More time with A & L

A & L were here along with Ringo & Ash for the whole of this week. It was a lot of fun and bonding, with some ups and downs. 1D and Sunil also were able to make short visits, which was great. It feels like suddenly everyone decided to ensure our annual quota friend visits are fully used up before the year ends.

Workouts

I got in two sessions of gym workouts this week, which I was pretty happy with, given A & L were around. I also got a lot of indoor running behind them! My high pulls seem to have gotten better, but cleans need more work. I’m hoping to work on more focused drills to improve the technique for getting under the bar.

Utsav’s talk on long-form writing

I missed watching the talk live, but caught up on this excellent presentation by Utsav on his process for long-form writing. Lots of nice sketches/paintings to accompany the presentation. It seemed like everyone attending it live also enjoyed it a lot, from the chat transcripts made available.

Plugin to replay zoom chat transcript

To enjoy the banter in the talk I mentioned above, I created a bookmarklet that allows me to watch the transcript of any zoom recording replayed alongside the video, when they are both uploaded to Google Drive with public access permissions.

I started writing it by hand as an exercise in not using any AI assistance, but I ran out of time allotted and wanted nicer looking UI and better UX for the replay which Claude was able to help finish, for me. Writing the code to parse the chat transcript (by hand) took longer than expected because of inconsistencies in the transcript that Zoom generated.

Blog newsletter needed a fix

I had a spam sign-up on the newsletter, but hadn’t had the time to remove it before the newsletter scheduled time. The send failed because the email ID was an @example.com email address. Resend catches these and refuses to broadcast (send) to an audience that includes such an email ID.

{
  "statusCode": 422,
  "message": "The audience you are sending contains a contact with an email address ending in `@example.com`. Please use our testing email address instead. See our documentation for more information.",
  "name": "validation_error"
}

I manually sent out this edition, and fixed the sign-up processing code to ignore these kinds of emails for the future.