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Favas

23 posts

Writing

Notes on what I build, what breaks, and moving countries.

  • Engineering and AI
  • Building and teams
  • Career and learning
  • Life and mind

2026

  1. I published a result where nothing wonMy lab's first study lost. I'd promised in advance to publish losses, so here it is.Research · 2 min read
  2. What grading AI answers taught me about writingI mark homework for language models. It made me a stricter reader of my own drafts.AI · 4 min read
  3. Sent is not deliveredA 200 means the message left. It doesn't mean it arrived.Engineering · 4 min read
  4. Building a company nobody asked forNobody asked for another software company. We started one anyway.Building · 1 min read
  5. What moving to the UAE changedA lot of what I thought was normal was just how things were in Kerala.Life · 1 min read
  6. Decisions I made at 3AMThree big decisions got made late at night, when I was too tired to keep overthinking them.Life · 1 min read

2025

  1. 2025, in release notesGraduated, started Nayrix from Kerala, then moved to the UAE. In that order.Life · 2 min read
  2. What portfolios leave outThe best work you've done is usually a problem nobody saw you solve.Career · 1 min read
  3. The one-person teamNo one to hand the hard parts to, and no one else to blame.Building · 1 min read
  4. Malayalam, English and JavaScriptWhat moving between languages taught me about code, and why right-to-left text is not an edge case.Life · 2 min read
  5. Graduating into uncertaintyEveryone asks what's next. The honest answer is that I don't know, and I've stopped pretending otherwise.Career · 2 min read
  6. AI wrote my auth in ten minutesIts code was better than mine. It still couldn't do the part of the job that matters.AI · 2 min read

2024

  1. What I got wrong in 2024Four things I was sure about, from CSS-in-JS to skipping tests, and what each one cost me.Engineering · 3 min read
  2. Why every icon strategy failsTeams pick one icon library and end up with four. The fix is making the right icon the easiest one to grab.Engineering · 3 min read
  3. Breaking things to learn themI learn systems fastest by breaking them on purpose, somewhere safe.Engineering · 2 min read
  4. The spreadsheet was already softwareShe said she could never code, but her spreadsheets were already doing a program's job.Building · 3 min read
  5. The AI tools I actually keptMost AI tools I tried didn't last a week. These stayed in my workday.AI · 2 min read
  6. The content system that made nothingI built a content machine that produced nothing, then found one rule that did.Building · 3 min read
  7. What the browser inspector taught meInspect Element taught me more about the web than any course did.Engineering · 2 min read
  8. Competent versus greatCompetent closes the ticket. Great usually means throwing work away.Life · 2 min read
  9. The question I ask designersOne question shows whether a designer starts from the problem or from the visuals.Building · 2 min read
  10. From Bio Science to bug fixesBiology taught me how to debug: change one thing at a time and write everything down.Career · 2 min read
  11. Talks that nobody remembersThey remembered the venue and the lunch. Not one point from the talk.Career · 2 min read