Reflections

I stopped using Chrome a long time ago due to privacy concerns, and I’ve been switching between Firefox, Edge, and occasionally Brave. But I never spent the time to fully compare these browsers and analyze which one best suits my needs. Today, I decided to look deeply into these browsers and ended up going down a rabbit hole of researching their privacy features. Why is this important? Every time we browse a website, we are sharing bits of our digital life with companies we don’t know.

Today I tried something fun - built a Pomodoro timer app mostly by talking to AI instead of typing code myself. And guess what - there is a term for it - vibe coding, coined by Andrej Karpathy 😎. I have done it a few times before, but this is the first time I am using it to build a full app. I wanted to create something that was useful and worked well, so I chose the Pomodoro timer.

A few months ago, if you had told me I’d be deadlifting 155 lbs, I would have laughed and said, “No way!” But here I am, doing it—something I never thought possible. In a previous post in my reimagine journey, I talked about reframing milestones to focus on consistency rather than arbitrary goals. At the time, I was working out on my own, trying to stay active with strength training and Zone 2 walks.

Today I tried Claude Code, the new agentic coding tool announced by Anthropic this morning. Unlike other agentic tools, Claude Code is a CLI tool. Claude has been my favorite AI coding partner so far. I use it via GitHub Copilot and as standalone through its web interface. I was curious to see how it works in CLI and decided to give it a try. In this post, I share my first impressions of using Claude Code - how I set it up, what I loved about it, what I didn’t, and how it compares to other similar tools.

Of late, I have been building and learning about browser extensions for a few projects. It was surprising to learn that there are many ways to build UI for these extensions and the most interesting one was the Side Panel UI available to Chrome extensions. In this post, I will talk about the Chrome side panel, how to build one and the advantages and limitations of using it. The Chrome side panel It is a vertical panel that opens on either side of the browser window, providing quick access to your bookmarks, history, reading list, and Google Lens.

I have been using many Vercel products in my web projects - for example, their Next.js app framework, deployment infrastructure and Vercel AI SDK. I love these tools because are easy to use and onboard, they are reliable and fast - and most of them are open source, which is fantastic ❤️. Their latest innovation is v0.dev, an AI-powered tool that helps you build frontend applications using a conversational chat interface.

In this post, we will compare the most popular AI tools (frontier models and AI assistants) based on its capabilities, limitations and my personal experience of using them day-to-day. In order to accomodate the multiple dimensions of each model, this comparison is represented as mind maps in three parts: Language models - the most popular text-based models that are used for text-to-text content generation. AI assistants - the chatbots that are powered by one or more of the above models.

This is the second part of my blog series on browser extensions. Here, we’ll delve into advanced concepts including TypeScript integration, service workers, and programmatic script injection. For a solid foundation, I recommend reading Browser Extensions: Part 1 - Introduction before tackling these more complex topics. How to use TypeScript in browser extensions By default, browser extensions use JavaScript as the programming language in the content scripts. However, TypeScript is more type safe and reliable to write the business logic.

Imagine a world where every website adapts to your specific needs in real-time, securely and easily, without selling your data to third party companies. It will be cool, right? Yes and it is possible - thanks to Browser extensions. In this post, we will learn about browser extensions - what they are, why you should build them and how to build them. We will conclude by looking at a few issues that come up frequently while building an extension and how to troubleshoot them.

Nine months ago, I started the Reimagine Journey to shift my career from engineering leadership to hands-on technology, specifically focusing on my health, personal growth and advanced tech skills. The long extended leave gave me the time and space to reflect on what I truly love and shape the next chapter of my career. It gave me the opportunity to determine how I want to live the rest of my life.