Vivek Shukla - Blog

Meditation

2026-04-08T00:00:00+00:00

Meditation is not something that you do; you just allow it to happen. It just needs the right ambience within you and enough practice. I think our inner nature itself is meditative and still; we just need to harness it. Make ourselves available to it.

Don’t be or aspire to be a senior or experienced meditator; there is no such thing. Always sit with the mindset of a beginner, as if you are doing it for the first time. Do not chase or ponder upon any experience during meditation; discard it, do not talk or think about it, forget it.

🔗</a>Sit</h2>
Sit cross-legged, keep your spine comfortably erect, your palms open and resting on your legs, eyes closed, your tongue placed at the origin of the upper teeth, head slightly higher than normal, and put a smile on your face. Tell your mind to relax. Take 3 deep breaths with a full stomach.
🔗</a>Embark</h2>
Close your eyes: Feel the environment, feel the temperature on your skin. Listen to the sounds around you. Smell the odour around you. Feel the touch of your body to your asana. Feel your body from top to bottom. See the darkness of the closed eyes. Ask yourself, “Who am I?”. See the thoughts that arise in you like waves, observe them until they disappear, don’t engage, then feel the phenomenon that keeps you alive, your breathing, just observe, let the body be. Just keep watching, even if your mind wants you to focus on your thoughts, just say not now, then come back to observe your breathing.

To make things happen, focus

2025-09-10T00:00:00+00:00

There are a gazillion things one may want to do, maybe as an escape, maybe as a distraction, maybe just wishful thinking, just to avoid the one thing that they should do.
The more substantial the thing you want to do, the more focus it will require. Don’t get distracted; to do something big you need to put your head down and work. Your goal must become the center of your life; it must consume you.
Either knowingly or unknowingly, people who have done something worthy in their life have put their focus on the goal. Maybe they thought of it as passion or obsession or challenge, but they kept their focus.

Is it worth doing? </blockquote>
When you pick something up, ask yourself, is it worth doing? Just a question in the void can clear a lot of things in you.
Maybe you will fail, maybe you will succeed, but if it’s worth doing, it should be done. It should be done for yourself. It’s important to pick some goals which are bigger than you; that is how you grow.

Content Strategy For Indie Makers

2025-09-07T00:00:00+00:00

A new wave of indie makers is emerging. Developing with technology was never this easy and accessible.
Every day new SaaS products are being launched. With this comes the problem that how one can capture the audience for their own product.
Conventional method of finding and targeting keywords, going on backlink hunting is not that impactful since the advent of AI. Don’t get me wrong these are still important however not at the beginning.
The number of people searching on Google is declining everyday and because of that even Google has put AI response first thing in the search, which reduces clicks on your website even more, even if it’s in Top 3 spot of search result.
However there is also AI slop fatigue among people, wherever you see people are using AI to write their content and it’s not that hard to spot it. So it’s recommended to use AI for idea generation, reviewing the content and strategy.
Having launched my own SaaS</a> and after researching quite a bit on marketing and content strategy. Based on my own journey and research, I’ve developed a content strategy that feels more sustainable. While these are just my thoughts, I’m already applying some of them and plan to fully commit to this approach.
🔗</a>Start at the start</h2>

Marketing is transfer of enthusiasm - Jason Fried </blockquote>
When you start any new project you are enthusiastic about it like it’s the best idea in the world which can change your life, use this enthusiasm to your advantage. Brainstorm content ideas, create the content, create the why of your idea/product. Find community around your problem on Reddit, X or Bluesky, engage with them.
One of the biggest mistake first time indie maker do (even I did) is that I’ll get on marketing and content creation after I’m done with the development of my product.
This is the worst thing you can do to your product and yourself. Content creation must go on hand in hand with your development work from the day one. I would first launch my website with wait-list form to capture visitor’s email. This will be put on all pages.
For me the time split between Development and Content creation would be:
At the start: 80% Development and 20% content.
When development is nearing completion: 50% Development and 50% Content
After launching the product: Well if your product is really viral or acquired good enough customer base then you should continue with 20% content creation and 80% development since you will be getting a lot of feedback, bug report and feature request.
If product is not successful as it was thought it would be then do 80% content creation and 20% development until you reach desired user base.
🔗</a>Create content around your product</h2>
It’s a good strategy to start creating content about basic stuff around your product (or service), even glossary stuff like explaining related terms, use cases, review of the current situation, etc.
Suppose your product is screen recorder app:

start with why this app, what are it’s features that sets it apart</li>
how to use it, give multiple use cases</li>
how it differs from existing products, cover each of the competition compared to which your product is better</li> </ul>
🔗</a>Go Big with Viral-Worthy Content</h2>
After covering all basics about your product, now you need to work on attention grabbing stuff. It could be either video or article, whichever suits your niche, however doing both would be encouraged.
Create Mr. Beast of content, spend 2 weeks, 4 weeks or even 8 weeks, but create something that truly grabs people’s attention. It can be research, experiment or entertaining stuff, but stick to your niche.
🔗</a>Don’t Sell, Rather Inform</h2>
I’ve shown interests on products where developer is not trying to sell you the stuff, rather informing you, helping you. Be helpful, this creates a good will, even if people do not buy your product, they might share it with someone else.
🔗</a>Engage</h2>
Be real. I would share my journey as a person. For example:

How I started</li>
How is it going</li>
Any important milestone reached</li> </ul>
Share your stories, share your number like profit, loss, investment, etc.

