Imitation Is the Sincerest Form of Flattery. It Still Stings.
I built an internal tool to prove content scraping with canaries, edge logs, and TLS fingerprints. A similar feature shipped elsewhere. It stung, then it made sense. […]
Write-ups
Technical articles.
datespots.city - Why We Removed Mumbai
Why Mumbai was removed from Datespots.city: public affection, hard-to-walk dates, curation depth, and choosing quality over city count. […]
datespots.city - Designing a Better Datespots Experience
Refining Datespots UI/UX: less cognitive load, observing friction instead of feature requests, consistency across the site, and performance as part of the experience. […]
datespots.city - A Hopeful Vision
A hopeful vision for Datespots.city: quality over completeness, places as the start of memories, and helping people spend time in cities more intentionally. […]
datespots.city - When Better UX Exposed Bad Data
Rebuilding map.datespots.city filters: auto-zoom exposed wrong neighborhood data, consistent menus, and filters that update counts together. […]
datespots.city - Building Something Meant to Be Left Behind
If Datespots works, people open it for five minutes, find a date idea, and leave. Use the internet to get people off the internet — the point of the product. […]
datespots.city - Why UI/UX Matters More Than Features
Why Datespots prioritizes UI/UX over feature count: don’t make users think, let design disappear, and make every pixel help answer where to go. […]
datespots.city - Highest Performing Pages: Street Fairs and Farmers’ Markets
Street fairs and farmers’ markets quietly became some of Datespots’ highest-traffic pages. Why they work for dates, why they’re hard to maintain, and why search engines love them. […]
datespots.city - Why Some Cities Were Rejected Because of Safety
Why safety is a deciding factor for which cities make it onto Datespots: not crime stats alone, but whether I can confidently recommend places to strangers exploring a city for the first time. […]
datespots.city - Why Some Cities Are Harder to Design For (And Probably Always Will Be)
Why I can’t add every city on request: population isn’t enough, data quality and safety matter, and I’d rather do fewer cities well than hundreds filled with generic lists. […]
datespots.city - Cloudflare D1 Went Down. My Homepage Didn’t Have To.
When D1 hit transient errors on July 3, 2026, datespots.city returned 503 while city subdomains kept working. What that exposed, and how I added retries, KV fallback, and cache layers for the homepage. […]
datespots.city - Why These 24 Cities?
How datespots.city chose its launch cities: why Mumbai was the hardest, what a day of curation looks like, where AI helps and where it doesn’t, and why fewer cities done well beats covering the world. […]
datespots.city
Scaling datespots.nyc to a global platform: subdomains instead of dozens of domains, three months of late nights, 24 cities at launch, and a surprise Cloudflare for Startups acceptance. […]
Building a Google Sheets plugin for EmDash, and stepping back (for now)
I built emdash-sheets-sync to connect Google Sheets to EmDash: service account, sync, admin UI, and a Portable Text block. The plugin API felt right; local dev with Astro/Vite/Miniflare, session cookies on localhost, and slash-menu gaps did not. This is what worked, what fought me, and why I’m pausing for focus, not because the idea is wrong. […]
Why DateSpots.NYC Is Not Monetized Despite Decent Traffic
Can you put a price on love? I could run AdSense or paywalls, but I don't want to make money out of people's already miserable and lonely lives. If the site helps two people come closer, the upkeep is worth it. […]
The Architecture Behind DateSpots.NYC
How DateSpots.NYC is built: Google Sheets as the backbone, Cloudflare Workers for caching and the date planner, WordPress as the face, Google Maps API for enriching data, and why the CDN and staying free matter. […]
Ditching WordPress, Going Static
I refactored both divyendra.com and codenza.app and removed WordPress completely. The overhead, the headaches, the constant updates and plugins and security patches. I asked Claude Opus to build the sites from scratch with a minimal look. The only thing that stayed the same is the CDN. […]
Stop Asking for Green GitHub Profiles from Experienced Engineers
I want to address something that’s been on my mind for a while. I’ve seen a growing trend that’s becoming quite frustrating: the obsession with green GitHub profiles. It feels like more and more companies and recruiters are judging candidates […]
My Moral Dilemma
I am a Distributed Systems Engineer. I say that because it seems like the only term that can describe everything I do day to day since it’s never the same thing. I love engineering; it’s the one thing I am […]
Career Highlights Till Now
I started grad school in 2017, pursuing a master’s degree in cybersecurity. Graduating in December 2018 was a significant milestone, marking the beginning of my professional career. Shortly after graduation, in March 2019, I secured an internship. I’ll be honest, […]
I’ve Stopped Caring About Titles
At my day job, my title has changed three times. It’s hard to believe, but I started as an SRE III. A year in, I got a pay bump and a new title: Principal SRE. Recently, they merged four teams, […]
From SRE ⇔ NASA
Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) is a discipline that combines aspects of software engineering and applies them to operations whose goal is to create scalable and reliable software systems. SRE teams are responsible for the reliability, performance, scalability, and monitoring of […] […]
Highways, Cars, and Navigators: Decoding My Job for the Non-Techie!
