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Created: 2026-05-01 Updated: 2026-05-01 5 min read

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The Context

April 2026

April was not great but not bad either. It was a quiet month for me. The theme of the month for me is confusion. I am just confused, have no idea what to do next, a lot of fear, a lot of self-doubts.

Like I said in my last month’s update, I kept continuing my Kafka and data-driven architecture dump. Whenever I get an idea of a data design pattern or some Kafka-related configuration that I would have arrived at intuitively using first principles before, I am just googling that idea, looking at reference books to know the exact name and implementations and I check what can be improved in my implementation when compared to the pre-existing implementations. I got this new perspective after reading the log. This is a long read (takes roughly 2-3 hrs) to get through, but once the idea that any data can be represented as a log/stream sinks in, it opens up a lot of ways to deal with the data. There are a few primitives that after I understanding why they exists like log (don’t confuse with the error-logging log), difference between commands and queries, events, why events should drive an architecture, I was able to intuitively arrive at the existing solutions that have been in place over the last decade. Not perfect but somewhere closer to what exists. I implemented transactional outbox, dead letter queue, Command Query Responsibility Segregation (CQRS), event sourcing. Learned about event sourcing and replaying events which I had read about in my Theory of Compilers coursework during engineering. This replaying of events is very common feature while building state machines and when we incorporate event sourcing coupled with CQRS, the event queue becomes the source of truth rather than the database, so the whole architectural perspective now shifts towards queue replication and queue consistency, just like how we think about the DB staying up. This is still a work in progress and whenever I get some ideas I go and try implementing them.

I was also trying to do a few dumb LLM-related experiments in my free time. There are a lot of use cases where you need to get the same deterministic web search output in your agent. Web searches are tricky because data keeps changing every minute. What if on every web search for the same queries you want the same search result or a configurable search result (configurations can be anything, you configure and expect the web search to behave that way)? I am just having fun and trying to figure out simple ways and see if it is possible to achieve this.

I had a lot of free time but I am slowly getting myself into a slightly darker space. I have a huge hurdle to cross in the next 2 months (54 days to be precise) and it gives me a lot of anxiety throughout the day as well as night terrors while sleeping. I am coping really badly by indulging in unhealthy food habits and doing whatever I can to just get through the days. So on a good day I code roughly 2 hrs, that too stretched throughout the day. Constantly distracted and intense panic attacks. But as usual I will get through it. I need to put in the hours else I cant better better.

As part of coping I took a month’s break from reading fiction and I have again started reading every day before going to sleep. Reading fiction helps me to not think of anything else which is what I need the most at this moment.

I notice that the number of blogs I read every day has drastically reduced. The main reason is my reduced tolerance to AI crap. There is a lot of content out there which dives into different parts of computer science but it takes a lot of effort to get through partly because it’s less yapping and more meat, unlike AI stuff which is more story-like with less content and more selling something stupid which needs very little cognitive load to get through. I need to read more blogs, articles, books on varied topics because I am starting to firmly believe that ideas arise from random places and it is very important to read and conceive varied ideas which will open up my mind to start thinking in directions that I didn’t know existed.

Thanks to this monthly update I at least have track of how awful the month was or how good the month was, but I see a need to have a rough idea of what I will read or work on every day apart from my day job. Not rigid but just a rough idea so that I am a bit more organized. Going to spend 5 minutes before going to sleep to plan out what I am going to learn/code for myself the next day which will act as a blueprint for me to follow and I will fit other things around that blueprint.

Interesting reads:

Books I read this month: