March 21, 2026, Today's Reflection

Dear Diary,

Before I get distracted with something else, I really want to write to you today's reflection. Reflection about two things.

1. My Anger

2. Time spent

Time spent

Let's talk about the time spent first. It's mostly about the time I spent in building the app for tracking things in the factory. I committed to Adesh that I would be doing it on weekend. So I decided to do it today.

I spent yesterday evening thinking mostly about what I should be doing. Should I be building an app from scratch or should I be using an existing ERP? Into ERPNext — I gave it a try to set a few things. I think overall it has a lot of things which is essentially making a system really good. However I also think that in order for us to set up that it would take a lot of time and it's just complex. And if I throw the same complex thing to people who are not habituated to tech products they would feel very scared and they won't be able to adopt it. And so I thought I would do it. Um we will make a custom app. Then later part of the evening I spent mostly worrying about what tech stack I should use.

This is the thing I want to talk to you about. In my mind, I have been wanting to build apps with MongoDB and Node.js, but every time I think of doing that, I get hit by the thought of not having an admin dashboard like Django. This is the best thing about Django that I get the admin dashboard for free. admin dashboard from scratch is not easy and it also takes a lot of time. So I spent a lot of time thinking about that. I want to build apps with MongoDB, but um everyone keeps suggesting me to use Postgres. Torn between that I spent a lot of time thinking even when I was sitting with mom, with my wife, but in the back of my mind it was this thought, which tech stack should I use all the time. And that actually consumed my evening. And looking back I think it wasn't worth it....

So yesterday I finalised I would go with BunJs and MongoDB. I asked Claude to uh prepare a plan. I asked Claude to prepare separate specs for design and for engineering. morning again after going back and forth for 2 hours I decided to use Django with Django Ninja.

I started at around three thirty to finally start coding. It took me almost one hour to have monorepo set up. The building the backend was very easy actually. It took me almost three prompts in same Claude session with one million context window. I think I only consumed it 40%. This took me the least amount of time and the results were almost good in the first shot itself.

Next I started to work on the admin frontend. That took me almost one and a half hour of researching on which view library I should use as the template for the admin panel. It seems like there are not many great options for free. Actually I take my words back. Actually I think I was over worried about having an admin panel theme. All I need is a UI library which provides components. An admin panel is not something which has to be built individually as an admin panel. It's still a web app which uses some components and sidebar is actually just a component. But I think this was the hard way I had to learn this. Almost 1.5 Hours of feeling anxious, Just decided on a UI library and decided to build the admin dashboard using that UI library.

Then I spent almost one hour setting up both front end projects. It was a little bit clunky. Yeah, to do some back and forth and some manual git commands. Because I had to share some of the stuff. I actually created the front end without having the complete backend. I just used uh the specs to generate a mock server. And once the backend was ready and I had OpenAPI specs, I created an actual client side SDK from that OpenAPI spec.

The actual implementation was again simple. I gave it a prompt, this time with plan mode. I gave the design screen shots basically. And Claude did it in one shot. Now there are some small bugs uh which I will go through and test manually. I also spent almost fifteen minutes trying to figure out Chrome integration with Claude. But it just did not work.

Conclusions

• Took me about 6 Hours in My head planning and thinking, mostly time spent thinking about the stack, which was not worth it. At this point I should just fix my stack. And create starter templates, I do not have to spend time thinking about these, Also these things make me more anxious and ruin my personal time.

• I think what I did today uh with Python and Django is good. I think Bun & MongoDB would have been equally okay as long as i have to make a custom admin panel anyway. I did not look at the code and I think I would also not look at the code anyway at least for a prototype project. I think I should prefer Bun & MongoDB.

• I learnt that it is not too difficult to create new admin panel, it is also an app. However front end app in general takes more time.

Next Things

• Create a set of tools which would eliminate a lot of the time it took me even before starting the project and a major source of headache.

• Create a starter template for Bun & Mongo & Nginx Templates

• Create a starter template with Django Ninja & Postgres & Nginx

• Create A starter template for admin dashboard & a frontend app with some basic toolings in place

• A tool to create client side SDK based on openapi specs

• Attempt building a default dashboard on top of Mongoose (similar to earlier version of keystone)

Now My anger

Lately I think I'm getting really angry. And this anger is almost triggering a fire inside me. I get so mad and impatient. I haven't seen myself such impatient before. But maybe I was and I just never noticed it. I've tried to think about Ramdas in those moments. I've tried to think of love and compassion in those moments. But I feel so bad. My mind does not want to listen to that. And in that moment I realize my own reality. That is that I like to listen to Ramdas. I feel good listening to him. But in all honesty, I haven't been able to improve anything in my life. I haven't been able to actually do anything which Ramdas said. I just like to listen to him his sweet words...

But I must control. I must understand this anger and it's not about resisting it, but I must not have the anger. Or else I'll burn everything down one day. I'm already reaching for that whenever I am angry.

Ok now, that's all for today.

Good night.