CC Readers —

How are we? How has the month been? Iced coffees are back in my life. What more does a boy need?

I thought of making this month's issue a bit experimental. Felt like changing things up. Here's the idea: ten bullet points about the month of March. Who doesn't like a good ol' list?

1. My latest rolls of film are back from the lab; some good shots, many duds. That is okay. I learned things. Even the duds look pretty. Film is magical.
2. /photography on my website got some new shots added. Check 'em out!
3. I now have a spreadsheet to track the coffee that I buy. I track where the coffee is from, how it was processed, and note down my thoughts on the brewing process. The aim is to find patterns and further develop my tasting palette.
4. What the fuck is happening with US-Iran ...
5. Dhurandhar part one baited me. Part two was so one-note, and ultimately a let down.
6. Watch The Great Shamsuddin Family. Dhurandhar fans won't like this one.
7. The Crown continues to be bloody brilliant. I might be in love with Lady Diana. I'M SORRY, S.
8. Feeling loved and appreciated at work. Got a raise. A project I drove was featured on Tech Crunch. Another project I'm a part of went viral as fuck. NDTV covered it too, which is kind of nuts.
9. After five years, my AirPods Max went kaput. They're my most used Apple device. Spending two weeks without them was horrible. I managed to get a replacement last week. Phew.
10. I don't need this keyboard. I don't need this keyboard. I don't need this keyboard.

Send me your March-in-a-list? I'd love it!

See you in a month!

More soon,

R

February has whizzed past. I spent the month working hard, watching TV, and tinkering with my spanking new home server setup. February's soundtrack has been a Spotify playlist called Lost in Translation. It's been on loop. I haven't been able to stop listening to it. Some of the Brazilian (?) / Portuguese (??) songs in the playlist are SO good. They remind me of the movie Chef for some reason. Funny brain with its funny associations.

~

Useful Software

My first major product launch at work happened at the beginning of the month. Kagi Translate is now available on Android and iOS! You can read more about the launch on the Kagi blog.

It feels GREAT to get this one out the door. I've been working on it ever since I joined Kagi. The app took many shapes and forms during the course of development. Shipping the first version has been a huge weight off my shoulders. I can now shift gears into an iteration mindset to make the app better and better!

This launch marked several milestones for me: my first launch at Kagi, my first product launch featured on Reddit (oof!), and the first time I launched something I considered to be 'useful software'. I have worked as a professional software engineer for close to eight years now. Yet, there have been only a few instances where I felt like I built something truly useful to people. That's unfortunately the reality of most jobs in tech. What you make doesn't really get used in any meaningful way. You're serving a client, who's serving a CEO, instead of building things for a real group of users. That is why this launch is extra special. I feel fortunate to be able to provide a valuable tool to a passionate group of Kagi users.

The initial response has been lovely. We got some press by The Intelligence, Fast Company, and regional publications like Tuga Tech (translated article here). More than press, I've loved reading and responding to feedback coming in from the Apple and Google Play stores.

Take Translate for a spin the next time you want to translate something. The app also has a built-in dictionary which can be used to search words and phrases in any language. There is also a nifty little proofreading tool. My favourite, however, is how we do image translation. We do contextual translation, rather than literal translations that bigger players like Google and Apple do. This lets us translate a food menu for you and provide you with the translated menu and rich information about the dishes on the menu.

Download Kagi Translate for Android or iOS.

DRAMA!

It's been too frickin long since I watched a proper television drama series. Over the last six months or so, my girlfriend and I fell into the trap of watching familiar, comfort sitcoms. How I Met Your Mother to be exact. We were having a good time with the show. One night, we randomly decided to start watching The Crown. It was my first time watching it and her second. And, WOW did it feel SO good to watch. Comedies are great. They are comfortable and light. But, BOY did we miss something nice and meaty. The Crown is a perfect comeback show too. So many layers to it: national politics, family politics, history, scandal. Delicious.

Bridgerton is back for its fourth season too. It's not as complex or meaty as The Crown, but we're big fans. I've been enjoying the latest season, much more than the last one. We're left with one episode. Excited to finish it as soon as I hit publish on this newsletter.

It feels good to be watching dramas again.

Home Server Land

After contemplating and researching for months, I bought a mini PC and dove head first into the world of home servers. The primary objective for my server is to run a Plex media server. Plex is a neat little tool that allows you to stream any of your media (movies, music, photos) to literally any device. Suppose you — cough cough — have a digital copy of a movie you own as a DVD. Load it onto Plex and you can stream the movie on your phone or TV.

Now, you might ask why this is so special. If you have a digital copy, why can't you just put it on your phone and then watch it? Yes, you can of course do that. However, the beauty of Plex is that once you add your media to it, you can make it available to others too. You can even watch the media with others with synced playback. Think Netflix party but for your personal media. When I first learned about this, it was a total game changer for me. I could finally watch all the movies and TV shows I own as DVDs and Blurays with my long distance girlfriend. Magic.

For the last few years, I've been running Plex on the cloud on a virtual computer. You have to pay a monthly subscription for this. At the end of 2025, I decided that it was worth the effort to set up a server at home instead. Hardware innovations over the years has made doing such a project super accessible. Just look at how adorable the mini PC is:

So smol. So strong. I call it The Intersect. IYKYK

I've been tinkering with Intersect this past month and have learned a ton about networking, running home servers, linux, port forwarding, and the pain of dealing with Indian ISPs. The Plex server is up and running. I am still ironing things out as I use the server. My YouTube feed is now filled with videos about home servers. I have more ideas about what I can do with The Intersect. I want to try and set up a tool called OpenClaw next to use as my personal AI assistant. Immich is next on the cards to let me build-my-own-Google-Photos at home. Exciting!

