*These are my personal thoughts, experiences, and opinions, and they do not reflect the views of the company I work for.*

Last week I wrote about [driving the California coast and finding clarity](/blog/2026-03-25-california-coast-letting-go-to-find-clarity/). That was a reflective post. This one is about nerding out this weekend on all things AI video editing, LLMs and iMovie version.

This past weekend, I packed up the family and drove to San Francisco. No agenda, no itinerary synced to a calendar, and almost no Slack notifications. Okay, there was one I was a little too eager to respond to. But mostly, it was just the open road, some good music, and a few days with the people I love most.

We hit the Golden Gate Bridge on a rare fog-free day. We had ice cream at Ghirardelli Square. We drove the 17-Mile Drive through Pebble Beach and picked up dark chocolate treats from All About the Chocolate in Carmel-by-the-Sea. We stopped at the Mystery Spot in Santa Cruz, because honestly, some days you need a place where gravity doesn't make sense to remind you that the world is more playful than your inbox suggests.

Now, as a good husband, I should have just bought her the subscription. But as an even better husband, I taught her how to set up her own chatbot locally on her Dell laptop. 16 GB of RAM, no fancy GPU, and it cost her exactly zero dollars in software.

No subscription. No data leaving the machine. Each model has its own limits on how much text it can take in, and you figure that out by trial and error, but there's no one charging you per question.

The requirement was simple: click "Share" on an article on my phone, add a quick comment, and have it show up on my site. The name "Radar" came from a list of options (Signal, Bookmarks, Feed, Picks) but "on my radar" felt right for what this is.

My first thought was a public WhatsApp channel. Share a link from my phone, have my site pull it in. Deflect the scale problem to a third-party. Except WhatsApp has no public API for channels. So that was a no-go.

My mode of learning is a mix of reading high-level documentation, thinking of some interesting problem to solve, and just getting my hands dirty. I've always been that way. I need to break something before I understand how it works. After this point is where I seek more structured forms of learning like courses, video walkthroughs and certifications.

I started experimenting with spec-driven development in winter 2025, spending weekends learning new things. Getting hands on using my personal Claude Code Max plan when Opus 4.5 dropped made me realize how much our [craft may be evolving](https://www.nvarma.com/blog/2026-01-20-software-engineering-as-craft/). It was exciting to feel the [builder awaken](https://www.nvarma.com/blog/2026-02-09-manager-ic-pendulum/) in me again. GitHub published [a great piece on spec-driven development with AI](https://github.blog/ai-and-ml/generative-ai/spec-driven-development-with-ai-get-started-with-a-new-open-source-toolkit/) that resonated with where my head was at the time. A lot has changed since then. Markdown has become the de facto way to store context between coding sessions, and things are evolving fast. If you're reading this months from now, some of what I reference may already look different, but the underlying patterns of how to structure your thinking for AI-assisted work, those I expect to hold up.

It was not trivially easy. Or rather, it was — I just didn't find the easy answer first.

My work runs on Outlook, locked down behind corporate IT. My personal life runs on Gmail. Both calendars sync to my Android phone, so *I* can see everything in one view. The problem is letting other people see when I'm available without giving them access to either calendar directly. If you're on iPhone with iCloud or you already pay for [Calendly](https://calendly.com/), this is old news. But I got curious about why it felt so hard for everyone else, and it turns out [Android sits at about 70% of the global mobile market](https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/worldwide) as of January 2026.

**Choose a model** — a big file trained on lots of data to make that type of output. **Describe what you want** — e.g. “a cat on a sofa” or “upbeat piano, rainy day.” **Run it** — the model refines things step by step (more steps = often better, but slower; on a Mini, a few minutes per image or track is normal). **Use the result** — image, audio, or video file. Different tools, same idea. I use ComfyUI for images and the same flow for music: pick model, describe, run, get output.

You choose the model (no lock-in to one website). No usage caps. Your prompts and outputs can stay on your machine. The tradeoff: some setup time, and on a Mac Mini each image or clip can take a few minutes instead of seconds.

So I built a small pipeline that handles it automatically. Push a new post to my Astro site, and GitHub Actions cross-publishes it to Dev.to and Hashnode with the canonical URL pointing back to my site. Medium is a different story, which I'll get to.

Before getting into the code, this is the one thing you should care about if you cross-publish anything. Every platform lets you set a canonical URL — `canonical_url` on Dev.to, `originalArticleURL` on Hashnode. It's basically a pointer that says "the original lives on my site." If you don't set it, Google sees three copies and will probably rank the platform version higher than yours.

I've been reflecting a lot lately about the pendulum swing between Engineering Manager and Individual Contributor. For those who have not read it, I would suggest reading [Charity Majors](https://charity.wtf/)' [multiple](https://charity.wtf/2017/05/11/the-engineer-manager-pendulum/) [posts](https://charity.wtf/2019/01/04/engineering-management-the-pendulum-or-the-ladder/) about this [topic](https://charity.wtf/tag/pendulum/) and coming back here. It's an emotional space I've been in for the last five years as a hands-on manager, but the last twelve months have completely changed the physics of that swing.