This Blog

2025-09-06T00:00:00+00:00

This post is not going to be very technical. I am just going to talk about my thought process behind implementing and needing various features this blog has.
In a nutshell, a blog is just a log of user’s life that is available over the internet. There are various blog service from free to paid. Even twitter (now X) is a blogging (micro blogging) platform.
This blog is build with Zola</a>, which is SSG (Static Site Generator), which parses Mardown file to generate HTML pages, which you can host anywhere, even for free, however you’ve to be bit technical.
In a SSG there is no database, you just have your markdown files and HTML templates, you can store it anywhere, like me most prefer to use version control system like GitHub to store the blog data.
In the past I have used all sorts of hosting method. I started with Blogspot, which is free blogging service by Google, it’s good but limited. Then I moved on to Wordpress for a good few years, however I didn’t like sometimes I had to be bit involved to manage it. It’s PHP based software and there are a lot of moving parts when it comes to managing it. And it’s certainly not free.
Then I heard about SSG, at first I was dismissive of it, however after some years I came along and moved to Hugo, another SSG which is very popular, one of the top choices for a lot of people. Hugo was good however I didn’t like it’s templating syntax, to me it reads very weird.
At some point I was working with Sveltekit for my work needs, so I though let’s give Sveltekit try since we can generate static sites with Sveltekit as well. I made a blog which also uses markdown to parse and serve the blog. After using this for around a year I moved to Zola (current blog) because the fact that Svelte and Sveltekit are frontend javascript framework, so they change a lot. Just moving from Svelte 4 to 5 was a big change.
After discovering Zola (another SSG) and reading up on it’s docs and other people’s blog, Zola clicked with me because of it’s very intuitive template syntax (I come from Django so!!). So I built this blog with my bare hand from the scratch.
Some of the features of Zola:

Generates static HTML</li>
Built-in syntax highlighting</li>
Load data from files like csv, json</li>
Also can load data from remote urls</li>
Sitemap generator</li>
RSS generator</li>
Very poweful concept of Section and Page</li>
Highly customizable</li> </ul>
After going through all this blogging of around 10 years, I knew a few things I needed. This time I just wanted to write (posts) and so I wanted to keep simple UI but behind the scene all the features one might need.
A brief on all the features this blog has:

SEO

Automatic handling of meta tags</li>
schema generation for structured data</li>
OG (Opengraph) tags</li> </ul> </li>
Post / Article

unlisted: makes post invisible in listings, only accessible via link</li>
noindex: marks post to be not indexed by search engines</li>
posted dated posts: set a later date for post to be published</li>
tags: add tags to post around relevant topic</li> </ul> </li> </ul>
I’ve been very happy with Zola. It does not get in the way and let me just write now. For long I have not been writing, but now I’ve decided to continue writing.

Upgrading to Ubuntu 24.04 on my Lenovo Legion 5

2025-04-28T00:00:00+00:00

I had been using Ubuntu 22.04 LTS for around 1.5 years. Overall, I like and prefer Ubuntu, and it works quite well on my Legion 5 laptop. Even gaming on Ubuntu is good since the Nvidia graphics driver comes preinstalled.
One minor issue was with the older GTK version. Because of this, the Dropbox desktop app would not run properly: when you install the .deb</code> package and then try to upgrade your system packages, it will fail and tell you to apply fixes which will uninstall Dropbox. So every time you want to upgrade your system packages, you have to uninstall Dropbox and then install it again.
🔗</a>Ubuntu 24.04 LTS</h2> Ubuntu 24.04 LTS was launched last year, but at the time I didn’t want to upgrade. However, after a year I thought it would be a good time since the major bugs would be fixed by now. Major reasons for upgrading: New Linux kernel</li> No GTK version issue with Dropbox</li> Some UI (GNOME) improvements</li> Needed to format the disk to allot a bigger partition size for Ubuntu</li> </ul> 🔗</a>Installation Experience</h2> The whole installation process was easy. I created a bootable USB drive using balenaEtcher</a>. Then I disabled secure boot and enabled boot from USB in the BIOS. On Lenovo, like most systems, you press F2 while booting to access the BIOS. I’m dual booting with Windows 11, which I use mostly for gaming (Marvel Rivals). I have two SSDs installed: 512 GB and 1 TB. The 512 GB one is all for Windows, and the 1 TB one I’ve partitioned into 500 GB for Ubuntu, 32 GB for swap memory, and the remaining storage is formatted as an NTFS drive so that both Windows and Ubuntu can access it. 🔗</a>Installing Apps</h2> Konsole: The default Terminal is okay, but I was bored with it so I decided to give Konsole</a> a try, and I really liked its simplicity and accessibility. Just make sure not to install it from the Snap store, as snap apps are sandboxed and most things will not work. I installed it from Flathub</a>.</li> VS Code: Installed directly from its website</li> Cursor: Cursor only provides an AppImage</a>, which is a portable app, so you don’t install it; it just runs in a sandbox and has no root access.</li> Zed: I gave Zed a try and there are some annoying bugs, like when the system wakes from sleep the Zed window doesn’t render and it shows some other window’s content on top of it, and the only way to fix it is to kill Zed and restart. Sometimes extensions won’t install, occasionally the editor shows a pointer cursor for no reason, there’s no Prettier extension, etc.</li> </ul> 🔗</a>Alt + Tab Scroll Glitch</h2> Alt + Tab is a very old issue that affects X11 systems and has remained unresolved by the Chromium team all this time. The problem is that when you are using the Chrome browser and some Electron-based app (which packages Chromium) like VS Code, the scrolling you do in one window will also happen in the other when you switch apps and scroll. This jittery and unexpected scrolling is a pain for a lot of people. This problem has been discussed here: askubuntu</a> and vscode issue</a> Solution: There is a workaround by Lucas Resck</a> using a GNOME extension</a> which works wonders. This only happens on X11 and not on Wayland, but the Nvidia driver support on Wayland is not good, so that’s not an option.