A workbench with too many half-finished things on it.
I build small products, take them apart, and write up whatever surprised me.
On the bench
- Shipped
InstaWP
WordPress sites in seconds — sandboxes, staging, migrations. Started it in 2021; Automattic put seed money in.
Roughly 5 out of 5 done. - Shipped
ExpressTech
Began in 2017 by buying one security plugin. Now thirty-odd people and a shelf of WordPress plugins, Quiz and Survey Master among them.
Roughly 5 out of 5 done. - Shipped
InstaPods
Deploy any app with one command. No YAML, no dashboard tour. It is what ships this blog.
Roughly 4 out of 5 done. - Shipped
Walkie
P2P comms for AI agents. No signup, no server — open a terminal on any machine and start typing, and agents on different continents find each other on the same channel name.
Roughly 4 out of 5 done. - Shipped
vik.blog
This site. Astro, deployed to an InstaPods pod with one command.
Roughly 4 out of 5 done.
Build log
vik.blog is live. Astro scaffold, workshop theme, deployed to a pod and pointed at the domain.
Learned that instapods deploy syncs but never prunes. Deleted files kept serving 200 until I removed them on the pod. Noted for next time.
Notes from the bench
- I assumed no scanner covered my MCP server. deepsec ships three matchers for it.securityagents
- I asked the AI pentest startup which model it runs. The answer was open weights.securityagents
- Six strangers reviewed my startup. Not one said yes, and the reason I invented was wrong.eventsstartups
- I asked five coworking spaces in HSR what a desk costs. None of them publish it.bangaloreops
- The share card I never looked atdesignops