Yogesh Lonkar

Ten years of tmux, and the 1,495 lines of zsh it cost me

Tue, 22 Sep 2026 11:30:00 +0530

TL;DR I’ve used tmux since 2016 because I can script it. Over ten years my config grew into 1,495 lines of zsh across 13 scripts, and in May 2026 the status bar alone was burning 15.4% of a core on battery. The fix was one #() call instead of six, and the scripts moved into one Rust daemon, tmux-companion. The bar costs 1.8% of a core on a spike and 0.3% idle now.

Claude and my stale posts

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 06:30:00 +0530

This post itself is the exception to what follows: Claude wrote it from the week long session, using my notes and its own commit history, and I edited it. The career posts and the hosting post started as my writing. This one did not.

This is a first draft. I have used Claude on this blog for two days. I will come back to this post when I have used it for two months.

Engineer: Chapter 2

Thu, 30 Jan 2025 20:13:20 +0100

Chapter 1 ended in 2017 with a Jenkins plugin and a wish to grow upward instead of sideways. This chapter covers the years since.

Production engineer Link to heading

One idea from my production engineering degree that stuck: poka-yoke, mistake-proofing. In college I read it as “prevent errors”. It took years of platform work to see the real point. You remove the mechanism of mistake so the person can spend their attention on the part of the job that needs it. That’s developer experience in one sentence, and I didn’t know it till I was doing the job.

Engineer: Chapter 1

Fri, 29 Nov 2024 15:33:37 +0100

I graduated in 2011, two years later than planned. It didn’t bother me then and it doesn’t now. People who learn it are surprised, so here is why.

The two missing years Link to heading

In the second year of my degree I left to work with computers. Assembling machines and installing pirated Windows was one of the few ways to earn from a computer in Pune then. It paid for smokes and beer. Writing software was more fun than screwing boards into cases, and nobody would pay me to write it without a degree.

Free static hosting with Cloudflare Pages, Terraform and GitHub Actions

Thu, 08 Jul 2021 20:23:49 +0200

TL;DR You have a static site and a domain. Cloudflare Pages serves it, Terraform sets up the hosting from a few files in your repo, R2 keeps Terraform’s memory, and GitHub Actions runs it all when you push. The bill is zero. The example repo walks through the setup one commit at a time.

I wrote the first version of this post in 2021. Since 2019 I had hosted a few sites for friends and family on AWS: S3 for files, CloudFront in front, Cloudflare for DNS only. Route53 charged half a dollar per domain per month, more than S3 and CloudFront together for sites that small. That post was about shaving that fee.