That's another issue of CC wrapped up. Thank you for reading till the end. I hope you're enjoying the newsletter so far. I certainly am. I feel like I have a rhythm and some momentum with these now. I have the itch to experiment more with the format too. Maybe some recurring segments? Music recommendations? Apps? What would you like to see more? Hit reply and let me know!

I've started transitioning from hot to cold coffee. Iced pour-over coffee is back. Iced lattes will follow soon. Winter rituals are getting replaced with summer ones. Time goes on and so shall we. Stay hydrated, buds! C'mon C'mon!

More soon,

R

CC Readers —

Welcome to 2026! According to my Life Calendar, we're already 7% (!!) done with the year. January has absolutely flown by. Whoosh. I've had a decent start to the year: a mixture of good and bad. Mais, C'est la vie, as they say. That's why this newsletter exists — to ensure I (/we??) keep on keeping on!

The start of the year was nice and calm for me. My end of year writing was done. I was on break from work — enjoying slow, sunny, winter days with my girlfriend. However, a week into the year, it was time for her to go back home. We're doing long distance and she was in India for Christmas and New Years. As you can imagine, separation is never easy. It takes us some time to shift gears and get back into our long distance routines and rituals. Around the same time (as her leaving), I returned to work where things went from zero to a hundred miles an hour in no time. The calmness of the year turned into a turbulent few weeks.

We settled into our long distance routines in a week or so. Work took longer to stabilise, but thankfully, as of yesterday, things are back to being calm. At the end of January, I feel settled, ready to take on the year. Let's get the first edition of CC for 2026 underway then, shall we?

Seventh Year of Reflecting

At the end of last year, I hit publish on my look-back at 2025. I've now written my reflection blog posts for seven straight years. I started this exercise on a whim back in 2019 and have managed to keep going through the years. I would be lying if I said doing these is easy. I've thought of quitting many times. I'm grateful to my past self for pushing through and hitting publish. The joy of being able to look back at each post is great motivation to keep going.

For the 2025 piece, I followed the format I established in 2024. I went through the various realms in my life and talked through what went well and what didn't.

For the bod this year, I bought a smart ring by Ultrahuman as a birthday gift for myself. I was a bit unsure about how useful a smart ring would be for a disabled person. Steps and workout tracking were not going to be of any use to me. I was hopeful that the ring might have ways to 'turn off' features that were not required. Unfortunately, that wasn't the case. [...]

Vinyl was a mini-hobby this year. I picked up some - ̗̀ nice ̖́ records over the course of the year. Some are new releases, while others are much older pressings I bought from collectors. My favorite way to spin vinyl is on weekends while brewing and sipping a nice cup of coffee. It's genuinely a soul soothing activity for me. [...]

A job switch year is a good time to reassess your money box. Money box is a term I learned from Monica Halan's Let's Talk Money. It is a dynamic system to keep track of money and how it flows on an individual basis. [...]

You can read the full piece here. Reply to this email if any of it resonates with you. Let's talk!

Becoming AI-Pilled

Ramblings on AI and its impact on being a professional (and hobbyist) programmer is becoming a regular feature of this newsletter. I really don't want it to be this way. But the pace of change of AI tech is SO rapid right now that I can't help but think and talk about it.

I no longer write code by hand now. I talk to my computer and get an AI agent to write my code. Sci-Fi is not so Fi anymore. Working with state of the art models like Opus 4.5 using Claude Code feels like magic. As a builder at heart, I feel equipped to build and ship whatever the hell I want. It feels like you can just do shit now.

No problem feels unsolvable now. In the pre-LLM, pre-agent era, I felt like a mortal programmer. I had my core set of skills and weaknesses. For instance, I was good at things like writing clean code but not the best at coding up complex UI animations. This disparity is out the window now. Having an AI agent at your disposal feels like a superpower. I can dream up any animation I want to make my creation delightful and then guide an agent to build it for me. Similarly, if a product manager at work wants a certain feature to be built, I can just get it done painlessly in record times. To me, this is an incredibly freeing feeling. I can work less to achieve the same or greater results.

Every conversation I am a part of these days touches the subject of AI in one way or another. I can't be the only one feeling this? How're you adapting to all this? How's work changing for you?

The! BBC!

Something SUPER COOL happened this month. The editor of this newsletter (aka my girlfriend) got the opportunity to be LIVE on BBC Radio talking about her favorite thing: her research on olfactory heritage (read: smells)! She got an email randomly on a week night asking if she'd be interested in doing this. UM, duh?!

On a personal level too, this was so exciting. I've loved podcasting and radio for many years. I now know someone who's actually been on live radio on the fricken' BBC. HOW COOL IS THAT!? I'm high key hoping she becomes a regular guest on the BBC — mostly because the audio nerd in me wants to figure out her microphone setup and audio-treat her room to sound super professional. ^ _ ^

If research on smells interests you, check out her segment here.

Mooooooovies

Movies have been goooood lately. I've been watching a healthy mix of old and new movies.

I watched Friendship (2024) on New Year's Day. I love Paul Rudd and whenever he's in a movie, I try to watch it. This one just didn't land for me. In fact, I hated it. Perhaps cringe comedy just isn't for me? Such a shame.

Next up, I watched Uncut Gems (2019). This one had been on my list for a long time. I decided to watch it while waiting for Marty Supreme (2025) to come out. Uncut Gems is by the same director(s): the Safdie brothers. I went into the movie knowing nothing about it — and WOW! I loved it! It's an instant classic for me. Be warned though: this movie will make you VERY anxious. It is not for the faint hearted. It grips you from the first minute and only lets go at the very end. So good.

Speaking of Marty Supreme, I watched it today! It was SUCH a fun time. MOVIES RULE! I love Mr. Chalamet or as my friends and I jokingly called him Mr. Chameleon. He can truly fit in and give a killer performance in any role. He was superb as Marty. Peak acting. Top of his game. I won't say much else as the movie is still pretty new and I don't want to spoil it. All I'll say is: watch it. Don't miss out on this one.

