iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Chris Dhanaraj @chrisdhanaraj.bsky.social · 17/07/2025

(Also hello again BlueSky, maybe I'll start being a PM thought leader or some garbage like that)

Chris Dhanaraj @chrisdhanaraj.bsky.social · 17/07/2025

My less than hot take is that there's a pretty significant difference between engineers using AI to write code and PM's using AI to write PRDs. A user of an application at the end of the day has no idea of the code behind an app, just the quality of the application.

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Chris Dhanaraj @chrisdhanaraj.bsky.social · 16/04/2025

Attempted to buy a Fujifilm XT-5 from Amazon, got sent a literal box with a rock inside of it instead and now am having to repeatedly explain to Amazon that… I cannot return the time because all I have is a box with a rock.

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Chris Dhanaraj @chrisdhanaraj.bsky.social · 07/04/2025

I love Arc, but… man that battery drain is untenable :( all I really want from browsers is the URL copy shortcut and the left-hand sidebar

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Chris Dhanaraj @chrisdhanaraj.bsky.social · 10/03/2025

But also seriously, live tennis is such a different experience. It was amazing to hear the crowd all get entirely enamored with Watanuki's playstyle together

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Chris Dhanaraj @chrisdhanaraj.bsky.social · 10/03/2025

If Watanuki has a million fans, I am one of them. If Watanuki has ten fans, I am one of them. If Watanuki has only one fan, that one is me. If Watanuki has no fans, I am no longer on this earth. #indianwells

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Chris Dhanaraj @chrisdhanaraj.bsky.social · 26/01/2025

This has been the most exhausting last three weeks of work in a while - my brain is tired and my body is ready for a week of naps. I did write a lot of great design system memos though, so there's that

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Chris Dhanaraj @chrisdhanaraj.bsky.social · 18/01/2025

If ESPN could stop airing Wolf Man trailers during the Australian Open, that would be great thanks

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Chris Dhanaraj @chrisdhanaraj.bsky.social · 21/12/2024

Someone tell me why ATL is consistently the worst airport

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Chris Dhanaraj @chrisdhanaraj.bsky.social · 14/12/2024

Okay but now what do I do until Stormlight book six??? (just finished five)

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Chris Dhanaraj @chrisdhanaraj.bsky.social · 06/12/2024

Re: burnout - I know you've all heard this before, but oh wow is it important to implement *some* kind of physical practice into your life. Near daily tennis has done wonders on keeping me mentally grounded when work is stressful

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Chris Dhanaraj @chrisdhanaraj.bsky.social · 03/12/2024

My burnout is immeasurable and I am ready to go turn off my brain for a few weeks. Two weeeeks left

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Chris Dhanaraj @chrisdhanaraj.bsky.social · 29/11/2024

Obligatorily Thanksgiving plate, powered by Serious Eats. Also mashed potatoes prep is made SO easy with the Anyday dishes, highly recommend

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Chris Dhanaraj @chrisdhanaraj.bsky.social · 27/11/2024

I know when I play poorly against pushers in tennis the problem is actually me, but god DAMN is it infuriating

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Chris Dhanaraj @chrisdhanaraj.bsky.social · 26/11/2024

This is already happening at some levels - I've gotten asked by eng leadership multiple times in the last two months around where AI fits into our roadmaps. And this is at the developer productivity angle, versus product where they're even further ahead on this

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Chris Dhanaraj @chrisdhanaraj.bsky.social · 25/11/2024

Spent a solid two to three hours trying to ChatGPT / Reddit a Notion formula question before just reading the docs and figuring it out in fifteen minutes. A big ole whoops from me (the AIs haven't come for me yet!)

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Chris Dhanaraj @chrisdhanaraj.bsky.social · 24/11/2024

We’re leveraging Notion as a CRM + Database for this tennis community app I’m building and… its honestly been delightful. One of the requirements was that manual entry had to be easy to do for a non-technical person, and working with Notion API has been pretty straight-forward.

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Chris Dhanaraj @chrisdhanaraj.bsky.social · 22/11/2024

I’ll say I’m a little surprised there aren’t more tutorials out there around modeling User data with Prisma / Supabase + Clerk / Auth0 / something out there. It *feels* like this is just a hard requirement for most applications, and nobody wants to stick all their data into Clerk, right?

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Chris Dhanaraj @chrisdhanaraj.bsky.social · 21/11/2024

Also my cats are trying to figure out how to share this

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Chris Dhanaraj @chrisdhanaraj.bsky.social · 21/11/2024

More lukewarm takes from me - your internal design systems (probably) should be building on top of React Aria or something similar. You probably aren’t resourced where you can cover the same level of expertise, and it’s a better use of your time to invest in business-specific component compositions

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Chris Dhanaraj @chrisdhanaraj.bsky.social · 21/11/2024

I know everybody is saying this, but *wow* what a world of difference my BlueSky feed is versus Twitter. Mindblowing how bad it is over there

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Chris Dhanaraj @chrisdhanaraj.bsky.social · 20/11/2024

Hot DAMN my cat is actually using one of the weird things I bought her

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Reposted by Chris Dhanaraj

Wes @notwes.bsky.social · 19/11/2024

This was *very* fun to be a part of. Our group call doing the platform operations was one of the most chaotic but impressive things I have seen while working at Netflix.

