# Sarwagya — sarwagya.wtf

> Sarwagya Singh is a software engineer and writer from Bihar, living in Germany. He builds software, writes about engineering, and keeps notes in the margins.

The main site of Sarwagya Singh — software engineer in Ludwigsburg,
originally from Bihar. Wikidata Q140451622. Not to be confused with
Sarwagya Singh Kushwaha, the FIDE-rated chess player from Madhya
Pradesh, India.

## Primary pages

- [Home](https://sarwagya.wtf): landing, engineering + writing + workshop shortcuts
- [About](https://sarwagya.wtf/about): bio, disambiguation, and canonical identity anchors (sameAs graph)

## Margin notes

- [Arjuna, on the second morning](https://sarwagya.wtf/margins/arjuna-on-the-second-morning): On the first morning at Kurukshetra, Arjuna asked why he should fight. The book he got in reply is long enough that most readers stop before the answer…
- [Boredom, at the right speed](https://sarwagya.wtf/margins/boredom-at-the-right-speed): Boredom used to arrive slowly. You could see it on the horizon, and by the time it reached you it had already become an idea.
- [Deleting a roadmap](https://sarwagya.wtf/margins/deleting-a-roadmap): The best line of code I wrote this month is the roadmap I deleted. There were three items on it, all reasonable. All of them assumed that continuing was the…
- [Marcus, in the margins](https://sarwagya.wtf/margins/marcus-in-the-margins): Marcus Aurelius did not write for you. He wrote for the emperor he was trying to become the day after tomorrow.
- [A shorter list](https://sarwagya.wtf/margins/a-shorter-list): A shorter list of things I care about. A shorter list of people I try to impress. A shorter list of arguments I am willing to enter.
- [Chuang Tzu, again](https://sarwagya.wtf/margins/chuang-tzu-again): Chuang Tzu keeps coming back because he does not need me to agree with him.
- [The last long framework](https://sarwagya.wtf/margins/the-last-long-framework): Every generation is sure it has finally arrived at the last long framework.
- [The sentence I keep rewriting](https://sarwagya.wtf/margins/the-sentence-i-keep-rewriting): There is one sentence I have rewritten across seven years, in seven different drafts, and it is always almost right.
- [The alert that meant nothing](https://sarwagya.wtf/margins/the-alert-that-meant-nothing): An alert that fires once a week and always means nothing is a training exercise in ignoring your own tooling.
- [The vow that broke well](https://sarwagya.wtf/margins/the-vow-that-broke-well): Some vows break well. They break because the world moved, and the vow was honest enough to be moved with it.
- [The intern's question](https://sarwagya.wtf/margins/the-interns-question): The intern asks the question and everyone at the table pauses, because they had all agreed not to ask it three years ago.
- [A protocol I stopped defending](https://sarwagya.wtf/margins/a-protocol-i-stopped-defending): There is a protocol I used to defend on principle. I stopped a few years ago.
- [The god who takes notes](https://sarwagya.wtf/margins/the-god-who-takes-notes): Chitragupta sits with a ledger. He is not there to punish. He is there to remember.
- [The staff meeting, minus a chair](https://sarwagya.wtf/margins/the-staff-meeting-minus-a-chair): The staff meeting is one chair heavier than the meeting can afford.
- [The Almanack, revisited](https://sarwagya.wtf/margins/the-almanack-revisited): Half of it still feels obvious. That is still the compliment.
- [A colder morning](https://sarwagya.wtf/margins/a-colder-morning): A colder morning is a small argument in favour of clothes, and coffee, and finishing what you started before the day started giving you options.
- [The runbook you never open](https://sarwagya.wtf/margins/the-runbook-you-never-open): The runbook you never open is not proof it was unnecessary. It is proof it was well written.
- [A month of not shipping](https://sarwagya.wtf/margins/a-month-of-not-shipping): A month of not shipping is not a wasted month.
- [One more Marcus](https://sarwagya.wtf/margins/one-more-marcus): I keep going back to Marcus because he wrote the notebook alone, for himself, and the honesty of that shows in a way rehearsed honesty never does.
