DAKSH GARGAS

About Me

Intro

I'm a product engineer who likes building things with a purpose. I work across the stack and wear a lot of hats. Throughout my career, I've taken products from the ground up to production while leading their development. I'm most at home building applications.

Outside of work, I build small apps to solve the problems I run into and write about technical topics that once confused me—breaking them down into the kind of clear, self-contained explanations I wish I had found when I was learning them.

Contributions

LOADING ACTIVITY…

Learnings

RSS

Why my Kubernetes cluster's IP ranges could break my home Wi-Fi 2 mintailscale

SagaOne Table, Three Continents 3 parts

Move the server next to your users and the database gets slower. Follow one table from three copies in one region to rows that each live near the person who writes them, then see why a brand-new key still crosses the ocean, and how to keep it home.

CockroachDB · multi-region · consensus · leaseholders · follower reads · REGIONAL BY ROW

The Server Moved, the Data Didn’t 10 panelspart I Every Row Has a Home 12 panelspart II Where the Ocean Comes Back 10 panelspart III

A follower count is not a multiplier 5 minrelevance Why rank_feature is faster than an integer 5 minsearch internals Zero errors isn't an explanation 7 minobservability

SagaYou Never Look at Everything 3 parts

A post becomes a point in space. The points wire themselves into a layered graph, one insert at a time — nobody lays it out. Then a search walks that graph to an answer that shares none of its words.

Vector search · embeddings · HNSW · approximate nearest neighbour · OpenSearch k-NN

Your Post Becomes a Point 10 panelspart I The Index Builds Itself 17 panelspart II Dog Playing in Winter 8 panelspart III

SagaNothing Stays Where You Put It 3 parts

Zoom into a stick of RAM until a single bit fills the frame, then take two detours to find out where your program actually lives and what stands between every address you use and every byte you get.

Zoom into RAM 8 panelspart I Where Does Your Program Live? 6 panelspart II What Is a Page? 11 panelspart III

SSH into your Mac, but only from home 7 minmacos The 4% rule: picking app background colors that survive cheap phone screens 6 mindisplays You can't move a terminal, so move the session 7 minclaude code Every Claude Code Session in One List 2 minclaude code Snapshot Your Terminal, Restore It After a Crash 3 minclaude code Ping me only when Claude has a question 7 minclaude code The Tale of the UUID 12 panelspanels Database Rate Limiting: The Missing Piece After a Circuit Breaker 3 minsystem design Bloom Filters, Explained Properly 5 mindata structures A Circuit Breaker Alone Won't Save Your Database 2 minresilience The Real GPU Tax of a Scaled Resolution 6 minmacos Why Redis Doesn't Implement "True" LRU 4 mincaching One brain, two wallets: two Claude Code accounts on one machine 6 minclaude code Designing a system you can't debug 11 minobservability Glow, a markdown reader that fills your terminal 3 minterminal The database is a folder 3 minarchitecture Every article draws its own line 13 mindesign Hello, world — why this site exists 1 minmeta

Apps

macOS

BlinkAlso Windows

Smart 20-20-20 eye break reminder.

First Ink

A menu-bar notepad for live meeting capture that reinstates the constraints of physical paper. Nothing reflows.

Umbra

Casts an adjustable shadow over the static menu bar and Dock to ease OLED wear — clearing the instant your cursor arrives.

TMEject

Auto-ejects your Time Machine drive after each successful backup, so you can unplug the dock without thinking.

MenuBarKitSwift Package

Reusable onboarding for macOS menu-bar apps: a launch banner that points at the hidden icon, and a "Can't find it?" recovery dialog. Swift Package, shared by First Ink, Umbra and TMEject.

iOS

PasteClean

Compose once, paste perfectly into Gmail. Sanitizes rich text so your formatting survives Gmail's rendering pipeline.

CLI

ssh-home-guard

Keeps macOS Remote Login on only on your home network — a root daemon watches which router you are behind and turns sshd off everywhere else.

GITHUB →

claude-sessions

Cross-project session picker and crash restore for Claude Code — fzf over every session, plus a snapshot timer that rebuilds your terminal after a crash.

GITHUB →

gdocs-to-md-mcpMCP Server

MCP server that reads Google Docs as clean markdown — headings, lists, tables and links survive, so LLMs get structure instead of raw JSON.

claude2tmux

Move Claude Code sessions from a plain terminal tab into tmux — detach, close the laptop, resume over SSH.

WEBSITE →

Professional Work

JinieiOS · Android

The HR chatbot of the PeopleStrong platform — leave, attendance, approvals and helpdesk answered in chat, for enterprise employees. Built ground-up, 2017–2021.

PeopleStrongiOS · Android

PeopleStrong's employee super-app — the full HR suite in one mobile home, used by enterprises across Asia. Built ground-up, 2017–2021.

WildriOS · Android

Troll-free social media platform — posting and comments filtered for toxicity before they land.

AQOIRComing Soon

Hydration and wellness companion app for Denver Life Sciences' wearable — real-time hydration, cardio and stress signals.

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