Technical – navatar.blog

November 25, 2025 AI · Technical

My own WordPress theme

I always want to build my own Wordpress theme, just because I could. Also, I am not happy with what's available out there, they are good enough but not something perfectly matching what I want for my blog.

Even though, I said "just because I could" - in practice, I could never find time to do it from scratch, at least not in this decade.

I am glad, I could finally do it using chatGPT and Cursor. I called it "kichava" theme. As of today this blog is running on this new theme I was able to pull together in couple of hours.

Update : Then I spent couple of days of midnight oil to get it ready for submission to Wordpress.org themes. Still waiting for review. Biggest challenge is to display excerpts with formatting kept as is. As multiple line poems being concatenation into single line is very injustice to the spirit of poem. Then there is this checklist from Wordpress I have to go over and validate multiple times. But now the theme looks much better. I want to add more block features in next version or incorporate any feedback I may receive.

September 25, 2025 Literature · Technical

Going on-call first time?

Prepare well in advance

Alright,

If we want to claim we are ready - we need lot of preparation, mock runs! That's what you should do before going oncall.

Read your team's runbooks and ensure you try them out, don't simply read like a news paper. If runbook says - search logs - you should actually search logs. If runbooks says run this command - you should actually run that command on a test system. This is important, make sure you have access to a dev/test environment where you can try these without fear of destroying everything.
Remember, once you are on-call ; You will be bombarded with issues and very little time to act. The more you prepare the more independently you can handle issues.

Shadow!

You don't need to shadow 24/7 but if you know current on-call is good at their job try to shadow them in zoom meetings while they are actually troubleshooting, mitigating issues. I personally learned a lot in this way. Don't ever miss a chance to participate in major incidents where a lot of folks will be pulled in and live troubleshooting will happen. That's great learning opportunity. Make time and keep shadowing.

Be Curious

Be curious

...

Be curious - if you don't know something ask around.
Be curious

...

May 18, 2025 Ideas · Technical

Idea to improve recommendations – multi personalities

Here is an idea to further improve recommendations for movies, products, services, places etc..

So far, we are treating each individual as always same - and trying to recommend either with collaboration filtering or content filtering - It goes only so far.

For "n" number of reasons, individual is not always behaving in same way. Some of them are hard to gauge but other are easy to get based on several signals. Some of the examples -
* What one likes in morning is not same as the one in evening.
* What one likes in spring is not same as the one in summer.
* What one likes in home is not same as the one in work.
* What one likes in regular is not same as the one in vacation.
* What one likes with alone is not same as the one with family.
* What one watches on mobile is not same as the one in TV.

You get the idea.

Stop treating individual as some unbroken piece of rock. Treat each individual with some degree of multiple personalities and apply clustering to each persona.

July 31, 2024 Interview Questions · Technical

Interview Question – (Microbe colony population)

/* 
 * Medical research lab. 
 * Phd - student. 
 * microbe - analyze its life cycle. 
 * If you start a microbe colony with a single microbe - it is growing extremely fast compared to other microbes. He want to understand and estimate growth provided there is enough resoruces for continous growth. 
 * Microbe - corm - reproduces via corms. 
 * First day it generates "3" corms. ==> For next three days it generates "3" each day. ==> Each corm will become another microbe in a day - on the same day it is born. 
 * After "3" days --> the corm will generate "2" new corms for next two days. 
 * after five days (3 + 2) cycle repeats. 
 * It dies after 51 days. 
 * Each corm starts following same cycle on the day they are born. They don't reproduce on the same day, but they will add "3" more micros from next day on-wards.
 
 ** After 365 days, how many corms will be there in the colony.  
** TODO: Make this post a little better. 
** TODO: Write  solution(s)
*/

June 6, 2024 Technical

Hello World!

Today I created this blog, followed instructions given here.

Changed username from default user. Apparently I can't change username, so created new user and deleted old one.

My website is registered on outside AWS, so added a A record DNS entry.

Update 6/9/2024
Added SSL : This is helpful tutorial.