Week notes - Still June?

Great food and a kick-up

Divya Shivaram

Jun 24, 2025

Hey it’s not Wednesday yet and week note is ready to go! This is a win, isn’t it?

my song of the week is November Rain. I’ll share why in a bit.

But first…

Win: I did a kick-up all by myself last week!

A kick up is where I face the wall, bend down and kick myself up to touch the wall with my legs, standing upside down.

Ok I have a video. I did a screen recording of the video because I felt too lazy to use a proper video software.

I also did a few knee pushups. Some history: I have been doing push up negatives for a few weeks now, but pushing myself up has been a challenge. This is the first time I was able to do it. Felt quite proud. I have some posture correction to do before I attempt the full pushup - my back is hinged up, it should be more flat.

I’m proud of how far I’ve come :))

That being said, I did cut classes throughout the week. I’m not proud of that, but I should be back in action from Thursday again. The more classes I miss, the harder it feels to get back. These videos help push me though.

We visited Doff pub last week. The food has significantly improved there and we loved absolutely everything we had. The lemon & coriander chicken, mushroom pizza, peri peri fries, orange lemonade etc. It’s a sports bar, so they played tennis on one screen, cricket on one and football on another.

I think I really like football, maybe I’ll start watching sports?

No guesses for what TV show I was binge watching (again). Ted Lasso.

This was my third run, and I felt the same warm, fuzzy feels as I did the first time around. Did I already mention this in my previous week note? Absolutely love every single character in this show. I went so far as to call it my most favourite TV show ever. EVER.

Thanks to this recent watch, I keep saying poopeh, in a funny accent.

We also watched Jigarthanda XX (again). It’s such a good movie, I can’t recommend it enough, if you haven’t watched it.

Abhinay and I also watched The Truman show after all these years! We’ve known about this movie since forever, but somehow neither of us had watched it. It feels extra relevant in today’s age. I feel like we have taken that movie as a SOP for life on the internet now.

The absolute highlight of last week was however, the food we ate at Tanjore Tiffins, Domlur. We had dosa, chicken curry, biryani, and copious amounts of buttermilk. YUM. Abhinay and Noddy chose to have the goli soda instead.

Definitely going to be our go-to for biryani from now on.

On our way to Domlur Abhinay started playing Eminem songs in the car. After how long! Singing along to love the way you lie and lose yourself among other songs felt like such a trip. Turns out Noddy has been a big fan since school. Given his age, I have no doubt haha. I too started listening to Eminem when I was in high school.

It’s why profanity is a part of my vocabulary, tbf.

Speaking of which, I’ve been trying to not swear though, I don’t know why. I think people around are making me think that adults don’t swear as much? Let’s see. I’m not fully convinced with this try.

Work-wise I haven’t been sharing much. It’s actually going quite good. It’s the only thing I do in a day when I’m not bed rotting watching some tv show, or eating take out food. It feels good to have a todo list. I use todoist, in case anyone’s curious.

I’m organising things for Michelle. The processes have been very ad-hoc, so over the last week I’ve been collecting information from their current devs and them, setting up repository in their own org on Github, adding README, and plenty other essential internal documentation. We have also been prioritising everything with two goals in mind - gear up for beta, make it easy to onboard a new dev. I love this work.

Yesterday we documented the entire production setup from AWS. For some reason they had a different docker file for every service running on the server, it was a puzzle to figure out. GG.

Genledger client work is coming along well too. Arvind and I zeroed in on the architecture and are super happy with the outcome!

What else is happening in life?

Haven’t vibe coded outside work.

We’re thinking of doing a Chennai trip in the second week of July. Wondering if we should just book an airbnb and take babies along :))

I’m thinking about discontinuing chatGPT subscription and stick to just cursor for chats too. I don’t see myself going back too much to older chats these days. And most times I just use the private chat option to make sure it does not use any history. Also Gemini is pretty much my go-to for all UX copy, document creation, design feedback related work.

pardon my dirty screen, but that’s sonnet appreciating gemini’s feedback on the ux ahahah

I’m thinking maybe instead of trying build a Granola for myself, I can pay for that instead of GPT hehe. It’s cheaper per person when we subscribe as a team. Still considering.

I’m starting to understand the answer to people asking “I could just ask an LLM to write this software for me, why should I pay”. I think I’ve always known, but it’s slowly coming to me in words.

My obsidian setup is out of whack and requires some clean-up. Usually when this happens, I abandon and jump ship or continue to pile on the unorganised garbage. I really don’t want to jump ship though, I love this software.

I’ve been listening to November Rain on repeat, thanks to Shrayas’s week note from last weekend! No complaints there. I’m listening to it as I write now too. And I’m SO GLAD to have been the one to introduce him to the ultimate Orion!