🧠 Musings
गद्धे पंचविशी / Donkey Days
2026-01-13
When my family explained the Marathi idiom Gaddhe Panchvishi (गद्धे पंचविशी) to me a few months ago, I couldn’t help but laugh and feel a little exposed. Roughly translating to “donkey-like behavior at age 25”, it describes a supposed tendency for 25-year old men to be headstrong, careless, and impulsive in their decision-making — like a wild donkey kicking and braying its way through life. The endearing idiom sounds like a widely quoted pop-science bit about the human brain’s prefrontal cortex not being fully developed until age 25.
I’ve made some significant changes in this ~25th year of my life — time will tell if those choices resemble those of a wild donkey’s — but there’s also plenty to look forward to.
In August 2025, I quit my software engineering job at SpaceX with no definite future plans. I’ve dreamt of several drafts describing my educational and professional journey up to that point, but haven’t had the courage nor willingness to put pen to paper. I might get to that stage one day, but it’s also likely some of that history will decay in my mind.
I’d floated my resume to a few companies around the time I was seriously considering leaving SpaceX. Despite nervously dancing for hiring committees, my bids were rejected. Among other things, it was difficult to focus on interview prep while I was busy with (and enjoying most parts of) my current job. I also did not want to quiet quit.
Eventually, the scales tipped and I was losing more mental & physical health than I was sustaining by staying in my job — hopefully it wasn’t the yummy lead pop-tarts. But therein laid my former CEO’s infamous Fork in the Road. I took the fork, dug into my favorite pizza-sized chicky parm, and turned in my resignation.
I quiver a tiny bit when I think about the unvested stock grants and bonuses I’ve foregone. I shudder a little more when I think about the poor timing of it all: being committed to eye-watering monthly rent, increasing consumer price volatility, massive Big Tech layoffs, and undulating optimism-pessimism on the exact state of the US economy. And I’m now shivering in the Seattle rain and 4pm sunsets.
This may have been the donkey thoughts speaking, but there are bigger problems in the world, so I tried not to be too worried.
I used this opportunity to travel more than I usually would, reconnecting with friends & family at their various home turfs. I relished my tech-bro pilgrimage to Japan. The list of places I haven’t visited, people I haven’t met, and food I haven’t eaten seems endless, so I only scratched the surface of what a true travel sabbatical could look like.
Despite the fast-moving fun of hopping about, I often craved the comfort of home and a stable daily routine. Notably, with more free range at home, I’ve enjoyed cooking in the kitchen arena. I can now vibe-cook a bunch of Indian dishes, make nearly round dosas and pancakes, and have taken ready-to-cook sauce jars out of the grocery rotation. It’s meaningful progress compared to the last time I wrote about my cooking habits.
I continued to walk down my reading list with books on: a review of nuclear weapons safety and organizational dynamics (The Limits of Safety), an epic tale of creating a 32-bit computer in the 70s/80s (The Soul of a New Machine), understanding the human condition from the bottom-up (The Infinite Staircase), perspectives on US-China tensions (Destined For War), and more. My reading list has skewed towards nonfiction for years, but I’m always open to recommendations!
To keep myself educated on technical doo-dat interviewing, I also skimmed through some books on software systems design interviews. Honestly, they left me feeling more unimpressed than I expected; they felt hilariously lacking in nuance and considerations for real-world operations. The industry seems strangely obsessed with asking young engineers to design fault-tolerant systems for one million daily active users — cobbling together in-memory caches, sharded databases, and streaming pipelines to produce the best C10M Galactus microservice there is. Maybe that’s just the norm for what you can squeeze into a 30-60 minute interview, and perhaps I’m a little sensitive after running ops for the Starlink network in my previous job.
It took some time to get over my burnout and return to programming. I’ve written separately about how I enjoyed learning and working in Rust.
Outside those solo activities, I’m deeply thankful to the friends, family, colleagues, and strangers who reached out after I quit my job. I also appreciate everyone who took the time to respond to my cold messages asking about their work. I’m fortunate to have a network that’s not only supportive but also willing to challenge my thinking and give me new thought-seeds to sow. I’d somewhat willfully put my head in arid sand during my time at SpaceX, so it’s been fun to grow fresh perspectives on our latest AI overlords, shiny new energy sources, and life outside the tech bubble.
I began working for SpaceX full-time while I was still a college student in Michigan. After graduation, I took a brief leave of absence for some short travel and to relocate to Washington, promptly returning to work after. I’d like to think this 2025 period of funemployment was the post-graduation break I never gave myself. I’m grateful for the support and luck that have allowed me to enjoy this ride.
So far in my short career, I’ve enjoyed untangling, retangling, and building network infrastructure and distributed systems. Networking problems induce a strange kind of headache that I enjoy — see xkcd 2259. To those ends, Tailscale and I seem to have found a good fit for each other in our shared interests (networking, managing system complexity) and values (privacy, trust, diversity).
Tailscale and WireGuard have the potential to bring forward a new evolution in secure private connectivity, akin to what Let’s Encrypt has done for the world wide web. Driven by their vision to build a New Internet™, the Tailscale team have already built an excellent product, as many homelabbers and businesses can attest. I’m excited to join the mission, keep learning, and work with the community — in my donkey days and beyond.
~ Amal