Welcome to another edition of my newsletter.

I visited Kolkata to meet my parents in Dec-2024. I planned the trip around my mother’s birthday and the Tata Steel Kolkata 25K. I was seeing them after a year, and it was pleasant weather in Kolkata. Not too hot nor too cold. We went to Shamiana at the Taj City Centre in New Town. The staff were helpful, and they went out of their way to serve us based on our needs. I am vegan so the chef made some dishes that were customized for me which was not on the menu. Grateful for that.

After I got back from India, I got my blood tests done just before Xmas2024. And to my surprise my Triglycerides was high. Now I have been vegan for 5 years now and my triglycerides were never this high. Only two things changed in the last year. The first is that we have a cook now. And the second is that I started taking vegan protein powder regularly after my workouts. So, my focus this year has been on fat reduction using calorie deficit but am not tracking this 100% accurately. I am doing this by reducing my portion sizes, skipping meals, eating dinner early, no snacking in the night, and focusing on getting 8 hours of sleep. I have also cut down my sugar intake but not eliminated it.

My focus last year was to complete a Half Marathon in under 2 hours. This year my focus is to finish an Olympic distance triathlon. I have been regularly running for some time now and cycle occasionally. But swimming is where I struggle. I can do breaststroke comfortably for 2K without stopping. But for triathlon I would need to focus on swimming freestyle to make the cut-off time for each segment. Therefore, I have recently started swimming lessons, with my wife, to learn freestyle. The other challenge is to learn and navigate in open water without the help of a lane marker 😃.

There are lot of challenges published regularly on Strava. And this year I have decided to focus on a running challenge - 100 kms of running every month in 2025. I have so far run 177.5 kms this year. Let’s see if I can continue this for the rest of the year without getting injured.

Another challenge I have started is a push-ups challenge. A minimum of 30 pushups every day from 01-Feb-2025 to 31-Jan-2026. So far, I haven’t skipped a date. Focus is on quantity rather than quality. I am thinking quality will come as I progress through the year and gain more strength.

I have also increased my protein through better powders. I was earlier taking Optimum Nutrition Plant Protein but recently tried Purition Pea Protein Isolate and BodyMe Naked Vegan Protein. The reason I wanted to try a different protein powder was to remove any added sugar in my powder and just get clean protein powder without any other additives. The BodyMe protein powder ingredient is organic plant protein blend (organic pea protein, organic sprouted brown rice protein, organic hemp seed protein) and I am happy with that and will be continuing to take it.

A friend of ours started a 28-days AI challenge in Jan-2025 and that helped us learn a lot of tools/topics over that period. We covered 25 different tools/topics over the 28 days period. We focussed on tools that we could use in our daily lives outside of work. The work environment is still highly controlled so it’s difficult to use any tool you want. We covered use cases for each tool, examples from our group, and even smart prompting techniques. After this challenge I created AI Nexus. Details below.

The AI challenge was inspired by Coursiv’s 28-day challenge.

I recently bought new running shoes - Hoka Clifton 9 Wide. I started getting knee pain and shin splints so decided to get a new shoe based on my current mileage. I am currently training for the Prague Half Marathon in April. And these shoes are really comfortable.

We also bought the Samsung 65” Frame TV for our house as we wanted a bigger TV as well as something that is aesthetically pleasing. We love the design of this TV and are quite pleased with it.

And I have finally applied for UK citizenship. After being eligible since Nov-2020 I have decided to apply for it as we have been travelling a lot recently. I applied for a Schengen visa in Jan-2025 and got it for only 6 months. But I needed it for 7 months minimum, as I have Valencia Half Marathon already booked. So instead of applying for Schengen visa twice in one year I decided to simply apply for UK citizenship.

Table of Contents

• 🏃‍♂ Tata Steel World 25K Kolkata

• 🤖 AI Nexus

• 🌐 Amitsarkar.tech

• ❤️ Things I enjoyed

🏃‍♂ Tata Steel World 25K Kolkata

I took part in the Tata Steel World 25K Kolkata run on my recent visit to India. And it was the first time I was running in an event in India. The crowd in India is amazing and it was good to see many runners out early in the morning.

The event was very well organized with closed roads, fuel/water stations proper timing controls and distance markers. The pre-event activities were great. And the race expo, where we collected the bib from, had lots of fun activities.

If you look at my pacing below, you can see that I went out really fast and therefore struggled in the end. I have now learnt this and now training to ensure I don’t go out too fast at the beginning of a race and go all out only at the end. I also didn’t train a lot before the event so that also affected my pace. But I’m overall really happy with my results and am glad I finished it without any injuries/cramps.

My only concern with running in India was the pollution. I was worried about the heat initially, but it was never a concern since the run started early morning.

Nevertheless, after this race, I want to now run at other events in India. And there are many exciting events at various locations in India.

🤖 AI Nexus

After the 28-days AI challenge got over I decided to build something from what we learnt. All the tools were organized in Google Sheets, and I thought what if we could ask ChatGPT to create a website from that file. The idea is to curate a list of AI tools that people can find useful and are able to easily share it with others.

So, I exported the Google Sheets to a CSV file and gave that to ChatGPT and asked it to create a website for me. After several iterations, the result was AI Nexus, your one-stop AI directory, categorized for easy access. 

