Life has been too much on steroids lately, and I’m off to meet the mountains again. Bunch of tracks going on!
Main track – Stripe
Recently hit the three-month mark at Stripe, and I seem to be liking it now - although the early days were frustrating. Some background - I joined the Risk organization of Stripe in the Verifications vertical. We try to ensure that Stripe users are who they really say they are and that we remain compliant with the countries we operate in.
Coming from early-stage startups, I’ve always been used to solving really broad problems. So naturally, in my first few weeks, it seemed like a very tiny and simple problem that we were solving in Verifications. Like, what even is verification - just send the data that users enter to government APIs, or OCR documents with an LLM, run it through a boolean expression evaluator, and that’s it. Naive, lol.
Verifications is a complex mammoth, and even if I were allowed to publicly share the nitty-gritties of it, it would take several posts to even touch the surface. Overall, my first three months here have been about absorbing the culture, building intuition for the engineering ecosystem and practices, figuring out the meaning of “impact,” and of course, making sense of the nifty cryptic acronyms. It was intimidating at first, but I’m getting a hang of things now.
I also used to think that work at bigger companies is relatively “chill” and “organized.” Again, naive. If you’re working as an engineer in fintech, especially in an ops-heavy function like Risk, you’ll always be on your toes. Even more so if you’re passionate about moving manual work to automation and codified processes - which, if you know anything about me, I am. I absolutely hate doing and seeing people do the same things again and again.
There’s also been an element of not-knowing-enough that’s been keeping me up at night. Not having a full understanding of the systems you work with is not a good feeling - and I’ve been trying to change that as soon as possible. It’s definitely been hectic. My first project reached a decently conclusive checkpoint this week, and I feel okay about it right now.
Passion tracks
Over the past five months, I’ve been working with the awesome team at Step Up For India, trying to contribute to their wonderful mission of transforming the education landscape in India. It’s a large and long-term mission, which they’ve started by teaching English to children and teachers in government schools - especially in those heavy on vernacular languages. They’ve reached over 30K teachers and over 700K students. Pretty cool, no? I’ve been helping out with some of their tech infrastructure - some website work, some consulting, some automation. It’s been awesome collaborating with them, and I hope it adds up to help their cause in some way. We’ll hopefully go live with some parts of the work this week, and I’m excited to finally see the collaboration come to life.
Another thing that’s going live in the next two weeks is PARI – People’s Archive of Rural India’s new website. Over the past year, I’ve been advising on the tech architecture for PARI. My observation working with PARI is that the scale these guys deal with is unimaginable and extremely unique. They have scale from a traffic perspective, from a CMS perspective, and from a “languages” perspective. Designing applications that have a multilingual interface and distributed multilingual storage - while keeping them performant, DRY, and intelligent - has been a very different experience.
Finally, on the passion front, I’m still genuinely surprised that there’s not a single good proactive AI assistant in the market. Is it really an unsolvable problem? We’ll find out! I’m still building on the side - mainly to improve my productivity at Stripe. I’m optimistic about it; it’s looking promising, mostly because I really have a productivity problem right now. I genuinely feel I can do a lot more. Planning to drop something by the end of this year. Let’s see!
Life stuff
The main reason I’ve been able to run life on steroids is because I’ve successfully stopped smoking. Can you imagine - I used to spend two hours a day just repeatedly going down to the smoking zone, putting smoke in my lungs, and coming back. It’s been almost three months since I quit smoking, and before you laugh, this time it’s for real.
I feel disgusted by smoke and the idea of smoking now. I see the trap, and I can taste the freedom I have when I’m not a smoker. Surely not going back to being a miserable addict after this. Thanks to the QuitSure app that fundamentally made me dislike smoking. Try it out if you want to quit too - trust me, you want to. Stop fooling yourself. Saying this after five years of fooling myself every day.
I remember saying things like:
- “Smoking is my best friend who always accompanies me.”
- “I live a healthy life otherwise. I can compensate by working out.”
- “Nicotine increases my testosterone and makes me more masculine.”
- “I love smoking and I’m okay with the risks associated with it.”
All deceptions and delusions, lol. Just stop lying to yourself and accept that you’re addicted to a drug and your mind is playing games with you because it cannot think beyond the neurochemical slavery of nicotine.
For me, it’s been an awesome three months being a non-smoker. Workouts have become enjoyable, food tastes better, aromas of mud, trees, and chai feel stronger, sleep is better, and most importantly, I have two extra hours in the day. I’ve been going out of Bangalore every weekend - Pondy, Coorg, Sivasamudra, Hogenakkar and a lot more.
Travel reminds me - another exciting thing - I finally got a car after avoiding it for almost six years. It’s a Honda Elevate Signature Black - I call it the Monolith. Monolith is meant to accommodate all my travel needs because of the simplicity of its engine architecture, the manual transmission, and its blocky monolithic design. Been working with Satabdi, a designer friend, who’s helping me design a metallic nameplate for Monolith.
Funnily, after I got Monolith, the Honda folks enrolled me in a lucky draw, and I happened to win a free electric Honda Activa. Serendipity at its best - I call it Smoothie, because of how smoothly it came to me and how smoothly it rides. The name was suggested by a friend who wanted me to call it Smooth Sister, inspired by the name of my motorcycle - Dark Sister.
Shadow used to love roaming around in the car, sitting like a king on the back seat and peeping out of the window. I feel a little sad that Shadow isn’t here anymore to roam around in my car. He’d have loved it.
Table Tennis
Having played quite seriously in school, semi-seriously in college, and almost not at all after that, I’ve started playing table tennis again. The main friction in not playing was the lack of good opponents - opponents who were challenging to play against. I decided to solve that problem by simply making the game harder for myself. Recently moved to the penhold grip, and it’s been a blast. I’ve been trying to be extremely creative - experimenting with new shots, new serves, new strategies. It’s felt like a completely different game.
I’ve also been watching a lot of pro table tennis lately to learn and be part of the scene. Xu Xin is my new favourite - what an artist at play. I love people who play sports as art more than competition, and yet compete at the highest level. Planning to get back to tournaments in 2026 - super excited.
On my way to trek to Deorital Chandrashila right now, almost ready to disconnect from the intensity and reunite with the mountains. But this feeling of having had such an intense three months and then reflecting on it makes me feel that I’ll always chase a fast-paced life where every morning I’m on my toes. IDK though, might feel completely the opposite in a few months. As long as I’m reflecting, it’s great, I guess!