When your regular work feels mundane, you can and should

Arpit Bhayani

Arpit Bhayani

Mar 10, 2026 • 1 min read


When your regular work feels mundane, you can and should solve a different kind of problem. Sometimes, I switch to simulating something from the real world…

In my second year of college, in C, I reimplemented the then-popular Pocket Tanks game, which involved projectile motion. In the first year, again in C, I simulated our solar system with realistic planetary motion. It was so fun!! The best summers I ever had.

More recently, I simulated the classic Game of Life, Rule 30 of Cellular Automata, and the Gravitational Search Algorithm.

Completely different problems; completely different mental model.

Now, we have tools and libs (p5 being the most popular) available with higher abstractions, making it easy to do visual programming, so that you just focus on core physics or algorithms. Give it a go!

Also, not asking you to do just this, but it is something you can pick up every few months to stay sharp and remind yourself that programming can still surprise you.

You can always do quirky things when you are bored :)

Arpit Bhayani

Principal Engineer II at Razorpay - building Agent Studio, Ex-staff engg at GCP Memorystore & Dataproc, Creator of DiceDB, ex-Amazon Fast Data, ex-Director of Engg. SRE and Data Engineering at Unacademy. I spark engineering curiosity through my no-fluff engineering videos on YouTube and my courses