I've been keeping up with AI chat interfaces and Multimodal prompts since early 2023 when they started becoming prominent. I started using AI coding agents back in May 2025, and honestly, I was blown away. Since then, with the arrival of newer foundational models of Claude Opus and GPT Codex, the **frontier of what's possible hasn't just moved — it's teleported at warp speed.**

In the age of AI saturation, original content is something that takes you back in time - nostalgic, almost. It's like, you know when you're a kid growing up and you have TV, radio and so many other forms of entertainment, but you still write your daily journal at night or listen to your favorite songs on your cassette tapes. I did for a while, until I moved on to something else that made me happy. The memories of that daily journal habit are still very fresh in my memories, sitting down with a diary and writing what was on my mind to this unknown person. The frustrations, the joy, the doubt and the dreams of better days ahead.

So in 2026 the trend that I want to set and socialize to everyone I know is the fact that you can still create things, you can share them with the world in their original true form. With all of its embellishments, all grammatically imperfect, even sentences that start with "With" and have too many commas in between them.

Both of these bugged me enough that I spent a Sunday night fixing them.

Here's what was happening. In my `SiteLayout.astro`, I had the Open Graph meta tag set up:

The old site was a bit dated. I had hand-coded HTML files from 2019 that I kept patching whenever I needed to add something. Want to write a new post? Go to blogger and write my mind, and then tweak the templates or themes just a bit every couple of years. I think the last time I actually wrote anything was 2024 because the whole process just... ugh. Life was too busy for me to rewrite a whole bloging CMS, or the dread of migrating away from blogger was too overwhelming. Then came the AI tools, which made me think... is the right time now?

I almost went with Next.js because that's what everyone uses and I figured there'd be plenty of tutorials. But then I remembered I don't actually need React for a blog? Like the whole point of my site is to display text and maybe some images. It's not an app.

**No AI was harmed… or used in writing this post.**

Every so often, new tools come in that change the way the industry works. As we head into 2026, we may be in the midst of a fundamental shift in Software Engineering as a craft, and what it takes to build software.

- [Which Leadership Style Is Best for Your Team?](https://online.wharton.upenn.edu/blog/which-leadership-style-is-best-for-your-team/) - from Wharton Online, I think my personal style switches between Servant/Democratic/Empathetic leadership depending on the situation. - [Baylor HR - Tips for Leading Hybrid and Remote Teams](https://hr.web.baylor.edu/news/story/2023/tips-leading-hybrid-and-remote-teams) - Some of my own learnings from real world experience is that overcommunication is okay at times if you are clear about your intent. - Learn to work async via documentation. - Be very intentional and clear in everything you write down so it doesn't leave any lingering questions or doubts in the reader's mind. - Encourage questions & update your documentation to reflect its evolution.

- [Building Remotely](https://buildingremotely.com/) - this whole series is a treasure trove, this one on [Remote leadership](https://buildingremotely.com/episode/remote-leadership/) was excellent

Terrorism, a sinister force that transcends borders and ideologies, poses one of the most profound threats to global peace. It is a manifestation of violence that targets innocent lives and aims to instill fear, distrust, and division in societies. The repercussions of terrorism are multifaceted, leaving deep emotional and physical scars on affected communities. Beyond immediate casualties, it creates a cycle of violence and reprisal, hindering the trust necessary for constructive dialogue and cooperation. In this context, the condemnation of terrorism is not merely a moral stance; it is a prerequisite for safeguarding peace and security on a global scale.

The significance of negotiated solutions cannot be overstated. Diplomacy, dialogue, and compromise have proven time and again to be potent tools in resolving conflicts and achieving lasting peace. Throughout history, leaders have opted for peaceful negotiations as an alternative to the horrors of war. These are not just historical anecdotes but invaluable lessons for the present and the future.

Like an immortal firefly, those memories continue to flash and shine over time. They say time heals and that everyone deals with grief in their own way. I have no idea why I'm posting this, but when I heard this song recently, it reminded me of Vijay who would have turned 37 today. Happy Birthday my friend, your memories will continue to live on through all the people whose lives you touched.

At that age, I was just learning how to be an adult when life taught me about its twists and turns having to unexpectedly deal with grief with the loss of my mom. While we coped as a family, the start date of my new job got delayed due to the company rescheduling it for recent college grads to the end of the year.

It is at this time that I decided to apply to what was then one of the most massive off-campus recruitment [drives](https://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-business/Infosys-to-recruit-25000-more-people/article15729175.ece) in India.

