The spring is here and the days have gotten longer and brighter. With a new month on the horizon, I wanted to try out a new project in which I am trying to redefine how a timer app could look and feel.

The Site 🛠️

After the overhaul in March, April was about polishes. A UI cleanup, a garden preview update, making things responsive where they were not. The kind of work that does not deserve its own section except to say that the site is settling into a shape that feels stable.

LockIn 🍅

I started building a pomodoro timer app in Swift. It is called LockIn.

The idea came from a frustration that every pomodoro app looks the same. The same rounded rectangles, the same countdown circles, the same design language borrowed from the same set of templates. I wanted to make something that felt different, something informed by Dieter Rams and the philosophy that a tool should be honest about what it is without being boring about how it looks.

The design is not locked down yet. I have a home view, a log screen, and UI assets that lean into iOS conventions. I have also been experimenting with the design in Claude to explore directions. But the hard part is not the code, it is deciding what the thing should look like when it is done. I can understand the code. I built most of it with Claude Code. The design conviction is the part that is still forming.

It is not finished, but I am currently in pursuit of how it should feel as an experience. This process is also making me question the tools themselves. How do you use conventional design tools when you are designing something that deliberately rejects convention?

Games 🎮

This was the month of Call of Duty.

I finished Modern Warfare, then Modern Warfare 2, and moved into Warzone. Three games spanning roughly 15 years of the franchise. What struck me was not any single game but the thread running through all of them. The controls are the same. Not similar, the same.

I revisited the controls when I picked up MW after a decade. Moving to MW II, the controls were the same, which felt expected. Same franchise, roughly five years apart. But when I picked up Warzone, that consistency still held, and that is the part that impressed me.

That kind of design consistency across 15 years is remarkable when you think about how much has changed in gaming during that period. Studios, engines, platforms, entire generations of hardware. And yet the fundamental interaction model held. A player who learned the language in 2009 can still speak it fluently in 2026. That consistency becomes even more meaningful when you consider that Warzone is PvP, not PvE. Every second matters, and knowing I did not have to relearn the controls meant I could focus on what actually mattered.

That being said, Warzone did not fail to innovate either. They followed the principle of if it is not broken, do not fix it. And when they found a new area of improvement, they provided gyro based aiming through the PS controller, disabled by default, allowing power users to decide whether they want the addition or not.

Outside of COD, FC is doing something interesting on the business side. They are giving away free Legendary Footballers Packs (internally called Icon Packs) to all existing PS Plus customers, a clear move to keep the user base excited ahead of the upcoming World Cup season.

Session length is a strange thing to care about when you built the site for yourself. But I do care, and March was the month I wanted to improve the sessions.

The intention was simple, make the site more interesting to be inside. Not to land on, but to stay in. The place where you arrive for one thing and leave having read three others. That does not happen by accident. It happens because something on the first page catches you, and then something on the second catches you again, and by the third you have forgotten you were only passing through.

Getting that sequence right meant thinking about first impressions, about anchoring essays on the homepage, about the threads that pull people further into the garden.

The Site

I started with the homepage. I wanted to surface the essays there, not as a list but as an anchor, something that told a visitor what kind of place this was before they had read a word.

From the experiments running since February, I landed on a design that was doing what I wanted. Users were moving through the pages in roughly the order I hoped. There is one anomaly in the data, a post about AI tools pulling more traffic than anything else, but I am choosing to ignore it for now due to AI being trendy.

The next question was what happens after someone lands in the garden. How do you hold their attention once they are inside? That is where a little animation using GSAP came in.

I had been learning it since February. March was where it went into production. The first thing I built was a sprite sheet animation, a small character that walks across the page and breaks into a run as you scroll faster. A detail most people will never consciously notice. But that is exactly the point. The best interactions are the ones that make a place feel alive without announcing themselves.

From there it snowballed. A custom cursor. Page transitions. Each one a small experiment, each one teaching me about how motion and timing work together. But snowballing came with a cost. After a point the codebase started feeling like a stranger to me, which is a particular kind of discomfort when you are an amateur who has to return to the same files months later and remember what you were thinking.

8 95

Jan Apr

Views

+1,087.5%

55.5% 100%

Jan Apr

Engagement rate

+80.2%

1.34s 5.4s

Jan Apr

Avg engagement time

+303%

I stopped adding and started cleaning. Shared types, consolidated components, utility functions pulled out of pages and into their own files, comments everywhere. Invisible to anyone visiting the site, but necessary if the codebase was going to make sense to me two years from now.