I received a message from a friend admitting he’s unclear about what I do professionally. I’ve written this article to simplify and explain the daily responsibilities of an SRE, System Architect, and Infrastructure Engineer.
Prometheus and Thanos: A Symbiotic Relationship
In my journey with monitoring and alerting tools, I’ve come to deeply appreciate Prometheus. Its real-time monitoring capability feels like having a pulse on your systems. But, just like any good story, our hero, Prometheus, has its Achilles’ heel. I […]
Securing the Web, One Site at a Time: Our Project to Stop Bad Actors
As the internet continues to grow, so do the number of bad actors, such as hackers and evildoers, who are determined to exploit websites for their gain. This can be a significant problem, not only for the website owners but […]
Best efforts to OSS
As an engineer/systems architect, you must keep up-to-date with the latest trends, technologies, and best practices in your field. One of the most effective ways to do that is by writing technical write-ups and sharing your knowledge with the community. […]
How I brought down production
I figured every SRE / Systems / DevOps / Infrastructure Engineer brings down production system some time or the other. So did I, that too on a monday morning at 11:00 am. I think this might actually be the biggest […]
AWS: DynamoDB + API Gateway – The Correct Way
I went through the hard way so you don’t. This is not a tutorial but more of a post to skip all the steps to fetch and clean data with DynamoDB + API Gateway.Before I say anything, I want to […]
Building projects to give it away, the truth about side projects.
I always loved building stuff. Small or big side projects, it didn’t really matter to me. From simple websites to using tensorflow’s inception V3 model to train images to detect fruits and objects for the blind, I did it all. […]
SRE: What I think happened to Robinhood trading app when it went down
I was waiting for Robinhood to post a postmortem but they aren’t and have never been transparent to post a public postmortem and shoot themselves in the foot by being in a sector to lose customers on a post. And […]
What I learned from bombing my final SRE interview at Google.
So here are some key things I learned about bombing my final round at google for an SRE. You will be judged on your competitive programming skills than your knowledge of Linux and systems. You should be able to communicate […]
Elasticsearch basic concepts and terminology
Data in Elasticsearch is organized into indices. Each index is made up of one or more shards. A shard is a low-level worker unit that holds just a slice of all the data in the index. Each shard is an instance of a Lucene index, which you can think of as […] […]
Public Key Cryptography Basics
Encryption is the process of taking a message and scrambling its contents so that only certain people can look at your message. Symmetric Encryption Let’s take the example of Alice and Bob. Alice has a sensitive document that she wants […]
Docker 103: Volumes
In the first part, we took a look at basics of Docker, building, stopping and removing them. This part will consist of mainly playing with changes and handling the concepts of volumes in docker. If we have to change few […]
Docker 102: Internal Working
Docker internal working: One of the goals of modern software development is to keep applications on the same host or cluster isolated from one another so they don’t unduly interfere with each other’s operation or maintenance. One solution to this […]
Docker concepts: file, images, and containers
I’ve been asked these questions quite a few times and I am confused about how to explain it in layman’s term, but again if you can’t explain it to a 5 yr old, you don’t understand it yourself. Dockerfile: A Dockerfile is […]
Docker 101: Basics
Docker is cool. I’ve just started to use and play it for small projects. This part will cover the basics of building and running docker containers and images. I started taking courses on Lynda.com which is given out free by […]
Linux: File Descriptors, Streams and Pipes
File Descriptor: Linux file descriptors are non-negative integers that help in identifying an open file within a process while using input/output resources like network sockets or pipes. It can be considered as an index table of open files. A kernel […]
Linux: HA-Proxy vs Varnish: What, How and Where
HA-Proxy HAProxy, or High Availability Proxy is used for load balancing. Load-balancer servers are also known as front-end servers. Generally, their purpose is to direct users to available application servers. A load-balancer server may have only the load balancer application […] […]
Linux: Shell Lifecycle
Before writing this, I wondered the same what goes on inside a shell lifecycle. It was explained to me in one of my system administration class but we certainly do not recollect everything in a graduate course. At work, I […]
Linux: Boot Process
The first step of the boot process is the BIOS (Basic Input Output System). 1. BIOS – Basic Input/Output System Performs system integrity checks Initializes hardware, detecting drives, USB, CD-ROMs, network cards, and any other hardware. Searches, loads, and executes […] […]
Linux: Load Balancing VS Load Sharing
These terms are used wrongly in so many ways that I sometimes cringe on it. More because I am confused when to relate to what. When you are a beginner you may overlook the difference Load Balancing VS Load Sharing, […]
Linux: How does DNS work?
Many people will ask you in interviews what exactly happens when you type google.com in your browser? And they want you to go in detail as possible. Or simply: How does dns work? 1. You type google.com into the address […]