical Data Hub, DataCite DOIs and happiness is tinkering about in Figma…

#Weeknote 43/2026 | TL;DR Chatting with the Singapore Biomedical Data Hub, DOIs with DataCite and happiness is... tinkering about in Figma medium.com/@adam.coulso... #weeknotes

Weeknote 3 (Jan 26-Feb 1) It’s been a fever dream of a week where Hudson William gave Mark Carney his Team Canada fleece1, it was declared Shane Hollander Day2 in Ottawa, and I was stranded downtown for 2 hours because the tra...

#Weeknote 3 now up a bit late because it needed a bit more time to write. This week: Heated Rivalry, brain stuff, and what do we owe to each other? heidi2o.cc/weeknote_3

Weeknote 05/2026 What I've been up to this week.

What I've been up to this week

blog.dougbelshaw.com/weeknote-05-...

#weeknote

Notes for the Week #5 (2026) This week note covers the week of 26th January–1st February. Supernova! ## Life# I returned to work last Monday after a ten day vacation. It was hard; my mind kept going back to the relaxing days. I felt very refreshed. It lasted only a day. My whole family caught a cold on Tuesday. My wife had it worst. While A and I have recovered, my wife is still not well enough. We made through the week somehow fighting the weariness. Despite the sicknesses, I’m happy to tell you that I was able to walk 316727 steps in January, that is 10217 steps every day on average. I missed hitting the mark 6 days out of 31, but because of walking extra steps on other days, I maintained the average. I’m going to continue this habit for now. ## Personal Projects# Not much work on the website this week, I think I’m done for a while. I don’t have any pending tasks or ideas for now. I’m going to focus on other projects next. I did accomplish a big one this week. I’ve been running my VPS on Digital Ocean for the last 12 years. It’s been convenient and I never faced any issues, but the bills have been increasing over years—recently I’ve been paying 17 USD per month for a single CPU/2GB RAM machine. This week I moved all my services and websites to Hetzner. Hetzner is charging me 15 USD for a four CPU/8GB RAM machine. It made no sense to stick to Digital Ocean. The migration was painless thanks to NixOS. Most of my service config is already in my Nix files. I had to copy some data over, mostly service databases and files. Here is the checklist I used: * Pin MySQL version * Build service * Stop service on old VPS * Dump service database * Disable service * Switch DNS to point to new VPS * Enable service on new VPS * Start service on new VPS * Stop service * Copy database dump to new VPS * Copy config files * Copy data files * Copy secret files * Restore permissions * Start service on new VPS * Verify service * Enable service backups * Enable service health checks * Run backup I migrated one service at a time, starting with the stateless services first. I had been delaying the move to Hetzner, because unlike Digital Ocean it is not hosted in India, and I wanted to have a good backup strategy. I ended up going with BorgBase’s 10GB free backup space plan to backup the dumps of service DBs and files. I also enabled weekly full disk backups in Hetzner. I’m comfortable with this arrangement. I also installed Beszel following Sathya’s recommendation. I already had Monit set up for alerts but it’s nice to see metric history and charts in Beszel. One day after the move, my website was discovered by terrible Chinese crawlers. They came very rapidly from random IPs, using headless browsers to visit one page at a time. My now powerful VPS held but I didn’t like them anyway. So I got back on Cloudflare proxy after two months of being off it, and turned on Cloudflare verification for Chinese IPs. The crawlers finally backed off after trying for few more hours. ## Reading & Watching# I started reading Proto by Laura Spinney. I love reading about linguistics and anthropology and I’m hoping this book is everything it is hyped to be. Wife and I watched Agatha Christie’s Seven Dials, a short TV show based on Agatha Christie’s 1929 novel The Seven Dials Mystery. The acting and sets were great but I was not entertained by the mystery of the case, which was rather tame. I’m super excited about the second season of the Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End anime. I loved the first season and I’ve been eagerly waiting. The first season has been ranked one in MyAnimeList’s list of top anime for years and I expect a great second season too. ## Interesting Internet Links# * Wheel Reinventor’s Principles * The Value of Things * (How to Write a (Lisp) Interpreter (In Python)) That’s all for this week. You can subscribe to the feed of my week notes for updates. If you have any questions or comments, please leave a comment below. If you liked this post, please share it. Thanks for reading!

