Brain Chatter
Random musings on technology, product engineering, and the art of building teams that actually ship things.
Most posts are born from 3 AM debugging sessions, team retrospectives that went sideways, or those shower thoughts about why software is still hard after all these years.
What I Write About
- Engineering Leadership — scaling teams, managing technical debt, and staying sane
- Product Engineering — building the right thing, the right way, at the right time
- Startup Stories — lessons learned from building at hypergrowth companies
- Systems Thinking — designing for failure, scale, and human behavior
All Posts
How Non-Tech CEOs Can Truly Support Their CTOs
September 30, 2025
A practical guide for non-technical CEOs on how to effectively partner with their CTOs beyond budgets and updates. Learn how to provide clarity, ac...
Humble self-appraisal or being a braggart?
November 16, 2023
Discover the art of self-appraisal that highlights your achievements without sounding like a boast – it's simpler than you think!
What's "hopeless" in product engineering?
November 09, 2023
Why product engineering teams get stuck in cycles of dysfunction, and the transformative journey from chaos to clarity.
Upfront architecture isn't for building software
October 30, 2023
The transformative journey from chaotic, disparate tech stacks to a harmonious, unified, and standardized software building.
What are we building?
October 18, 2023
If startups think in Modular and abstraction based systems as identified above they can build simpler product with the most efficiency.
Running TensorFlow 2 on Apple M1/M2 Macs
January 14, 2023
Getting started with TensorFlow2. Installing and Running it on Apple M1 (ARM) (ARM64) Machines.
On being a good team member.
August 26, 2021
what does it take to shine at a workplace full of hustle, mission and driving positive impact for the next set of end users? what are the important...
A new home. A year at Sequoia.
August 24, 2021
Having spent a year at Sequoia, how was last one year? What lies ahead?
A tale of a food stall, from monolith to microservices
June 06, 2021
An evolution journey of a monolith hawker stall to a micro-services enabled restaurant.
Good-byes are tough, but this isn’t a good-bye
July 30, 2020
Ajey wrote farewell note for his staff at gojek.
Stop proving, start moving
March 12, 2015
Sometimes, you need to sell yourself. What I mean is that you need to sell your services and make sure that people know what they want. If they do,...
Fight like dogs, hunt like a pack
March 11, 2015
That’s the first rule for your startup if you are starting up with few friends. And there are few simple reasons for this, I learned it hardway, I ...
Inception, to speed up, to shape up.
January 01, 2015
While in Inception, 2010, Sci-Fi Movie things slow down when you incept. But on the contrary, agile inceptions are more like creating the seed of ...
RubyConf India - Hospitality was anything but pleasant at The Lalit resort and spa, Goa
March 24, 2014
RubyConf India 14 - Hospitality was anything but pleasant at The Lalit resort and spa, Goa, we had pretty bitter experience and would like to captu...
Change for eventual failure
February 17, 2013
I have always believed in software functionality being ZERO or ONE. It means that either it will work or it will not, very well..! people argue tha...
Tuning performance with Java - on Linux systems
December 03, 2012
I love java, rather jvm - well, as technology and have been making use of it. Java world is full of rock solid implementations about technologies a...
Engineering at hoppr - technologies we use...
November 29, 2012
At hoppr we get checkins over SMS and USSD, soon our apps will launch across mediums and then we will open up other access mediums. At hoppr, we p...
Perceptions - what makes you stand out?
October 31, 2012
Source : Stable Diffusion (Revised on 13/02/2023) Thought Experiment on Perceived Image vs Projected Image Every time I look at people judg...
3 Rules for passionate people
October 25, 2012
In the past, I have been in discussion with people - where we tried to answer following questions
mongo or not to mongo
October 14, 2012
Literally means - to ask or not :-) But over here my context is bit different. After taking a brief break from ThoughtWorks, I joined hoppr, a dif...
Enterprise Infrastructure Series Part 4 - monitoring and provisioning automation
October 14, 2012
Unfortunately, I gone silent after 3 exciting posts on Enterprise Infrastructure Series, there were many events which caused this silence.. T...
Enterprise Infrastructure Series Part 3 - Configuration Automation
January 12, 2012
In the last two posts I went about how to get basic virutalization and why configuration management is necessary. In this part I will explain abo...
Enterprise Infrastructure Series Part 2 - Need for Configuration Management
January 01, 2012
I lead "Continuous Delivery" group aka DevOps group within ThoughtWorks. One of main principles we follow within our group is that we should automa...
Enterprise Infrastructure Series Part 1 - Bootstrap OpenVZ
December 31, 2011
We have been working with OpenVZ for almost 4 years now, and its just amazing that how this nice piece of technology not only provides 99% native v...
Enterprise Infrastructure Series
December 31, 2011
I have been working on setting up internal cloud with my team, we have been using many technologies to build all these things together.