#013

I Didn't Apply

September 13, 2026·—

The career update I was sitting on last week is real, signed, and public. Also built a meme host and a daily argument.

Last week I said there was a career update I wasn't talking about yet. Here it is.

Workers IOCopied!

I'm joining Workers IO (YC F26) as DevRel, working with Chaitanya. I didn't apply. A YC founder DM'd me after seeing Breakscale.

The whole chain: I was trying to learn load balancers, wanted to see one fall over instead of reading about it, couldn't find a simulator that wasn't fake animations, so I built one over a weekend and posted it. Eight stars on the Thursday. The DM came ten days after the repo went up.

Offer landed Monday morning.

Accepted it the same day, contracts signed Tuesday night, company email by Thursday. Then it went public.

He also posted his own story that week: sold his first company ten years ago, spent the decade since as an engineer, and is now building Workers IO as a solo founder. Agents write software faster than a hundred engineers now, and almost nobody is checking it. That's the thing he came back to build.

It's on the site now too, which made closing out the GSoC card and putting this above it feel like a real milestone.

The replies to the announcement were the part I didn't expect. A lot of people telling me this was their sign to start posting things.

I also got a second intern offer this week, from another founder, on LinkedIn. Not saying anything more about that one.

loreCopied!

Built and shipped lore in one night on Tuesday, between a 10-to-6 class day and an OS quiz.

It's a meme archive for a friend group. Click a meme, paste the link anywhere, and it renders as the real image instead of a dead URL. Log in with Discord, wait for approval, upload, wait for approval, and then everyone can see it.

Runs entirely free on Cloudflare: Workers, D1, R2. TOTP for the owner login, Discord OAuth for everyone else, invite codes, a review queue, reports and bans, per-file and total storage caps so R2 never leaves the free tier, metadata stripped from uploads without re-encoding, and lockout after repeated wrong codes. Source is up if you want your own.

jhagdaCopied!

Then on Saturday I built jhagda, which is a daily argument. One question, two sides, and the whole country votes.

The good part isn't the total, it's the city split. Chennai is 95% chai. Jaipur is 90% coffee. Bengaluru and Hyderabad both went coffee while the country went chai.

Dhoni or Kohli came out 51 to 49. India genuinely cannot decide. Chennai says Kohli, which is not what you'd guess, and Delhi says Kohli while Pune says Dhoni at 75%.

Cloudflare Workers and Durable Objects underneath, edge-cached, per-IP rate limits bucketed by /64, an OG image rendered per fight so shares show the current split, and a live ticker of who just voted where.

BreakscaleCopied!

Still going. 1,144 stars, 108 forks, and Workers IO is now named as title sponsor in the README.

Thirteen more PRs merged from people who aren't me this week. kevin9327 alone fixed four separate bounds bugs in the simulation: the autoscaler when a knob isn't a number, a region switch with non-numeric values, the transcoder's rendition ladder, and the broker's partition count. kaihere14 replaced compressed-JSON share links with a compact wire format, nawazish2 made it suggest a fix when a component can't keep up, yeabsira-gashaw stopped it minting node ids already on the canvas, and csy20 documented that cache hit rates are independent per hop.

The restCopied!

Midsems start tomorrow, so most of the week outside all this was CoA, DAA, OS, DBMS, PoPL and Sociology, in roughly that order of panic. A DBMS quiz on Saturday, an OS quiz on Thursday, an OS viva somewhere in there.

I also posted "midsems next week so I'm locking in, if you see me active, remind me I have exams." We'll see how that goes.

Also unified the design tokens and page headers across this site, fixed the mobile layout, and added three more Switzerland photos to places.

What I found interestingCopied!

Came across a paper on audio steganography and got a bit obsessed. You take a cover audio file, embed a secret message or signal into it, and it comes out the other side sounding like ordinary audio. Eve can listen to the whole channel and hear nothing.

Hiding data in a thing that doesn't look like it's carrying data is a very good kind of problem. This one's going in the ideas list.

gods-eye-view : a spy satellite simulator in the browser, except the data is real. Live open source spatial intelligence on a photorealistic globe.
x-algorithm : the algorithm powering the For You feed, open sourced. Relevant to my interests lately for obvious reasons.
netflix-tube : turns YouTube into Netflix. The description is just "i was bored so quickly built this stupid tool", which is the correct energy.
workersio/skills : agent skills to find and fix software bugs. Reading this one for work now, which is a strange sentence to type.
claude-code-templates : CLI for configuring and monitoring Claude Code.