After recently completing my Scrum training, a lot of thoughts have been floating in my mind about agile in general. There is overhaul required when enterprise teams are introduced to Scrum as [Ken Schwaber](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Schwaber) described best **"Scrum is now more mainstream than radical."**

Let me start with where I come from. I started my career at an IT services behemoth in India. My employee number was in the low 60,000s. Within a few months of the outsourcing boom at its peak in 2006, the company suddenly grew to 110,000. With so many recent college grads and easy money to be made, the waterfall approach seemed great for mentoring new kids. The business model was mostly throwing a bunch of recent college grads who have gone through a crash course training into a team based on "domains" like Insurance, Healthcare, Banking and Manufacturing. Planning involved setting a tight deadline and apply as much pressure as possible to deliver within the deadline regardless of quality or whether requirements fully are met. There's always the on-site guy (poor soul) who will spend sleepless nights attending your conference calls and wake up early before you leave work so he can chat. This role had even more pressure of meeting the customer face to face and firefighting deployments that need to go on time. One of the main life lessons for me was to respect to people who knew better than me AND those knew who no better. Regardless, the experience taught me a lot about team structure, working towards deadlines and the general chain of command that is strictly enforced within the work culture in India (that I knew of).

In my many years of owning gadgets, I have always been fond of keeping my devices as long as they work and basically run them to the ground until they stopped working. That personal trait has kept me happy and has been one of my financial pillars for saving money. The only times where I thought of upgrading or going for that new phone is that awkward feeling when you see friends or colleagues go show them off every other year - their new, latest and greatest device that is a big hit.

This time it happened to be my phone. My good ol' [Samsung Galaxy SII Skyrocket](http://www.samsung.com/us/support/owners/product/SGH-I727MSAATT) was the first smartphone I owned. I had bought it exactly at the time AT&T ended unlimited data i.e. I did not have a plan to get grandfathered into. Regardless, I signed up for a $15 / month data usage plan on 4G LTE.

Since Posterous is now dead, I'm moving back to the place I started blogging back in 2004. I had a harrowing time going and autoposting all my old posts. I've lost all the comments and timestamps and permalinks. I'm disappointed, but it is what you do. Pick up the pieces and move on.

The URL may be my own domain, but the underlying blogspot address has not changed. I hope one day Google doesn't shutter blogger just like it did Reader recently.

I am one the lucky ones to be getting a bunch of calls for jobs. I believe the best way to prepare is to actually spend time preparing for it. Consider it like an exam. Your chances of failure increase if you decide to wing it. Unless you are among the 1% of this world's geniuses, you will need to prepare. I've tried winging it before. It sucks. I've come out of a phone interview looking like an idiot. I've finished personal interviews which went from bad to lousy. Not all of them were my fault, but I could have spent time researching more about what I was getting into.

If you are interested in some tips, read on. If you know it all, I wish you the best.

I was watching the Olympics ceremony headlines the other day and I noticed Muhammed Ali lighting the torch on behalf of Team USA. It was a sad sight to the see the greatest of all time with the dreadful disease that has become a fixture of his post-retirement life. Seeing him with high spirits was a good sign though.

I remember the song that DJ Steve Porter created as a tribute for Team USA that features some of his most powerful words.

As time has gone by, my worldview has shaped little things like 'thoughts' and 'feelings' about a vast array of topics. One of them is equality. Living in the United States of America for a little more than 4 years now, one of the great experiences has been the very fact that I am in the land of the free.

One of the leaders responsible for enhacing the meaning of that phrase is Dr. King. In 2013, "the land of the free" might not seem quite right to describe the state of affairs. However, it begs to question what equality means in this day and age. Is it just how you are treated by others due to "the color of your skin"? Or is it "by the content of your character"? Being a technologist, one of my greatest worries has been how freedom is being stifled in the information age.

So here we are, in twenty-twelve (or two thousand and twelve for the puritans). Life is ploughing on in its own freakish ways. I am working as an engineer in the education sector. Education Technology industry to be more precise.

Here's hoping we all circle back and meet even after the mayan calendar ends.

It is very easy to judge people based on what they write or say. We live in a world where changing your mind about something leads to being labelled as 'fickle','flip-flopper' or 'contradictory'. This world is turning into a tiny place with a long trail of your online history left to be archived. As time goes, I think we will move towards a society where people do not judge others solely from one incident or article. Recent history of [cyber bullying](http://stopcyberbullying.org/) makes me think it could take a while.

As move into a more interconnected world, what with smartphones, tablets and the internet taking over your microwave oven, it is going to be hard to cover your tracks of online goof-ups. Armchair critics from all around the world who happen to chance upon your article get to pass judgements on your opinions or anything you say that happens to be politically or socially awkward. Now, in a perfect world, online anonimity is something that should be your birth right. However, hiding behind proxies (there is a chance you can get tracked even if you do) to achieve anonimity is something I won't advice.