Bhardwaj Rish

You're tasked to design a hotel room. You start with a bare room, and you have to turn it into a fully functioning hotel room. What do you do? From memory, you know what hotel rooms have: a bed, a toilet, a cupboard, a shower. All the bare minimal functional things. You remember you like the bathmat at a hotel you stayed at a year ago.  You put it all together and you get a hotel room. It works, but it's really just the basics.  It solves the the obvious problems, but it misses the actual experience. When thinking from memory, or without structure, you miss out on small details that make the experience go from being the bare minimum to very pleasant.  Specifically: A guest opens the door - what is the first thing they do? They probably look for the light switch - can they find it without thinking? They dig in their luggage to find a change of clothes - where do they place their baggage? What is their shower at this hotel like?  They need a place to keep their toiletr...

There’s a Indian tale of an elephant and 6 blindfolded people. Each is made to feel a different part of the elephant. One touches the bushy little tail and shouts, it’s a rope! Another touches its massive leg and shouts it’s a tree! One says it’s a spear, another says it’s a wall, and so on. Each person comes up with a different answer, based on the perspective they’re made to look at the giant from. Now you could say they’re all wrong, but that’s not true. The lesson I’m drawing: given the information they have, none of them is wrong. Each, in their own reality, is right. Life is much the same. If “life” is a massive blob filled with colors and objects and emotions that everyone gets a different pinhole to view and experience from, we’re all going to have different perspectives. Each person will establish their own ideals, belief systems, and rights-vs-wrongs. So everything that anyone ever does, is right . (right != morally correct) It is the right thing to do given their world, give...

June 2025 was the last time I wrote code by hand. And it is the last time I will have ever written code by hand in my life . Yikes! That's taken me a few days to sink in.  I remember my undergrad days when I'd code all night building Webmail  and Lifehacks .  I'd read up every design pattern, every article, scour StackOverflow for every question that remotely related to what I was doing, and naively try to apply it for my use case. In retrospect, I was learning how to build long term maintainable projects.  It was difficult, most examples I found online were either too easy, or too difficult to follow. It was an arduous, gradual process, but I believe that's what it takes for humans to get good at something. It's March 2026 now. 9 months since I last wrote code by hand. I have submitted over 5,000 lines of code at the company I joined a few months ago. I have made over 2,000 commits to personal projects . And every single one was written by an AI. I'm not vibe ...

There's this scene in Kung Fu Panda where Po asks his father - the goose who runs a noodle restaurant - what the secret ingredient in his renowned  Secret Ingredient Soup is . I expected the usual answer: love. But he says probably the wisest words I've heard in a movie: to make something special, you just have to believe it is special. (I absolutely love this movie) And that's it. Special is what you make it. That's new years eve. The sun rises the same it always does. Nature doesn't mark itself on this specific day celebrating another trip around the year. Humans just collectively decided that this is the day. We celebrate, we light firecrackers, we wish each other happy times.  What you believe to be special, is special. That's what traditions are. That's your birthday. That’s the exam you studied for two years for. That's the first day of your new job. That's the last day of your previous job. That's the day you get married. That's the da...

I left Google. I left Google!! :O Uff, that's taking a while to sink in. I walked around campus one last time, and the place is just full of memories. I spent exactly 6 years there. In one team. I took a project from proof of concept to production. And yet, I am as happy to leave as I was when I first joined! (read about how I felt when I got into Google  here .) What a full circle of emotion :D I have great things to say about Google, it really is a company that takes care of its employees. You get 3 meals a day, a gym and shower in every major city you travel to, colleagues from all around the world that become great friends, and social recognition from everyone you know. And yet, I chose to leave. Why, you ask? Well, we all want different things in different phases of our lives. In this phase of life, here's what I am looking for: At Google, I was in a 99 -> 99.99 project. Now, I want a 1 -> 99. I want a scale up where the company has roughly defined the domain they...

The future is smart glasses The future is smart glasses. It's obvious to me. This is going to happen. We wear prescription glasses for vision correction. We wear shades when its sunny. We know what glasses feel like.  Unlike the time the phone was first introduced, glasses already exist.  Humanity is just making these glasses  smarter . And the tech underneath is so, so cool. But I don't want that future. I think of the late 19th century when pocket watches became an everyday object. "These kids, they're not free; time controls their life", the older people must have said. And yet, the ability to meet people at a specified time is useful. It was a net positive in progressing civilization. Then came the mobile phones and smart watches. We live with them. We live by them. I can find information, make notes, set alarms, talk to anyone I want. Sure there are bad things with mobiles. We're constantly distracted, we've lost the ability to navigate, we no longe...

I took 9 weeks off of work, and I loved it. Here are my learnings: My ideal 'Year Off': some people take a year off to travel. My year off would be heads down building stuff for fun. I'd make a ton of these tiny rc cars , build this trash can that catches your trash , and so. many. fun. apps. This stuff makes me happy. I like side quests, a lot. My side quest can't become my main quest. I gotta have a side going at all times. It keeps me excited. Not having enough time to work on the side quests keeps them interesting. If my side quest becomes my main thing, then it's just another job, and I end up having a new thing on the side. Don't make your respite your target source of income. I made Intention because it let me write code when my primary job didn't give me a greenfield project. And I loved it. Then I pivoted and tried to make it make money for me, and that me sad - because now it became all about marketing and getting users.  (..it is a contradiction ...

The world we live in today is a herd market. The moment someone finds gold, the herd rushes down the same path. We’re all eating the same dish, just in different flavors. It’s like a chef discovering pasta. The instant people fall in love with little wheat cylinders, every chef puts pasta on their menu. One makes spirals, one makes tiny cylinders, another makes massive cylinders. The shape changes - but it’s all pasta. The key is, it’s the same underlying ‘unlock’: people like wheat in shapes. And that’s exactly what’s happening in tech. At the scale of large companies, we have 10 companies building the same LLM. We have 5 apps serving the same short form content. Zoom in to individual indie hackers and small companies. The moment this simple habit tracker app started making money - the market was flooded with ‘simple’ habit trackers. Same with this AI Calorie tracking app, and the same with my Lifehacks app that I built years ago. Zoom in further to individual content creators. Dif...

I spent a day at Automatica, one of the world's largest robotics automation + photonics trade shows hosted in Munich once every two years. Here are my notes from it: Hooooly cow there are so many companies in the world! There were about 900 robotics automation companies, and 1200 photonics companies (!!). I really liked stepping out of my little software world to see that there is so much more tangible/physical world tech going on in the world. The robotics automation world seems to be split into 3 parts: The arm manufacturers - they make the arms, and sell them to system integrators The robot fingers (or any special grip, suction cup etc) manufacturers - they sell to system integrators too The system integrators - they go out to find customers, beverage factories, food industries and the like that need automation for specific use cases The system integrators operate on finding niches, and there are 2 types of niches: 1. Country / localization as a niche.  "We serve customers ...