The final movie I watched this month was One Battle After Another (2025). This showed up in so many people's best-of lists for 2025, often at the #1 spot. I really enjoyed it, especially when Leo is being absolutely hilarious. The climax of the film stands out as well. That. Car. Chase. Overall though, the political undertone of the movie felt forced to me. I didn’t like it. My #1 for 2025 goes to Sinners (2025). I really hope they win big this year. Fingers crossed!

OK, that's all I got for this month! I'm looking forward to February being filled with more movies and fun with AI-assisted programming. Let's see what advancements the next month brings. I hope everyone is staying warm and doing well. Until next time... C'mon C'mon!

More soon,

R

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

Ratik here — for once — starting to write CC early. There’s still eight days till my end-of-month deadline. Good job, me! I can’t take all the credit though: It’s a Saturday after a busy work week. I watched a great film last night, which I am still thinking about. I’ve been basking in the winter sun for the last two hours. I just brewed myself a delicious cup of coffee. So, of course, I felt like writing. Multiple factors have come together to formulate the perfect vibe for me to write.

I finally watched Haider (2014) last night. Yes, I know, I’m very late. I usually am though so it's okay. Haider has been on my watchlist for many years. The decision to watch it last night was pretty sudden. My girlfriend and I were looking for something cozy to watch and then she suggested we watch Haider (which she loves) instead. Haider is the polar opposite of what one would call cozy. It’s dark and gruesome. It smacks you in the gut. But, it had been on my list for years and I’m always down for a Good™ movie. We put the movie on and let it consume us for the next three hours.

Haider is an adaption of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. It’s the third in the series of Shakespeare adaptations by writer, director, and musician Vishal Bhardwaj. I don’t know much about Hamlet and went into the film with an open mind. Within the first ten minutes of the movie, I knew I was in for a treat. I was filled with the feeling of: Ah, okay, this is a proper, proper movie. The actors on screen were at the top of their game. The movie looked fantastic. The background score was just right. Modern Hindi cinema just does not make me feel this way. It’s sad to see how badly we have lost our way.

Haider is set against the backdrop of Kashmir and its long history of social and political conflict. I liked how the movie never screams its messaging on the viewers. It just shows you how things were (are?) and treats you as an intelligent consumer. There were countless scenes in the movie that made me say: "How the hell was this film allowed to release in India?!" That says a lot about where we are at as a nation at the moment. I am certain a movie like Haider would not be allowed a theatrical release in 2025 India.

The film's music and cinematography left me feeling all sorts of ways. It was all so expertly crafted. There were gut wrenching songs for emotionally intense scenes, and tracks with insane bass lines that would trigger the stankiest of stank faces in anyone watching. While watching, I thought the music was by A. R. Rahman but I was wrong. Vishal Bhardwaj co-wrote, directed, AND did music for this movie. What a guy.

The acting performances were stellar across the board. Everyone was at the top of their game. The standout for me was of course, Irrfan Khan, who I miss dearly. I have no idea why. I obviously never knew the guy, but his death made me sad, and continues to do so. Seeing him in a film again was really, really nice. At one point, I told my girlfriend that I think good Hindi cinema died with Irrfan Khan.

As for the movie’s story, I felt that the first hour and a half was superb. It had me in a stronghold. I was locked the fuck in. The last hour was weaker. The script dragged on a tad bit longer than I'd like. Perhaps they were trying to stick too tightly to Hamlet? Regardless though, I think Haider has lots on offer for film lovers. It's a masterpiece in my book.

Watch Haider if you haven't. Re-watch it if it's been a while. Pssst, it's available freely on YouTube in Hindi. For a subtitled version, you'll have to do some digging.

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...

Hello again.

Time has passed and I am now a few hours away from the CC deadline. ¯\(ツ)/¯

All that early writing momentum went down the drain with me falling sick this past week. So, here we are once again, scrambling to publish. But publish we must!

Weddings Galore

November-December is wedding season in Delhi. It seems like everyone around you is either getting married or attending a wedding at this time. I attended two over the past month as well. The first was for a classmate from college at the start of November. As is custom at Indian weddings, it was a multi-day affair. I only attended the main event, the wedding day. It was really nice seeing old friends from college and catching up with them. Everyone seems to be 'settled', which was good to see.

The second wedding was last week. It was a family friend's wedding that I was attending with my family. We met up with other friends at the wedding and had a great time! The wedding itself was great. However, the circumstances surrounding it were quite annoying.

The wedding lasted for two days. Both day's events were at a far-off location from our house. Delhi's horrific wedding season traffic made commuting to the venue a nightmarish experience. To top that, the cold and air pollution from the first day's event made me fall sick. I woke up with an aching throat the next day. This made attending the second day's festivities an even bigger task. Once it was all over, time felt like such a blur. So much had happened. My body and brain felt like mush. Wednesday had arrived. I was back at work — unwell — with an important product demo to prepare for.

Moar Movies

As promised last month, let's talk about the movies I've been watching. I'm currently in the process of watching three movie series: (1) The Ocean's Series, (2) Pirates of the Caribbean, and (3) Daniel Craig's James Bond films.

I'm through with Ocean's Eleven (2001), Twelve (2004), and Thirteen (2007). I watched the movies with a group of friends (Hello, Movie Club! 👋). The 2025 Louvre heist made us want to watch the movies. We met for three weeks on Thursdays and gobbled up the films. What a trilogy! I loved it to bits. Eleven is probably my favorite. Twelve is by far the funniest of the bunch. Thirteen felt cozy and a return to form after Twelve's shenanigans. What a thrilling experience overall! Every single one in Ocean's crew was perfect (Basher has my heart though).

We're yet to watch the recent reboot in Ocean's Eight (2018). It got mixed reviews when it came out, but I am excited to watch it. What's not to love about yet another heist?