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Chris Dhanaraj @chrisdhanaraj.bsky.social · 17/11/2024

Going to my first hackathon in like a decade, just like the youths.

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Reposted by Chris Dhanaraj

jordan @jdan.me · 16/11/2024

Do they have chairs and tables in this or is that a different thing

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Chris Dhanaraj @chrisdhanaraj.bsky.social · 16/11/2024

Watching the live ops channel tonight has been amazing, so much respect for the team #netflix

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Chris Dhanaraj @chrisdhanaraj.bsky.social · 15/11/2024

I’m sketching out an app for this tennis community I joined (#justSFthings), and I’m continually wow’d by how easy it is to just ship things these days. I can go from nothing —> full-stack application + db + auth in less than hour, just wild.

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Chris Dhanaraj @chrisdhanaraj.bsky.social · 13/11/2024

Bufo emojies are suddenly all the rage in our Slack channels and never have I ever felt so out of the loop. I love them, but what’s the context??? Where did they came from, what’s going on help

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Chris Dhanaraj @chrisdhanaraj.bsky.social · 12/11/2024

My not-so-hot take is that air fryers are great, but assuming limited counter space, not worth it. Get a counter-top convection toaster oven instead - no nuggets in five minutes, but you can get them in fifteen AND also cook a turkey in it

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Reposted by Chris Dhanaraj

Norin 🦈 🔜 Designercon @mahoukarp.com · 11/11/2024

Oh to be a shark

Comic of shork living life

1.) Am shark! (this is Mako Shark)
2.) No bills! (tosses papers in air)
3.) No work! (playing games and eats all day)
4.) Only chomp chomp (eats pizza)

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Chris Dhanaraj @chrisdhanaraj.bsky.social · 11/11/2024

Not going to lie, opened a code editor for kinda the first time in a year this weekend and wow was that relaxing

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Chris Dhanaraj @chrisdhanaraj.bsky.social · 10/11/2024

Memos and DnD, my current two lives

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Chris Dhanaraj @chrisdhanaraj.bsky.social · 09/11/2024

I'm driving design systems roadmaps again (after like eight years!) and I'm a little surprised that more systems haven't stepped into componentizing more complex business patterns (inc data fetching). When I left we were all talking atomic designs, but not enough "organisms" in the ecosystem

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Chris Dhanaraj @chrisdhanaraj.bsky.social · 06/11/2024

Life is hard right now, here's my kittens when I just got 'em seven and a half years ago.

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Chris Dhanaraj @chrisdhanaraj.bsky.social · 04/11/2024

Frontpage! As a ten-year-old old it was really important for me to make a Pokemon gallery site, join every web ring possible, and see that visitor counter hit at least 100. Also, I certainly didn’t just smash refresh to try to inflate my numbers; I’d never do something devious like that.

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Chris Dhanaraj @chrisdhanaraj.bsky.social · 04/11/2024

Seven years at Netflix today! I’ve hopped at least five teams, had eleven managers, swapped disciplines - and easily say that this is the best place I’ve worked. The culture has changed since I first started, but it still invites people to push for innovation and that’s hard to match anywhere else

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Chris Dhanaraj @chrisdhanaraj.bsky.social · 02/11/2024

I’m really curious how other companies (medium or big) scale the JS app development process. We’re doing some interesting things next year around centralizing / managing core development flows (think serverless, but for the client) which I don’t know is novel or just quietly what everyone does

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Chris Dhanaraj @chrisdhanaraj.bsky.social · 31/10/2024

How do I tell Blue Sky that when I selected “sports” in the onboarding flow I actually just meant tennis

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Chris Dhanaraj @chrisdhanaraj.bsky.social · 30/10/2024

Also my first few months of being a PM I simply did not follow through on any outside commitments, very sorry to everyone I ghosted

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Chris Dhanaraj @chrisdhanaraj.bsky.social · 30/10/2024

My biggest surprise about shifting into Product from (IC) Engineering was just the amount of mental burden it is to try to a) get enough context about problems b) distill it down into something useful for folks. Which largely is the entire job - I remember wondering why PMs always worked late!

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Chris Dhanaraj @chrisdhanaraj.bsky.social · 29/10/2024

Also these starter packs? Absolutely delightful.

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Chris Dhanaraj @chrisdhanaraj.bsky.social · 29/10/2024

👋 Hello! My social media mostly died when Twitter did (well, probably a little before that), but Blue Sky looks nice enough :) I’ll start yammering on again about tech, just this time from a Platform PM perspective. A different view (but maybe not as much as I expected) than being an engineer!

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