Mishra G: why this site exists
I bought this domain in 2009 and barely used it for 17 years. Now that AI writes everything, my own imperfect words are the reason to start again.
It all started in my school days. My classmates often called me Mishra G, where the “G” is for “ji”, a mark of respect.
I was born and brought up in Kanpur, the biggest industrial city of Uttar Pradesh. I went to college in Ghaziabad, another city in UP, but part of the National Capital Region around Delhi. There, my friends and close mates called me Mishra ji. In north India this is a normal way to address people, by surname with “ji” after it: Sharma ji, Gupta ji, Chaubey ji. In college it became my other name.
When I joined my first startup, I was inspired by a few colleagues and the developer community around them. Most of them wrote code for open source and shared what they knew through blogs and code. I wanted to do the same, so in 2009 I bought mishrag.com. I wrote a few posts. For most of the last 17 years, I was just renewing the domain.
Why now
Over the last year I have seen AI-generated content posted everywhere. It is becoming very difficult to tell what is genuine and what is written by AI. That is when I started thinking about this site again.
At the start I was very shy. I worried about what people would think of my grammar, my vocabulary, my thinking. Now frontier models have become super advanced. So I feel writing in my own words, the way I actually think and speak, will show a unique identity, and make my writing feel more human.
Recently I read some articles and heard podcasts where engineers said they don’t want AI to run everything in their systems. They keep some hardcoded checks on purpose, so the AI cannot take over. I feel writing needs the same. My own words, mistakes included, are my hardcoded check.
These thoughts helped me start writing again, and pin down my views. Who knows, maybe one day an AI agent will become like me and write in my style.
What I want from it
To improve communication and think clearly, I feel practice matters most. How well you communicate depends on how deeply you know the subject. Deep subjects are a challenge of their own, because people know them but cannot express them in writing.
So I want to use this site to focus on my thought process: to make my thinking very clear, to say the right point to the right audience, and to lose my shyness about explaining my views openly in public.
So what will you find here? Engineering decisions, and why systems work or fail. Lessons from leading teams and building products like Adyakshar and Gharana. And sometimes family, travel and human nature. Some of these are things I hesitated to share until now. Real experience, in my own words.