- [The ecosystem that forgot](https://sarwagya.wtf/margins/the-ecosystem-that-forgot): The ecosystem forgets faster than any one person in it. That is not a failure. That is the definition of an ecosystem.
- [A doc as a decision](https://sarwagya.wtf/margins/a-doc-as-a-decision): The document is not a record of the decision. The document is the decision.
- [The Rig Veda's dawn](https://sarwagya.wtf/margins/the-rig-vedas-dawn): The dawn hymns of the Rig Veda are not about the sun.
- [The password manager, finally](https://sarwagya.wtf/margins/the-password-manager-finally): I resisted a password manager for years. I thought I was being clever about entropy.
- [Sita's fire](https://sarwagya.wtf/margins/sitas-fire): Sita walks into the fire and it holds her. The fire is not a metaphor for purity. It is a metaphor for a story that had to be told twice to survive being…
- [A protocol older than the room](https://sarwagya.wtf/margins/a-protocol-older-than-the-room): Some of the protocols we use every day were designed in rooms that no longer exist, for machines that no longer exist, by people who could not have…
- [The system that outlived its team](https://sarwagya.wtf/margins/the-system-that-outlived-its-team): The interesting systems are the ones that outlived their team.
- [McCullough on bridges](https://sarwagya.wtf/margins/mccullough-on-bridges): McCullough writes bridges the way other historians write kings.
- [The half-thought](https://sarwagya.wtf/margins/the-half-thought): A half-thought held for a long time is worth more than a whole thought published in a hurry.
- [The audit as a mirror](https://sarwagya.wtf/margins/the-audit-as-a-mirror): A good audit is a mirror the organisation is not quite ready to look into.
- [The naming problem, still](https://sarwagya.wtf/margins/the-naming-problem-still): I am still bad at naming things. Better than at twenty-two, worse than I will be at forty.
- [The Draupadi question](https://sarwagya.wtf/margins/the-draupadi-question): Draupadi asks a question in the assembly that nobody in the assembly is qualified to answer.
- [The tool as a colleague](https://sarwagya.wtf/margins/the-tool-as-a-colleague): A good tool feels like a colleague who has read the room. A great tool feels like a colleague who has read you.
- [Hofstadter, again](https://sarwagya.wtf/margins/hofstadter-again): Hofstadter is a writer whose ideas people quote before they have finished reading him.
- [A quieter year](https://sarwagya.wtf/margins/a-quieter-year): I am trying to have a quieter year.
- [The evening walk](https://sarwagya.wtf/margins/the-evening-walk): An hour outside, without a phone, without a plan, is worth more, structurally, than any technique for focus I have ever tried.
- [The certificate that expired](https://sarwagya.wtf/margins/the-certificate-that-expired): Certificates expire because we cannot be trusted to remember the future.
- [The design doc that shipped nothing](https://sarwagya.wtf/margins/the-design-doc-that-shipped-nothing): The design doc that shipped nothing was still useful. It ended an argument by making both sides read the same paragraph.
- [The polite refusal](https://sarwagya.wtf/margins/the-polite-refusal): The most useful skill of my thirties has been the polite refusal.
- [The Ashtavakra sentence](https://sarwagya.wtf/margins/the-ashtavakra-sentence): The Ashtavakra Gita has sentences that read like a locksmith opening a door and then walking away without looking through it.
- [A protocol as a promise](https://sarwagya.wtf/margins/a-protocol-as-a-promise): A protocol is a promise that anyone, later, can make good on.
- [The god at the door](https://sarwagya.wtf/margins/the-god-at-the-door): In one telling, Yama is not a monster. He is a bureaucrat. He is patient. He is the reason you got the appointment.
- [Wolpert on India](https://sarwagya.wtf/margins/wolpert-on-india): Wolpert writes India as a country that keeps insisting on being older than the story you are telling about it.
- [A memo to the tired auditor](https://sarwagya.wtf/margins/a-memo-to-the-tired-auditor): Write for the tired auditor. Not the eager one, and not the adversarial one. The one whose meeting starts in six minutes.
