About
Hi, I'm Raj. 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.
I like talking to the people who use what I build as much as building it. And I like the part where nobody knows the answer yet, and we have to work it out.
Most of my days are engineering. What I'm trying to get better at is everything around it: deciding what's worth building, getting it in front of the right people, how it lands with them, and whether the numbers work.
I'm in Mumbai. If you're around and you write Elixir or Rust, come to the meetups; I co-host Rust Mumbai and Elixir Mumbai. I also give talks now and then.
Outside work I build things, some because they're useful and some because I want to see how they work. The one I've stuck with longest is Winterfell, a Kubernetes cluster at home. It now runs a lot of my digital life.
Most mornings start with coffee and Hacker News, and what I want to keep goes into my bookmarks. I read a lot; right now it's On Grand Strategy. I travel when I can, and some trips turn into travelogues.
Things I keep coming back to
- You can just do things.
- What's the most ambitious version of this?
- Leverage over busyness.
- Systems over willpower.
- Long games, chosen slowly.
If you want to know more
- Writing: notes on what I build, and whatever I'm curious about.
- Books: what I've read, and what stuck.
- Bookmarks: the best of what I find on the web.
- Contrail: every flight I've taken, on a globe.
- Travelogues: trips, frame by frame.
Lately
- Said in a tweet: “ideas show up when you're out of tokens…”
- Stashed Keep Your Identity Small.
- Tweeted “opus 5.5 has such good taste in design, articulation…”
- Liked Arjun Gupta’s post.
- Tweeted a photo: “Getting quite hot out here in Mumbai”.
- Put out Room for Everything.
- Bookmarked 三共リゲイン CM総集編 -勇気のしるし篇-.
- Said in a tweet: “claude loves using Kevin MacLeod music”.
- Scribbled notes on Kafka on the Shore.
- Bookmarked How we made claude.ai 3x faster in two weeks.
- Hopped a flight from Nagpur to Mumbai.
- Saved DAU/MAU is an important metric to measure engagement, but… and The Power User Curve: The Best Way to Understand Your Most…
- Clipped How I Vibed a Proof of Conway's Conjecture.
- Filed away The Harness Margin Opportunity.
- Clipped The coming product retention crisis.
- Saved What You'll Wish You'd Known.
- Clipped How to build a company when you're not an optimist.
- Said in a tweet: “self hosting is fun and games until suddenly a node…”
- Saved An Alien Mind.
- Bookmarked It's Price Before Product. Period.
- Filed away Model, Care, Execution.
- Tweeted “grok 4.6 when reviewing a PR created by opus…”
- Said in a tweet: “many valuable ideas are invisible because the mind…”
- Tweeted “you would not believe it, but it matters whether you add…”
- Said in a tweet: “a tiny chrome extension + native host + a cli…”
- Tweeted “i only ever touch sonnet 5 when i'm token poor at the end…”
- Started work on
tokmeter. - Done with Days at the Morisaki Bookshop.
- Tweeted a photo: “i mentioned in my journal last night that i'm into…”
- Got to the end of The Goal and The Great Gatsby.
- Flew from Bhopal to Mumbai.
- Took a flight from Mumbai to Nagpur.
- Tweeted two photos: “packed room on a rainy saturday afternoon…”
- Wrapped up A Sport and a Pastime.
- Stashed The Agent-Era Career.
- Said in a tweet: “Need a /goal with more than 4000 character limit”.
- Made it through Fatherland and What I Talk About When I Talk About Running.
- Filed away “Brunello Cucinelli” - Om Malik.
- Stashed The Age Of The 40-Year-Old Solo Founder Is Here.
- Finished Stoner.
- Posted Connecting to Two Tailnets from a Single Device.
- Wrote up 5 Days in Amsterdam.
- Got to the end of Crime and Punishment.
- Clipped Why Japanese companies do so many different things.
- Filed away A few words on DS4.
- Flew Bangalore to Mumbai.
- Flew Mumbai to Bangalore.
- Saved The Silent Cost of Bad Habits - James Clear.
- Wrote Contrail.
- Took a flight from Bangalore to Mumbai.
- Published 2 Days in Yosemite.
- Tweeted a photo: “Catch us at the @invideoOfficial booth at Rust India”.
- Caught a flight from Mumbai to Bangalore.
- Published Claude Code's Memory Model.
- Started
cc-wiretap. - Put out The Product Context Doc.
- Finished Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids.
- Started building
fast-claude-code-statusline. - Done with Dance Dance Dance, The Stranger and The Unbearable Lightness of Being.
- Started building
whisper-type. - Wrote Internal DNS for a k3s Tailscale Cluster.
- Flew Mumbai to Bangalore.
- Made it through East of Eden.
- Wrapped up Dune, Dune Messiah, Norwegian Wood, Siddhartha, Sputnik Sweetheart and Stories of Your Life and Others.
- Trip: Phuket and Krabi.
- Flew Krabi to Mumbai.
- Flew Mumbai to Phuket.
- Flew Bangalore to Mumbai.
- Made it through 1Q84.
If any of this sounds like your kind of thing, say hi. I'd like to hear what you're working on.