Writing
Notes from the build.
How the products work, why I made the calls I did, and what it takes to launch them — including the parts most teams leave out.
Start here · Building
Bands, not percentages: a spatial join you can’t afford to get wrong
How TraceSarkar matches a photo of a pothole to the ward that owns the road and the contract that paid for it — and why every gate is built to ask rather than guess.
VCVinit Churi14 Oct 2026 · 10 min
- Making a housing society’s books balance — in paiseWhy ViharSync keeps a real double-entry ledger, stores every rupee as an integer, and lets Postgres refuse any journal entry that doesn’t add up.Building · ViharSync
- 39 experiments toward a video editor with no serversWebCodecs, WebGPU, OPFS and on-device AI: how we’re de-risking an editor that runs entirely in the browser — and where the agentic part of ReelForge will come from.Building · ReelForge
- No model in the path: why we hand-write the post and the PDFTraceSarkar uses AI to read a photograph. It refuses to use AI to write a sentence about anyone. Here’s where we drew that line, and why.Principles · TraceSarkar
- 164 commits in seven days: rebuilding ViharSync with coding agentsWe chose a stack for AI agents to write, then built guardrails so strict that an agent can’t finish while anything is broken. What that looked like in practice.Building · ViharSync
- One filter graph: how ReelForge renders captions, B-roll and audio in a single FFmpeg passFrom a canvas preview in the browser to an .ass subtitle file and one filter_complex on the server — the render pipeline behind every ReelForge export.Building · ReelForge
- Safe by construction: privacy engineering for a civic app on a zero budgetFaces destroyed before any model sees them, locations snapped instead of jittered, and database constraints that make the unsafe path impossible rather than unlikely.Building · TraceSarkar
- Putting Maharashtra’s co-operative housing law into the softwareBilling bases, a 12% interest cap, complaint clocks and refuge floors that must never become flats. What we learned turning bye-laws into types and constraints.Product · ViharSync
- A free tier that doesn’t bankrupt you: pricing ReelForge for India and the worldGeo-priced plans in rupees and dollars, payments confirmed twice and activated once, and the quiet cost controls that let a video product offer a free plan at all.Launch · ReelForge
- Everything between a working app and a launched oneViharSync V2 runs end to end on a demo society. Here is the honest list of what still stands between that and real money moving through it.Launch · ViharSync