Published on: 31/08/2026

Last edited on: 31/08/2026

Welcome back to another late weeknote 🥲. I was initially just gonna say: “I was busy this weekend too”, but I wanted to understand what was it that actually stopped me from publishing this weeknote on time. I usually write weeknotes on Sunday mornings, and for the last three weeks, I genuinely have been busy during that time. First was shifting houses, second was a trip where I didn’t even have my laptop with me, and the third and the latest is because I was out climbing on real rocks in Raogudlu. But well, details about that will be revealed in next weeknote xD.

Life

Poem

I published a poem this week! I wrote it while enjoying a magnificent sunset upon a small lake. Gazing at the reflection of mountains in the lake, a stroke of inspiration hit and the poem was ready half an hour later :). This poem is aimed at people who are just tagging along in life, flowing wherever it takes, no struggles, no ambitions, just existing. This is a plea to them to struggle (tatake)! Have something you can struggle for! You will enjoy your lives so much more.

Concert

I attended The Yellow Diary’s concert this Saturday, it was SO MAGICAL! This was my first ever concert and I am so happy it was this!!! I have been listening to their songs for a very long time but mostly consuming them passively. Never realizing a bunch of separate songs I have been savouring, were from this single band. I had so many OH moments over the last two weeks, slowly realizing so many songs from my playlist were from them 😭.

P.S. ignore the guy singing right into my phone 😭

Hangouts

One of my motivations of moving near to my climbing gym was spending more time with my climbing friends. I was not a big fan of paying for cabs every other night and hence often skipped group hangout plans. But now, now is different. I live in walking/cycling distances from everyone and would love to hang out with them more! This Thursday one such impromptu plan happened, but I am not sure I want more of these, we were up till 3 AM in the night playing Contact! We literally made sure we had covered each and every letter from A-Z. Only thing fueling us was Chai shots at a random shop whose owner’s only entertainment was looking at us shouting Contact randomly followed by spewing words all of us had forgotten for years. Resultantly, Contact has been banned in our group for a few months 😂. But it was fun, maybe maybe again sometime :P.

Break pads

I decided to get my cycle’s break pads changed for extra safety and peace of mind. I started looking for a repair place and spent a bunch of time trying to find a cheap one at that in Indiranagar itself. Sadly, there’s no good advice online! All of them point to the expensive stores where I would need to spend my cycle’s worth just to step in. But a random query at a car garage store sent me down a rabbit hole of finding this small shop near Bob’s bar. It turned out to be pretty nearby to my house and I got pads replaced plus air check plus brake alignment correction, all for 90 rupees only! FAFO wins :).

Acidity

I prefer eating less spiced (masaledar) food in general and also having just one chai in a day. Both of these things have gone haywire ever since I shifted here. This would not have been a problem unless I found myself having acidity suddenly. I am now on a hunt for what exactly is causing this. Divide and conquer, first suspect is chai, second is the extra spice I am consuming in food here.

Climbing

This week I didn’t spend a lot of time climbing, but the limited time spent was super high quality one! On Tuesday, I again spent my session working on the overhang level 5. This time it was with my usual climbing gang and OH BOY they helped me so much! I had a completely different beta by the end of the session and was reasonably confident that I can get it in the next one!!

And on Thursday, finally after four sessions spanning 4-5 hours each…I SENT IT!! YESSS!!!!! I am screaming writing this weeknote, I am so happy I can cry. This is definitely not a level 5, so many of my strong friends couldn’t even make the start move, and to make it worse, start is not even the crux move 🫠. Every move can be refined with careful body positioning and micro-betas. All of the hard work came together in the end, and I was at the top, matching the final hold. I was also lucky enough to get the exact send in video! Angle got a bit weird, and one might not be able to assess how hard the start is, but I don’t care, this weeknote is the evidence and memoir for that!

Thursday was actually a very good day, except this level 5, in the new set I did everything from level 1 to level 5 and also got a level 6!! All on the same day! Some days you die of thirst, meanwhile on some you are drowning in success! What a week, I am satisfied. Now time to project even harder purple level 5 in the cave. It has such a bad one arm lockoff, I had to make sure my bicep got enough rest for a week!

Swimming

I went to tryout Game Theory’s swimming pool in Ulsoor. They charged me 370 for an hour!! For a reminder, I used to pay 70 rupees for an hour in Jayanagar! What a ripoff. They even had a weird situation where people were learning swimming, doing laps and training scuba diving, all in one single pool. 😭

I am absolutely not happy with the swimming pool situation here, but sadly this is the best pool around 🥲. Maybe when I return, I will take a membership here, with membership it becomes cheaper but not as cheap as Jayanagar. Well you gain some, you lose some….

Food

• I tried Subway Paneer Loaded Sandwhich, it was ehh, not ordering it again. Free chocolate cookie was tasty tho 😋.
• I also tried a bunch of local bakeries in Kerala! It was a feast of cream buns, carrot and plum cakes, some rice and jaggery sweet, small sweetend breads, and so much more I don’t know names of/can’t describe!!
• There will be a bunch of different places listed in my in progress trip blog :).

Work

We made amazing progress on integration of logical table readers integration.

