K Srinivas Rao

I teach backend stuff.

yt -

[David K 🎹 @DavidKPiano]

If you willingly use `useEffect` for data fetching, that's fine, just please go into your GitHub settings and set this to disabled

[dax @thdxr]

i am no longer sure dario is conscious

[Rhys @RhysSullivan]

you'll know if something is written in rust because people will tell you it is

you'll know if something is written in typescript because you'll actually be using it

[K Srinivas Rao @sriniously]

ship fast or ship perfect? ai rots your brain or coding is over? i don't know what to believe anymore. someone let me know when we pick a side.

[K Srinivas Rao @sriniously]

all these llms think software engineering is a christopher nolan film. every tutorial starts at 3am. every outage happens "in the dead of night." there's always a pager. someone is always "jolted awake."

meanwhile the actual prod incident (if you even wanna call it that) happened at 2pm on a tuesday, everyone saw it because we were in a meeting, the fix was someone typed 'flase' instead of 'false', and we were home by 5.

but sure, tell me again about the "bleary-eyed" engineer clutching coffee at 3am, staring into the abyss of a cascading failure, questioning every life choice.

it was a typo kevin. you pushed a typo.

[®️ahul @Rhl_Rwt_01]

Best playlist if you want to learn what backend systems are and how they work beneath the surface.

It actually presents a BACKEND FROM THE FIRST PRINCIPLE
Thanks to @sriniously for this gem

[K Srinivas Rao @sriniously]

@codexadarsh That’s crazy

[ThePrimeagen @ThePrimeagen]

I love that people are discovering that crypto bros are scammers and have just moved to AI

Welcome to Costco, I love you

[K Srinivas Rao @sriniously]

OpenAI: hires Osborne

Me: waiting for the inevitable scene where he corners an engineer on the roof screaming "YOU KNOW HOW MUCH I SACRIFICED?!" after GPT-6 hallucinates

[K Srinivas Rao @sriniously]

The number of things I do in life just because 'vachan dedi hai'... bhai main kahan ka bheeshm pitamah hoon, ab vachan dedi he toh dedi he, wapas bhi lee jaa sakti he

[K Srinivas Rao @sriniously]

"Japan to revise romanization rules for first time in 70 years"

me, misreading (impressed): wow, Japan is regulating romance? such a forward-thinking country. every nation should have rules before kids start writing love poems to AI waifus

re-reads headline (disappointed, relieved):

oh. it's about writing Japanese in Latin letters. that's… significantly less dystopian

[K Srinivas Rao @sriniously]

one common thing I have always noticed in the kind of content that I consume and see other people love consuming, and the kind of products that I feel is wildly intuitive, is that, most of the times these creations are the results of founders/creators getting annoyed at their workflow or strongly feeling the gap, so much so that, they feel this strong urge to fix it themselves. go ahead and try it, think back, the kind of videos that you care enough to hit the like button or post a comment, the articles that you bookmark or the saas product or dev tool that is an integral part of your workflow.

there is that energy, that you can’t fake. when someone creates something to scratch their own itch, you feel it. the attention to detail, all the edge cases handled because they have LIVED those. the explanations land perfectly in your brain like a tetris because they remember what confused them. The feature prioritisation always works in the market because to date they are still the target users.

now contrast that with content or products built "for the market." You also feel that instantly. that saas landing page, that youtube video optimized for the algorithm, that blog post written to rank, you know exactly what I’m talking about, we see those everyday.

when something feels meh, I ask, was this made by someone who would actually use/consume this? 9 times out of 10, the answer is no. they just reverse engineered what they thought people wanted instead of building what they knew people needed because they needed it themselves.

fortunately, our tech ecosystem is so beautiful today because the number of "I made this for me and people like me" stuff still dominates the "I made this for you" stuff

[Drizzle ORM @DrizzleORM]

how he looks at you when you sleep for 5ms every 50 chars

[David K 🎹 @DavidKPiano]

Fetching in useEffect()

[K Srinivas Rao @sriniously]

@mhawthorne Exactly.

