My posts on design.

I write about anything and everything that interests me.

designdevgrowthjournal
Pixel-art blue orb floats above a reflective lake beneath a starry, moonlit sky, with cursor.

How to build an interactive Grok Bot-like avatar

Build a Grok Bot-like avatar with SVG, Astro, and React. Add cursor tracking, expressive eyes, protective winks, and natural idle animations.

Person holding a glowing string connected to floating star, moon, and cloud-shaped balloons in a blue sky.

Where to draw the line between Imitation and Inspiration?

AI commoditized execution, so "taste" is the new moat. The programmer's version: imitation is copy by value, inspiration is copy by reference.

Hands reach toward a glowing vintage computer enclosed in a glass dome, surrounded by stars.

Assume the Endpoint Is Hostile

Lakhs of government PCs can reach the core, each trusting whoever sits in front of it. Borrow Apple's closed model and make the wrong move unavailable.

Illustrated workers pass bricks up a ramp while building a red domed structure with scaffolding.

GitHub for Government Work

The multi-year, single-vendor RFP is the root cause. Treat the core platform as an open commons: small priced tasks, paid per merged pull request.

Vintage red-and-cream technical illustration of interlocking gears, clockwork mechanisms, and circular engineering diagrams.

How I'd Build Government Software That Doesn't Fall Over

You don't fix a meltdown with experts parachuting in after the breach. You fix it with defaults: a federated core, HTML-first frontends, private storage.

A towering server building drips pink goo as paper airplanes fill a vivid city sky.

BTS of CBSE's Infra Meltdown.

CBSE called its result-day collapse a cyberattack. The numbers say plain demand, the kind monolithic, one-vendor government IT can't survive.

A worker climbs a massive riveted steam machine beneath swirling orange clouds and flying papers.

Stop Fixing India's Exams

NEET leaked, CBSE's new marking system melted down, and 23.6% of young Indian graduates are jobless. We keep debugging an exam machine we should replace.

Four tech-style logos displayed atop classical stone columns against a starry cosmic backdrop.

I Tried 4 Search Engines So You Don't Have To

Here's the definitive guide to choosing between Orama, Pagefind, Meilisearch, and Google for your static site.