Curiosity as a Compass

Infrastructure as code
I explored Terraform, Pulumi and Ansible, for a project to cater infrastructure provisioning and configuration management for one of the products I am working on.

From the engineering point of view, my take was that Pulumi wins on flexibility by letting you code in real languages. That being said, Ansible is still heavyweight champ (WWE reference xD) for config management.

SSH friction
I spend a lot of time working on servers and bare metal machines for production deployments, containerized development environments, self-hosted setups. That means a lot of SSH sessions. Jumping between servers. Moving files across machines. Running repetitive operational commands.

Even though I do maintain CMD aliases and scripts, it still takes time. More importantly, it consumes cognitive energy. You have to remember flags, paths, hostnames, sequences. It is a small friction, but it compounds.

So I kinda revisited my SSH workflows and started thinking about how much friction I quietly tolerate every single day. I have to memorize commands. I jump between terminals. I rely on aliases. I context switch constantly.

That kind of got me thinking, instead of memorizing commands, why not design interfaces that reduce cognitive load?

That line of thought led me to start a small project called Vecna (yes, the Stranger Things reference, the one who controls all the mind flayers xD).

So idea is simple, centralize control, reduce friction, and make SSH driven workflows better and more structured.

It is still in a very early stage, mostly ideation and foundational building, but if this problem space resonates with you, feel free to explore the repo and follow along: https://github.com/zhravan/vecna

P.S: Yes, it is OSS

The Painkiller Vitamin Candy Framework
On the product side, I was randomly exploring articles impact AI is having on SaaS market. Everywhere you look, there is something or other that is AI powered. But interestingly, the question is not who is adding AI, it is, what category those products actually fall into.

That is when I stumbled upon the PVCP framework. It reframes product thinking in a brutally simple way, as Painkiller, Vitamin, Candy and Placebo.

When viewed through this lens, a lot of AI SaaS suddenly breaks further on how relevant is its existence. I think for that reason, this breaks down any business idea on how relevant it is.

The framework forced me to pause before getting excited about ideas. Instead of asking, “Can this be built?”, the better question became, “Does this remove real pain?”

Something becomes valuable only when it meaningfully shifts time, cost, risk, status, or capability for someone.

This week’s biggest insight wasn’t technical. It was strategic.