Film Photos, Stranger Things, Buh-Bye 2025
December 29, 2025
Greetings Readers —
Welcome to the final issue of C'mon C'mon for 2025. We're deeeep into December. It's cold (brrrr) (and polluted) out here. I'm enjoying downtime away from work. I have been using this time to drink Good Coffee, watch the final season of Stranger Things, reflect on the year gone by, and most importantly spend time with friends and family. How is your end-of-year coming along?
At the end of each year, I have a ritual of publishing two blog posts. The first is a rundown of my default apps for the year. I love apps and enjoy trying new ones to see if they can improve my life in some way. This year's edition of State of the Apps (a name borrowed from my podcast) is out now. You can find it here. A notable change this year was the addition of many Kagi apps — which I'm involved in building! The second ritual post is a reflection piece on the outgoing year. Work on this is underway. Loads to do over the next few days to get this over the line. But first, we must get this month's edition of C'mon C'mon out the door and into your mailboxes.
Shot on iPhone Film
Back in August, I bought two rolls of film to experiment with an old point-and-shoot camera I found at home. I had no idea how the experiment would go. Heck, I wasn't even sure if the camera would produce any photos. Nevertheless, I proceeded, excited to discover the outcome at the end.
I shot the two rolls between August and December, sent them off to a lab to be developed, and got scans back last week. I was so giddy when I got the email from the lab. I opened the link and slowly went through the photos. My smile widened with each photo. The initial few shots were a complete mess. Some were blurry and out of focus, others were in focus but overpowered by the mandatory flash that goes off on my camera. It didn't matter though. Each photo was a joy to see. I chuckled seeing the difference in what I thought I was shooting and what actually came through in the end.
What I love most about film photography is the grungy, grainy, imperfect nature of photos. I've become tired of the perfect photos modern cameras produce. Everything feels crisp, tidy, and cold. I understand how these qualities can be useful to professionals, but, for those documenting life, this is not the case. I don't enjoy using the default camera app on my iPhone for this reason. I choose to use apps like Dazz Cam or more recently Moment's new Camera app while doing phone photography. This is also the reason I picked up a Fuji camera some time ago. Fuji's film simulations are a great way to get that film look I was after. Although, now that I've actually shot film photos, the Fuji photos feel like a replica of the real deal.
I'm excited to play around with film more. I picked up two rolls of Kodak Gold 200, along with another point-and-shoot camera from the 70s. This camera allows me to shoot without flash if I want to. I'm really excited to see the result of this new experiment in the coming months. In the meantime, my YouTube algorithm is now aware of my interest in film photography and is surfacing fantastic videos for me to watch. If any of you folks shoot on film or have thoughts / ideas to share, shoot me a reply!
Collective Consumption
The final season of Stranger Things is out on Netflix. It's been coming out in parts, as separate volumes. I started watching the season a few days before the second volume came out to minimize wait time between volumes. The final episode comes out on New Year's Eve — which is SO exciting. I really enjoy 'global events' like these where an event or a release is consumed by the whole world together. Another such event recently was the latest Knives Out movie Wake Up Dead Man dropping on Netflix. My girlfriend and I were eagerly waiting for the movie to become available. It came out at 2:30PM IST and we put it on almost instantly. Fun! We loved the latest iteration.
Going back to Stranger Things, I've been enjoying it a lot. There's nothing quite like the show in terms of vibes. I don't particularly care about the writing, plot holes, or cinematography when it comes to cult shows like ST. It's about the vibes for me and the vibes are hitting hard this season. I'm all caught up on the show now. The wait for the finale is on. I hope they nail the landing. Fingers crossed!
Times Are-A Changing
Things are absolutely wild in the world of software engineering these days. AI is fundamentally changing how engineers write and think about code. It seems there is a significant change every few weeks, if not every few days. Andrej Karpathy's recent tweet surmises the current software engineering landscape nicely:
I've never felt this much behind as a programmer. The profession is being dramatically refactored as the bits contributed by the programmer are increasingly sparse and between. I have a sense that I could be 10X more powerful if I just properly string together what has become available over the last ~year and a failure to claim the boost feels decidedly like skill issue. There's a new programmable layer of abstraction to master (in addition to the usual layers below) involving agents, subagents, their prompts, contexts, memory, modes, permissions, tools, plugins, skills, hooks, MCP, LSP, slash commands, workflows, IDE integrations, and a need to build an all-encompassing mental model for strengths and pitfalls of fundamentally stochastic, fallible, unintelligible and changing entities suddenly intermingled with what used to be good old fashioned engineering. Clearly some powerful alien tool was handed around except it comes with no manual and everyone has to figure out how to hold it and operate it, while the resulting magnitude 9 earthquake is rocking the profession. Roll up your sleeves to not fall behind.
I resonate with what Karpathy is saying. I'm trying to put a positive spin on it though. Instead of feeling left behind, I view AI as a powerful tool that can be used to create things we want to see in the world.
I've mentioned using Claude Code in previous editions of the newsletter. Up till December, I was using Claude primarily for personal projects. For my work at Kagi, Claude was being used sparingly. Things changed in December though. This month I wrote minimal code by hand, and was still insanely productive. I don't see this trend stopping in the new year. I'm excited to shape myself in this new world we find ourselves in.
2026 is going to be the year of side projects for me. I want to make cool shit to put out in the world!
That brings us to the end. It's a wrap on C'mon C'mon for 2025. Six issues in now and feeling proud. I finally whirred up a newsletter this year. It's not the easiest to keep going each month. Things happen. Moods go for a toss. Writing gets hard. I'm glad to have kept going though. The reward is the body of work that gets established piece by piece, month on month. You just gotta keep on keeping on for that to happen.
Thank you all for joining me on this journey. I hope you all have a peaceful end to the year and a joyous beginning to the next. For my Stranger Things fans, good luck to us for Operation Beanstalk. Lots of love. C'mon C'mon.
More soon!
R