• Iceberg with immediate consistency is blazingly fast when compared to our old stack. ⚡ Surprising thing is we did these benchmarks with immediate consistency ON on our new stack and OFF on our old stack (read without and with caching respectively).
• We also merged support for Delta and plan parquet tables. Both of them are strictly on par/better when compared to old stack, again with immediate consistency ON in new stack and OFF in old one!

Tech

I have developed a sudden interest in k8s and its internal operations. I have been brushing up again how k8s works, but this time not just covering its objects, but how does it work on the fundamental level! I have spent so much time understanding, how Service are just VIP and they only exist in ip routing table of the nodes. How CNI, CSI, CRI works. How external load balancers are integrated with details covering L2 routing, BGP routing and external load balancers of AWS! Expect few blog posts around the same soon!

TV Show

It was a surprisingly low watchtime week. Last week I was watched till episode 10, but this week I didn’t even complete one episode. Episode 11 is still in progress, damn that was a busy week!

Reads

• https://fzakaria.com/2026/08/23/your-executable-is-a-sqlite-database
  • People are absolute genius! What an incredible idea.
• https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/1vujnka/arcmutext_vs_channels/
  • personally i view Arc<Mutex<T>> as code smell in most cases
    • slamming credit card on the table: I am sold!
• A nice vlog on Basic Mountaineering Course, one day I will find some time to do this for sure! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HrUCnk9a768
• I would go on to say, maybe re-type the code you really don’t want to lose out on: https://x.com/arpit_bhayani/status/2092103965655867831
• This hit too hard, I watched ping pong few years ago, so was excited to see a video essay about it show up on my feed, but mann, this video just destroyed me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sFwLCuflGFU
• There’s a compiler mailing list which I have been a part of for a while. Here professors of universities discuss interesting research papers, recent events, etc. Ofc, they had to discuss LLMs at some point. It finally came up as a question: Why should students still study compilers?.

For many years, I've regarded compiler construction as one of the most  
scientific, disciplined, and algorithmic areas of computer science. There is  
something wonderfully satisfying about a field in which so much can be derived  
systematically rather than done by the seat of the pants.  
  
The difficulty, at least in my experience, is that there simply aren't that  
many jobs writing compilers. Occasionally I get a small job writing a  
dedicated parser, but for the most part I have little opportunity to use  
compiler algorithms professionally. That makes it hard to justify spending my  
limited time keeping those skills fresh.  
  
And now I wonder whether LLMs will reduce the demand for some kinds of  
compiler and parser expertise even further.  
  
So I'm curious what people on this list think: **Why should a computer science  
student today take a compiler course?**  
  
Do students take compiler courses because the techniques they learn are likely  
to be useful in their careers, despite the relatively small number of jobs  
involving compiler development? Or is the real value of a compiler course that  
it teaches broader ways of thinking about languages, grammars,  
representations, transformations, optimization, and software systems?  
  
And has the arrival of LLMs changed your answer at all?

I really liked this answer from a mathematician on it:

As a mathematician, I can only comment on this as an outsider. But perhaps an  
outside perspective has some value here.  
  
Even though in mathematics (to my regret) it has become increasingly common to  
motivate topics by explaining what they might be useful for later, most of  
what we teach is about things that already exist. We teach theorems that have  
already been proved. Exercises and exam questions have usually been asked  
before in similar, and sometimes even identical, form.  
  
Since the arrival of LLMs, there has been something close to panic among some  
colleagues that students can now simply solve everything with ChatGPT. What  
tends to be forgotten is that students could always copy solutions to homework  
or take-home exams from other students without understanding them. They could  
also memorize solutions to standard exam problems without understanding why  
they work.  
  
But there have also always been students who wanted to know _why_  something  
works, either because they were curious from the beginning or because somebody  
managed to make them curious. They wanted to understand how one might come up  
with a proof rather than merely reproduce it. Those students gradually  
developed their own ways of thinking. Later they were not only better at  
dealing with known theorems and standard problems, but also at developing  
creative ideas when confronted with problems they had never seen before.  
  
Mathematics has done rather well with the idea that learning how existing  
things work prepares you for challenges you do not yet know. That also means  
not merely using tools — known theorems, for example — without having any idea  
why they work.  
  
Of course it is neither possible nor necessary to understand everything down  
to the last detail. But I think it helps enormously to enjoy trying to  
understand as much as possible, without constantly being distracted by the  
question “what will this be useful for?” If you really understand something,  
some useful consequence will often turn out to be a by-product — possibly one  
that nobody could have predicted when you learned it.  
  
I have no idea which problems LLMs (which I use myself) will be able to solve  
better than I can in the future. But I suspect I will be able to use them much  
better if I understand which problems I can delegate to them as part of  
solving a larger problem that they cannot yet solve the way I can.  
  
And coming back to compilers: I find it difficult to understand why one would  
_not_  want to know how a compiler works. Quite apart from whether one will  
ever write a compiler professionally, I think it is simply interesting to  
understand how the thing that turns your program into something a machine can  
execute actually works.  
  
  
Michael Lehn  
  
University of Ulm, Institute for Numerical Mathematics  
Helmholtzstr. 20  
D-89069 Ulm, Germany

• Another day at work: +6,258 -2,217. Someone raised a PR with these stats and wants it merged :).
• Felt too personal: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SEzw2rKYryw
  • Also in general this channel has banger videos! Do check it out!