Growth Notes: 20th October 2025 - 26th October 2025

This week was full of celebrations, enjoyment and travel. Although, I could've studied more, read more and solved a few more problems, I chose not to. I spent time with my family, relaxed and enjoyed the festival.

While the pressure was off, I think this week, the growth was more from a personal/social prespective rather than professional perspective. During celebrations, I found myself questioning the sentences that were being said in conversations casually. Wondered how people usually think (not always with logic) and how unware we often are that thinking logically is being missed.

Initiatives

While finding resources for reading, I remembered that I had read a few essays from the Sequences Highlights but never finished all of them. So, I've set a goal to read all the essays till the end of this year (31st Dec, 2025). Here's my summary of The Lens That Sees Its Flaws (first essay):

Reading List

1. Effective Context Enginnering for AI agents. An article from Engineering team at Anthropic, explaining why prompt engineering isn't enough, and how context engineering can be used to effectively provide enough context to an AI agent in minimal set of tokens, such that it can take good decisions and achieve desirable outcome.

2. Use the saw, fear the saw. I think this resonates with the quote from Spider-Man movie - "With great power comes great responsibility". But this can be in context of anything - a techonology, a weapon or a tool for that matter, what is important that we shouldn't stop making tools that we think are dangerous, rather we should start using them judiciously.

3. One Year with Next.js App Router — Why We're Moving On (via). I'll have to give it one more read, with attention to details on examples to clearly understand what difficulties were faced with Nextjs and how migrating to Tanstack start helped. The good part is that code snippets are colored based on client/server components, so its easier to distinguish between the two.

4. Build Your Own Database (via). A very good explainer that walks through each step of creating a simple database, and why optimisations are made in databases with examples. The interative examples are really great to visualize each concept.

5. The Lens That Sees Its Flaws. Attached my summary above. Read my post on X.

Quotes

From The Lens That Sees Its Flaws:

Mice can see, but they can't understand seeing. You can understand seeing, and because of that, you can do things that mice cannot do. Take a moment to marvel at this, for it is indeed marvelous.

From Use the saw, fear the saw:

I use the saw, I fear the saw. I have handmade furniture, and I have all my limbs.