Posts on Anand's Blog

A Day Trip to the Mojave

Wed, 08 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I’d been wanting to explore the Mojave Desert since last winter. Being one of the hottest places on earth, the smart move is to visit during the cooler months. We had plans earlier this year, but California’s wet season had other ideas, and we ended up shelving the trip.

Come spring, the itch was still there. And this time, my daughter’s growing obsession with all things geology gave us a perfect excuse. She’d been reading about caves and rock formations, so when I stumbled across Mitchell Caverns in the Mojave Preserve, the trip basically planned itself.

We decided to do it as a day trip from Orange County on a Sunday. Two stops. One day. Let’s go.

Stop 1: Mitchell Caverns

If you take Exit 100 off the I-40 and drive about 20 miles into the preserve, you’ll reach the Mitchell Caverns area. These are abandoned caves from the Gold Rush era that have since been restored and opened up for guided tours. Tours run on Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays with two time slots available. We grabbed the 11 AM slot.

Providence Mountains State Recreation Area entrance

Want to visit? You can book your cave tour here on the California State Parks website. Slots fill up fast, so plan ahead!

We got there around 10:30, checked in at the visitor center, and the tour kicked off on time. Our guide, Catherine, clearly loved what she did. She didn’t just walk us through a cave, she broke down the science behind how these formations came to be, pointed out the local flora and fauna along the way, and made the whole thing feel like a proper geology lesson disguised as a hike.

Sweeping views of the desert landscape surrounding Mitchell Caverns

The walk to the cave entrance is roughly a mile, but don’t let that fool you into thinking it’s just a commute. Catherine stopped several times along the trail to explain the desert landscape around us, which honestly made the hike just as interesting as the cave itself.

Hiking up to the cave entrance through the Providence Mountains

Inside? The limestone formations were stunning. Stalactites, stalagmites, and columns that have been forming for thousands of years. The kind of thing that makes you go quiet for a second.

Close-up of limestone stalactites inside Mitchell Caverns

Wide view of the incredible cave formations inside Mitchell Caverns

The whole tour lasted about two hours. At the end, they gave us two choices: exit through a separate cave exit, or walk back the way we came. We chose to walk back through the cave. Why wouldn’t you? It’s like watching your favorite movie twice and catching things you missed the first time.

One thing to note: nothing is allowed inside the cave. No water, no bags, no snacks. You leave everything outside. Cameras and phones are fine though, because let’s be honest, what’s the point of visiting if you can’t take pictures?

Back at the visitor center, they gave us complimentary stickers and postcards, which my daughter was probably more excited about than the cave itself.

Since we were there in spring, the area around Mitchell Caverns was full of wildflower blooms, which meant butterflies everywhere. As someone who spends way too much time chasing butterflies with a camera, I may have held the family up a bit getting shots of these little beauties.

Painted Lady butterfly spotted near Mitchell Caverns during the spring bloom

Stop 2: Hole-in-the-Wall Visitor Center

About 20 minutes from Mitchell Caverns is the Hole-in-the-Wall Visitor Center. This was the only active visitor center in the preserve at the time, since the main one at Kelso Depot was closed for maintenance. We stopped in, grabbed a few souvenirs, and mapped out our next move.

Old Glory waving proudly at the Hole-in-the-Wall Visitor Center

Stop 3: Kelso Sand Dunes

The main event. There are two ways to reach Kelso Dunes: cut through the interior of the preserve, or loop back out to the I-40 and re-enter. We took the I-40 route.

Most of the road to the dunes is paved, but the last three miles are unpaved and bumpy. If there’s been any recent rain, I’d skip this stretch entirely. It’s not worth the risk.

Kelso Sand Dunes rising from the desert floor

The dunes themselves were incredible. The only other dunes we’d seen before were at Death Valley, and these are noticeably bigger and taller. After parking, it’s about a 20-minute walk just to reach the base. We didn’t go all the way to the top, but we watched others make the full climb up and back down. The complete hike to the summit and back takes roughly three hours. You can find the trail on AllTrails if you want the full route.

The long walk toward the base of the Kelso Sand Dunes

Kelso Dunes are known for producing a deep booming sound when you walk across the sand near the top, caused by the grains vibrating against each other. I’d recommend doing this hike early in the morning or in the evening since it gets brutally hot out here during the day.

One Important Tip

There are no gas stations inside the Mojave National Preserve. None. Plan accordingly and fill up before you enter. We topped off in Ludlow on the way in and were glad we did.

