Digital Product Designer, Digital Garden at hiran.in/ and sends This&That to your inbox via hiran.substack.com
Joined November 2008
- Tweets 7,756
- Following 332
- Followers 2,499
- Likes 3,999
309 Photos and videos
Pinned Tweet
23 Aug 2022
അച്ഛനെങ്ങനെ ആറു ദിവസം കൊണ്ട് പോയി എന്ന് ചിന്തിച്ചിരിക്കുമ്പോൾ ദാ, ആറു മണിക്കൂർ കൊണ്ട് അമ്മയും പോവുന്നു!
വി. യു. വേണുഗോപാലൻ
16 ജൂലൈ 2022
പി. കെ. രോഹിണി
18 ആഗസ്റ്റ് 2022
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Jun 11
My website was always around what I collected or consumed - dokuwiki with movies I have downloaded, to Jekyll website that listed reading, coffee roasters. Last week I spend some time and re-did it to a more visual version.
Introducing hiran.in/everything ;) Do check!
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ALT Together, we mourn design—killed, according to X, approximately 847 times this year alone. And yet, no matter how many times we declare design is dead, it is alive. Design is everywhere, quietly thriving in the clarity of the subway map when you fear you have missed your stop, in the legibility of the dinner menu even when you aren't sure if sorrel is a vegetable or a new pasta shape, and in the dopamine-releasing notification that a meeting has been cancelled. Design doesn't die. It is not a trend to be disrupted or a technology to be replaced. It's the difference between caring about how something makes you feel, not just if it works. So here's to design—endlessly declared gone, endlessly proving everyone wrong.
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Feb 24
So are they making it 'Keralam Story 1', or continuing with 'Kerala Story 2'.
Targeted Hate.
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Feb 11
I don’t know if Twitter account is ban, views are always < 100z. And the newsletter links get shadow banned. So, if you search, you will find new issue of ways of working, in which I am talking to Deepu Pradeep about his ways of working! DM if you need the link
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Jan 29
Ways of Working Issue 1 is out.
This issue is a conversation with Riyaz Usman. An educator at Infosys, a long-time reader, and someone whose relationship with books has quietly shaped how he works, travels, and makes choices over the years. Read now at : hiran.substack.com/p/ways-of…
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Jan 29
Ways of Working is a series of conversations with people about how they do what they do — their work, habits, tools, and what they care about. If you enjoy reading unhurried conversations, do subscribe to follow future issues.
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Not able to generate or get invoice from @Olacabs , emailed support and they too are not taking care of the same.
As a customer, am I not entitled to get bill for service I paid?
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I built a system to generate digital planners.
If you use Goodnotes, Notability, reMarkable, or any PDF based planner, you probably know the feeling. You find a format you like, but you cannot quite change it to fit how you think or how you plan. 1/n
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I am now trying to solve the last part of making it usable directly on the web, around safely running Typst and handling fonts in a browser friendly way.
If this is something you have worked on before, or if you have ideas around it, I would love to learn from you. 3/n
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If you want to try it, there are two ways. You can download a few ready made sample planners from a folder and start using them directly. Or you can go to the repo, run it locally, and generate your own with your own settings. n/n
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27 Dec 2025
Coming soon. Webpage that let's you generate PDFs with hyperlink that works with @GoodnotesApp , @NotabilityApp, @Apple Notes and even @remarkablepaper.
FOSS. @typstapp powered.
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27 Dec 2025
As of now.
- It works neatly.
- Can generate all permutations and combinations
- PDF hyperlinks are logical and correct
Next to Do
- I don't know how to host this.
- Looking to Collab with Typst experts
- I want to add some preset Configs, so that it's easier.
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6 Dec 2025
It's a regulation violation. Why is no one talking about a class action? IndiGo should be penalized, and they should pay every customer who had to go through this. As simple as that.
We are sorry 🙏
Community note
Indigo doesn't mention its failure to comply to DGCA regulations which led to this mess in the first place. Aviation expert, Subhash Goyal said this on IndiGo flight cancellations: x.com/ANI/status/199…
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21 Nov 2025
Love seeing all the hype for Ershad Kunnakkadan! We go way back through Free Software circles, SMC, and later at Bang the Table. Been awesome watching his journey. Big congrats, @ershus!
This man dropped out of a no-name college in India to be a software engineer and by 33, worked his way up to being CEO of a $100M company in New York.
Here's the never-before-shared incredibly inspirational story of Ershad Kunnakkadan:
> be middle class kid in random state school in Kerala, India
> get really into computers
> senior hands you Ubuntu 8.04 CD, whole new world
> starts contributing to SMC (a malayalam computing group)
> gets into blogging cause SMC seniors are into it
> go to no-name small private college in Kerala
> spend more time in terminals than classrooms
> shell scripting contests, Linux admin, security, virus cleaning, bots, paper presentations
> doesnt see a point to college exams
> drops out after 2nd year, promises family "I will earn a degree somehow"
> lands internship at small software co
> grows into being an architect
> found security bugs in Github and Prezi
> reads "Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution" and the "The Google Story", dreamt of being in the US one day
> does Google Summer of Code
> earns a degree remotely from Bharathiar University
> gets remote job at BigBinary
> moves back to Kochi to be near family
> involved in local free software circles and workshops, events, meetups
> building a quiet dense body of work over loud personal brand
> gets introduced to Gumroad as a consultant first
> joins Gumroad as a senior engineer
> gets married
> moves to Abu Dhabi to be closer to wife's family
> does the boring crucial stuff - scalability, security, payouts, infra
> grows to being a staff software engineer at Gumroad
> support millions of users and $1B in creator earnings
> just focusses on self-improvement
> never once thinks about promotion
> moves to New York City on an O-1 visa
> Gumroad looking for a new CEO
> board looks around and its clear who is best fit for the job
> become CEO of a $100M gmv business
I just love the story of Ershad. No brands, no pedigree, no MBA, no loudness. When I asked him the quality that got him here, he said "reliability". A truly kind, quiet and generous person. Who loves computers. Dropping out when you're rich is trendy in America, but to see someone Indian drop out and work their way up into the top role is pure inspiration.
Don't worry if you don't have all the accolades and ornaments you see in people who achieve your dreams. Be a good person, and be reliable.
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13 Jul 2025
Thanks to @amazonIN for making prime day app look like Flipkart. That makes me close the app before ordering!
Saved 5-10k 😇
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30 May 2025
Accidentally i realised all @IndiaPostOffice Pincodes are Hexa Decimal, and can have a colour value. So I viusalised it using @LeafletJS , thanks to data from @DataPortalIndia - here are the screenshots. For code and A3 map using @qgis - github.com/hfactor/pincode-m…
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30 May 2025
Thanks to OSM Kerala contributors for democratising the conversations around GIS. It helped me a lot in making decisions.
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