By the end of it, the site had a new homescreen, unified typography, a new footer, dark theme support where it had been missing, and a component architecture that finally felt coherent.

Then came the unglamorous part. Robot.txt, JSON-LD, RSS updates, structured data for posts. Not the kind of work you commit to GitHub with any pride. But the kind that matters if you want the garden to actually be findable.

The Essay ✍️

I have been researching how games provide aid to players without breaking their immersion, the design problem of helping someone without making them feel helped. The essay is here if you want to read it.

Getting the writing done was one part. The other was making sure the reading experience matched the care that went into it. Updated layouts, a custom table of contents, components rebuilt to sit properly inside prose. There is always a gap between finishing a piece and actually shipping it. March was the month I closed that gap.

Training 🏋️

The 5K plan did not survive contact with reality. I started personal training instead, which felt like the smarter call. Building a base properly rather than rushing toward a target and risking another setback. The rotator cuff is still in recovery. One thing at a time.

Photography 📷

Going. Spending more time now on composition and framing, mostly wide angle at F4 and above.

February carried January’s momentum forward. Not a dramatic leap, just the same quiet building, with a few new threads added to the mix.

Photography 📷

Still happening. The camera is still coming out and that alone feels like a win worth noting.

CSS and GSAP 🎞️

Started picking up animations this month. CSS first, then GSAP. It is not for work, at least not explicitly. It is for the site and for the curiosity of getting better at motion design.

There is something satisfying about making things move with intention. Animation is one of those skills that sits at the edge of design and code, and that intersection is exactly where I want to be spending more time.

Switching to Claude and Cursor 🤖

Subscribed to Claude and Cursor this month and moved away from ChatGPT.

The decision was partly practical. The 40 dollars a month is already paying off in how fast I am learning and how much better the tools fit into my actual workflow. As I wrote in January, the right AI tools do not replace the thinking, they accelerate it.

But the other part of the decision was values. I am not willing to support tools or companies whose money is tied to war or those who enable it. No matter how good the product is, that line matters to me.

Twitter, and the Uncomfortable Part 🐦

I started using Twitter again after a long time. I know how that sounds, especially right after the paragraph above.

The honest version is this: there are a lot of design engineers on Twitter and I want to improve that side of my craft and find more people working at the same intersection. The visibility and the community are genuinely there in a way that is hard to find elsewhere right now.

But I am not going to pretend the contradiction does not exist. Moving away from a tool because of who it supports, then logging into a platform owned by someone whose philosophy does not align with mine at all, is not a clean position. I know that. I am holding it with some discomfort rather than resolving it too neatly.

Some compromises are made eyes open. This is one of them.

Running and Training 🏃

I did not run for the past week. That is the honest part.

But starting fresh this week with a personal trainer and getting back to BJJ. The rotator cuff is still in recovery but the rest of me is ready to move again. February was where the intention held even when the consistency slipped, and March is where I want both to align.

January felt like momentum starting to find its shape. Not dramatic momentum. The quiet kind, where you start doing things again and realise you had missed them.

Photography 📷

I picked up the camera again. The ZV-E10 with the 18-105 has been sitting there, and January was the month I stopped letting it collect dust.

Started posting on Instagram again, which feels like a temporary home for now. The longer plan is to move it all to Pixelfed and eventually surface it on the site through its API. Owning the feed, not just feeding the algorithm. That part is still a plan. But the shooting is happening, and that is the part that matters first.

Running 🏃

January is also when I started taking running seriously.

The rotator cuff is still healing and physiotherapy is ongoing, so the upper body work stays on hold. Running became the thing I could do, and somewhere along the way it stopped being a substitute and started being the point.

Alongside that, I have been doing more stretches and core work. Not as a workaround, but as a foundation. I want to get back to training strong, and this feels like the right way to build toward that.

The plan is to run a 5k by march 3rd week. I’ve been training for it using Runna and Strava, and even though it hurts my shin sometimes, Im still pushing it. I dont want it to be another injury though :D. Injuries due to overtraining is a real thing and I proved it twice in the last 6 months.

Games I’m Playing 🎮

Stopped playing Ratchet & Clank. It was charming but it did not pull me back.

FC26 is still going strong though, and January made me think about why.

I first noticed the pattern during COVID. Everyone was locked inside, and games like PUBG and CODM became the primary way people stayed connected. Not just entertainment, but actual social infrastructure. You would drop into a match and suddenly you were with your people again, even if they were across the city or the country.

