Bhardwaj Rish

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 ...

Me: I have a png. black lines with transparent background. Can you help write python code to make the black lines slightly more thick please? Claude: Yeah, here's the python file.  Me: Ah, can you just run it for me? I've attached the file image, it's a turtle. Claude: I've run into an error. I can't find the file's name. (keeps thinking) It seems like I can't directly access the uploaded file through the analysis tool. This might be a limitation of how files are handled in this environment . Let me think of alternative approaches: I could create an HTML artifact that allows the user to upload the image and process it in the browser I could provide them with JavaScript code they can run locally I think the best approach would be to create an interactive HTML artifact that lets them upload their image and see the result processed in real-time. Me: Claude: Here's the tool you can upload your file to. (and then I upload the turtle) -- Yikes, this is good....

Claude Code blew my mind. It is SO good! I spent about a day with Claude Code fixing up old bugs on my website that I never made time to fix. The fixes are all in my private repo, but they were all the same bugs listed in the public one here . What blew my mind is my mental shift from coding things myself to just asking it to do them for me. 10 minutes in and I stopped writing code myself. It still takes some back and forth, and it doesn't yet get everything right, but the fact that I didn't have to write code myself was a big shift. What Claude Code did Made my website responsive.  My website had a whole lot responsiveness problems . CSS is a tedious little monster and so I never got myself to learn Bootstrap and other front end frameworks. With Claude Code, I just had to tell it in English what I wanted it to do, and it did them exactly as I wanted them. No more CSS for me! Added Dark Mode. I've always wanted dark mode. With Claude Opus 4 it basically three shotted it,...

These are notes from when I went to The Zurich AI conference 2025. This was the first time I've attended a conference solely for networking. Here's what I learned/experienced: The people Of the ±200 people that attended, I interacted with very few product/startup people, researchers / engineers, and especially no engineers from big tech. There were primarily 2 types of people:  Business hunters / leads of consultancies and agencies, Management at traditional businesses (insurance, data companies). It seemed like many traditional businesses are actively trying to find use cases for AI, and so when I asked them what they're doing with AI I got one of two responses: It's confidential. Long complicated sentences that I couldn't make simple sense of. This might be naive, but it sounded to me like they're forcing AI use cases or trying to shoe horn it into their businesses, rather than having a solid business use case for it. I live in a small ecosystem at Big Tech. I...

tl;dr: I am a senior software engineer, and I know I can easily do this work for the rest of my life. So, it's time to shake it up. - Big tech "levels" people, putting them in categories of seniority. I've reached the "terminal" level at BigTech - the Senior Software Engineer. A place where a significant number of software engineers spend their lives. I know for a fact that I can do this work at this level for the rest of my life. The tech industry has* jobs at this level. Given where I am today, a 30 year old with limited responsibilities, I have the freedom to shake it up.  Join a startup, change my role, start all over, work as a barista, work at a farm. The worst that I can do is stay where I am, that is, continue with my current team. Slightly better is to change within BigTech, but I'm pretty confident it'll be the same problems any team I switch to. So, I must shake it up. Do something where I don't know what that future will be.  I can al...

Growth at my time at BigTech meant several things to me: Become the person everyone in my working radius knows. Be responsible for a good chunk of work, and in turn get promoted for it. Learn how a big org works, and learn to be effective in them. Eventually be in the room that leaders make decisions. Based on these metrics for growth, here's what I learned you need: Visibility. Visibility Visibility. Assuming you're already a top tier engineer, a team lead, and a go-to person in your project, here's how you get visibility: Be where leaders are. Don't try to play the ladder game from a remote office. It's futile. It's like trying to climb an extra greasy ladder. You will eventually get up there, but no one will recognize nor reward you for having climbed the greasy variant. Look where leaders are looking. Don't work on things you think are important. Don't work on things your users think are important. Work on things leadership thinks are important. T...

Over the last 2 months with Claude Pro I've reached the point where I work with AI the way I work with humans. I'm working on a fairly non-standard app - it's got a long living foreground service and interacts with the device from that service. And I'm surprised how helpful it has been for this non-standard use case. Simple tasks First, for simple tasks, I tell the AI what to do and ask it explicitly not to write code. We first review what it's going to do before letting it code. It takes us about 2 to 3 iterations, and then it codes. For most tasks, it's really good. The reviewing started as a way to work around Claude's tight token limit, but now it's just a really good tool to make sure Claude and I are on the same page. This is exactly what I do at work with my team. Every meeting is us writing high level bullets of what they will work on, and once we're on the same page, I just review their code - which usually takes them 1-2 days to come back w...