Pirates has been its own little wild adventure. I somehow completely missed the bus on these movies while growing up. Boy have I been missing out. I've watched the first two right now and LOVED both of them. The look and sound incredible. The Pirates movies come under the horror-comedy genre for me — which is SO cool as a concept. I'm eager to watch the third one. The cliffhanger at the end of Dead Man's Chest (2006) was ooooof. My favorite bit across both the movies has been Davy Jones playing the organ. Horrifying cool.

Daniel Craig's Bond films were my idea to watch. It started with me wanting to show my girlfriend Casino Royale (2006) — one of my favorite films. I wasn't sure if she would enjoy it, but to my surprise, she did! This led to us deciding to watch all five of Daniel Craig's Bond movies. We're done with Quantum of Solace (2008) as well, which was — just as I remembered — eh, okay. I'm excited about the rest of the movies, especially the last one, which I've never watched.

After watching films from the 2000s, I can't help but think about how GOOD they look visually. The Ocean's films were a stand-out in this regard. I absolutely loved how they looked. They were the right kind of contrast-y. There was so much character in each of the shots. Thinking about this reminded me of a Patrick Tomasso video titled: Why don't movies look like movies anymore? In the video, Patrick claims that modern cinematography's preference for shooting with high dynamic range (HDR) is the reason for this dissonance.

A gross simplification: suppose you have a scene where an actor is standing against a brightly lit window. Older movies wouldn't care about the window being over-exposed or "fully blown out" i.e. entirely white colored. These days, using HDR, cameras are able to capture the same shot with a blue sky and fluffy clouds in the window. HDR fans will argue that seeing more things in the scene makes it grand and immersive. I am on the other side of this argument. I think shots like this feel synthetic and over-engineered. Watching movies from the 2000s has been such a breath of fresh air.

I hate Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow (I don't)

Reading has been a slog for me this winter. I blame Gabrielle Zevin's Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow (TTT) for this. I finished TTT at the start of this year and loved it to bits. I've since made my girlfriend and best friend read it as well. Everything pales in comparison to TTT. TTT was so gripping. I just could not stop reading that book. I've tried switching to non-fiction. I enjoyed it for a while, but then it quickly became boring. I went back to fiction recently and just failed to gain any momentum while reading. I'm pretty frustrated about this.

The search to find a book that captures my imagination continues. I'm looking for something short-to-medium in length, with a story that makes the book hard to put down. Reply back with recommendations!

Owning Your Work

I spent some time with my bud Claude this month working on a more fleshed out webpage for C'mon C'mon. I use Buttondown to power CC. Buttondown is great and offers a lot of neat features for newsletter runners. One of these features is a public archive and RSS feed for your newsletter. Until now, I was relying on the Buttondown archive to direct people to past issues. This works well, but has one downside. Relying on Buttondown to host the newsletter's archive means that they own my work, my words. I fully trust Buttondown as a service, but I wouldn't want them to be the sole owner of my work. For this reason, my personal website now has a CC archive on it with nice looking, shareable URLs (which I love!).

• https://ratik.in/cmon (index of past issues)
• https://ratik.in/cmon/1 (link to a particular issue)

While I was putting this together, I also created an RSS feed for CC that lives on my website:

• https://ratik.in/cmon/feed.xml

Now you can subscribe to C'mon C'mon using your favorite RSS reader if you'd like!

Putting this together was a fun little exercise. My vision for this website feature was to use a script to drive page generation. I wanted to be able to run one script to update my website with content from the latest edition of CC. I spent around 2 hours working with Claude and ended up with a solution I like. I now have a script that lives in my website's codebase. Running this script fetches Buttondown's C'mon C'mon RSS feed for and generates a new webpage and RSS feed entry for each newsletter issue. Boom! I'm satisfied with how this works right now. Long term, I want to update this mechanism to also scrape images from Buttondown and host them on my website for the archive pages to use.

December is upon us friends. Christmas and New Year are near. I'm looking forward to many things. My girlfriend is in town in December (wooop!). The new Knives Out movie comes out soon. AAA! Christmas == Christmas cake (Plum cake), which has me drooling already. Time off from work!! Christmas music and movies!!!!!! What are you looking forward to in the coming weeks?

The year is ending and I have to start thinking about my year end review. This year would be the seventh (!!!) year of me writing and publishing one. I'm slightly nervous. LOTS of writing to do between the blog and this newsletter.

C'mon C'mon to me and to you.

More soon!
R

C'mon C'mon-ers —

Hello hello! It is I, Ratik, writing to you using a teeny tiny keyboard (pictured below!). I built this keyboard last week during Diwali week aka time off from work week. I'd originally planned on writing and sending this month's issue of CC during my time off. I had also planned on spending time on some top secret side projects. Did I do any of that?

Noooooope.

So, what have I been up to this month then? Let's find out!

Indie Games Rock

Hades II came out late September and got me back into playing video games.

Hades is one of my favorite video game series of all time. I've sunk over 75 hours into the first game and have currently spent 25 hours playing the second one. These are rookie numbers by the way. People play these games for WAY longer. They're able to do so because there is just so much content packed into these games, making them infinitely playable.

In a world where large game studios continue to raise prices for their game titles, Hades II launched at the $25-30 mark. To put that into context, GTA VI is rumored to cost upwards of $90 on launch. Mental. Hades is made by a game studio called Supergiant Games, which consists of 25 people. Together, they make Hades and make it available on literally all game platforms. On top of that, they even allow you to share save files across platforms. This lets me play a Hades game on my Nintendo Switch and then switch to my Mac and continue playing the game. I wish more video games allowed players to do this.