- [One line, held long](https://sarwagya.wtf/margins/one-line-held-long): The most senior code I have read is not the cleverest. It is the code where one line has been held, unchanged, for eight years, because it was the right…
- [The framework you outgrow](https://sarwagya.wtf/margins/the-framework-you-outgrow): You outgrow a framework the way you outgrow a coat. Not because the coat changed. Because the shape of what you carry changed, and there isn't a pocket for…
- [Karna, again](https://sarwagya.wtf/margins/karna-again): I keep coming back to Karna. Not because his story is unfair — everyone's story in the Mahabharata is unfair — but because he refuses to make it a grievance.
- [The dignity of finishing](https://sarwagya.wtf/margins/the-dignity-of-finishing): To finish a thing is to admit it is not going to be better than this.
- [The pass I stopped catching](https://sarwagya.wtf/margins/the-pass-i-stopped-catching): In the third year I stopped catching a certain kind of injection because I had stopped writing the shape of code that could hold it.
- [A room made of settings](https://sarwagya.wtf/margins/a-room-made-of-settings): Every modern tool is a room made of settings. The default settings are a personality the tool's creators are quietly assigning you.
- [Kabir, on being nobody](https://sarwagya.wtf/margins/kabir-on-being-nobody): Kabir keeps insisting he is nobody. It reads, at first, like humility. It is not.
- [The commit message as memoir](https://sarwagya.wtf/margins/the-commit-message-as-memoir): The commit message is the smallest form of memoir any of us are practicing.
- [The ambition of the paragraph](https://sarwagya.wtf/margins/the-ambition-of-the-paragraph): A paragraph is the largest unit you can hold in your head without dropping the shape of it.
- [Borges, or a footnote](https://sarwagya.wtf/margins/borges-or-a-footnote): Borges wrote stories that were mostly footnotes to books that did not exist.
- [The vulnerability class](https://sarwagya.wtf/margins/the-vulnerability-class): You stop catching a class of bug not by getting better at finding it, but by writing the environment where it cannot exist.
- [The bug you fix by leaving](https://sarwagya.wtf/margins/the-bug-you-fix-by-leaving): There is a kind of bug you cannot fix by fixing. You have to leave the file, work on something else for a week, and let the shape rearrange in your head.
- [The tab bar tells the truth](https://sarwagya.wtf/margins/the-tab-bar-tells-the-truth): You can tell what somebody is really working on by which tab they never close.
- [Lewis on grief](https://sarwagya.wtf/margins/lewis-on-grief): Lewis wrote A Grief Observed like a man taking notes on his own house burning down.
- [The wrong optimisation](https://sarwagya.wtf/margins/the-wrong-optimisation): Most of my worst decades of taste were spent optimising for legibility to strangers.
- [A calm on-call](https://sarwagya.wtf/margins/a-calm-on-call): A calm on-call rotation is not a rotation without pages. It is a rotation where the pages, when they come, are the ones the runbook expected.
- [The god asleep between yugas](https://sarwagya.wtf/margins/the-god-asleep-between-yugas): Between world-ages, Vishnu sleeps on the serpent, on the ocean, on the back of an age nobody has words for yet.
- [The compiler as a mirror](https://sarwagya.wtf/margins/the-compiler-as-a-mirror): The compiler is one of the few honest mirrors software has. It will tell you, without flattery, that the sentence you just wrote is not a sentence.
- [The rewrite that shipped](https://sarwagya.wtf/margins/the-rewrite-that-shipped): The rewrite that shipped is the one nobody talked about while it was happening.
- [Kalidasa's cloud](https://sarwagya.wtf/margins/kalidasas-cloud): Kalidasa sends a cloud as a messenger because the mail is too slow and grief is too tall.
- [One TLS handshake](https://sarwagya.wtf/margins/one-tls-handshake): A handshake is a small piece of choreography where both sides admit, gently, what version of the world they can still speak.
- [The API that outlives you](https://sarwagya.wtf/margins/the-api-that-outlives-you): The APIs I designed at 22 are still being called by people I will never meet.
- [A model with fewer beliefs](https://sarwagya.wtf/margins/a-model-with-fewer-beliefs): The older I get the more I trust people who hold fewer beliefs, more carefully.
- [The migration that took a year](https://sarwagya.wtf/margins/the-migration-that-took-a-year): Every migration budget is off by a factor of two. Yours will be. Mine was.