A new #weeknote: https://abhinavsarkar.net/notes/2026-weeknotes-02-01/
This time we talk about migrating VPSes, walking and not being entertained.

#weeknote #blogging

Professional traction & personal distraction In a somewhat indulgent - but also justified, I feel - manner, I only ‘worked’ for 3 days and spent Thursday and Friday in Brighton for a friend’s birthday and a general catch-up w

A short week, but a productive one.
A new collaboration, articles on mentoring and procrastination, and book 2 past the halfway mark.

Week note, "Professional traction & personal distraction": buff.ly/DEjXWq9

#weeknote #fractional

Notes for the Week #4 (2026) This week note covers the week of 19th–25th January. Blue As Sky ## Life & Travel I was on vacation this week. This was my first proper vacation after 6½ years. My wife, I, and our 3yo A took a train to Kodaikanal on last Sunday. This was A’s first train journey of life. There was much excitement, followed by much boredom waiting for the train. We took the overnight train from Bangalore and slept through the journey. I had the upper berth, which was right next to the AC vent, leading to a slight cold that I nursed for the rest of the vacation. In our unpreparedness caused by the aforementioned lack of vacations for years, we made many mistakes. We forgot to check how far our hotel was from the train station, and it turned out to be a 3 hour car drive away. We didn’t pack enough warm clothes for the cold weather, the right footwear for the hilly terrain, and adequate number of toys for A. Somehow we managed to walk around the town and visit all the touristy places. Keeping A engaged all the time without any friends and toys was the biggest challenge, and we ended up with more TV time than the usual. The weather in Kodaikanal was chilly—the kind of cold we have forgotten about living in the comfort of Bangalore weather. I had to put on many layers while the locals were walking around in T-shirts—it was slightly embarrassing. I still kept my habit of walking ten thousand steps each day. We spent a lot of time indoors, playing games and reading books. I even found some time to work on my website. We returned by train on Thursday night and reached home on Friday morning. The return journey was a bit troublesome, both my wife and A fell sick because of motion sickness. Rest of the week was spent in recovering from the vacation. ## Health I took a break from walking for the last two days to recover from the pain in my knees caused by climbing the hills in the wrong shoes. I walked eleven thousand steps today, causing my average to stay over ten thousand steps per day this month. However, I feel like I’m regressing again from the good sleeping habit I built in the last few months. Also, I keep forgetting to wear my reading glasses. ## Photography I took over a hundred photos over this vacation. I even dusted out my old point-and-shoot camera that I had been neglecting in preference to my phone camera. I posted some of these photos to my Photography page. The photo on the top of this note is also one of them. I’ll post some more in the upcoming days. Subscribe to my photography feed if you are interested. ## Personal Projects This week I worked on comments on my website. Informed by a comment on the previous week note, I found that commenting via Isso on my notes was broken. While I was fixing it, I noticed that Isso provides an Atom feed for each comment thread, allowing commenters to subscribe to it to receive updates and replies. So I added per post comment feeds to my website that are just a slightly massaged version of the Isso comment feeds. See this very post’s comment feed for example. Then I added a feed for all comments on my website, collected from all posts and notes. This feed is for me to keep track of new comments. While I was doing that I also removed comments from Twitter on my posts because Twitter sucks. After coming back to Bangalore, I spent a day optimizing the static site generator (SSG) executable size. My SSG is written in Haskell, and I use Nix to compile and statically link it to a single binary exe. Recently the size of the exe had ballooned to 120 MB! The reason for this is, the SSG uses Pandoc, Skylighting and some other libraries that are very featureful. Pandoc has readers and writers for scores of formats, and Skylighting supports hundreds of syntax grammars. Even though I only need Markdown and HTML support and have snippets in twenty-some programming languages on this website, I still had to include a lot of unused code in the exe. Pandoc also pulls in many heavy dependencies like Typst and LaTeX etc. This had been on my mind for years, and yesterday I sat down and wrote a series of patches for Pandoc and Skylighting to delete all the unused code. I apply these patches via my Nix-based build system. I also configured ICU to retain data only for English and removed many advanced features following the build guide. These changes **halved** the exe size to 61 MB! Then I compressed the exe using UPX. The final size is now 9.5 MB. The downsize of compression is a slowdown of 2 seconds when generating the website, which I’m okay with. ## Watching I rewatched Your Name on a whim when it appeared in my recommendations. Such a beautiful and well-done movie! I didn’t get time to watch or read anything else. Even my feed reader queue has grown to almost a thousand. ## Interesting Internet Links * The Case For Comments * Agent Psychosis: Are We Going Insane? * Dynamic GHC matrix in GitHub CI That’s all for this week. You can subscribe to the feed of my week notes for updates. If you have any questions or comments, please leave a comment below. If you liked this post, please share it. Thanks for reading!

