Hello! My name is Azan (a·zaan). I'm a self-taught musician, an enjoyer of the outdoors, and a software engineer. Below is a mix of things I've written myself and things I've read and wanted to share. Posts are mine, reposts link out to whoever wrote the original.
EmailGitHubMastodonRSSPortfolio

Writing on things I've built, broken, and learned from

    My contributions to the 'chai article'

    How I make nun chai (salted tea) at home

    NixOS and Ente on Hetzner

    My experience installing NixOS on a cheap Hetzner VPS and hosting Ente on it using Docker Compose

    My attempts to use a CMS in 2026

    CMS' are difficult to get right and all my clients want a WYSIWYG

    Authorization is still quite broken

    Modelling permissions in OpenFGA and why check() isn't enough

    Hot takes from IndieWebClub in the absence of Tanvi

    Fifteen contrarian opinions about writing

    Markdown is actually not _that_ extensible

    Where Markdown's HTML/directive hybrids fall apart

    Generating my resume programmatically

    Moving from LaTeX to typst for my resume

    Music at hack4play with strudel.cc

    Workshop notes from Kochi Bienalle's Forplay Society programme

    A weeknote because Tanvi is scary - II

    Workshops, an SMTP client in a Cloudflare Worker, and being tired

    Backing up my Obsidian store and open-sourcing my website

    Restic on local and Cloudflare R2

    A conversation about Chancenkarte

    Notes from a colleague who moved to Germany on a Chancenkarte

    A nice thing a stranger has done for me

    A song lyric that gave me a reason to keep going

    All my download metrics in one place

    Trying to find a single view of package download stats across registries

    PROGA and how to "protect" consumers

    Prohibition over regulation in India's online gaming ban

    A case for regulator-backed open-source tools

    India's DPDPA needs open-source compliance tooling, not just rules

    The trash that is NextJS

    On why the App Router makes Next.js unusable for a real SPA

    Music at IndiaFOSS with strudel.cc

    My notes about an impromptu live coding music performance at IndiaFOSS 2025

    A new set of ambigrams

    I made these for friends and stamps

    Migrating from Notion to Obsidian

    My journey migrating my knowledge base from Notion to Obsidian

    Cubic bezier curves, SVGs, and tone.js

    Sound generation that could very well have been a random number generator

    Notion as a bookmarks app

    Using Notion as a powerful bookmarks manager and CMS

    I got PSM-I Certified

    On getting Scrum certified and what it actually took

    OpenAPI documentation and string templating

    One of the ways not to write a documentation builder

    An ambrigram of my name

    The process of creating a symbol for my name

    Ordering food in flights

    Navigating UX design for an airline meal service

    All the ambigrams in my notebooks

    A collection of hand-drawn ambigrams from personal notebooks