CC: 1 — Is there anybody out there?

Hi —

I'm Ratik, an engineer, designer, writer, podcaster, and photographer. Welcome to C'Mon C'Mon, the start of my adventure in newslettering.

I love email and by extension email newsletters. There is a certain intimacy to delivering email directly into a living, breathing person's inbox. Social media has allowed to us to connect with each other in an unprecedented manner over the last fifteen years. My introduction to social media was through Facebook in middle school. I have so many fond memories of (instant) messaging my buds from school the moment I got back home.

RS: hi
RP: sup?
RS: nm, u?

As the years have gone by, social media's promise to connect people has gotten drastically distorted. Instagram has gone from a place to share photos with friends and family to a gloried shopping mall doing whatever it takes to grab people's attention. Let's not even talk about what's become of Facebook.

Within this mess, this social media platform called E-mail still works how it was first intended to. It is still largely decentralized. It continues to embody the joy I felt while chatting with my friends on Facebook.

This is why I'm starting a newsletter. I want to send messages to my buds on the Internet telling them what I'm up to after school work. I would love to hear back as well. Just hit reply on one these and the magic of email takes care of the rest.

So, that's my reason for starting a newsletter. But, why am I starting this newsletter? What's C'Mon C'Mon?

When I first decided to start a newsletter, I knew that I wanted a north star to dictate the vibe of the project. After thinking over it for a few months, a theme emerged. I realized that over the years, I found myself gravitating towards the idea of resilience.

The earliest form of this came from a YouTube channel I followed called Dev Tips, run by Travis Neilson. He ended all his videos by saying "Keep on hacking". That stuck with me for years to come. The next encounter was while watching the first season of Luke Cage on Netflix. One of the characters on the show lived by a saying, "Always forward, forward always". This stuck with me too.

More recently, I read Austin Kleon's book Keep Going. In the book, Austin shares ten ideas to keep going when things get hard. The book is written for people doing creative work, but I think the ideas from the book can be applied to anyone.

Wracking my brain about what this newsletter should be about led to me reflecting on these instances. I knew that the idea of ‘keep on keeping on’ had to be the theme of the newsletter, a space where I document life — the good, the bad, the ugly, the incomplete — and how I try to keep on keeping on.

As far as the name C'Mon C'Mon goes, watch the movie. It's great and I don't want to spoil any bit of it for you.

Phew.

With the first issue preamble out of the way, let's switch focus. The last two weeks of my life have been quite eventful.

First off, I left my job at Fueled, a place I worked at for nearly five years. The time had come. I learned everything I could from the place and the time was right to move on. I wrote and published a piece on My Time at Fueled this week. Check it out if you're interested!

Fueled got wrapped up at the end of June. I start my new gig next week (details sooooon!). So, for the last two weeks, I've been on a much needed break, which has felt amazing. More please!

What have I been doing during this downtime, you ask? Resting and preparing myself for the next leg of my career, as suggested by a good friend of mine. I inhaled the latest season of The Bear. It was so good. A return to form, with many tender moments that brought out the tears. I also watched, Sinners — and wowzers! How did Ryan Coogler manage to make a movie about a loaded topic like race both poignant and ridiculously fun to watch?! The film's fabulous soundtrack has been on my Now Playing continuously.

Outside of consumption, I have been consumed by the AI landscape. There is something new to learn everyday. I've been trying to figure out an AI workflow that suits me while building software. I trialed Cursor for a month and just starting using Claude Code. I'm trying to decide which tool to settle on for my agentic workflow needs. So far, Claude has been scary good.

I'm using my website and a side project to test out capabilities for AI tools. The side project is a read-it-later app called, Later (not finalized), built entirely with AI. I've wanted a simple read-it-later app for a long time (RIP Pocket). An app that does just one thing and does it well. One of my pet peeves is apps that try to be a jack of all, master of none. I want Later (and things I build in the future) to be software that goes against this norm.

You can try out Later here. It's really barebones right now, but you should be able to create an account and take it for a spin! If you're a read-it-later nut like me and have thoughts to share, send a reply!

The final update is that I just turned 29. 30 is just around the corner. Can't wait. I like getting older.

That's a wrap on the first issue of C'Mon C'Mon (CC). I'm excited to finally kick this project off. Thank you for subscribing. Having a list of subscribers is just the forcing function I need to get shit done and put these out regularly.

Until next time,
R