datespots.city - What’s Happening: Events, Edge Caching, and a Smarter Homepage
Ticketmaster and street-fair events in a city sheet, edge-cached by day, plus quieter nearest-city homepage ordering.
All write-ups
Newest first.
There Are Only 168 Hours in a Week
Three and a half months of a day job plus Datespots nights: roughly 100-hour weeks, and what the math actually adds up to.
All the Cities, Someday
A life goal to visit every Datespots city, preferably with a partner, and the difference between being able to go alone and wanting to.
datespots.city - Fixing the Map, Then Making It Fast
CARTO watermarks, vector basemaps, lazy map loading, and panning fixes.
Game Theory & Dating, Part 3: There Isn’t Supposed to Be Another Player
Game theory won't give you a dating strategy, patterns beat signals.
Game Theory & Dating, Part 2: The Market Isn’t Symmetrical
Dating apps aren't the same game for everyone: scarcity vs abundance.
Game Theory & Dating, Part 1: You Don’t Know What Game They’re Playing
You don't know what game the other person thinks they're playing.
datespots.city - Why I Removed Mumbai
Why Mumbai left the guide: affection, walkability, and curation depth.
datespots.city - Designing a Better Datespots Experience
Less cognitive load, more consistency, performance as UX.
datespots.city - A Hopeful Vision
Quality over completeness, places as the start of memories.
datespots.city - When Better UX Exposed Bad Data
Better filters and maps revealed wrong neighborhood data.
datespots.city - Building Something Meant to Be Left Behind
If it works, people open it for five minutes and leave.
datespots.city - Why UI/UX Matters More Than Features
Don't make users think, every pixel helps answer where to go.
datespots.city - Highest Performing Pages: Street Fairs and Farmers' Markets
Why street fairs quietly became top-performing pages.
datespots.city - Why Some Cities Were Rejected Because of Safety
Safety as a deciding factor for which cities make the cut.
datespots.city - Why Some Cities Are Harder to Design For (And Probably Always Will Be)
Population isn't enough, data quality and walkability matter.
datespots.city - Cloudflare D1 Went Down. My Homepage Didn't Have To.
When D1 struggled, the homepage learned to fall back.
datespots.city - Why These 24 Cities?
How launch cities were chosen, and why fewer done well wins.
datespots.city
From NYC to a global platform: subdomains, late nights, 24 cities.
Building a Google Sheets plugin for EmDash, and stepping back (for now)
Building a Sheets plugin for EmDash, and pausing for focus.
Why DateSpots.NYC Is Not Monetized Despite Decent Traffic
Why the NYC guide stays free despite decent traffic.
The Architecture Behind DateSpots.NYC
Sheets, Workers, WordPress, Maps, and why staying free matters.
Stop Asking for Green GitHub Profiles from Experienced Engineers
Stop judging experienced engineers by green contribution grids.
My Moral Dilemma
A personal note on ethics and engineering choices.
Career Highlights Till Now
Milestones and turning points so far.
I’ve Stopped Caring About Titles
Why titles stopped mattering as much as the work.
Highways, Cars, and Navigators: Decoding My Job for the Non-Techie!
Explaining SRE and infra work with highways and navigators.
Prometheus and Thanos: A Symbiotic Relationship
Prometheus for the pulse, Thanos for the long view.
AWS: DynamoDB + API Gateway – The Correct Way
The hard-won path to clean DynamoDB JSON via API Gateway.
Building projects to give it away, the truth about side projects.
Building projects to give them away.
SRE: What I think happened to Robinhood trading app when it went down
What I think happened when Robinhood went down.
What I learned from bombing my final SRE interview at Google.
Lessons from bombing a final Google SRE round.
Elasticsearch basic concepts and terminology
Indices, shards, and Lucene basics.
Public Key Cryptography Basics
Symmetric vs asymmetric encryption, simply.
Docker 103: Volumes
Docker 103: working with volumes.
Docker 102: Internal Working
Docker 102: isolation and internal workings.
Docker concepts: file, images, and containers
Dockerfiles, images, and containers.
Docker 101: Basics
Docker 101: building and running containers.
Linux: File Descriptors, Streams and Pipes
File descriptors, streams, and pipes.
Linux: HA-Proxy vs Varnish: What, How and Where
HAProxy vs Varnish: what, how, and where.
Linux: Shell Lifecycle
What happens inside a shell lifecycle.
Linux: Boot Process
BIOS to kernel: the Linux boot process.
Linux: Load Balancing VS Load Sharing
Load balancing vs load sharing, clarified.
Linux: How does DNS work?
What happens when you type a URL.