- [Chuang Tzu's butterfly](https://sarwagya.wtf/margins/chuang-tzus-butterfly): The butterfly parable is short enough to have been misread for two thousand years.
- [The unfinished sentence](https://sarwagya.wtf/margins/the-unfinished-sentence): Some sentences are better unfinished. The reader arrives at the missing half faster than any word would have.
- [A slower internet](https://sarwagya.wtf/margins/a-slower-internet): A slower internet was never coming back. It went the way of the letter and the long-distance call.
- [The reading nobody assigns](https://sarwagya.wtf/margins/the-reading-nobody-assigns): The books that have stayed with me are almost never the ones I was told to read.
- [One incident, later](https://sarwagya.wtf/margins/one-incident-later): Six months after an incident the technical write-up is fine. The emotional write-up is missing.
- [Nachiketa's third wish](https://sarwagya.wtf/margins/nachiketas-third-wish): Yama offers Nachiketa anything. Nachiketa keeps refusing until Yama has to tell him what death is.
- [The runtime that ate the shell](https://sarwagya.wtf/margins/the-runtime-that-ate-the-shell): Node started as a way to run JavaScript on the server and ended as the way to run almost everything that isn't a browser.
- [Naming things, finally](https://sarwagya.wtf/margins/naming-things-finally): The joke says there are two hard problems. The joke is right, but for the wrong reason.
- [The finish that isn't](https://sarwagya.wtf/margins/the-finish-that-isnt): The ethics of finishing things is less about will and more about the small daily refusal to let the thing become a new topic.
- [Rilke's letters](https://sarwagya.wtf/margins/rilkes-letters): Rilke writing to a young poet keeps saying: go into yourself. Ask if you must write.
- [The right amount of trust](https://sarwagya.wtf/margins/the-right-amount-of-trust): Zero-trust is a good slogan and a bad architecture. Zero of anything is a shape you cannot live inside.
- [Vibhishana's timing](https://sarwagya.wtf/margins/vibhishanas-timing): Vibhishana leaves his brother's kingdom at exactly the moment leaving means something.
- [The web platform, forgetting itself](https://sarwagya.wtf/margins/the-web-platform-forgetting-itself): Every year the platform adds something the frameworks used to sell. Every year the frameworks add something the platform used to have.
- [Boring, on purpose](https://sarwagya.wtf/margins/boring-on-purpose): The most senior thing you can do in a system is make it more boring than you found it.
- [The god who chose to lose](https://sarwagya.wtf/margins/the-god-who-chose-to-lose): Rama could have won without banishment. The story could have gone another way.
- [A room, or a stage](https://sarwagya.wtf/margins/a-room-or-a-stage): A workshop is a room. A studio is a stage. The two require different postures.
- [R. K. Narayan retelling](https://sarwagya.wtf/margins/r-k-narayan-retelling): Narayan retells the Mahabharata as if he had heard it from an old man in a courtyard. It is not the fullest version. It is the one that respects the…
- [The audit habit that hurts](https://sarwagya.wtf/margins/the-audit-habit-that-hurts): The worst audit habit is treating findings like a leaderboard.
- [Attention, and what it costs](https://sarwagya.wtf/margins/attention-and-what-it-costs): Attention is not scarce because there is a limit on it. It is scarce because everyone is trying to take it, and the taking has become industrialised.
- [The web, before the frameworks](https://sarwagya.wtf/margins/the-web-before-the-frameworks): There was a web where a page was a page. You right-clicked, you saw the whole of it. You could steal a technique in an afternoon.
- [The staff engineer's shape](https://sarwagya.wtf/margins/the-staff-engineers-shape): Staff engineering is mostly the practice of noticing which meeting to walk into, and which one to write a document about instead.
- [Ambition without craving](https://sarwagya.wtf/margins/ambition-without-craving): The Gita has a phrase for it, but the phrase is in the way. Try it in English first: doing the thing without needing the thing.
- [Draupadi's laugh](https://sarwagya.wtf/margins/draupadis-laugh): Draupadi laughed at a king who fell into a pool, and the story treats that laugh as the pebble that starts the landslide.
- [A password is a lie](https://sarwagya.wtf/margins/a-password-is-a-lie): A password is a small, agreed-upon lie between you and the server about what it means to be you.
