Siddhartha Golu
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siddharthagolu.com
Siddhartha Golu
@siddharthagolu.com
58 followers 43 following 190 posts
I read books to understand myself. Infrastructure nerd. Co-Founder & CTO, one800.help.

Writes sporadically at siddharthagolu.com
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siddharthagolu.com
I have nothing but great things to say about OpenObserve. It's one of the few tools in the space which actually deliver on the marketing copy.

I've been self-hosting it for logs, metrics and traces at my startup and apart from the initial set up, I've hardly had to tweak things to make it work.
A screenshot of the OpenObserve dashboard, shows 6.9 billion events, 8.81 TB ingested size
December 12, 2025 at 11:49 AM
siddharthagolu.com
LinkedIn is Indian uncle personified.

How is it that despite universally hated, LinkedIn is still the de-facto king of professional networking. Network effect reigning supreme?
December 12, 2025 at 6:50 AM
siddharthagolu.com
The only wrapped I look forward to in December
Screenshot of AntennaPod wrapped which showcases my Top 5 podcasts from 2025. They are: 1. The Seen and the Unseen 2. Acquired 3. Lex Fridman Podcast 4. The Changelog 5. Everything is Everything
December 10, 2025 at 9:32 AM
siddharthagolu.com
An incredibly moving portrayal of two gay men in rural Maharashtra
A movie poster for the film "Cactus Pears". Shows two men with their eyes closed.
September 24, 2025 at 4:35 AM
siddharthagolu.com
Didn't imagine that an extension that I mostly created for myself would be useful to 30 other users as well
A screenshot of a Firefox extension that I'd created named "Zen Twitter/Blesky". Shows 2 reviews and 31 users.
September 23, 2025 at 11:15 AM
siddharthagolu.com
"Technicolor maximalism at display. Every shot feels controlled and patient and you can feel the craft shining through. The story is immaterial, maybe even treated as a crutch to let the visuals speak some narrative. Oh, the visuals."

www.siddharthagolu.com/posts/cinema...
A poster for the film "Jugnuma/The Fable (2024)". Shows a happy family under an open sky.
September 16, 2025 at 5:50 PM
siddharthagolu.com
This is what happens when you chase markets and money and lose sight of WHAT THE HELL are you building
A funding news for an astrology based startup in India, uses AI
September 15, 2025 at 7:30 AM
siddharthagolu.com
A pet peeve of mine - useless changelogs

The inverse is also true; I love people who care enough to write good changelogs, even if short ones. Just let me know WHAT "bugs were fixed" and "enhancements were added"!
A screenshot from a changelog of a software update which says: "New in this release: we've fixed bugs and added various other enhancements."
September 6, 2025 at 4:12 AM
siddharthagolu.com
I'm building a native android app for Logseq.

Logseq, the desktop, is an amazing app and has been my daily driver for the past 3 years. However, I found the mobile app to be extremely lacking in performance.

Here's my attempt at making a better companion app 1/n
A screenshot of the bare-bones markdown reader app for Logseq, shows my graph's today's journal entry
August 24, 2025 at 10:53 AM
siddharthagolu.com
GitHub started spamming the personal feed by including all the releases + any PRs closed in *all* of your starred repos. I consume my feed using RSS so it became a mess.