I've thoroughly enjoyed Hades II till now. I'm yet to beat the game, but I get closer each time I play it. I want to write more about my thoughts on the game once I finish it. I haven't written a 'piece' on a video game before. It is something I'd like to try and do to improve as a writer. When the time comes, I will of course share what I write on here. For now, if you're into video games at all, I highly, highly recommend checking out Hades. Start with the first one. You should be able to pick it up on whichever game console is convenient for you.

Keyboards: Big and Smol

Keyboards are often described by their relative length to a full size or 100% keyboard. Popular sizes include: 100%, 80%, 75%, 65%, and 60%. My favorite is a 60%. 60s have all the functionality I need.

Over the Diwali break, I was able to find time to build some boards. My Dad and I built a 100% for him, as his birthday gift, and I built a ... 40% for myself. Yup, a 40. This little ripper is even smaller than a 60. I mean, just look at this thing compared to a full-size.

TINNNNNY!!!!!!!

Learning to type on a 40 has been one helluva chore. If you look at the layout of the board closely, you'll notice that it has no numbers, no punctuation, and no arrows. To access these, you have to hold down a function key. Think of how you hold down ⇧ Shift to capitalize letters. The same concept applies here. On holding a function key, you are able to type numbers. If you hold down function and ⇧ Shift, you can access symbols associated with each number (%, &, #, etc.). Finger gymnastics.

I hated learning to type on this at first. Slowly, but surely, I am getting the hang of it. I talked about the importance of doing hard things last time. I am treating this exercise as one such hard task. With just a few days of typing, the number of fingers I use to type has gone up.

Website Freshness

Speaking of keyboards, earlier in the month, I spent some time updating my website. I'd been meaning to update my keyboards page for a while. It's a page I use to track my collection of bespoke mechanical keyboards I've amassed over the last 5 (!!) years. The page used to be a grid of keyboard photos. I've updated it now so that each board links to its own page. I plan on writing about each of the boards over time. I envision the page to have stories of why, how, when I got each board. There will be images and of course detailed thoughts on each board. This is going to be a multi-year project that I will take my time doing. I'm very excited to build this repository of information over time.

You can check out the page here. The individual keyboard pages are a work in progress.

Another small update I made was adding a page to track orgs I want to work for at some point in my career. These are orgs that resonate with me in some way. It's an ever evolving list which I thought would make sense to track over time. Available here: Dreams.

That's all for this month! A crisp edition. A glaring miss this time is a section of films. Though I watched some nice ones this past month, I want to spend more time thinking about them before writing something. You can follow my film diary on Letterboxd in the meantime if you want.

Tons going on at work right now. We shipped Kagi News — a news app that refreshes just once a day. We're trying to combat conventional News consumption patterns through this app. You can download it for Android or iOS. Read more about Kagi News here. The next app to launch at Kagi will be the one I have been spearheading efforts for. Fingers crossed!

Life is going to be hectic in the coming weeks. Many, many, many social events are lined up. Part of me is excited, part of me is dreading the social drain I'm about to endure. Wish me luck and tell me to ... C'mon C'mon!

More soon,

R

p.s., This is going out on the 31st of October, so Happy Halloweeeeen! 🎃 👻

How are you doing? What do you have going on these days? What's new? I'm Ratik, founder and CEO of C'mon C'mon, broadcasting to you LIVE from my bedroom. I'm listening to a Tiny Desk Concert as I type this email. The vibes are immaculate and I feel GOOD.

My workplace Kagi has a monthly meeting for the whole company. It's called the monthly Townhall. In this month's Townhall, we had a mini session by our AI Lead Matt about mental health and burnout. During the session, Matt told us about an important study on human psychology called Pavlovian counterconditioning. In the study, researchers performed an experiment on rats using food and electric shocks. Two scenarios were devised based on 'stimuli ordering'. In the first scenario, rats received a shock followed by food. In the second, food came first and then the shock.

Over time, something fascinating emerged. The rats receiving an electric shock first got comfortable with it. They started to willingly get the shock in order to get food. In contrast, the cohort of rats — which was getting food first — became averse to food and stopped eating. This study highlighted an important trait of mammal brains: the back-propagation of rewards. The rats started to enjoy electric shocks because they understood food would be given to them as a reward. Wild.

Counterconditioning is used heavily for habit building. A classic example of this is kids being given dessert only after eating their veggies. Whenever I need to do something I consider hard (cough writing cough), I treat myself with a small reward afterwards. Do this enough number of times and you slowly get okay with doing the hard things in life. Plus, life's too short to not give yourself little treats, no?

Film

My girlfriend aka my film buddy is back from her travels. So — of course — many-a-movies were watched this month.

Disclaimer: this section might contain minor movie spoilers. Reader Be Warned.

I rewatched Materialists (2025) and KPop Demon Hunters (2025) this month.

Materialists really fell apart for me during this second watch. It didn't hold up at all. My favorite character of the movie was ... New York City. The trio of actors came across as really one-note for me, especially Dakota, who seems to play the same role in all her movies (!!).

KPop Demon Hunters on the other hand is fantastic. I don't think its for everyone, but it CERTAINLY is for me. I love everything about the movie. It's got great music, funny gags, fantastic voice acting, and top tier animation. I believe the animation tech is the same as Sony's Spiderverse movies, just WAY more dialed up.

The movie is on Netflix in case you want to watch.

An eh film from the month was Oh, Hi! (2025) featuring Molly Gordon. I really liked Molly as Claire Bear in The Bear and had high hopes for Oh, Hi. The premise is good: Molly's character Iris is going on a romantic getaway with Isaac (Logan Lerman). Isaac is charming, and Iris thinks he is really into her. We soon find out that there is a mismatch in their feelings for each other. Iris is convinced that Isaac is her soulmate. Isaac disagrees. Over the course of the screenplay, Iris goes to increasingly ridiculous and problematic lengths (???) to prove to Isaac that they are meant to be together. On paper, this seemed like a thrilling watch. The execution felt short for me. Such a shame.