That pattern has not gone away. If anything, it is clearer to me now.In a new city, around new people, its comforting to have a connection with people you are already comfortable with, and FC26 is one of the main ways I stay connected to friends scattered around the world. A quick match, a voice call running alongside it. It is low stakes on the surface, but the social thread underneath is real.

The game is the excuse. The connection is the point. And that is a loop that is very hard to walk away from.

The Desk 🖥️

I have been thinking about the setup. Specifically, thinking about undoing it.

The external monitor, the whole desk arrangement. I want to move away from it and work on a single laptop screen instead. Less friction, more portability, less of a reason to stay anchored to one spot.

It has not fully happened yet. But the intention is there, and with me, intention usually gets there eventually.

I will write about how Im using the spaces in optimising my workflow and productivity in a future post.

With all the Winter Arc conversations floating around on social media, December is often portrayed as a month of darkness, cold, and decline. But for me, December has always felt different. It feels calm. A month for slowing down, reflecting, and quietly collecting fuel for what comes next.

After the shakiness of November, especially around routines, December felt like a soft reset. I started finding my rhythm again, returned to BJJ, and almost immediately got injured once more. This time it was the rotator cuff. At this point, it feels almost predictable, but it also forced me to slow down and listen.

Health 🧘‍♂️

Health-wise, I consciously chose not to push.

I am not lifting heavy weights at all right now due to the injury. Instead, I’m focusing on maintaining my conditioning. Most days revolve around endurance runs with short sprints in between. It keeps my body active without stressing injured areas.

I also made walking a non-negotiable. Getting between 7K and 10K steps daily has been surprisingly grounding. There is something calming about long walks during winter. It gives me space to think without forcing productivity.

SwiftUI and Staying Consistent 🍎

SwiftUI has been my anchor this month. I am currently at Day 50 of hacking with Swift, and that consistency matters more to me than the number itself.

Some days I learn something new. Other days I just reinforce what I already know. But I show up. Opening Xcode, reading code, tweaking small things. That habit feels stable now, and I can see how repetition is slowly compounding into confidence.

I’m no longer chasing speed. I’m chasing continuity.

Games I’m Playing 🎮

I started playing Ratchet & Clank this month. It didn’t hit me emotionally the way Ghost of Tsushima did, but it has its own charm.

What stood out most was how well the game integrates with the PlayStation DualSense controller. The haptics, trigger resistance, and feedback add a layer to the experience that feels intentional and well designed. It’s one of those moments where you step back and appreciate how hardware and software design come together. I want to write about this from a design perspective.

Gratitude and Looking Back 🙏

As the year comes to an end, I’ve been reflecting on where I started and where I am now.

At the beginning of this year, I had less knowledge and less privilege than I do today. I was unsure, experimenting, and trying to find my footing in multiple areas. As this year ends, I can confidently say I am in a better place. Not because everything is figured out, but because I have moved forward.

What matters more to me is that I am learning, challenging myself, putting myself in uncomfortable situations, whether it’s SwiftUI, BJJ, writing, or building things. That forward motion means more to me than any milestone.

December reminded me that growth doesn’t always need to be loud. Its the consistency that compounds to be the behemoth.

November felt slow and a little disrupting, the kind of month where routines loosen up and progress becomes quiet and steady. It was busier than usual on both the personal and career side. I spent most of the month juggling learning, training, and keeping life in order. Because of that, my side projects stayed still. Not a bad stillness, but a deliberate slowing down.

This month was mostly about getting deeper into SwiftUI, playing way too much FC 26 Rush, showing up to BJJ classes, trying to build something small in Swift, and turning 32 with a sense of calm reflection.

Learning SwiftUI 🍎

I kept the momentum from last month and reached Day 30 of the SwiftUI course. This is probably the first time I stayed consistent without dropping the habit halfway.

I continued following Josh Kaufman’s idea on learning anything in 20 hours. It helps me keep the whole process light, simple, and more about repetition than mastery. I’m letting the concepts stick naturally instead of forcing it.

Building My First Swift App 🏋️‍♂️📱

To test what I actually learned, I started building a small fitness app using HealthKit. It is nothing serious, just a space to practice and understand how things connect.

Building something from scratch is always humbling. Every stuck moment reminds me that the point here is to learn by doing and not to ship a polished product. Even after years in design and product, starting something new still scares me in the same familiar way, but that is also what makes it exciting.