[K Srinivas Rao @sriniously]

Lately, as a developer, especially with the advent of agentic ai tools, there's no denying that the amount of "joy" in writing code at work has significantly gone down. I mean yes, we are more productive than ever, we have more power and time to build anything we want, but iykyk.

Which brings to my point of this post.

I was never into building personal software, meaning, creating tools/automation workflows for MYSELF. I never felt the need and it always was a drag. So this is a particular unexplored area of life that is proving to be the number one contributor to bring that "joy" back, with this feeling of building software for yourself that nobody else will ever use, or rather I won't LET anybody use. So embarrassing.

When you are the only user, you make a lot of "interesting" tradeoffs, not the ones I would be proud to discuss amongst my peers in any professional setup. Things like, skipping the auth layer, why? Well, because if you don't trust yourself in your own machine, then my friend you have a bigger problem at hand. There will be this VERY important CLI flag that you use all the time, but instead of making it a default, you depend on your zsh suggestions and auto-completions to write it out for you, who cares. And man don't get me started on the db schemas and indices? Index? What's that? And the classic, git push origin main. God, the satisfaction I get from that, EVERY SINGLE TIME.

Personal software also frees you to be maximally weird. I have a script that parses my browser history, runs it through embedding models, and clusters my research sessions. It's held together with string and shell scripts. It would never pass code review, lol, I would fire me if I saw that code in ANY kind of context. But it's grown to be so useful to me in a way that polished tools aren't, because I built it around my exact mental model of how I work.

The reason for this feeling, for the most part, is professional software development often optimizes for the wrong things. Well not really wrong, they are the necessary evils, but wrong in this context. We build for hypothetical users, imaginary scale, theoretical maintainability by future developers who may never exist, atleast in the initial phase. Personal tools revert this formula. You build for one real user with real needs right now. And the needs that you have a 200% understanding of.

So build something small and ugly for yourself. Use it every day. Let it evolve based on actual friction and use rather than anticipated requirements. You'll develop intuitions that no tutorial can teach you and also find a little more joy.

[jacob paris ▲ @jacobmparis]

remember when they were like

web 1 = read
web 2 = read/write
web 3 = blockchain paywalls

AI agents offering site-site communication is a much stronger candidate for a real web 3

[K Srinivas Rao @sriniously]

When you get a pet, you’re on a new arc

[Bryce Roberts @bryce]

Adults- you have a moral responsibility to create holiday magic for the next generations.

You are not too cool to dress up, or decorate or be silly. The wonder of childhood rests on your shoulders.

[K Srinivas Rao @sriniously]

I have been EXTREMELY lucky when it comes to my youtube channel, when it comes to the amount of love I receive from people everyday, and I cannot be grateful enough for that.

ESPECIALLY given all the flaws that I have.

1. The ridiculously poor video editing and camera angle. And I am saying this with just a hint of shame that, they’re not going to improve anytime soon. Content and research is always going to be the priority.

2. In some of my earlier videos I read too much from my notes, lol. And honestly so far, this is the ONLY complaint I have seen in the comments. And it’s surprisingly rare. Content is not easy guys, and neither is teaching, and doing both of them together for hours, you tend to lose track, so the notes were necessary to stop me from rambling. I believe I have improved in later videos, but again, it’s an ongoing effort.

3. My frequency of uploading. Now this is something I am truly guilty of. What can I say, I am involved in too many projects, doing way too many things than a sane person should be doing. But I’m working on that too, clearing out the other priorities to make room for the videos.

I could go on with the list, but I am not gonna go ahead and give you guys more reasons to complain about.

But anyway, thank you to all the people who make the effort to write/share/comment about my videos and the ones who send me thank you notes in the dm. I see and read EVERYTHING. For someone who seeks external validation a lot, I would have stopped making these videos without these tweets/comments/dms long back.

I don’t believe I am doing anything great with these videos. I have never taught anything to anyone. I am introverted to the point of offending people with my presence. And I wish someone with better communication skills, better knowledge and more experience in the industry taught this stuff, so that I didn’t have to go on and do a bad job at this just to fill a gap. But unfortunately for you and me both, no one is doing it, so you’re stuck with me.