May Musings (posted on the 7th of June but started in May because I'm lazy) #
I'm going to fit a whole lot of stuff into this post :) #
It's been 7 months since my last post! #
I've been meaning to write a post for a while now, but I've been busy with school, friends, work, hackathons, and a whole bunch of other stuff. Quick recap of the past 7 months:
November #
I more or less found a friend group and settled in. I also went for a few hackathons, won a few of them, and got to meet Stephen Wolfram—surreal, considering half my math education came from having 12 WolframAlpha tabs open at any given time. I finally tasted proper Boston winter (verdict: too cold, would not recommend biking without gloves). Closed out the month by spending Thanksgiving doomscrolling twitter and hanging out with my other international student friends.
December #
Finals went well, went home for the holidays, hung out with high school friends, got to meet my parents, and nearly joined Lovable but decided moving to Sweden was a lame trade-off. (They’re at $60 M ARR now—secure the bag, I guess!) While in Bangalore I helped my mom plan her dessert-box subscription: she's doing well now! Rebuilt my personal site just because I could. Also discovered Tilly Birds live sessions on YouTube and fell down a Thai-rock rabbit hole that still hasn’t ended.
January #
Dunya Baradari recruited me to join her at the MIT Media Lab, under the Fluid Interfaces Group. I'm working on a project with her and a few other folks on a digital-twins platform for biomechanical data. I also joined Rev as part of the executive board after being a member the previous sem! They pretty much made my Northeastern experience the absolute blast that it's been so far, so I'm very sad that the founding team has now graduated but I'm glad to be able to contribute to continuing the legacy.
- Started my “side-project-a-day-until-i-get-an-internship” Twitter challenge—lasted precisely 3 days before I got an internship. I was actually slightly disappointed because it meant I wouldn't get to continue the challenge.
- Spent a LOT of time watching anime
February #
I won FinHacks with Sophia! The project—financial digital twins—used gpt-4o structured output, the perplexity API, and a couple of tiny ML models for the pricing modedl. Also:
- Began the homomorphic-encryption deep dive that is now 90 % of my reading list.
- Got hopelessly addicted to Risk of Rain 2 co-op at 3 AM with Bensen—true bonding experience.
March #
Genuinely what the fuck did I even do this month? No idea. I think I hung out with Bensen and Tyler a lot. Like, until 5 AM everyday.
- Met my friend Ritvik after four years.
- Bought the domain onemonth.dev (curriculum-in-30-days generator) on impulse—then actually specced the MVP during a 2 AM Discord call.
- Discovered Rabbit-Holeware as a term and started a Notion page collecting “software that makes me build new things.”
- Wrote an article for the Hardware Thrashers of X, a community of hardware hackers on X who started a zine!
April #
I spent a lot of time with my friend group and built a lot of fun projects like SnapSyndicate (LLMs form pop-up companies to ship user ideas) and an early prototype of Materialization Shiritori for Hack@Brown.
- Friends and I went for a picnic at Boston Common since it was the end of the semester. Polaroid could not handle the sunlight so we had zero good pics from there but it's fine—I'm not salty.
- Anime Club hosted a karaoke night! Highlights: absolutely butchered Renai Circulation, no regrets :D
- I went to a trampoline park with my friends; realized mid-backflip that cardio is still a real thing.
- Attended the YC @ MIT event with the Reducto founders and Jared Friedman; was hyped for Diana Hu but she was out sick.
- Completed my linguistics paper on the Kansai dialect—turns out intonation contours are wilder than any regex I’ve written.
May #
May opened with the MCP + A2A hackathon at AWS, where Paper Chase (research-to-startup agent) won a $1k prize! I also accepted a summer internship at Mosaic (YC W25; AI video editor) in SF, so I was knee-deep in visa paperwork, housing hunts, and deciding whether I could survive on viet cold coffees alone.
- Helped my mom refine the dessert-box packaging!
- Went on the most awesome hacker retreat ever with my friends at Rev!
- Started practising Persona 5 Royal’s “confidant-maxxing” schedule in real life (yes, there is a spreadsheet).
- Finally got around to spinning up a WSL2 dev environment on the Zephyrus—GPU passthrough is magic.
- Booked flights for my end-of-May–August SF stay
- Landed in SF!
