Arnab Nandi

Writing about the things I learn & discover… my thoughts, fragments and reflections.

~Sic Parvis Magna

Recent Posts

What does “Vanilla” even mean?🍦

I was on a SIG contributor experience call for the APEC region, like I usually am every time it happens. Attendance was low that day so instead of sticking to the usual agenda, a few of us just started talking about random things related to upstream work. Somewhere in that loose conversation, we landed on a phrase: “vanilla flavour.” Just to be clear, we were not talking about ice cream. We were talking about “vanilla flavour of Kubernetes.” ...

September 6, 2026 · 4 min · Arnab Nandi

Makefiles Finally Made Sense to Me

I’ve been studying the Node Readiness Controller codebase lately. It’s a Kubernetes project and like most Kubernetes projects, it has a Makefile. Makefiles are usually large files spanning over 300+ lines, so my immediate reaction to it was to close it and come back to it later. This weekend, I did some research on what Makefiles are and why are they needed. Now, I do have a good idea on what they are, so I decided to document my understanding in case I need to come back to it later. ...

August 26, 2026 · 5 min · Arnab Nandi

An Ode to Badminton: The Love and the Fear

I started playing badminton again about 6 months ago. Before that, I hadn’t touched a racket in 6 years (well, “hadn’t touched” would be an exaggeration but you know what I intend to say). That was a long time and if you ask me, long enough that when people asked if I played any sport, badminton wasn’t even the answer I gave anymore. There was a knee injury somewhere in that gap, I am not going to get into the details of it here, it’s not really the point of this post but it’s the reason for the gap and it’s part of why picking it up again wasn’t as simple as just showing up one day and playing. ...

August 22, 2026 · 6 min · Arnab Nandi

Understanding HEARTBEAT_PERIOD: Why a Reporter Sometimes Chooses Not to Write

A maintainer asked me to look at a merged PR in node-readiness-controller and figure out how to get it into NRC documentation. That was the whole assignment as it was given to me. I opened the PR #263 and the first thing I saw was a variable called HEARTBEAT_PERIOD. I had no idea what it did neither did I knew what a “heartbeat” meant in this context. I want to write down what it actually took to go from that to actually document it and ultimately get it merged as part of the NRC documentation. ...

August 19, 2026 · 9 min · Arnab Nandi

This is a Test Post

This is a Test Post This is a test post that I am using to test my My Notion → Hugo Publishing Setup I’m currently trying to get my blog setup to work a little differently. Instead of writing a post directly in Hugo, I want to be able to write it in Notion, mark it as published and let the rest happen automatically. What I’m Testing There are a few things I want to make sure are working together: ...

August 18, 2026 · 2 min · Arnab Nandi

Adding a Minikube Addon from Scratch

Introduction: Why I’m Writing This Hi! This is where I write about the lessons that I learn from open source contributions! This is not a polished “here’s how to contribute to open source” tutorial written by someone who has done it a hundred times. The project is Minikube, the tool that lets you run a Kubernetes cluster on your local machine for development and testing. The contribution I worked on was adding Node Readiness Controller (NRC) as a Minikube addon, so that anyone in the world can type minikube start --addons=nrc and have it just work. ...

May 6, 2026 · 13 min · Arnab Nandi

Hello, World!

I started a little notebook on the internet. I turned a year older on 14th April, and I randomly had the thought that maybe I should buy myself a domain. It felt like a nice idea. Lately, I have been spending a lot of time on open source, Kubernetes, learning new stuff, and job hunting. It has been good, but at the same time it has also been mentally exhausting. Too many things to think about, too many things I want to figure out. ...

April 14, 2026 · 2 min · Arnab Nandi