The Curious Engineer

All blogs / Essays / personal

Neil Kakkar

neilkakkar.com

I want to understand how the world works. This blog tracks my growth, the things I’ve learned, and how I’m leveraging them to do epic things.

Essays / personalEngineering management / careersAI / ML

’18’19’20’21’22’23’24’25’26
Posts
69 from 29 Jul 2018 to 21 Jun 2026
Posting
now and then (5 in the last year)
Kind
personal blog
Feed
https://neilkakkar.com/feed.xml

2026 5

  1. AI Made Me Braver
  2. Blog section
  3. How I’m Productive with Claude Code
  4. Agentic Debt
  5. What I learned about burnout and anxiety at 30

2023 2

  1. How to setup duration based profiling in Sentry
  2. How to simulate a broken database connection for testing in Django

2022 1

  1. The “People fuck up because they’re not like me” Fallacy

2021 7

  1. How I Own Projects as a Software Engineer
  2. Funnels: The One Big Mental Model from Sales & Marketing
  3. Building your own Hey email Feed in Gmail
  4. Debugging Interesting Bugs at PostHog
  5. Why Is Naming Things Hard?
  6. All Stories Are Wrong, but Some Are Useful
  7. 10 Powerful Life Skills for the New Decade

2020 10

  1. Games People Play - The Blogpost
  2. 4 Different Perspectives to Solve Problems
  3. Things I Learned to Become a Senior Software Engineer
  4. Bayes Theorem: A Framework for Critical Thinking
  5. 4 of the best Ideas from The Idea Muse
  6. Big Ideas from Rationality I've Found Repeatedly Useful
  7. How My App Failed Even Before Making it to The AppStore
  8. Vocabulary as a Meta Mental Model
  9. Contemplations on Cascades
  10. The Best Things I Learned In 2019

2019 30

  1. How Unix Works: Become a Better Software Engineer
  2. Germs are small, sticky, and omnipresent
  3. A Better Birthday Gift
  4. If Influence were a blog post
  5. The Dunning Kruger Effect
  6. Things I Learnt from a Senior Software Engineer
  7. A Guide to Climate Change
  8. Where do analogies break down?
  9. If Sapiens were a blog post
  10. A Short History of Capitalism
  11. Taming Digital Technology
  12. Gameplan for a mediocre college
  13. How Ryanair can change flying
  14. Second Order Thinking - A Practical Guide
  15. How To Understand Systems
  16. How to Deal With Information Overload
  17. Psychology of Human Misjudgment
  18. The Human Log
  19. Averages are Meaningless*
  20. How not to be afraid of Javascript - Part 2
  21. Algorithms to Live By
  22. Computational Kindness
  23. How not to be afraid of javascript anymore
  24. Playing the long term game
  25. A Framework for First Principles Thinking
  26. The Personality Loop
  27. How not to live life
  28. How the medium earning algorithm works
  29. How not to be afraid of python anymore
  30. How to See Systems

2018 13

  1. Is your writing missing the touch of the greatest writers ever?
  2. How not to be afraid of vim anymore
  3. How to hack your life like a video game
  4. How to get noticed in the javascript world
  5. Now that you're not afraid of git anymore, here's how to leverage what you know
  6. How to learn anything quickly: leverage the vocabulary
  7. How to break through the trap of consumerism
  8. How Not to Be Afraid of Git Anymore
  9. Why keeping things in a mess is the most optimal algorithm
  10. Writing isn't about more
  11. How to escape mediocrity
  12. Making the most out of college
  13. A simplistic explanation to mental models

Undated 1

  1. curated section