Bhardwaj Rish

One doesn't stumble into greatness. Everything great takes solid effort. And effort takes hours. But where do you find those hours? The human schedule is full of things that keep us away from putting in those hours. Eat, exercise, hygiene, social, mental well-being, you name it. A usual day (at best) in most of my software engineer friends' lives. When I was in 11th and 12th grade, my parents made it possible for me to just study, and care for nothing else in the world. Those were the years I put in the most hours to a discipline than I ever have. There was no concept of study life balance . That study life balance was to come after 2 years of this solid grind once you got admitted to a top tier university. Until then, weekdays meant school all day and study all evening. Weekends meant study all day and study all night. And I miss that. - The reason most of us never get to put in any solid effort, raw hours, in pursuit of getting really good at something is because humans an...

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...