Starting BJJ 🥋

I also started learning Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu this month. It humbled me instantly in a good way.

BJJ feels like learning a new programming language. Confusing at first, awkward in practice, and full of small moments that suddenly click. It also made me realize that the calm I thought I had is only the surface level. BJJ needs a different kind of calm, the kind you hold until the exact second you need to explode with strength. I have no idea how to do that yet, but I like learning it.

FC 26 and the Rush Loop 🎮

Rush mode in FC 26 Ultimate Team became my main escape this month. Quick matches and the constant reward loop made it the perfect end of day activity.

Seven years ago, a colleague warned me about games that trap us in endless loops without progressing a narrative. I am now exploring how these systems are designed and how they create that sticky experience. It is interesting to see it from both the player and designer perspective.

Turning 32 🎂

I turned 32 this month.
I wrote more about it here

Birthdays make me look inward in a quiet way. I feel like I am becoming more intentional about how I learn, how I spend my time, and what I want the next decade to look like.

Stillness in Side Projects 🌫️

With SwiftUI, BJJ, work, and life happening at once, my side projects slowed down. Not because I lost interest but because my mind felt full. Some months are for movement and some months are for letting things sit. November was the second type.

The month of fall, refreshing and calm. The month begun with rain, easing the heat and finally confirming that summer had ended.

October was all about me chasing TwoStrauss’s tutorial again, learning Swift and playing lots (and lots) of games.

Lets start with Swift 

I always wanted to learn swift. The Apple ecosystem and its elegance have fascinated me for years. My first attempt was back in 2018 through a Udacity course, but I could never finish. I thought it was laziness, but looking back, I learned so many other things in that period including basics of design, data analysis, sql, python and R but never swift.

That early experience left me thinking Swift was hard, and that thought kept me intimidated for years. I tried learning again and again, but never made real progress.

Then recently, while building my portfolio in Astro (AI tools as Creative Partners) , I used Claude and Cursor extensively to learn along the way. That process changed my confidence completely and I realized I don’t need to memorize everything, I just need to know how to find solutions.

I even wrote a note about how AI has changed the way I learn and how it empowers rather than replaces. The same thing happened here.

Right now, I’m following TwoStrauss’s tutorial and using Claude.ai whenever I get stuck or need deeper explanations.

Play 🎮

Ever since I joined the game industry, I’ve started to appreciate gaming as culture and as design experience. This month, I wanted to see how console games approach design and how they balance usability with emotion.

I’ve been playing Ghost of Tsushima since September, and after a month, I finally finished the storyline (yes, the storyline, I know). The game was deeply emotional and it felt like watching a series that I was part of. The storytelling was compelling, immersive, and beautiful.

After that, I began exploring live ops in console games through FC 26, Forza Horizon 5, and another masterpiece, God of War.

Writing. 🖋️

I always wanted to write, and to tell stories better. I couldn’t find a natural flow. Whenever I did, I ended up disliking my own words. They felt forced, like cheap literature.

Recently, I learned about a principle many writers follow: write first, edit later. get the structure down, and refine after. That small shift helped a lot.

This is where Im using AI tools again, not to write for me, but to keep me consistent while editing as I tend to switch tone midway and the tools help me to keep the tone in check.

This very note was written in iA Writer (my favorite app — more on that later) and later edited using the help of AI to maintain tone and clarity.

Would that be called overreliance or vibe coding? I dont know. The goal is to use these tools to learn and practice, so eventually, I won’t need them.

September’s been a mix of gaming highs, building the portfolios, and unexpected injuries. Here’s a snapshot of what kept me busy (and sometimes injured) this month.

The Ghost

Absolutely loved the game, from story to gameplay and to the visuals, it was a treat for both the eyes and ears. I’d heard about it for a while, but since I didn’t have a PlayStation, I never got the chance to play. I thought Sekiro would scratch that itch, but instead it just reminded me how bad I am as a player, rather than making me want to keep playing.

Where the game truly shines is in its story. It sets the stage beautifully, helping the player understand who they are as the protagonist and how they should approach the journey. That said, one area felt a bit disappointing: the forced assassin missions with Yuna. The game spends so much time talking about honor and the samurai way of life, only to push you into stealth kills just because Yuna is scared :/.

The game initially blew me out by saying that it can start as a Japanese movie, where the characters speaks in japanese and I would have english subtitles. The game also had a Kurosawa style where the game is in black and white mimicking the Akira Kurosawa, Take that for immersion!!

