Infrastructure, DevOps, and backend engineering insights.
My Kindle Oasis mostly sat on the nightstand while I doomscrolled on the phone next to it. Meanwhile I kept saving articles to Karakeep, my self-hosted bookmark manager. Saving had become a way of closing tabs without guilt: everything was tagged and searchabl…
When you are debugging a production incident, you are forming hypotheses, testing them against evidence, ruling things out, trying not to confuse correlation with causation, and making triage calls under time pressure. The hard part is the reasoning – figuring…
I wanted a browser terminal at terminal.mrkaran.dev that works from laptop, tablet, and phone without special client setup. The stack that works cleanly for this is ttyd + tmux. Architecture# Browser -> Caddy -> ttyd -> nsenter -> su - karan -> tmux(main) Two…
I recently set up LiteLLM with AWS Bedrock as the LLM provider. The docs cover the happy path, but there are a few gotchas that cost me some debugging time. This post covers what I learned, from basic setup to per-project cost tracking with Application Inferen…
So… I rewrote Gullak. Again. If you missed v1: I built Gullak last year — Go + Vue + SQLite + Telegram — and the whole gimmick was: I can type something like “Coffee 150” and it gets logged. It worked. Saumya used it too. Life was good. And then slowly… it sta…
The industry is currently obsessed with defining standards for how Large Language Models (LLMs) should interact with software. We see a proliferation of SDKs, function calling schemas, and protocols like MCP (Model Context Protocol). They all aim to solve the…
About eight months ago I wrote about Logchef – a log viewer I’d been building to scratch my own itch with log exploration at work. Back then it was basically a nicer way to query ClickHouse without writing raw SQL every time. Today I’m shipping v1.0, and it’s…
About a month ago, I downloaded my CIBIL report expecting a routine check. Instead, I found loans from lenders I had never interacted with, written-off accounts, overdues from fintechs I had never installed, and even two-wheeler loan enquiries. I don’t even ri…
Everyone is worried that AI will replace programmers. They’re missing the real revolution: AI is turning everyone into one. I’ve been noticing a new pattern: people with deep domain knowledge but no coding experience are now building their own tools. Armed wit…
Introduction# For the past five years, I have maintained a homelab in various configurations. This journey has served as a practical exploration of different technologies, from Raspberry Pi clusters running K3s to a hybrid cloud setup and eventually a cloud-ba…
I recently spent some time debugging a WireGuard tunnel that was acting weird. The handshake was successful, pings worked perfectly, but any TCP connection failed with connect: no route to host. Classic misleading error message. The routing was fine. The Setup…
So, for the last 3-4 months, I’ve been busy building Logchef. This tool basically grew straight out of my day job managing logs at Zerodha, where I’ve been managing logs for almost half a decade. I wanted to share a bit about how Logchef came to be. Like many,…
I’ve been introduced to Nix by my colleagues at work. Being a Linux user for over a decade and a serial distro hopper, I was curious to learn more about it. I’d seen Nix mentioned before, but the comments about its steep learning curve made me wonder if the ef…
I’ve been playing badminton more regularly since the start of 2025 - almost 4-5 days a week. I recently moved to a new part of the city, which meant I couldn’t play with my old friends anymore. PlayO has been super helpful for finding games with new people. On…
My Obsidian vault has gotten quite messy over time. I’ve been dumping notes without proper frontmatter, tags were all over the place, and some notes didn’t even have proper titles! I needed a way to clean this up without spending hours manually organizing ever…
2024 was indeed an important year for me as it marked several significant milestones. Quite happy with how this year was! Here’s my reflection on this memorable year. Life# Got married to the prettiest and dearest Saumya 💗 Did my first international trip, exp…
Just yesterday, GitHub announced integrating Claude 3.5 Sonnet with Copilot. Interesting times ahead. In my experience, Claude has been remarkably better than the GPT-4 family of models for programming tasks. I’ve tried a bunch of tools like Cursor, Continue.d…
I recently discovered Outline a collaborative knowledge base. I wanted to self-host it on my server, but the mandatory auth provider requirement was off-putting. My server is on a private encrypted network (Tailscale) that only my approved devices in the tailn…
A couple of weeks ago, I decided to start logging and tracking my expenses. The goal was not to record every minor purchase but to gain a general insight into where my money was going. In this post, I’ll dive deep into the behind-the-scenes of building Gullak—…
Last month, I did a wonderful trip travelling through the scenic landscapes of Switzerland. My wife and I were in Lucerne and had scheduled a day trip to Mt. Titlis for the next day but were wondering what to do that evening. After strolling along the Chapel B…
I have an upcoming trip to Europe, which I am quite excited about. I wanted to set up a Tailscale exit node to ensure that critical apps I depend on, such as banking portals continue working from outside the country. Tailscale provides a feature called “Exit n…
Earlier this week, I had stumbled upon 1brc, which presents a fun task: loading a huge text file (1 billion lines) in Java as quickly as possible. The One Billion Row Challenge (1BRC) is a fun exploration of how far modern Java can be pushed for aggregating on…
Introduction to SadServers# Recently, I stumbled upon sadservers, a platform described as “Like LeetCode for Linux”. The premise is: you are given access to a full remote Linux server with a pre-configured problem. Your mission is to diagnose and fix the issue…
This blog post is ignited by the following Twitter exchange: I don’t take the accusation of unsubstantiated argument, especially on a technical topic lightly. I firmly believe in substantiated arguments and hence, here I am, elaborating on my stance. If found…
At $dayjob, we use AWS Pinpoint to send out SMS to our customers. We’ve also written a detailed blog post on how we use Clickhouse + vector stack for our logging needs. We additionally wanted to store the delivery logs generated by the Pinpoint service. But li…
To set the stage, it’s crucial to understand what we mean by “bridge networking”. In a nutshell, it is a type of network connection in Linux that allows virtual interfaces, like the ones used by virtual machines and containers, to share a physical network inte…
You know those budget freaks? People who log and categorise every Rupee they’ve spent over the month? The financially sane people? I am definitely not one and I suck at it. I moved cities a couple of months back and had some big ticket spends off late, mostly…
At work, we use a Vector pipeline for processing and shipping logs to Clickhouse. We also self-host our SMTP servers and recently started using Haraka SMTP. While Haraka is excellent in raw performance and throughput, it needed an external logging plugin for a…
A few months ago, a proposal for adding a structured logging library in Go was introduced by Jonathan Amsterdam. At present, Go has a minimal and bare-bones log package which works all right for basic use cases. However, the current library has a few shortcomi…
CoreDNS is an extensible DNS server (which is actually a fork of Caddy v1) that can be used to serve DNS records for a domain. It is written in Go and is very easy to extend. It has a plugin system that allows you to write your own plugins to extend its functi…