Another eh watch this month was the third installment of Paddington: Paddington in Peru (2024). I ABSOLUTELY LOVE the first two movies in the series. This one, not so much. The movie starts off on a strong note. We see Paddington and feel a jolt of happiness. Huh! What new adventure will this Bear go on this time? A few scenes go by and we find out that ... THEY HAVE CHANGED THE ACTOR PLAYING THE MOTHER. WHAT?! Everything goes downhill from that point. Sigh. I found out later that this installment is by a different Director too and not the OG Paul King. Changing the Director and the Bear's MOM (???) — of all people — was devastating for this film.

One good thing to come out of watching Paddington in Peru was the discovery of Paddington the Bear's Letterboxd. Yes, he's active there. His review of Paddington (2014) reads:

Oh dear, I do hope the Browns weren’t too angry about the bathroom incident. I was only trying to freshen up, but plumbing is more complicated than it looks.

He also has a review of Mr. Bean’s Holiday (2007):

Mr. Bean is such a delightful man, though he did seem to find himself in quite a bit of trouble. I think traveling is much easier when one packs a proper itinerary.

aaaand, my favorite — for Home Alone (1990):

I’m very glad things turned out all right in the end. If it were me, I’d have simply invited the burglars in for some tea. A little kindness can go a long way.

Paddington the Bear: an instant follow.

Thankfully, the month wasn't completely filled with disappointments. I watched two great films.

The first was The Wedding Banquet (2025). I liked this one a lot. In fact — as time has passed — I've started liking it more. The film on the surface is a rom-com-y-dramedy, but watching it reveals its layers and nuances. I like movies that take familiar tropes and show them in a new light. The Wedding Banquet does this for the convention-parent-doesn't-know-about-their-kids-unconventional-partner trope. The leads in the film are gay Asians. There's social commentary on immigration in America. One character's arc shows their IVF journey. There's lots of heft in this one, yet the story is told in a light manner. I liked that very much.

In striking contrast to that, the other movie I loved this month was Chicago (2002). Boy oh BOY, there was no lightness or subtlety in this one. It was IN your face from the get go and I loved it! Chicago is a musical set in the 1920s, showcasing the glitz and glamour of the era while exploring themes of crime and celebrity. The plot revolves around two women, Roxie Hart and Velma Kelly, who find themselves in jail for murder. They have a lawyer trying to prove them innocent in front of a jury. The story is thrilling and is told using RIDICULOUSLY good song and dance. I think this one is a must watch for any music fan, especially if you enjoy broadway and/or jazz. Masterpiece.

Fooooooooood

I finally visited BOMBA in New Delhi for a meal. The wait was definitely worth it. BOMBA is a pizzeria and taqueria. Strange combination, I know. The first page on their menu said that they wanted this exact combination of things because they love pizzas and tacos equally. Fair enough. I respect it.

The food at BOMBA was great. I really liked the pizza but the tacos stood out for me. More importantly, their entrance had a ramp and was easily accessible for me on a wheelchair. Lack of accessibility is always an annoyance when it comes to eating spots around my city. Thankfully, this place was a breeze to visit. I can't wait to go back!

I managed to get some nice shots of food. You will definitely get hungry seeing these. I'm sorry.

I'm documenting food photos I snap in a series called Nomnoms on Glass. Check it out!

Tiny App

Last night I decided to do some YouTube clean up. As per usual, my watch later playlist had ballooned up massively (C'mon, Ratik. 1000+ videos to watch later? Sheesh). Something had to be done. I had to put an end to it.

I sifted through the playlist and used a very strict mental yardstick to pick videos I absolutely 10000% wanted to watch. I saved URLs for these videos in a note on my Notes app. Then, I installed the YT Watch Later Assist extension on my browser and told it to nuke ALL the videos in the playlist. This is a slow process. The extension goes through the entire playlist and deletes each video one by one.

As far as I know, this is the best way to approach this problem. If you know a better way to do this, please reach out. I'm sure I will need this in the future.

T_T

While doing this cleanup, I decided to listen to some music. This was music I'd queued up while sifting through the watch later playlist. A lot of these were Tiny Desk Concerts. So, here I was — observing videos get deleted one by one — listening to Timberlake and his band absolutely smash it on the Tiny Desk — thinking to myself, “Damn, I really like Tiny Desk.” Why don't I listen to these more often?!

Introducing Tiny Desk Now!

In true Robin Sloan style, I spent some time today with my buddy Claude building a tiny, home-cooked app to solve my problem.

The idea is simple: type tinydesk.now in a URL bar and hit ⏎ Enter. The app should open and redirect you to a random Tiny Desk on YouTube. That's it!

If you enjoy Tiny Desk, try the app out! I've been using it while typing this email out and its been delightful. The sheer size (1300+ videos!!) of the Tiny Desk repository ensures a high probability of landing on a new concert each time. In a few hours of use, I have learned that seven years ago Steve Martin was on Tiny Desk?! What the heck? Steve Martin is truly the most precious.

Aaaaand, that's all for this month folks! Thank you for reading all the way through. I hope you found something worth your while here. After last month's fixes, email replies are now working as expected. Wink wink.

As I close this email out, I'm looking forward to October. Lots of festivals in October, including Diwali of course. I have time off from work coming up. I want to use it to relax, recover, and make shit. Can't wait! Happy Diwali in advance to all who celebrate! I'll see y'all on the flip-side.

C'mon C'mon,

R

Hi buds —

Welcome back to C’mon C’mon! I’m Ratik and BOY has it been a busy month.

A few readers replied to the previous issue of the newsletter. Thank you, thank you, thank you for your kind words. I hear you, I see you. I just couldn’t get back to you. In the rush of getting the first issue out, I forgot to toggle a particular setting in my newslettering software. This made the newsletter go out from an email alias rather than my actual email. As a result, I did see each of your messages but had no way to actually reply back. I’ve patched this up now and things should work as expected. Hit reply and let’s find out!

