I build software wherever I happen to be, though Bengaluru keeps getting me back. Something about the air there.

Otherwise, I’m moving. Every so often that means finding myself on a shaky, questionable local bus headed nowhere in particular.

There’s writing. Painting too. Someday, films. A guitar has followed me around since Class Four, which is not the same thing as knowing how to play it.

I am learning how to cook, surf and a bunch of other things.

Then there are books that I read, poems that I sing, and discuss more philosophy than is probably useful.

Life is short; opportunity fleeting; experiment perilous; judgement flawed.
— Hippocrates

Gigs & Projects

• Bitsila ONDC SaaS - Founding Engineer
• Opmaint - Engineering Head
• PacketMan - Open Source Postman Alternative
• Service Recommender
• Sales Predictor - ML based sales prediction
• Dell Internship - interned here in my 5th semester of college.
• Reddit2Spotify a simple script which creates you playlists from songs recommended in Reddit comment section, for example this.
• FlutterCRUDInterface - a flutter boilerplate generator

Experiments

• Hotspot Generation Scripts boot for Rpi4
• Varnamala - A duolingo clone for making language learning more accessible
• falcon-mini software to make a Rpi into a talking robot, which you can plug into toys

Games

• Life - Conway's cellular automaton, written in Dart
• Universe - a small physics engine with laws of nature you can change
• Population - civilizations evolving into new species, with meteors and climate change
• Fractals - the Mandelbrot set and friends, to zoom into
• Light - an optical bench: lasers, mirrors, prisms and lenses, with the angles
• Tilchata - a 3D horror-comedy: it's 3 AM and the cockroach can fly
• All games

Writing

• Articles here (RSS)
• Medium
  • Django & DRF Flexibility
  • Django Lifecycle Hooks
  • MySQL on Manjaro - this one helped few people
• A Few Fav Tech Helpers - these are here as well as medium
  • Easy Crontab with Celery-Beat
  • Setting up Django with Docker Compose & OrbStack
  • Historical Records in Django
  • Why I chose Vim? - My journey from despising Vim in my first year of college to crowning it as the ultimate editor
  • Writing a scheduler using Django/DRF
  • Why Choose Django as a Startup?
  • Rails really packs a punch — I'm a huge Django enthusiast myself, but I've got to admit, Rails offers a level of comprehensiveness that Django just doesn't match. The only thing keeping me anchored to Django is my preference for Python over DHH Lang (also known as Ruby)

Essays

Django

• A Simple Guide to Django REST Framework Serializers
• When to Use Django Signals (and When to Avoid Them)
• A Simple Start to Testing in Django
• A Simple Pattern for Django Settings
• Start Every Django Project with a Custom User Model
• A Simple Guide to Django Middleware
• When Your Django App Gets Too Big
• A Simple Fix for Slow Django Queries
• Easy Crontab with Celery-Beat
• Historical Records in Django
• Setting up Django with Docker Compose & OrbStack
• Why choose Django as a startup?
• Writing a scheduler using Django and CeleryBeat, CronTab

Rails

• A Simple Way to Manage Rails Secrets
• How to Upgrade a Legacy Rails Application
• Building Modern Frontends Without a JavaScript Framework
• Rethinking Rails Views with ViewComponents
• The Easiest Way to Find and Fix N+1 Queries in Rails
• How to Think About Caching in Rails
• Why Your Rails Tests Are Slow
• When Rails Models Get Too Big
• Why Most Rails Apps Get Background Jobs Wrong
• Rails really packs a punch
• Rails 8 Kamal 2 on Digital Ocean with Managed DB

Flutter

• How to Manage Dependencies in Flutter Without a Framework
• How to Embed Native UI in Flutter The Simple Way
• A Simpler Way to Boost Flutter Performance with Dart FFI
• A Simple Pattern for Scalable Flutter UI
• How to Stop Useless Widget Rebuilds in Flutter
• Keeping Your Flutter UI Smooth with Isolates
• Calling Native Code from Flutter Is Easier Than You Think
• Build Fast Lists in Flutter
• Functional Error Handling in Flutter

PostgreSQL

• Beyond pg_dump: A Simple Guide to PostgreSQL Point-in-Time Recovery
• A Simple Workflow for Database Migrations in Git
• A Simple Guide to PostgreSQL Index Types
• Moving a Big Database Without Breaking Things
• A Simple Guide to PostgreSQL EXPLAIN ANALYZE
• A Practical Guide to PostgreSQL Backups

Servers

• Hetzner Load Balancers vs. a Simple HAProxy Setup
• The Simple Magic of SSH Port Forwarding
• Adding Storage on Hetzner: Volumes vs Storage Boxes
• A Simple Guide to Systemd for Developers
• A Simple Reverse Proxy for Your Hetzner Server
• Using Hetzner's Free Firewall Instead of UFW
• Simple Encrypted Backups on Hetzner with Restic
• Securing Your New Hetzner Server: The First Hour
• Hetzner Private Networking The Simple Way
• Debugging Connections with Simple Linux Tools
• Hetzner Cloud vs Dedicated: A Guide to Saving Money
• Raspberry Pi 4 Hotspot

Git & Vim

• Stop Stashing: A Better Git Workflow with Worktrees
• Git's Magic Undo Button: Recovering Lost Commits
• Find Bugs Fast with Git Bisect
• A Simple Workflow for Clean Git History
• Why I chose Vim?

