Weekly journal

These started as a Sunday-morning notebook habit. Banani, second-floor flat, the call to fajr already faded, lukewarm Twinings still in the cup from the night before. Each entry is one week of work and reading, posted Sunday before the week absorbed it. “Week 26, 2023,” “Week 39, 2023,” and “Week 52, 2024” all live here because the practice held for two-and-a-bit years before the writing turned heavier and the weekly cadence shifted. The argument the cluster makes is procedural rather than thematic. If you write down what you actually did each week, you stop telling yourself the story you wished had happened, and the gap between the two stories is where most career drift hides. There’s no narrative arc across forty-three of these. Some weeks were one stakeholder call and a stalled migration. Other weeks broke something open. The value of reading them in sequence is the texture of a Principal PO’s actual week-by-week ledger across hiring rounds, two product reorgs, the slow agentic pivot, and a couple of personal stretches that didn’t make it into the published essays. Read three or four in a row, ideally on a slow Friday at your desk, and you’ll get a much better calibration on how slowly the interesting weeks actually arrive at a Principal PO’s inbox.