Life Update

The Big Update from last month is that I started a new job! I’ve joined Kagi on a full-time basis. It took only ~eighteen fricken months to find a job I like, send in an application for it, hear back (ANNOYINGLY rare), interview, and finally get in. What a ride. 0/10 wouldn’t recommend.

I’m quite excited to be a Kagian. Kagi is a public benefit corporation focussed on building ad-free, privacy-focused products. Their flagship offering is a search engine, which is accompanied by other products to help you browse the web, translate, consume the news, etc. All of Kagi's products have user privacy and safety at the center.

I strongly identify with Kagi's ethos of building more humane technology. We have a lot of cool stuff being built internally, which I'm excited to put out into the universe.

As is tradition for me, I published a little blog post talking more about my motivation behind choosing Kagi as the next stop on Career Express. You can read it here.

Human Loops

This past month has flown by. Starting the new job introduced a lot of new stimuli into my life, leading to many thoughts and feelings. One such thought I've been mulling over is what I now recognize as one of my human loops.

Imagine a video game you've played in your life. Any game will do. A video game can be thought of as a never-ending cycle. The game constantly checks for the player's input (like a button press) and updates the game's world based on those inputs. This continuous cycle, running behind the scenes, is called the game loop. I think humans also have loops in our minds that make us who we are. Some loops are good, while others can be bad.

A loop I often find myself in goes like this:

1. Overworking at my job (out of enjoyment)

2. Tired at the end of the day

3. No time spent on things I actually want to do (hobbies, my own projects)

4. Dialing back work by settings boundaries

5. Progress at work slowing down

6. Missing enjoyment from work

7. Back to 1

I've been stuck in this loop for the past month. Initially, I told myself to be present-focussed and allow things to take their natural course. This quickly got out of hand. I was ending workdays feeling exhausted, with no energy left for activities that help me recharge. As a result, I would start the next workday feeling drained. Ugh.

I'm trying to get out this loop by tracking the time I spend working. I'm using an app called Balance to help me do this. Balance lets me "clock-into" work by pressing a button and runs in the background throughout the day. I check the timer on it periodically and stop working around the eight hour mark. So far, this has been helpful. My hunch is that I will eventually settle into a rhythm at work and won't need an app to help me. In the interim, this system works.

No Pain, No Gain?

Speaking of hobbies, I'm trying very hard to make writing one. Writing doesn't come naturally to me. It just always ends up being a huge undertaking. I've heard prolific writers call the act of writing a visceral experience. I relate to that. When I write, it feels like I'm clawing things from the depths of my mind and soul. It is so hard to articulate fleeting thoughts and shape them into something clear on the page.

I've been trying two things to aid my writing process. First: I've disabled all AI-assisted writing tools from my Mac. I am a heavy Raycast user. One of the features Raycast provides is quick access to AI commands through shortcuts on your computer. One such shortcut is called 'improve writing'. This shortcut lets you select any piece of text, hit a keyboard shortcut, and BOOM — it improves it for you using AI. Objectively, this is great user experience design. Subjectively, however, this feature became a bad habit for me. The ease of use led me to using this feature way too much. Giving this writing hack to someone learning to get better at writing is a recipe for disaster. I kid you not, there were times when I would put down mere words in a document without any sentence structure and then tell AI to improve the writing. Crazy. I'm glad I caught onto this behavior and turned this feature off. The result is that writing is painful again, and perhaps it should be?

Second: distractions are the bane of sustained writing sessions. My most productive writing occurs when I am alone, late into the night. The peace and quiet allow me to zone in on the writing process. To eliminate distractions, I am working on creating an iPad-only writing workflow. The iPad is more limiting than a Mac. Multitasking is much harder, so I am less likely to open YouTube and get distracted on an iPad compared to a Mac. A few weeks ago, I modified my Happy Hacking Keyboards (HHKB) to be Bluetooth-enabled using the Yang BLE mod. These keyboards are typically wired, but I found a supplier in China who makes Bluetooth microcontrollers for HHKBs. I ordered one, bought a battery locally, and voilà — my HHKB and iPad workflow is ready. It works like a charm! Modding tech gives me such a kick. Oof.

Magical Bean Juice

I enjoy having rituals that mark the start of a new season. Winter's ritual is reading in the sun. Summer's ritual for the last few years has been switching my daily coffee from a hot latte to an iced latte. However, this year, that changed.

After months of contemplating, I finally decided to get a Hario V60 for making pour-over coffee this year. I had resisted this for many years. I live with a rare condition called SMA, which affects my muscle strength. So, I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to lift a heavy kettle and pour water with precision into a V60. I decided to take the plunge anyway. What’s the worst that could happen? Once all the equipment arrived, as expected, it took me some time to develop a process that worked for me. I encountered two challenges.

First, I needed to figure out a way to hold the kettle in a way that worked for me. For most people, lifting a kettle and pouring is a simple task. I attempted to do this but quickly realized it wouldn't work for me due to my arm strength. Instead, I followed my natural instinct of pouring with my right arm while supporting the (hot) kettle using a towel in my left hand.

The second challenge was the height of my table. The setup for brewing a pour-over has a certain height. When placed on a table, it becomes even taller. Pouring from a kettle with precision at an uncomfortable height while sitting in a wheelchair proved to be quite difficult. My current solution to this problem is using two different surfaces for brewing coffee. I begin at my coffee station, where I grind the beans, and then move to a lower surface for brewing. Although this method leaves my space a bit messy, the delicious coffee makes it worthwhile.

Once I sorted out my process, I began focusing on the actual recipe for brewing coffee. It took me almost the entire summer, but I think I'm finally getting the hang of it. I brewed some excellent cups this past week.