Startups

• The Job Scorecard
• The Hardest Conversation
• The Founder's Bottleneck
• The Customer Conversation That Builds Your Product
• The First 30 Days: A Simple Onboarding Plan
• How to Pay Your First Ten Employees
• The One Page Product Spec
• The Three Signs You Aren't Ready to Hire
• The Minimalist Hiring Loop
• Deciding What to Build Next
• Your First Engineer

Philosophy

• The Source of Unhappiness Is a Simple Mistake
• Action Without Attachment
• The Practice of the Unattached Observer
• Finding Your Dharma Is Not a Treasure Hunt
• Finding the Self by Subtraction
• The Mind's Three Modes
• The Illusion of Being the Doer
• Accepting God
• Proof of God
• Why do we suffer?

Stories & Poems

• A City I so Loved
• Ballad of Canker Sores
• Shobashona's Boti

From Books

• HelgoLand
• Holy Mother
• In the Hours of Meditation
• The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna
• Remote Office Not Required

Books

• The Shelf - my reading log from 2025 onwards: what's open, what's finished, and how far along I honestly am

Social

• GitHub - rshrc
• Twitter - @realRishiB
• rishi.banerjee1009deletethisifyourenotarobot@gmailthisaswell.com

Public appearance

• Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat - I was the pharoah

Music Taste

This is the collection where I list the ones that "I" find unconventional. Which means; Michael, Elvis, Coldplay and many more of the obvious artists make the list.

• Breaking Benjamin
  • Favorite Album Phobia
• Foo Fighters go buy some merch
  • Favorite Album Wasting Light
  • Sonic Highways is surreal
• RTJ - Run the Jewels
  • Truth be told, I got hooked with Legend has It from Black Panther, then I heard A Report to the Shareholders 4 years later, paving the way for me to explore all the albums by RTJ, and I love each and every one of them
• Danzig - Listen to this song
• The Black Album
• B.B. King is always gonna make the list :)
• Sound City - Reel to Reel you need to listen to this album, if born as a mortal on this mortal earth, for the love of God!
• Porcupine Tree this band requires so much more attention, Steven Wilson is literally a living God of Music. A college senior recommended this to me, and I am thankful to her wherever she is!
• Age of Aquarius
• Hulo a really good indie artist
• Radiohead Erlich Bachman can hate them, I can't
• Ozzy Osbourne RIP
• Killer Mike taken out of RTJ
• Danzig "MOTHER"
• Alter Bridge Great for emotional gym workouts
• Krishna Das introduced to me by Sattu, my closest friend, confidant, and fellow lover of Shiva
• Parvaaz Kashmiri and Urdu psych rock, from Bengaluru
  • Start with Baran, then Kun, then Na Gul Na Gulistan
• The Local Train - Vaaqif and Aalas Ka Pedh, both albums, start to finish
• George Harrison - All Things Must Pass, and While My Guitar Gently Weeps, which I built a whole playlist around
• The Beatles Norwegian Wood especially
• Jeff Buckley just listen to Grace
• Chris Cornell that voice. RIP
• Audioslave Chris Cornell with Tom Morello on guitar, what more do you want
• Chevelle if you like Breaking Benjamin, you will like Chevelle
• Foxy Shazam criminally underrated, go listen
• Muse - The Wow! Signal
• Woodkid - The Golden Age
• Nick Johnston - Child of Bliss, instrumental guitar at its best
• Anthony Vincent Ten Second Songs, look him up on YouTube
• Keane - Cause and Effect, and Somewhere Only We Know, which never gets old
• David Bowie Starman, Heroes, Space Oddity, pick any one, you cannot go wrong
• Yeat Twizzy Rich is on repeat right now, go listen
• Some rap as well: Kendrick Lamar, Jeezy, Kanye West, Fetty Wap
• Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse both soundtracks, Daniel Pemberton's score and Metro Boomin's album, go listen

About this page

This page consists of only two resources: the HTML and the picture. The styles, scripts and icons are baked into the HTML at build time; album covers load only when you hover a Spotify link.
The ‘appearing’ effect is achieved using the CSS keyframes feature, orchestrated by a compile-time Dart script.

This site is based on Filiph Hráček's original work on filiph/filiphnet, a minimalist, Markdown-first personal site generator.
I've forked and extended it with my own customizations — but the core elegance of the setup is very much thanks to Filiph's original vision and engineering.

---