Before we know it, everything around us is going to change. Here are my notes as of Jan 2025: We live in a world where computers can communicate more naturally, professionally, and even compassionately than most people. Computers have become sorcerers of words, and yet everyone is going about their lives as if nothing has happened. It feels like AI is that Earth shattering asteroid headed straight towards us from the movie Don't Look Up. If you haven't see the movie, please watch it. It’s a brilliant take on human nature. Half the people don’t believe AI will change anything. A few are sounding the alarm. And politicians? They’re doing what they do best—grabbing more power. Unfortunately we live in a hyper world, and people are tired of hypes. In 5 years, we've had Web3 Crypto NFTs AI may be hype, but for good reason. There's substance here. Of course, Rule 34 of the Internet prevails. I find it amusing that there aren't killer AI applications yet, except search and...

What am (A)I to do?

Our team of 3 at big tech was constantly bombarded with the next big fire to put out on a weekly basis, requiring us to shift focus as soon as something came up. In the last 2 months, I've used the following strategy on  how we work , and we've found this very effective. No fancy tools, no agile sprint jargon, just the barebones of what made sense to us. Once you've figured out what the team needs to roughly do in the next year, then it's all about execution. Here's what our week looks like. Monday Morning = Plan We meet on Monday morning at a time most convenient to all and decide the agenda for the week. Each team member takes about 5-10 minutes. A minute on the past week Is there something that came up because of which you couldn't complete the planned work? Agenda for the next week Was there something that came up during the past week that you noted important enough to work on immediately? What's your focus for this week? Aim Plan only as much as you ca...

To plan better, try this .

"Now think of the person that runs the portable restrooms business. At construction sites or concert halls, you have these portable toilets everywhere - I'm certain the person never set out with a deep passion for toilets when building this business. No, it's business, for business' sake, and that business has an overall positive influence on society. The means of building a business, that is, the product you build or the service you provide is merely the vehicle. And depending on where you want to go, there is no shame in the choice of vehicle taken. As long as you're doing business ". It was happenstance how I met Maylon, but his analogy stuck with me. I was driving back home from the office while working in Seattle, when I stopped at a gas station. Now I was struggling to refuel this rental car, and up comes this massive Ford F-150 on the opposite side. The man inside, dressed in classic business attire - a fitting shirt with creaseless pants, hair sleek li...

Finding my partner feels more like finding  my kind . I’m this mix of an Indian boy with Indian familial ties, but European hobbies and a European way of leading life. I've lived in both worlds for 15 years each. There aren't many that have seen and lived in both worlds, and experienced completely different ways of life. Maybe I am asking for too much, but I don’t understand why one wouldn’t. If I have high standards for most things that I do in life, why wouldn’t I hope or want my partner to think from the same lens? Here's my value system. Be generally optimistic. A positive, happy person whose baseline state is to lean towards an optimistic outlook towards everything in life. Be fit. If one is not physically fit, there's low chance they're mentally fit. Plus, being fit shows discipline and consistency. Be hard working. Everything in life is a project. From raising children, to picking up groceries weekly, to building a home. And no one wants to work with a lazy ...

"Why do you want to move?", he asked me.  --- One of the things humans try to do is control and predict every little aspect of their life. From relationships, to work, to weather, to time. We constantly live under the illusion that knowing what will happen and preparing for it is a possibility. And then life surprises you and you see you had little control in the first place. However, there are things I feel you can do to position yourself in such a way that increases the chances of your desired outcome. What that means is if you're hoping to learn to speak German, it makes very little sense to live in India. You could however position yourself such that you move to Germany, or find a job at a German institute, and your chances of speaking the language dramatically increase. Just in the same way, if you're hoping to find love - to find an Indian partner who has lived a life much like yours, you have a much higher chance if you position yourself in a country where ther...

I’ve been in India for the past two months now, and for the first time in my life, I can imagine myself live here again. Nothing drastic has changed in my day to day life, nor in either of the nations per se, but maybe I’ve had enough time to experience the flip-side to know what India’s strengths are. I’ve always acknowledged how I get the chance to live in two different worlds. But this is the very first time I’ve realized I also lead two different lives each time I switch countries. For me, Germany is a nation where you put the self first - you learn about yourself as an individual. It’s also a country where you learn to live life in the way they show us in movies - walks in parks, play sports any time of the day, vacations in every season the climate has to offer, meetups at little cafes with chairs out on the street. Work is secondary, rarely one’s primary driver in life. Therefore, it is also rarely one’s identity. The country and the mindset is averse to change. The philosophy h...

I have a bold claim to make: As compared to Europe, it's much easier to get and keep fit in India. But it's far less likely. Easier because: Relatability In India, you can relate to the others' bodies. Everyone around you has the same body style, our carb heavy diet that causes so many of us to be skinny fat. And so when you go to a calisthenics gym, it really helps to be able to look around and see that a person who looks like you is fit . That shines hope, telling you that it is possible in the first place. In Europe, the same is counterproductive. Looking at the European's low body fat, tall yet muscular physique makes me think they're just born with it. (Which is not true. I suppose they really do have great genes, but their meat heavy diet and walkable/cycleable cities help with keeping fit). Food is easier in India. You know your food here. You know the spices we use and how it tastes. It's that familiar feeling of eating something you know, as opposed to...