Is it raining these days where you live?

My wife and I were walking to the market yesterday in a light rain, not quite a drizzle, or a mizzle, but a shower, if you will. It is a bit of a walk, but it is always picturesque, and yesterday was specially relaxed. There were gusts of wind, the scotch pine trees danced, the small shrubs in the house garden shook almost violently.

My wife asked if I remember memories of rain from my childhood, and in that moment, I didn’t. I had to fish for specific ones from my childhood. A lot of them are just playing cricket, coming back from school in a sudden downpour, or just sitting at the main door of our old house, and looking at the tapping of the rain drops on the tiny puddles and the occasional passer-by through the gap in the boundary wall.

A strong memory that I have however is of when I was 14-15 I think and visiting my father’s home village in Bihar. It was monsoon, the road that led to the village was a narrow raised dirt road between farms. I was riding with a relative to his home in another village. It had been raining since a week and the road was slippery as a soaped-up floor-tile. The car, a Maruti 800, was struggling to stay on the road and while it was dry at the moment, the clouds threatened rain any minute. And deliver on the thread they did.

It rained like someone had poured a huge bucket from a rooftop. It is hard to describe if you haven’t experienced rain in south and south-east Asia. Imagine a large shower at a public beach, then turn it on at full and add strong winds to it. I digress. Immediately, the road become one you see in mud races, the car gave up and went off road into a ditch near a mango orchard. We tried to get it going, to no avail. The winds were ferocious and the trees shook as if the tops wanted to leave the trunks. The mangos were obviously ripe, it was the season and they started dropping all around. Almost as if on cue, some people (who did not own the orchard) from the village, stormed to the edge of the orchard in the soaking rain and started collecting as many mangos as their hands, or their lungis could carry. There were young men, women, kids, everyone and the joy on their faces was something you could only have at the prospect of eating lots of mangoes, that too, for free.

We eventually got out of the ditch with the help of some of the men from this crowd and went our merry way.

I did not want to write about work or anything in tech this week. After reading this yesterday, and a bunch of reactions, I was just tired. I don’t know where we are going as the world.

Interesting reads

1. A comment on the whole Anthropic scene from yesterday/friday
   Everything makes sense, and also nothing does. Here is where I reached this comment from

2. The Everlasting, by Alix E. Harrow
   I have been reading this book the past week

A project I discovered

Scale Postgres n times.
Connection pooler, load balancer, distributed database. One executable, deployable anywhere

PgDog - Horizontal scaling for PostgreSQL

PgDog is an open-source connection pooler, load balancer, and sharding proxy for PostgreSQL.

Haven’t used it yet, but I can see myself using this in the future if needed

A photo I took

Hope you liked my little rainy day tales. See you next week ✌🏽