How Balaji think, mapped · lit by their own logs · 3 showing
How you reason · the four moves
How you work · the qualities founders read for
Showing — it’s in their logs; tap for the receiptno %, no rank — evidence, not a score.
Milestones1 earned
Day 10 · Jul 23
The climbYou're moving.
The shape of your 12 entries
You're moving.
8 Jun → 24 Jul · valleys = stuck · peaks = shipped
Then → now
Then you were I was working on a laravel….
Now: Today's learning leadership in tech is….
Now: Today's learning leadership in tech is….
Every valley named in your own words. Nobody can fake a climb.
Balaji · the character an interview can’t show
12 logs over 7 weeks — read from their own words.
+ Only points up2 of 4 traits shown · reasons across 2 of 4 moves
Character · what an interview can’t reach
✓Shown
Honest when it's not working
3 stuck and 0 hard days, logged plainly instead of hidden.
Proof · from their own logs
11 Jun
22 Jul
23 Jul
◇Not yet
Adjusts — updates when the evidence changes
No change-of-mind logged yet — not a mark against them, just not yet on the page.
◇Not yet
Lifts other people's work
Reads plenty (20 reactions) but hasn't yet weighed in on anyone's thinking — not a mark against them, just not yet on the page.
✓Shown
Makes the tools better
2 reports they filed got fixed — they improve what they use, not just what they're paid to.
Proof · reports they got fixed
4 Aug
4 Aug
The judgment behind it ↓
And the technical judgment holds up
Evidence0
Alternative2
Assumption2
Tradeoff0
Showed up · 11 days
3 stuck + 0 hard days, logged anyway. Nobody farms honest bad days — that’s why this counts and a streak doesn’t.
A hard day, in their words
Morning. 5.40 AM stuck at MySQL connection error, this site must be live 5 hours before as per canadian time, but it's still stuck with one basic error.After lot debugging which in
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Recent logs12
Free write
Today's learning
leadership in tech is not about knowing everything
it's about creating a team that can figure things out without you
good leaders don't become the bottleneck
they create clarity
they build trust
they make others better
someone said,
the goal is not to be needed forever
the goal is to make yourself replaceable
I saw it in a YouTube video,
And realized helping others rise will rise your position
been thinking about that today.
Mistake
23000 rupess gone within 1 second.
I was building a copy trader software for my client, the work was simple , user will only place trade in one demat account and the same order should be placed in other connected accounts ,
My problem is how could I implement this using the API from like Dham, upstox , Groww.
After building that , i connected the real api instead sandbox because sandbox does support the postback api.
I was almost about to test the entire system later realized client gave me the real account which he was regularly trading.
If my software make one wrong api call , he might loose all his bets
So I asked client for new fresh account with less or no funds, that's how we stopped a disaster
Stuck
I brainstromed the entire app structure, it has colleges page, exams, reeviws, institutes and seo meta data for all pages. So i tried to store them in json files inside the tables
Database design for collegefynder, it is a content heavy platform so i dont know what tables to be created?
I think using json to store data was a wrong idea for a relational database, because we are losing the power of creating relations, filteration and reason why we chose postgres on the first day
Thinking lazy and try to dump all the data in json instead of column was the real cause. So I went with my coding agent and spent a day to design the database schema.
Free write
An LLM is a Brain of an Ai model whereas AI agent is made using an AI LLM like claude sonnet, deepseek, we can use any model for AI agent based on our requirement, because AI agent is like body and LLM is the brain in the context of human body.
Decided
Day 01 : of CollegeFynder, This is a kind of Big challenge, i need to decided a tech architecture that can handle a website with 60k+ college listings with all the details, A backend that can withstand heavy traffic. A DB that can handle both relational and non relation data, i was confused and later i decided to go with NEXT, NEST with DB as postgres along with Redis.
There were other options, but i am not good at it and the tech stack i had chose was perfect. it is always a better to work with what you know well, unless its necessary to switch
NEXT is a react framework that works well for seo related sites, since we are listing 60K+ colleges , this is a plus point.. I used Postgres because of its flexability, mongoDB is not suitable as our DB has too much relational data that links from 0one table to other. I am not sure about docker, i am planning to add it , but this decision have time, i will pass it now/
I assume that this tech stack will be fine for this project.
I gave up Mysql , even though i regularly use it along with my projects
Decided
I picked Tailwind over Plain CSS / modules.
Tailwind offers a prebuilt designs like buttons, cards and animations, easy to maitain( you need not to open a big css file or folders), low code, since it is a fresh project i am not bound to use plain css. Tailwind is Developer friendly and productive compared to Plain css · I'll know I was right in 2 weeks if: 1. i can build new pages quickly
2.i have written very little custom CSS, styling changes are easy to make
3.i had not spent time debugging CSS specificity or unused styles.
Free write
I was building risestable.com using React. However, I couldn't build the backend because I don't have a server to host it. To work around this, I decided to use a Google Form as the backend and integrate it into my custom-themed form.
Unfortunately, I got stuck on this for a long time because I kept running into multiple errors. Most of the issues were caused by small mismatches between the options in my custom form and the corresponding options in the Google Form.
At first, I assumed that matching the field IDs would be enough for the submissions to work correctly. Later, I realized that Google Forms requires the option values to match exactly, including capitalization and spelling. In other words, the option values are case-sensitive, so even a small difference causes the submission to fail.
Free write
Honestly today I felt dumb by not doing this Few days back I built a website and made it live, i submitted to Google search console for indexing,Technical seo was perfect, I did some keyword research and make sure SEO gets 100 in pagespeed test.But one forgotten thingy , yeah I forgot to add robots.txt and sitemap.xml ,Now the indexing was not done and not showing up in google.What an chaos, i did nice design, good technical seo and others but one forgotten move, it's costing my credibility
Stuck
Morning. 5.40 AM stuck at MySQL connection error, this site must be live 5 hours before as per canadian time, but it's still stuck with one basic error.After lot debugging which includes config clearing,Recreating users for db. Changing passwords, And while using the terminal I found out i named the db with uppercase at start so I am using lower case in .env One small letter runied my peace. Honestly, the problems are very small when look at it with patience 🥺
Learned
I learnt about deploy keys from GitHub , an I used webhook to form GitHub to run a custom script inside the vps server , so my app will have have latest code when I commit with new dependencies and migrations.I know better ways are there but I am exploring different ways to deploy
Learned
How to get a meta APIs for whatsapp from Creating marketing campaign software
Thinking
I was working on a laravel project , forgot to run migrations, changes were not showing up and got some db errors later ran migrations and cleared the cache.