Thankfully, FreshRSS includes a way to mark an article as read automatically if it contains certain keywords.
FreshRSS setting to mark an article as read, includes my settings to remove GitHub's spam
August 21, 2025 at 2:09 PM
siddharthagolu.com
Reddit's product design for notifications is a classic case of user hostile design pattern. Who thought it would be a good idea to have a user go through all of the subscribed communities, individually, and turn the notifications off for each of them?!
Reddit's notification settings, showing you have to turn off notifications for each community
August 18, 2025 at 8:21 AM
siddharthagolu.com
Wish every documentation site gave such an easy option to inject in LLMs
A screenshot of y-websocket library's documentation hosted on GitBook which shows a "Copy Page as markdown for LLMs" button
August 17, 2025 at 5:22 AM
siddharthagolu.com
Matt Levine understands Sam Altman
A paragraph from a recent piece by Matt Levine says: "I have described Altman's marketing approach as "business negging." If you say "our product is good and will make the world a lot better," that is sort of ho-hum; everyone says that, so your audience will discount it. But if you say "our product will probably make the world a lot better but could destroy humanity, tee hee aren't I a little rascal," that's exciting! People are drawn to danger, and if you go around warning people that your product might destroy humanity then that strongly suggests that you think it's powerful."
July 24, 2025 at 6:54 AM
siddharthagolu.com
My Discover tab
A series of posts marked as "Show less like this"
July 1, 2025 at 8:36 AM
siddharthagolu.com
I just want to download my insurance policy - why should I have to download an app to do that? How is this not illegal?
June 29, 2025 at 12:28 PM
siddharthagolu.com
This is what I was waiting for, for so long! I'm gonna prune the shit out of my Discover feed now.
Bluesky's screenshot of a post getting disappeared from Discover when you mark "See less like this"
June 2, 2025 at 2:29 PM
siddharthagolu.com
A great way to think about Prisons and how unfair our society treats prisoners
A screenshot from Changelog's Zulip discussion around prison reforms: "I have been thinking about this for the last couple of days and a thought occured to me. A child is born in your town in a hospital not too far away from you, maybe the same hospital you were born in. Is raised in your culture and traditions, goes to public school just like you did. Watched the same TV shows as you, listened to same songs we all do, and participated in the same culture as we all do. One day this person is arrested for whatever reason. Society doesn't look at this person and say "how have we failed this person, what did fail to provide him or her that they had to resort to crime or drugs. What kinds of messages did our culture and education system feed them which resulted in this etc". Instead society says "this person failed us, they chose to harm our society. This is an affront to our society and they must be punished harshly as possible." I think this is at the core of what's wrong with our so called justice system. Note: It's obvious the justice system in the USA is collapsing rapidly but this notion applies to most other countries as well."
June 2, 2025 at 2:24 PM
siddharthagolu.com
How the hell have we normalized this?
A screenshot of a comment from Lobste.rs which says: "I had some plans to finish one of my projects with data pipelines (using local environment), but russia decided to shell Kyiv with ballistic missiles and drones this night, so most of the night was quite awful; dogs were shocked, humans crying, all that stuff. No direct hits (at my building), but one was quite close in the neighbourhood. So l'll put some effort in pinging my colleagues and getting some sleep afterwards. Data pipelines - optional."
May 25, 2025 at 5:42 AM
siddharthagolu.com
Google AI Studio randomly decided to give language lessons
A screenshot from Google AI Studio showing marathi language in logs
May 20, 2025 at 10:49 AM
siddharthagolu.com
Not something to boast about Amazon, when the marketing saying "delivery in 10 mins"
A screenshot of amazon now saying the order got delivered in 39 mins
May 20, 2025 at 8:34 AM
siddharthagolu.com
I think this is a pretty accurate description of Philosophy
A quotation from the book "A history of western philosophy" by Bertrand Russell, which reads: "Philosophy, as I shall understand the word, is something intermediate between theology and science. Like theology, it consists of speculations on matters as to which definite knowledge has, so far, been unascertainable; but like science, it appeals to human reason rather than to authority, whether that of tradition or that of revelation. All definite knowledge-so | should contend-belongs to science; all dogma as to what surpasses definite knowledge belongs to theology. But between theology and science there is a No Man's Land, exposed to attack from both sides; this No Man's Land is philosophy. Almost all the questions of most interest to speculative minds are such as science cannot answer, and the confident answers of theologians no longer seem so convincing as they did in former centuries."
May 4, 2025 at 3:30 AM
siddharthagolu.com
Another great piece by @restofworld.org, and another reminder of rampant toxicity in India's startups

restofworld.org/2025/bhavish...

I keep wondering why is it that this industry rewards "move fast and break things" and not people obsessed with quality and thoughtfulness.
May 2, 2025 at 9:34 AM
siddharthagolu.com
Waiting for Aider benchmarks to hit before I start downloading these insane (on paper) models
Screenshot of the latest Qwen3 models comparison across benchmarks with other closed/open source models
April 29, 2025 at 6:05 PM
siddharthagolu.com
I've only ever written two poems in my life, both ~5-6 years ago. Yet they still comfort me whenever I go back and read them.

"Fear" in 2020: www.siddharthagolu.com/posts/scared...

"Deference vs Indifference" in 2019: www.siddharthagolu.com/posts/defere...
Screenshot of a poem which reads: "I’m scared. No, not because there’s a pandemic going on, even though that itself is enough to make one lose their mind. There’s another deadly virus crawling its way into my whole being. Slowly eating away at my sanity, feasting on my thoughts, mutating inside my head as if a colony of ants was given an open invitation to a room full of sugary syrup. I’m disintegrating. Funny how the same thoughts, who once used to tell me there’s an ocean of possibilities out there; are slowly drowning me into the same pool, replacing me, devouring me bit-by-bit as if my feet are tied with stones of expectations and I keep swimming to the bottom, mistaking it for the shore. Splash. Splash. Splash. I see people making art, saving lives, reading books, writing novels, cooking food, running home marathons - resolving to turn this gloom into resilient happiness. And I can’t help but feel disgusted at my curled up crying self in the bedroom corner, struggling to tell apart midnight from noon." A screenshot of a poem which reads: "There used to be a time when things used to be simple. I’d wake up, rub my eyes, sit up straight, close my eyes, And pray that He will continue to guide me as He had done the previous day. There used to be a time when I used to love the aroma of the stick when it burned, lighting up my day with the secret enchantments, as if the secrecy itself was the source of my happiness. There used to be a time when coming home after a bad day, I’d sit on my bed and join my hands and close my eyes and quietly shed a tear. The statues didn’t move or speak or whisper, but I felt assured that somehow those little stones were the only ones who listened to me and answered back. But now, I wake up and lie on my bed for hours, watching the fan complete circles after circles after circles, as if I was stuck in the middle while everyone else around me kept going through life as if it was such an easy task. But now, The smell of the burning stick nauseates my senses, the secret spells make me mad, the constant enchantings feel as if someone lit a person on fire while they were sleeping. But now, when I come back home after a bad day, to the empty apartment echoing with silence so loud I worry my neighbors will start complaining - Even crying for hours doesn’t help."
April 22, 2025 at 6:28 PM
siddharthagolu.com
Finally finished Volume III of The Complete Story of Civilization - Caesar and Christ. Took ~30 hours to finish this one. I was reading Proust's Volume III (The Guermantes Way) alongside this one, finishing these two feels like the end of an era. Will write up my thoughts on the book in some time.
A screenshot of a time tracker application showcasing the amount of time it took me to read the book "The complete story of civilization: Caesar and Christ"
April 11, 2025 at 4:46 AM