June #
June’s theme so far: ramp-up and level-up. I officially started at Mosaic on the 25th of May under CPT, and it's now been 2 weeks since I've started! Lots of Python/TypeScript, ffmpeg pipelines, and agent orchestration diagrams. My onboarding was essentially a push into the deep-end of the pool, and I'm now swimming in a sea of new things :D in terms of things I shipped at Mosaic:
- Popular Music tile
- The entire public-facing API which allows you to use Mosaic video editing agents + create agents just from a prompt!
- Wrote all the API docs
- Built 5 example apps for the API
- Including an MCP server which you can use now
- Next week I'm shipping a new service which handles all external integrations/triggers/socia media scheduled posts/etc.
Other stuff:
- Housing saga: left my Marina Airbnb and moved to one in the Mission. Not a great neighborhood in comparison, but then again nothing is. It's also closer to everything, so worth it imo!
- Wired Freedom ebike bought and arriving this month!
- Rev remote duties: recruiting for next fall, where I and a few other naive underclassmen will take over from the seniors. It's going to be a hell of a ride!
- Random stuff: dropped by Founders Inc HQ. Buildspace was the start of all this for me, so that was a trip.
- Paperwork grind: bullied payroll into acknowledging F-1 FICA exemptions.
Now I've started working on Akiko (my Tauri-based local desktop companion). Whisper.cpp now runs GPU-accelerated on the Zephyrus without melting, and LangGraph handles memory better after I piped state into DuckDB + Chroma. Akiko can almost pair-program; but memory and tts still need some work. Chatterbox-TTS released right in time though!
Outside of code, June will have a few main themes:
- Building cool shit @ Mosaic
- Making cool new friends in SF :D
- Hopefully my ebike arrives early and I can bike a lot
- Building something cool for the World's Largest Hackathon
End of the month target: ship my first 10 production PRs at Mosaic, finish Akiko, Tensor Alpha, and Materialization Shiritori MVPs, and finish watching Dr. Stone. Hold me to it :)
My Favorite Software #
- Cursor – 2nd best AI pair-programmer I've tried after Cline, but I use Cursor more because I'm not rich yet.
- uv – Python deps resolve so fast my brain lags. Fuck the Pytorch gpu wheel dedicated index though. Here's a github gist which I made which solves it but holy shit I wish this was done by default: link
- black – formatting nirvana.
- Notion – no, nothing comes even close. I will die on this hill, and yes I've spent a month using every one of the alternatives (Obsidian, Tana, Roam, Nuclino, Joplin, Standard Notes, etc.)
- Discord – best community layer, worst search :(
- Spotify + Spicetify – cat follow cursor while song play :D
- DearPyGui – GPU-accelerated GUI in minutes
- FFmpeg – the Swiss-army knife nobody masters except for LLMs.
- Helix – the only modal editor I like and use.
- ImHex – waow raw bytes!
- FastAPI – favorite favorite favorite
- LM Studio – boo ollama lm studio superiority
- Canva – been subscribed for like six or seven years now
- Everything Search – Windows without this feels broken.
- WSL2 – Linux escapism without leaving Windows land.
- n8n – automations galore, no Zapier tax.
- yt-dlp – if it streams, I can save it.
- Excalidraw – the only whiteboarding tool I need
- Sonic Pi – cool toy
- Zig – low-level joy without writing ugly rust code
- Krita – drawing tablet bestie.
- Claude Code – it's cool but I'm bottlenecked by using it through WSL2
- Godot – ty brackeys for the intro; much appreciated
- Firecrawl – web scraping but actually good
- Radix UI – goated components
- Supabase – no need to elaborate
- Vercel – yes platform lock in but the free plan is great and I just want sanity
- Linear – i don't even use it at work but i use it for my personal project planning like that's how good it is
- Moondream – tiny vision model which absolutely clears anything i throw at it
- Modal – serverless containers with very cool DX
- Tauri – what electron should've been and ten times better than that
- OBS – need i say more
- Poly Pizza – free 3-D models!
- Vite – an actually good server and bundler in the JS/TS ecosystem??? (bun is awesome too but like cmon man why is windows support so bad)
If you have more Rabbit-Holeware, hmu on twitter @tetraslam
This post was written in collaboration with OpenAI o3, which has made me pick up writing again by giving me a daily recap of my day. I'm not sure if I'll continue this, but it's been fun so far!