This was one of those trips that reminded me why day trips are underrated. No hotel bookings, no elaborate itinerary. Just load up the car, pick a direction, and go see something new. The Mojave delivered on every front.

How I Built a Spelling Bee App for My Daughter (and Why This Win Feels a Little Bit Mine Too)

Mon, 06 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Earlier this year, my daughter won her school Spelling Bee. Every single word.

And honestly, this win feels a little bit mine too. Let me tell you why.

I am a Mainframe developer. COBOL, JCL, batch processing — that has been my world for years. Web apps, mobile apps? Completely foreign territory.

Back in January, my daughter came home excited about her school Spelling Bee. She needed to practice. A lot. We started by looking for apps in the App Store, but nothing quite fit what we needed. Some were too basic, others were cluttered with features that got in the way. And somewhere between being a frustrated parent and a curious developer, I thought… what if I just build something for her?

So I did.

The App

With Claude as my AI pair programmer, I built the Spell Bee Practice App from scratch.

The app reads out words at multiple speeds so she could hear every syllable, pulls real-time definitions from the Merriam-Webster Dictionary API, lets you upload your own word list or type words in manually, and tracks progress as you go. It works as a Progressive Web App with separate versions optimized for mobile and iPad. And the whole thing lives in a single HTML file. No backend. No build process. Deployed free on GitHub Pages.

The Honest Part

I could not have built this alone. Tailwind CSS, async API calls, the Web Speech API, PWA manifests — all new to me. But Claude did not just write code. It explained the reasoning behind every decision and flagged things I would never have considered. It felt less like using a tool and more like working with someone who knew what they were doing and had the patience to bring me along.

We built the whole thing conversationally, one feature at a time, inside a single Claude Project.

What This Changes (and What It Doesn’t)

I have written before about how AI is not a magic wand — especially when it comes to complex legacy modernization, where the real challenges are organizational, not technical. I still believe that.

But this experience showed me the other side. When the scope is clear, the motivation is real, and you are willing to think through every decision yourself, AI can genuinely help you build something meaningful in a space you have never worked in before.

You do not need to know everything before you start building. Sometimes a single HTML file is all you need. And the best motivation for any side project? Someone you love depending on it.

The app is live and the code is open below. Go build something for someone you love. 🐝

Live App & Repo: github.com/ndranandraj/spellbee-mobile-enhanced

Mainframe Modernization in the AI World

Sat, 28 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. Everyone’s excited about AI tools like Claude being used to modernize legacy COBOL systems. And they genuinely help, don’t get me wrong. But my hot take? AI won’t modernize your mainframe immediately. At least not by itself.

I say this from experience.

My first project in the mid 2000s was a mainframe-to-SAP migration. 18 months. Clear scope. Migration tools were ready. Two years later? We hadn’t even crossed 25%.

That wasn’t a failure of effort or talent. It was a failure of understanding just how deep the rabbit hole goes.

And this isn’t new. We’ve been trying to get off mainframes for 30+ years. Y2K was supposed to force everyone to modernize. It didn’t. Then came COBOL-to-Java converters. Then model-driven tools. Then cloud platforms. Then low-code rewrites. Every decade had its “this is finally the thing” moment.

And yet the mainframe is still there. Still processing an estimated $3 trillion in commerce every single day.

The problem was never the tooling. It was everything around it.

These systems are 40-60 years old. The people who understood them are gone. The code is the documentation. Half of it looks wrong until you realize it was intentional, for a reason nobody wrote down. You only find out why when something breaks.

And it’s never just the code. You have to move the data, rebuild the batch workflows, the middleware, the security models. All at the same time. Without breaking the thing quietly keeping the lights on.

Then comes the hardest part. Proving it works exactly the same.

For a bank, “close enough” can mean a rounding error of half a cent across 10 million transactions. SOX, Basel III, and other regulatory frameworks don’t care how smart your tool is. They want a clear paper trail down to the last decimal place.

AI is genuinely better than anything before it. It understands context and can reason about code in ways older tools never could. But it still hits the same walls. Missing knowledge, untestable edge cases, organizational resistance, regulatory burden. The walls haven’t changed. Just the tool hitting them.

The companies getting this right treat modernization as a long-term commitment, not a shortcut. They bring the right people, the right process, and realistic expectations. The tool is just one part of that equation.

I learned that lesson in 2007. Still holds true today.

What did your experience look like?