out.of.d

I had purchased four books to devour during the Christmas holidays as a way to recharge, learn and get ready for the next year. But a surprise spike in traffic to my blog (thanks to the Hacker News front page referrals) right on the first day made me throw that plan out the window and spend the holidays reflecting instead.

This is not a “how-to” post, however. It’s about my journey, as a non-native English speaker, of navigating a world dominated by English, and of reducing the friction between thoughts and words.

I expect that the story will resonate with people who come from similar backgrounds.

The Confusion and the Excitement

On the night of December 23, I received an email from Netlify, where I host my website, that I had exceeded 75% of the bandwidth quota for my free tier. It was late and I was exhausted from the holiday travel, so I didn’t think much of it. When I woke up, I saw an email from midnight that I was at 125% usage, and that all services had been suspended until the beginning of next month, unless I paid to keep them going. I was afraid my blog was dark.

Surprised and confused, I checked Simple Analytics and it showed me thousands of views on one of my latest essays, Perfect Software. I had published it 2 days ago. Before this happened, I had a total of <500 views on my blog, all the pages combined. So you can imagine how genuinely confused I was with the numbers I was seeing. The referrer was news.ycombinator.com, aka HackerNews. Things started to make some sense. I checked HackerNews to find out that my essay had made it to the front page and had >70 comments.

It felt surreal, unreal.

When the confusion and the excitement wore off, I spent some time thinking about what I was feeling and why. I didn’t want to classify it as “happiness” and move on. It was deeper than the ephemeral dopamine release and deserved deliberation to understand.

It spoke to the writer in me.

I don’t say writer as a credential but as a description of a habit. It has taken some time for me to realize this, but defining the identity by the act itself eliminates the pressure of perfection and the need for certification. I am a writer like I am a runner.

Although the essay that became popular is about software, it isn’t technical. So the attention and engagement it got didn’t stem from the technical merit of my argument, but rather the resonance of the sentiment, which was evident from the discussions and the DMs I received after. It touched on the things that people deeply care about, whether it’s code, software, LLMs, joy or agency. As a reader, I’ve always loved a piece of writing that articulates what I feel but cannot describe. I had set out to do that here.

A Young Boy Looking Out and Up

I come from a humble, middle-class background in a small town in India, Shivamogga. My dad didn’t go to college, and mom, despite having an undergraduate degree, stayed at home and dedicated her life to family. Although my brother and I both went to an English-medium school, English was strictly a subject in a textbook, not a language of communication. We never spoke in English with anyone.

A few years later, however, my brother went to college in Bengaluru. It was his first encounter with English as a language. He consumed Western shows and movies, read English novels and other books outside of the curriculum, and, above all else, spoke English. When he came back home during the holidays, he would seamlessly weave English words into our conversations in Tulu, Marathi, or Kannada, our native languages. It looked impressive. He had become the person that I wanted to become. It was as if by leaving our hometown, he had crossed the border of the middle class.

I was always fascinated with English. It was a symbol of sophistication. It signaled the upper class. It signaled literacy. Maybe that was the allure. I wanted to look sophisticated. I wanted to look literate. But I felt embarrassed using English words in front of my brother. I felt like a wannabe. I felt insufficient and insecure. I lacked the confidence and the courage.

It wasn’t obvious where this mixed bag of feelings about English - the fascination and the insecurities - came from. I was never explicitly told or taught that, which makes me wonder if it’s a residue of India’s colonial past. Almost an inheritance of a gene that makes you feel like your own language, culture, and people are insufficient and something to overcome. Like Sumana Roy says in her terrific essay, The Provincial Reader, “This is the provincial’s fate — to gaze out of the window at the cost of neglecting the inhabitants in the room”.

Back then, I neither had the maturity to see it, nor the clarity and fluency to articulate it.

In my final year of college, I had decided to take the GRE and the TOEFL, the gateways to colleges outside of India. My brother had already gone to a good college in the US. I wanted to follow in his footsteps. But since I attended college in my hometown, I didn’t think I had enough English in me to be able to crack the exams on my own. So I signed up for GRE training classes in Bengaluru. I’d travel to the city by train on the weekends for the next few months. I stayed at my cousin’s place and commuted to the classes by bus. Bus and train rides became my dojo. For someone who wanted to sound literate, GRE words were a goldmine. I studied fancy GRE words obsessively and I realized I had a knack for it. I started reading out loud on the train, so I could hear myself speaking. I didn’t converse in English just yet, but this laid good foundations.

I scored well in those exams, went to the US a couple of years later for grad school and eventually landed in the Bay Area for work. This was the first time in 25 years that I wasn’t running on a treadmill anymore. I wasn’t chasing any milestones - college, degree, grades, job. The typical Indian journey called for marriage, “settling down” and having kids as the next steps, but those wouldn’t come until a few years later. I finally had the time to do things with no other objective in mind but the sheer joy of doing. I could read and write for fun.

Freedom and Growth

I started reading a wide range of books, primarily non-fiction. While I chose books on topics I was interested in, what I learned implicitly, with every one of them, was language. I was being exposed to fluency at a level I had never experienced until that point in life. The thing about reading widely is that you come to learn what resonates with you. You start to appreciate the nuances of the writing style, tone, vocabulary, and storytelling and realize that they matter. You start to find your voice, your taste, ironically by studying others.

While reading helps you learn it, writing helps you craft it. You go from being terrible at expressing your thoughts to being comfortable at doing that. The flow from thoughts to paper is a superpower. From thoughts to spoken words in real-time, more so.

If there was ever a product to measure any of this, the KPIs would be Mean Time to Paper and Mean Time to Speech: the average latency between the conception of a thought to paper or the spoken word. The goal of the product would be to minimize those metrics. In this case, the “product” was the hard work of practice.

As I switched from an IC role to a manager, my communication skills became more important than ever. Overnight, I was expected to be in meetings all day, listening to people, communicating with people. I wasn’t merely holding conversations anymore. I was influencing, mentoring and coaching. I was managing individuals, teams, stakeholders, projects and outcomes. I had to be precise, concise, and convincing.

It was unsurprising that my move to management wasn’t my idea. The beliefs cemented in my mind about my language, my origins, and my limitations, had convinced me that “leadership” was a dialect I couldn’t speak. I couldn't imagine surviving a role built entirely on clarity of communication in English. So when someone I respected insisted that I could do this, he had given the permission I didn’t know I was looking for. Sometimes, you have to borrow belief from others until you have enough of your own to keep going. So I took the plunge.

To my younger self, who hesitated to use English words with his brother, this role would have been a nightmare. But years of practice - the GRE words, the reading, the reflecting, and tons of poor, persistent attempts at writing - had prepared me for this. I was now being told I was an effective communicator, and dare I say, a leader.

The best thing about my job is that I get so many chances at getting better that I have no excuse to not improve. If I stumbled trying to communicate a certain thought, I always had the next day, the day after, and every other day where I did the same thing, over and over again, with a diverse set of people, each with unique needs and goals.

I had already amassed the tools for improvement: reading, writing and reflection, and they stayed with me.

What It All Means

And that brings me back to the front page of Hacker News.

When I saw those thousands of visitors and dozens of comments, I didn’t feel pride over a popular post. What I felt was the validation of a decades-long journey. I had gone from a boy who felt like a "wannabe" for speaking English, to someone who could write an essay that resonated with thousands of strangers across the globe.

The destination of this journey isn’t pride or arrogance. It isn’t even happiness of having accomplished some milestone: making it to the front page of HackerNews was never a goal. It’s quiet confidence and conviction in my abilities and intuitions. It’s the courage to pursue my curiosity and interests.