Trial and Error

Thirteen Days and Counting

Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3  The indexes went in on a Thursday afternoon. By Friday morning the difference was visible in the numbers. Before the fix, our server was consistently running at close to full CPU during peak hours. After, it sat at under two percent idle most of the time. The same traffic. The same queries. The same forty thousand records. Just found in milliseconds instead of scanned row by row....

The Thing Nobody Thought to Check

Part 1 - Part 2 By this point in the story, we had cleaned up a hacked blog, killed a runaway process eating seven hundred percent of CPU, and blocked bots making a hundred thousand requests a day. The server was better. Noticeably better. But it was still going down. Less often, but still. Something was missing. The breakthrough came when we stopped looking at what was happening on the surface — the traffic, the...

Down the Rabbit Hole

If you haven't read Part 1, the short version is: my site kept going down, I kept fixing things, and it kept going down anyway. By the time I started actually digging into what was happening, I had already run out of the obvious explanations. So we went deeper. The first thing anyone will tell you when your server is crashing is to check the logs. Great advice. Completely useless if you've never read a...

Part 1 of 4 — in which I learn that 'it's probably fine' is not a diagnosis

It started with a message from my developer. "Site's down, restarting it now." Okay, fine. These things happen. I didn't think much of it. Then it happened again the next day. Then twice in one day. Then I started getting alerts at 6 in the morning telling me the site was down, only for it to come back up on its own ten minutes later before I'd even had my coffee. I'm not a coder....

What nobody tells you about automating Zoho Campaigns — and how I figured it out the hard way

There's a saying in Chennai. If you've learned to ride an autorickshaw through T. Nagar peak hour traffic — dodging Saravana Stores patrons, Food carts in tricycles, that one uncle who parks his Activa exactly in the middle of the road — then you can drive anywhere in the world Zoho’s API is exactly like T. Nagar traffic. If you successfully integrate with Zoho Campaigns API, I promise you — any other API in the...

I Tried to Replace Zoho Campaigns with an AI Agent. I Gave Up Halfway.

Anthropic’s announcement about launching Claude agentic plugins was kind of an eye-opener for me. Before you mistake me for an AI expert, let me make this clear. I am not. I run a business. I experiment a lot. I try to automate anything that feels repetitive or expensive. With my limited coding skills, I’ve picked up this habit of playing around with generative and agentic AI tools. They’re mostly fun to work with, especially when...

Why Your Product Isn’t the Hero. Your Customer Is

Some time back I was at a home appliances shop to buy a couple of kitchen equipments. The salesperson was trying to sell the new food processor that had just come to the market. She had good clarity about the product. While at it, I didn’t find anything special about her sales talk. But after leaving the place, one thing struck me very hard. During the entire sales pitch, she didn’t say anything about the...

One Product Choice That Quietly Won My Loyalty

I almost always choose Rapido over Uber, and the reason is embarrassingly small. It has nothing to do with pricing, availability, or even loyalty. It comes down to the OTP. Uber gives me a new OTP for every ride. Rapido doesn’t. It’s the same number, every single time. On paper, that feels like a bad idea. We’ve been trained to believe that anything involving an OTP must be random, temporary, and treated like a state...

Every now and then, a random show or conversation sneaks up on you — the kind that you start watching casually, only to find yourself unexpectedly moved or inspired by the people in it. That’s exactly what happened when I stumbled upon Startup Singam a Tamil reality show I discovered through linkedinBut this one caught my attention for a different reason — the producer was Kumar VembuEveryone knows Sridhar Vembu, the co-founder of Zoho. But how many...