The website is structured as follows -

Homepage, which consists of

• a hero image,

• a list of categories,

• a testimonial section, and

• a footer section

Category page, which consists of

• a nav bar section that helps you navigate across the site,

• a list of AI tools for that category, and

• a footer section

Footer section, which consists of

• a link for an About Us page,

• a link for a Credits page,

• a link for Exploring various aspects of AI,

• a copyright section, and

• links to my social media profiles.

The website also has a scroll to top button and a responsive look.

The main logo for the website is an image generated using ChatGPT.

The website is created entirely using a CSV file that has the AI tool name, the URL, a description, and a category. Then for each website I asked ChatGPT to create a Python script to get a screenshot of their homepage and store it in a location with the file name as the name of the tool.

The images for each category page are from Unsplash. The hero image on the homepage is from Pixabay.

But I didn’t want to create the homepage from scratch every time I added a new category. And I didn’t want to create a category page from scratch every time I added a new tool. So, I use a single Python script to generate the homepage, and all the category pages from scratch every time I run the script. Which updates any categories and updates any tools.

The best thing with this approach is that I can publish a new tool to my website in under 60 seconds.

Some pages had to be manually created. The About, Credit, Explore AI (and its sub-pages). So, I needed to figure out a way to update the footer for all pages using a single script. I again asked ChatGPT to create a Python script to help me edit the Footer on all pages using a script. And that worked as well.

The next task was to get the website on Google search results. So, I needed to create a Google Search Console asset for my website.

And finally, you can search it on google.

The last thing was to get a preview on Whatsapp.

The whole thing was created using code generated by ChatGPT with lots of tweaking from my end. You need to understand the fundamentals and know what you want. The tool can then help you build on that. Otherwise, you end up wasting a lot of time in understanding what you really want to build.

I hope this can be an inspiration to people who want to build and launch something of their own.

🌐 Amitsarkar.tech

My next task was to completely update my own website and move everything I have on the internet to it. I also wanted to update my CV, and this was a good opportunity for me to get everything updated. After the AI Nexus project this was the next important thing, I worked on.

I had my website for some time now, but I wanted to change the look and feel of it and add some additional elements and pages to it while removing some duplicate stuff.

I modified the following -

• Changed from using w3.css to tailwind.css

• Updated the nav bar and footer on all pages and created a script to update it automatically on all pages.

• Added a hero image to the homepage

• Added a podcast preview on the homepage

• Added a scroll to top button on all pages

• Transferred all links from linktr.ee to my website.

• Created a Projects, Travel, Events and Sitemap pages.

• Updated the Work page to automatically calculate my years of experience at each company on each page load.

  

  Automatic years of experience calculation

• Updated my CV. I was recently looking at my CV and wanted to use AI to help me trim it down and make it more professional. I used this article, Headhunter shares CV tips to land more interviews, for guiding ChatGPT o1 model to optimize my CV. It trimmed my CV from 4 pages to 2 pages by removing unnecessary things and ensuring the language and tone is consistent.

• Currently I am trying to get a chatbot on my website that answers any questions related to my public profile. The front-end interface is ready, the backend-data is ready. I need to find a way to host a LLM on a server and then use RAG to access my training data every time a user asks a question inside the chat. This is currently working locally on my machine but is not fully accurate in terms of its response.

I can safely say that using ChatGPT and GitHub Copilot has been a game changer for me.

❤️ Things I enjoyed

This section has been inspired by Ali Abdaal’s wonderful newsletter.

🎬 Video - Amit Sarkar's journey in QA leadership is an AI avatar video I created using Synthesia.

📝 Article - 1-800-ChatGPT - Calling and Messaging ChatGPT with your phone is an experimental feature that enables wider access to ChatGPT via phone calls or WhatsApp messages.

📱 App - Voicepal, your AI Ghostwriter. It’s a new AI tool from Ali Abdaal and I have used it to talk about various ideas that I normally have and then convert it into a newsletter article or X post. Really useful. I have a pro version of the app. It is also available on iOS.

🎙️ Podcast - Weight Loss Rules episode from the podcast Feel Better Live More by Dr. Rangan Chatterjee. It focuses on four key principles for sustainable weight loss: boosting fibre intake, increasing protein, opting for whole foods, and prioritizing better sleep.

📺 TV show - Severance is an amazing series and both me and my wife are hooked to it. It follows employees at a mysterious company who undergo a procedure to separate their work and personal lives using a brain implant.

🌐 Website - mySociety has four different websites that allow you to do the following things in the UK. I used WriteToThem and did get a response from my MP Peter Fortune of Bromley & Biggin Hill.

• WhatDoTheyKnow - Request information from public bodies

• FixMyStreet - Report neighbourhood problems to the local council

• TheyWorkForYou - Keep an eye on what MPs say and how they vote

• WriteToThem - Write to MPs and other local representatives

Thank you so much once again for reading my newsletter this week. Please feel free to Buy me a coffee if you are enjoying what I am sharing.

If you want to follow me around the internet, then please do so here.

Until we meet again next week, stay fit, work hard, pursue your ideas, and love more.