Editor's Note

This newsletter is a collection of ideas from the week, things I built, things I broke, questions I couldn't ignore, and patterns that kept repeating.

No trends, no noise. Just useful thoughts, insights and learnings.

» Learning Log: Curiosity as a Compass

Over the past few weeks, I have been diving deep into multiple areas. It was not about mastering one big domain rather following curiosity wherever it pulled me. It has been a journey across infrastructure, developer tooling, product thinking and even market dynamics.

• Infrastructure as code
  I explored Terraform, Pulumi and Ansible, for a project to cater infrastructure provisioning and configuration management for one of the products I am working on.
  

  From the engineering point of view, my take was that Pulumi wins on flexibility by letting you code in real languages. That being said, Ansible is still heavyweight champ (WWE reference xD) for config management.
  

• SSH friction
  I spend a lot of time working on servers and bare metal machines for production deployments, containerized development environments, self-hosted setups. That means a lot of SSH sessions. Jumping between servers. Moving files across machines. Running repetitive operational commands.
  
  Even though I do maintain CMD aliases and scripts, it still takes time. More importantly, it consumes cognitive energy. You have to remember flags, paths, hostnames, sequences. It is a small friction, but it compounds.

  
  So I kinda revisited my SSH workflows and started thinking about how much friction I quietly tolerate every single day. I have to memorize commands. I jump between terminals. I rely on aliases. I context switch constantly.
  
  That kind of got me thinking, instead of memorizing commands, why not design interfaces that reduce cognitive load?
  

  That line of thought led me to start a small project called Vecna (yes, the Stranger Things reference, the one who controls all the mind flayers xD).
  
  So idea is simple, centralize control, reduce friction, and make SSH driven workflows better and more structured.

  
  It is still in a very early stage, mostly ideation and foundational building, but if this problem space resonates with you, feel free to explore the repo and follow along: https://github.com/zhravan/vecna
  
  P.S: Yes, it is OSS
  

• The Painkiller Vitamin Candy Framework
  On the product side, I was randomly exploring articles impact AI is having on SaaS market. Everywhere you look, there is something or other that is AI powered. But interestingly, the question is not who is adding AI, it is, what category those products actually fall into.
  
  That is when I stumbled upon the PVCP framework. It reframes product thinking in a brutally simple way, as Painkiller, Vitamin, Candy and Placebo.

  
  

  

  The Painkiller Vitamin Candy Framework

  
  When viewed through this lens, a lot of AI SaaS suddenly breaks further on how relevant is its existence. I think for that reason, this breaks down any business idea on how relevant it is.
  
  The framework forced me to pause before getting excited about ideas. Instead of asking, “Can this be built?”, the better question became, “Does this remove real pain?”
  
  Something becomes valuable only when it meaningfully shifts time, cost, risk, status, or capability for someone.
  
  This week’s biggest insight wasn’t technical. It was strategic.

  ---

» Did You Know?

The Firefox logo is not a fox. It is actually a red panda.

Firefox Panda ❤️ 

» 🏆 OSS Shoutout

Mole: One of the craziest Open Source tools out for every MacOS users

I recently came across Mole and genuinely loved. I personally use Mole majorly for deep cleaning. It handles deep cleaning by removing caches, logs, and browser leftovers, the quiet storage parasites that slowly eat space over time. The smart uninstaller is beyond dragging apps to Trash, preferences, and hidden remnants that usually linger in obscure system folders as dot files etc.

Trust me if you use, you will know the value it adds

Signing off for now.

Till next time,
Shravan Kumar B (@zhravan)

Editor's Note

This newsletter is a collection of ideas from the week, things I built, things I broke, questions I couldn't ignore, and patterns that kept repeating.

No trends, no noise. Just useful thoughts, insights and learnings.

» Blogs

On Freelancing: My lessons & learnings

Sharing my personal reflection on freelancing, the freedom, the challenges, and the reality of building your own path.

» Did You Know?

A real moth was found in the Harvard Mark II in 1947, later popularized by Grace Hopper, though she didn’t coin the term "debugging".

» 🏆 OSS Shoutout

One of the craziest tools for online and remote whiteboard collaboration

I personally use Excalidraw as whiteboard collaboration. I have a self hosted version, simple one click deployment without too much of setup hassle. Real-time collaboration is smooth, the tools are simple but practical, and being open source makes it reliable and easy to trust for everyday use.

Till next time,
Shravan Kumar B (@zhravan)
OhMyScript Labs