Raghav Agrawal @impactology@mastodon.social

Tweet by Harshil Tomar (@Hartdrawss): "This is the TOXIC Indian freelance industry. got a legal notice today. Rs. 10,00,000 penalty for 'non-compliance'. here's the full story: - signed a ₹X L ERP project - delivered 100% of agreed scope - they kept adding features saying 'this was discussed day 1' - i absorbed it, built 40% extra out of goodwill - 6 months of over-delivering - still got a legal notice. the Indian market has a specific breed of client. they sign a scope, ignore it the moment work starts, gaslight you into believing their new demands were 'always part of the deal' and then threaten you when you can't keep up. > the signed agreement means nothing to them > your goodwill becomes their weapon > I should have walked away at month 2. > lesson learned the hard way." Includes a screenshot of an email imposing a Rs. 10,00,000 penalty for non-compliance with the agreed timeline.

Email reading: "Dear Harshil, Greetings for the day. As per the subject stated above, [REDACTED] issued a work order for the development of a web application on [REDACTED]. During the initial kickoff meeting, our Managing Director explained the complete requirements of the application. As per the commitment made, the project was to be completed [REDACTED]. However, as of March 2026, the application has reached only about 10% of our company's requirements. This unacceptable delay has resulted in a significant loss of company time and operational efficiency. Due to the prolonged delay in delivering the agreed project, a penalty of Rs. 10,00,000 has already been imposed on you for non-compliance with the agreed timeline.

Reply tweet by Kanak (@kanak_k365): "Something similar happened (not the legal notice part) he kept on adding new things, i kept on agreeing and in a meeting he says you don't know what you are doing, we should have hired someone else (a lot more) when I said I'll charge more from now on as you are just adding more and more. Sent him his money back and deleted the repo." Quoted tweet is Harshil Tomar's original post about the toxic Indian freelance industry.

Is this common in freelancing? What can be done to avoid it?

x.com/Hartdrawss/s...

the chinese internet (a visit to china pt.2) "light apps" and a separate internet only for phones

The Chinese Internet by Spencer Chang substack.com/home/post/p-...

"In December & January, I spent over a month in China. What follows is a condensed breakdown of all the observations I had. I’m splitting them up into 3 sections: physical culture, digital culture & craft/creative culture"

uwu we are just smol beans doing some chonky peeping

the difference between "technology" and "design" is "this is the only way it'll work" vs "you could just make different decisions and get different outcomes"

Distilled Capability This is a meditation on essential concepts like capability, invention, and technology, and how the promise of software—whether or not that promise is delivered upon—is pure capability, and very little...

a while ago i ruminated on how software is always marketed in terms of features, which conveniently represent on one hand a capability for the user, and on the other a unit of work for programmers

but a raw capability says nothing about how the software behaves doriantaylor.com/distilled-ca...

my inclination is to shift the focus from technology (which is developing raw capability) to *design*, which is about decisions taken within a given capability envelope that qualitatively alter how it acts upon the world by emphasizing some parts of it and de-emphasizing others

for the most part writing code isn't inventing novel technology any more than writing an essay is inventing the printing press

to the extent that your product genuinely introduces any novel capability at all, there are a hundred times as many decisions around how it's packaged and provisioned

most software dev is applications and app dev is almost all gluing together libraries with ui; you notice when you invent something novel (to you at least)

indeed one explanation for why LLMs work for code at all is that they pick up on patterns that repeat themselves all over the corpus

as somebody who has been making software for nearly 30 years, the relationship of any particular software artifact to "technology" is tenuous, in my opinion

some artifacts are more technology-ey than others

most i would say (like apps) just rearticulate various mundane business processes

Herbert Simon argued that we manage complexity not by knowing more, but by constraining the problem. Compression is not summarization. Compression is removing dimensions that do not change action. Humans cannot process infinite complexity, so we construct boundaries to make problems solvable. When you feel mentally heavy or blank, it’s often because you’re treating every dimension of a domain as if it matters equally. You’re trying to solve an infinite problem.

Aka defining a boundary of relevance right?

The Fragility of Borrowed Intelligence — Aishwarya Khanduja

www.aishwaryadoingthings.com/the-fragilit...

Visualizing Fortune 500 logos by similarity by Knut Synstad www.knutsynstad.com/projects/vis...

Anyone on the TL here has worked with Hugh Dubberly?

Visual Collaboration Tools for teams building software by Kenny Baas-Schwegler Krisztina Hirth & João Rosa

leanpub.com/visualcollab...

Patterns of Legacy Displacement

Effective modernization of legacy software systems
martinfowler.com/articles/patte
rns-legacy-displacement/

Domain-Driven Refactorings
hschwentner.io/domain-drive...

Modernize with Confidence – convert your legacy liability into a competitive advantage

legacy-modernization.io is a comprehensive collection of proven patterns, strategies, and resources to help you plan and execute your modernization journey with confidence.

Cloud Native Transformation Patterns

Tools for creating effective Cloud Native architecture—and remaking the way we work

www.cnpatterns.org/patterns-lib...

Architecture Antipatterns

Discover common architecture antipatterns, learn how to avoid them and overcome design pitfalls! Gain valuable insights, practical advice, and real-world examples to build better software architectures and improve existing ones.
architecture-antipatterns.tech

Value-Driven Analysis and Design: Applying Domain-Driven Practices in Ethical Software Engineering

dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/...

"Domain Storytelling is a collaborative modelling method. It brings together domain experts and development teams and helps them to understand a domain, find bounded contexts, to establish a ubiquitous language, and to talk about requirements"

Domain Storytelling: A Collaborative, Visual, and Agile Way to Build Domain-Driven Software by Stefan Hofer, Henning Schwentner

www.oreilly.com/library/view...

An Introduction to Domain Storytelling

www.youtube.com/watch?v=d9k9...

GitHub : A curated list of awesome resources and links about tackling legacy systems that gives hope.

github.com/feststelltas...

"Most developers just learn how to create new systems initially and not how to maintain existing ones or even evolve those systems. This list tries to close these gaps"

How to do blind/visually impaired coders keep a mental model of what's happening in their codebase

How are you finding bsky so far

Foldit was such a radically imaginative project, it's the kind of project I think that allows a maker to skip ever having to job hunt via resume/cvs

The author followed me on twitter, that's how I came across their book

<3

💜✨ Interview with author @jyoshimi.bsky.social
www.tonyakubo.com/016-gaming-c... #cancerresearch #design #gamedesign #systemsthinking #citizenscience @tonyakubo.bsky.social

Gaming Cancer: How Building and Playing Video Games Can Accelerate Scientific Discovery by Jeff Yoshimi

www.amazon.in/Gaming-Cance...

The most practical information architecture book that does not sell itself as an information architecture book

WE ARE LIVE! Dying with nerves and excitement. Please help us realise All Will Rise by supporting our kickstarter! Plot your revenge against the billionaire class and play the demo now! #indiegames #indiedev #gamedev