Still, it’s far better than the Spider-Man games where you pay €50–60 to play as Spider-Man, only to be forced into playing Mary Jane especially during in heat of the moment (what in the actual hell?).

I’m still working my way through Ghost of Tsushima and plan to write about it in more detail later.

Finishing the Portfolio

Speaking of writing — since finishing my portfolio (or as I like to call it, my wiki) 12 days ago, I’ve been planning a bunch of posts related to it: how I built it, and what I’m currently learning.

Here’s one I’ve already published: Why I Built This Site , where I dive into the reasons behind creating it.

The Injury

September turned out to be a pretty testing month. First, I got hit with a fever, and then I managed to injure myself on a bench press :D. With the gym off-limits and long hours straining my neck, I used the downtime to finally optimize my ROG Ally — or rather, free it from its toxic relationship with Windows (read: I installed SteamOS).

I should probably also write about how handheld gaming devices are carving out their place in the industry, especially now that devices like the PlayStation Portal are being so well received. In the meantime, here are my physical companions that kept me sane this month (and probably will for the next few):

All in all, September felt like a strange blend of recovery, creativity, and play. Between samurai duels, debugging Astro collections, and experimenting with handheld consoles, I’ve got plenty more to write about in the weeks ahead and I pray that I write more :D

Spiderman 2 - The end

Even though I tried to keep myself engaged to the game until I complete, there were many instances where I wanted to move away from the game.

Sure, the game was interesting and amazing, but for someone who played the Spiderman and the Miles Morales before this, I was getting bored with the usual spiderman shenanigans, may be a bit of oxymoron I guess, What else should I’ve expected from a spiderman game? But after a while comes THE VENOM, and good lord what an amazing sight it was. The game took an extra leap from the usual spidey stuff and more into Hulk (or Venom) SMA-SH, Loved the novelty.

As a sidenote, I should prep notes while Im playing games to write better 🤷.

Redesigning the portfolio.

Well, this somethign that I come across alot, I’ve been working on this portfolio since december from the very basic version to this-multi collection, multi faceted, over engineered and over glorified blog.

It all started from a thought of having a decentralized content platform which would act as a repository for my knowledge and the content I’ve produced or should produce.

Previously, my site had two versions of documents, Long formatted and short formatted. I also tried to incorporate mastodon to scratch the need for micro blogging but then it didnt serve me quiet well.

I often have a requirement of writing contents in fragments and then keeping it arranged only for it to later be chopped down and refine further, and hence I thought of building… “Series”

I would use this series to write more about how I built this site, and the games that Im currently playing so that it would act as a detailed repo and then we can formulate notes or essays from it to talk about specific instances.

AI Coding.

I’ve been trying to delve into coding for a while and since I was learning on how to be a better designer (Not saying that Im a better designer 🤷🏻‍♂️) it was very hard for me to maintain both aspects of learning and hence I thought of focusing only on the design aspect.

But since, AI tools like Trae and Cursor emerged, its been helping me alot in learning and helping me to recall what I’ve learned.

So, after lots of attempts and tryouts I’ve built this site using Astro and React with the help of Trae.

Playstation

Even though I had many different consoles over the years for gaming ranging from the Gameboy era to Rog ally (which is technically a PC), my recent aquisition of Playstation 5 has allowed me to experience the ways in which controllers could provide a different experience to the user.

I'm in an absolute awe about the way it handles haptics and provides a surround system by providing sound through the joy stick itself.

Playing Spiderman

I’ve always leaned toward PC when it comes to gaming. More control, better performance, ability to mod things the way I like. Console exclusivity always felt unnecessary to me. Why lock great games to a specific platform is what I thought all the time and I hated that some consoles charged more for games than their PC versions.

But playing Spider-Man 2 on the PS5 made me pause a bit.

There’s something about it. The way the controller reacts to what’s happening on screen, the haptic feedbacks, the way controller produces sound on shooting the web… It’s hard to explain, but it felt right, just like the game was meant to live on that hardware.

I remember Steve jobs quoting Allen kay in one of his presentation as “To build a great software you have to build a great hardware” and the console exclusivity just felt like the same. maybe it isnt just about gatekeeping. Maybe it’s about building something deeply optimized, where the hardware and software are fully in sync. That kind of tight integration isn’t easy to replicate.

WOW, that sounds like my next post :D. Well, more on the holistic experience later.