A new #weeknote, this time about travels, comments and trimming the fat: https://abhinavsarkar.net/notes/2026-weeknotes-01-25/

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Weeknote 42/2026 TL;DR big approvals are like buses, aurora borealis and comfort in pastry

#Weeknote 42/2026 | TL;DR big approvals are like buses, aurora borealis and comfort in pastry medium.com/@adam.coulso... #weeknotes

Less writing last week, more planning and taking stock. Sometimes you need to step back to see where you're going.

Read "Content plotting & deft potting" here: buff.ly/Ar5zRDh

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Notes for the Week #3 (2026) This week note covers the week of 12th–18th January. ## Life Bangalore is slowly getting warmer. The city seems to be coming out of the winter; I don’t require heavy blankets at nights anymore. This week has been a usual mix of work and personal. I attended the Indieweb club Bangalore meetup on Saturday. It was a tech-focused session in which all of us worked on our respective websites. I write about it in a later section. It has been 6½ years since I took a proper vacation. I’m hoping that we find some time this year. ## Health I’ve still been walking 10000 steps a day (on average). After doing it for 12 days straight, I decided to take a day off to rest, on which I walked only 6000 steps. The rest definitely help me recover from the muscle soreness. I hope to continue this habit for the rest of the year. ## Personal Projects I finally fixed the Opengraph preview images for posts on my website by changing them from SVGs to PNGs. Turns out, none of the social media platforms support rendering SVG previews correctly, most likely because that’d required a full browser. So I switched to PNG which is well supported. Generating images was a fun problem. I wanted to keep the solution as lightweight as possible, so that ruled out converting SVGs to PNGs. I thought about using a Haskell solution using the diagrams library, but that requires a huge dependency chain. Since my website generator is statically compiled, I didn’t want to add hundred of MBs of dependencies to it. Finally I settled on a hack: using Plotly to create a chart that is only annotations! I already use Plotly for rendering charts in my blog posts, so no additional dependencies were needed. I created the image as an empty chart with post title and metadata as annotations, and it worked great. See the preview image of this very post for an example. Later in the week, I added support for showing backlinks in post footer, which is a small but nice feature. At the Indieweb club meeting, inspired by Jatan, I improved the post Atom feeds to add a footer in the post bodies. For now, the footer links to my posts and notes pages, but I’ll enhance it later. I also upgraded all services on stic.earth including Mastodon to NixOS 25.11. Everything went smoothly except Netdata, which is now broken. Unfortunately, it is too complex and bloated for me to understand and fix it. I’m thinking of switching to an alternative. If you have any suggestions, please send them my way via comments. ## Recent Posts I finally finished my Implementing Co series of posts. It took me only four years and nine months. I had been sitting on the draft of the last part for over two years, and by some cosmic inspiration, I suddenly had an urge to finish it this week. With one day of work, I polished and published it, finally concluding the series. It feels great to get it over with. Unfortunately, it was not as big a hit as the last week’s post. ## Watching I watched some more of The Ancient Magus’ Bride anime, almost finished now. Wife and I watched The Thursday Murder Club movie, split over three days because life kept getting in the way. It was a decent watch, but the mystery was okayish. My most listened to track was again Dreams Tonite by Alvvays. It’s stuck in my head now. ## Interesting Internet Links * The Case for Blogging in the Ruins * Why write unit tests? * Box combinators That’s all for this week. You can subscribe to the feed of my week notes for updates. If you have any questions or comments, please leave a comment below. If you liked this post, please share it. Thanks for reading!

A new #weeknote about images, OS upgrades and finishing projects: https://abhinavsarkar.net/notes/2026-weeknotes-01-18/

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