Week 11/2025

2025-03-15 · Mihir Pathak

I had a talk with Konarak about the problem I’m facing with my website/blog. I want to add more photos, but GitHub Pages has only a 1GB repo size limit. I was considering setting up a Raspberry Pi or an Oracle server (similar to Amazon S3). Konarak suggested trying Cloudflare Pages instead. I created a project on Cloudflare Pages and found it surprisingly simple. Initially, I was manually creating my Hugo site on my local machine and copying only the ‘Public’ folder to CF Pages. I wondered if there was a way to deploy directly from the command line. My first attempt wasn’t successful, so I had a short call with Konarak who helped me set it up properly. Now I can deploy my site with just a single command line - much more efficient than writing multiple git commands. This website now lives on CF Pages.

I read Adhavan’s weekly note and noticed he used a grid format for displaying images. I liked it and tried implementing the same thing on my blog. It took some time to figure out because I was already using shortcode for image handling and optimization. Using shortcode for both grid and image optimization together was challenging. I tried different AI tools to solve this problem - Claude, ChatGPT and Co-pilot. Co-pilot gave the simplest solution on the first attempt. ChatGPT was the worst, while Claude was average. They kept giving complex solutions that didn’t work for me.
Watched the Gujarati film ‘Ventilator’, which is based on a Marathi film with the same name. It was a wonderful watch. I didn’t know it was officially available on YouTube. Thanks to the algorithm for making my Sunday!

It was an office colleague’s birthday, so we went out for lunch with the whole team.
I had a call with Earth Educator Fellow Vimal who runs an organization called WildED. We discussed nature education, program design approaches, how to approach schools, and more.
I explored how to incorporate Gujarati fonts on my blog. I currently use Inconsolata fonts for English text. For Gujarati, I discovered a GitHub repository called ‘Chhapkam’, developed by my friends Samyak Bhuta and Kartik Mistry. With Co-pilot’s assistance, I figured out the process of uploading these fonts and configuring them to activate whenever I write Gujarati content in my blog posts or pages.

Bansari (friend/colleague from office) took me to meet her friend Vishnu, who works at American India Foundation as a science educator. We talked about life & education (what else can I talk about!!)

We played Holi at the office. I’ve never played Holi at my previous workplaces and really enjoyed it.
Me & Nidhi had a online meeting with Tanaya (from nature classroom). She is developing assessment tool to measure the impact of nature based learning intervention.
I watched a film called ‘Gujju Bhai - Most Wanted’. It was a fun watch. Again, thanks to my YouTube algorithm.

My parents came to Ahmedabad. Papa bought a second-hand Activa for me & Nidhi. They drove from Vadodara to Ahmedabad. In the evening, we went to Palladium mall (we all wanted to spend time at the same place, and the mall was just 20 steps away from our home, so we decided to go there… it was fun discussing brands, packaging design, and fashion with papa).

Papa and I went to my office on the Activa. I wanted to check if I remembered the way. Though I wasn’t confident, I surprisingly reached there very smoothly without looking at a map. I realized that now I have personal mobility. I’ve never owned a vehicle before, mostly using public transport/Uber/Ola/Rapido. Most of my houses and workplaces were nearby, but now with my office 10km away and living in Ahmedabad—a happening city with drama, events, and literature-related talks—having a vehicle will be very helpful.
There’s a heat wave going on in Ahmedabad. Luckily, I go to the office early in the morning and return after 5pm, so I skip the worst hours, but it’s still very hot and this is just the beginning of summer. I’m very grateful to have a living space with AC and happy that I could offer air conditioning to my parents. Environmentally, AC is the worst thing to have, but when you live in a city apartment, it’s difficult to choose alternatives. For most years in my career, I worked in remote villages. Sometimes I feel like I’m being pulled into city life…

I am grateful for:

The opportunity to work with researchers. Currently at the office, I’m involved in pilot activities with children where we test different hypotheses. There are proper observers/research associates documenting the whole process. I wish to move more toward the research side now. At Khojbeen (our nature-project-theater based learning initiative that Nidhi and I are nurturing), we’re also partnering with Nature Classroom and hopefully with Srivi to research our intervention. Srivi is a wonderful researcher, artist, and educator. I would like to work with her on environmental aesthetics.
Reading a lot about aesthetic sense development lately. This might help me develop activity modules or conduct sessions. I wish to hold a session with my office team on this topic. Taking a session is the best motivation to study things in depth.

We had a meeting with Tanaya about assessment tool
We are in touch with srivi, we are planning to do research about aesthetic sense development in children through nature based intervention.
We published an invitation for summer internship positions with our team. We received a diverse range of interesting applications from PhD students all the way to 10th grade students. We’re specifically looking for someone who is based in Ahmedabad, has a genuine interest in nature education, and is enthusiastic about working with children.

I want to write one blog / weekly note kind of thing for office work which I will not publish anywhere. Only on my local machine.
Apart from that I want to start weekly note for khojbeen mandali. Instead of blog I might publish it on instagram. The copy of same thing will be in one section of my regular weekly note.
I need to visit bhopal in April second week for the second workshop of Child Development Course. Need to book tickets.
I want to start some documentation project like documenting / mapping trees in my apartment or something like that. May be I should start my nature journaling practice again.