The Hard Way is the Easy Way
My happiest stretches were the hard pushes, not the comfortable ones. I think feeling down is often feeling powerless, and doing something hard is how I get my agency back.
Hi, I'm Raj.
Welcome to my digital garden.
I'm an engineer by training and a product person by instinct. I work on invideo, where we're building the agents and tools that serious creative work will run on.
Here, I write about my tinkerings.
Lately
- Scribbled notes on South of the Border, West of the Sun and Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!
Latest Posts
Room for Everything
I sat down to write about this September.
Connecting to Two Tailnets from a Single Device
I run my personal homelab on one tailnet and work runs another, but the Tailscale app only keeps one of them active at a time. This post is my notes on running a second tailnet entirely in userspace, reached through a SOCKS proxy, without touching the host's routing.
5 Days in Amsterdam
A photo diary of five days in Amsterdam in October 2023. De Wallen, De Pijp, Zaanse Schans, and the canals at night, frame by frame.
Contrail
I keep a log of every flight I take.
2 Days in Yosemite
A photo diary of two days in Yosemite over the Fourth of July weekend, 2025.
Claude Code's Memory Model
My notes on Claude Code's memory feature.
The Product Context Doc
I've been using LLMs to force clarity in my product thinking, and it starts with a short doc.
Internal DNS for a k3s Tailscale Cluster
I wanted my internal-only services on my k3s cluster to be accessible via friendly domain names instead of IP:port combos. Here's how I wired together Tailscale, Cloudflare DNS, cert-manager, and Traefik to make it work.
Choosing a TTS Model for Self Hosting
I wanted to self-host a TTS model for my homelab. Here are my notes on evaluating Kokoro, F5, StyleTTS 2, Fish Audio S1, and Index TTS 2.
Understanding Server RAM
I needed to upgrade the RAM on my homelab server and found that server RAM works differently from consumer RAM. This post is my notes on ECC, RDIMM, LRDIMM, ranks, channels, and how to avoid the common pitfalls.
How does Gunicorn work?
I've recently been playing with Gunicorn to serve an ML model (I know, I'll shift to Nx soon!) and wanted to understand what exactly it does for us and how it works under the hood. Here are my notes on its pre-fork worker model and why Nginx is needed in front of it.
Be careful with System.system_time in Elixir!
I encountered a sneaky bug in my Elixir app where `System.system_time` led to expired tokens. This led to a deep dive into how Elixir handles time, and a small PR to the `Goth` library.
Handling Rust Panics in WASM
Solving the issue of unresolved JavaScript promises in WASM when Rust panics occur, using Promise.race as a practical workaround.
Refreshing Third Party Tokens before they expire using GenServers in Elixir
A guide on how we can create a module which will always give a valid token back. It will also refresh the token before it expires.
Writing testable and decoupled Elixir using the Adapter Pattern
A guide on how we can use Elixir Behaviours to write extensible, testable and decoupled code.
Keep your CloudFront content private with signed URLs
A tutorial to use signed URLs to keep your CloudFront content private by default and control access to it more granularly. This simple, yet effective technique can help ensure the security and privacy of your content
Installing Elixir on Mac M1
While installing elixir on a mac m1 machine, I ran into a lot of issues. This post is a quick guide on the issues I faced and how to fix them.
Webapp feels slow? Run a perf trace!
When dealing with a large and complex web application, you might often run into situations where an operation is slower than it should. Let's see how we can run a performance trace to find out what's slowing things down.
Force nginx to refresh DNS in proxy pass
While implementing reverse proxy in nginx, the IP address of upstream is cached by nginx. This becomes a problem when the upstream server changes its IP address. This post explains how to force nginx to refresh DNS in proxy pass.