I've also been using AI to help me get better at pouring. After each brew, I share images with ChatGPT and ask it to analyze my coffee bed and offer tips. Quite fun!

At one point, I asked about pouring technique and it was VERY eager to generate an image for me to put its point across.

We are living in wild, wild times, folks.

Making Mundane Photos

After a short break, I'm gradually getting back into photography. I had paused because I felt I had nothing interesting to capture. I don't go out that much and spend most of my time at home. There's only so much you can shoot within the same space.

My friend Arun has recently dived deep into the world of photography. He shares his work in a group chat we are part of, and it's been wonderful to see the progress and improvement in his craft. Many of his photos capture how light interacts with objects in his home or the places he visits. Seeing this was just the motivation I needed to get out of my slump. I'm trying to embody his spirit more to take photos of random bits and bobs around the house. I also plan on carrying my camera out with me more so I can get some diversity of locations to play around with.

For additional motivation, I'm consuming a lot more photography YouTube. The quality of videos people produce on there is just so good. A few channels I've been enjoying are: Roman Fox, Chris Orange, Tom Humble, and of course the fantastic Faizal Westcott.

I'm also back consuming and posting on Glass. Arun's on Glass too. Check his work out :)

That was all I had for this month! Thank you so much for reading all the way to the end.

Monsoons are in full swing here in North India. Winter is coming. I'll soon be sitting in the sun and reading books that have been queuing up. Iced coffee will get replaced with lattes and cappuccinos. Time keeps going on and on and on and on, and so should you.

See you next month! Until then…

C'mon C'mon,

R

Hi —

I'm Ratik, an engineer, designer, writer, podcaster, and photographer. Welcome to C'Mon C'Mon, the start of my adventure in newslettering.

I love email and by extension email newsletters. There is a certain intimacy to delivering email directly into a living, breathing person's inbox. Social media has allowed to us to connect with each other in an unprecedented manner over the last fifteen years. My introduction to social media was through Facebook in middle school. I have so many fond memories of (instant) messaging my buds from school the moment I got back home.

RS: hi
RP: sup?
RS: nm, u?

As the years have gone by, social media's promise to connect people has gotten drastically distorted. Instagram has gone from a place to share photos with friends and family to a gloried shopping mall doing whatever it takes to grab people's attention. Let's not even talk about what's become of Facebook.

Within this mess, this social media platform called E-mail still works how it was first intended to. It is still largely decentralized. It continues to embody the joy I felt while chatting with my friends on Facebook.

This is why I'm starting a newsletter. I want to send messages to my buds on the Internet telling them what I'm up to after school work. I would love to hear back as well. Just hit reply on one these and the magic of email takes care of the rest.

So, that's my reason for starting a newsletter. But, why am I starting this newsletter? What's C'Mon C'Mon?

When I first decided to start a newsletter, I knew that I wanted a north star to dictate the vibe of the project. After thinking over it for a few months, a theme emerged. I realized that over the years, I found myself gravitating towards the idea of resilience.

The earliest form of this came from a YouTube channel I followed called Dev Tips, run by Travis Neilson. He ended all his videos by saying "Keep on hacking". That stuck with me for years to come. The next encounter was while watching the first season of Luke Cage on Netflix. One of the characters on the show lived by a saying, "Always forward, forward always". This stuck with me too.

More recently, I read Austin Kleon's book Keep Going. In the book, Austin shares ten ideas to keep going when things get hard. The book is written for people doing creative work, but I think the ideas from the book can be applied to anyone.

Wracking my brain about what this newsletter should be about led to me reflecting on these instances. I knew that the idea of ‘keep on keeping on’ had to be the theme of the newsletter, a space where I document life — the good, the bad, the ugly, the incomplete — and how I try to keep on keeping on.

As far as the name C'Mon C'Mon goes, watch the movie. It's great and I don't want to spoil any bit of it for you.

Phew.

With the first issue preamble out of the way, let's switch focus. The last two weeks of my life have been quite eventful.

First off, I left my job at Fueled, a place I worked at for nearly five years. The time had come. I learned everything I could from the place and the time was right to move on. I wrote and published a piece on My Time at Fueled this week. Check it out if you're interested!

Fueled got wrapped up at the end of June. I start my new gig next week (details sooooon!). So, for the last two weeks, I've been on a much needed break, which has felt amazing. More please!

What have I been doing during this downtime, you ask? Resting and preparing myself for the next leg of my career, as suggested by a good friend of mine. I inhaled the latest season of The Bear. It was so good. A return to form, with many tender moments that brought out the tears. I also watched, Sinners — and wowzers! How did Ryan Coogler manage to make a movie about a loaded topic like race both poignant and ridiculously fun to watch?! The film's fabulous soundtrack has been on my Now Playing continuously.

Outside of consumption, I have been consumed by the AI landscape. There is something new to learn everyday. I've been trying to figure out an AI workflow that suits me while building software. I trialed Cursor for a month and just starting using Claude Code. I'm trying to decide which tool to settle on for my agentic workflow needs. So far, Claude has been scary good.

I'm using my website and a side project to test out capabilities for AI tools. The side project is a read-it-later app called, Later (not finalized), built entirely with AI. I've wanted a simple read-it-later app for a long time (RIP Pocket). An app that does just one thing and does it well. One of my pet peeves is apps that try to be a jack of all, master of none. I want Later (and things I build in the future) to be software that goes against this norm.

You can try out Later here. It's really barebones right now, but you should be able to create an account and take it for a spin! If you're a read-it-later nut like me and have thoughts to share, send a reply!

The final update is that I just turned 29. 30 is just around the corner. Can't wait. I like getting older.

That's a wrap on the first issue of C'Mon C'Mon (CC). I'm excited to finally kick this project off. Thank you for subscribing. Having a list of subscribers is just the forcing function I need to get shit done and put these out regularly.

Until next time,
R