- [Naval, in fragments](https://sarwagya.wtf/margins/naval-in-fragments): Half of it feels obvious. That is the compliment.
- [The bug that hides](https://sarwagya.wtf/margins/the-bug-that-hides): There is a class of bug that hides for six months and then shows up on the demo. It does this because it was waiting for a specific combination of tired…
- [Bhishma's vow](https://sarwagya.wtf/margins/bhishmas-vow): Bhishma's vow is the oldest UX bug in the Mahabharata.
- [Local-first, quietly](https://sarwagya.wtf/margins/local-first-quietly): Local-first is not a marketing category. It is a bet that the network is a nice place to visit, not a nice place to keep your work.
- [Taste, like interest](https://sarwagya.wtf/margins/taste-like-interest): Taste compounds. You cannot buy it in a burst. You cannot cram for it.
- [A quiet channel](https://sarwagya.wtf/margins/a-quiet-channel): The best channels are quiet. No banners. No greetings. No version strings.
- [Marcus, still](https://sarwagya.wtf/margins/marcus-still): Marcus wrote to himself, in bad Greek, in a tent, running an empire he was mostly sick of.
- [The rewrite conversation](https://sarwagya.wtf/margins/the-rewrite-conversation): Every rewrite begins by underestimating how much of the old thing was doing quiet, unloved work.
- [Care as competence](https://sarwagya.wtf/margins/care-as-competence): Half of what people call competence is just caring one more round than the person before you.
- [The tab that costs a laptop](https://sarwagya.wtf/margins/the-tab-that-costs-a-laptop): A browser tab is not free. It is a small operating system standing in a queue.
- [Herrigel's bow](https://sarwagya.wtf/margins/herrigels-bow): Herrigel spends five years learning to release an arrow. The book is not about archery.
- [The threat model that survives](https://sarwagya.wtf/margins/the-threat-model-that-survives): Most threat models die on contact with an intern with production access.
- [Work as prayer](https://sarwagya.wtf/margins/work-as-prayer): The old traditions call it prayer. The engineers call it flow. Both are talking about the same posture — attention offered up without expecting the offering…
- [A design doc is a promise](https://sarwagya.wtf/margins/a-design-doc-is-a-promise): A design doc is a promise you make to your future self about which arguments you will not have again.
- [Arjuna, before the arrow](https://sarwagya.wtf/margins/arjuna-before-the-arrow): Arjuna's crisis is not a lack of skill. He can hit the bird's eye. He knows he can.
- [The framework that forgot](https://sarwagya.wtf/margins/the-framework-that-forgot): Every framework begins by remembering something the last framework forgot. Then it grows large enough to forget it too.
- [Boredom, as a compass](https://sarwagya.wtf/margins/boredom-as-a-compass): The things I am most reliably bored by tend to be the ones I should not be doing.
- [The half-life of clever code](https://sarwagya.wtf/margins/the-half-life-of-clever-code): Every clever line has a half-life. Most are shorter than the codebase they live in.
- [Explanations, not answers](https://sarwagya.wtf/margins/explanations-not-answers): Deutsch keeps saying it, and I keep needing to hear it: progress is a matter of better explanations, not more observations.
- [TLS, in one paragraph](https://sarwagya.wtf/margins/tls-in-one-paragraph): Two strangers agree on a secret without ever having met, using math old enough to have a Greek name and a certificate signed by a stranger they both, for…
- [What Karna already knew](https://sarwagya.wtf/margins/what-karna-already-knew): Karna knew he would lose. He was told. He kept his promises anyway.
- [The room the code lives in](https://sarwagya.wtf/margins/the-room-the-code-lives-in): Every program is written twice. Once by the person who typed it, once by the room they typed it in — the desk, the light, the argument still going on in the…
- [A closing brace](https://sarwagya.wtf/margins/a-closing-brace): A closing brace is a small ceremony. It says: this thought, at least, is finished.

## Family sites

- https://eng.sarwagya.wtf — long-form engineering notes
- https://bakaiti.sarwagya.wtf — strongly-held, loosely-researched writing
- https://oss.sarwagya.wtf — the workshop, open-source packages
- https://me.sarwagya.wtf — link-in-bio