Blog

Thoughts, ideas, and things I've learned.

26 notes

· 9 min read

Why 10x Faster Coding Isn't 10x Faster Shipping

Make the coding ten times faster and a ten-hour feature still takes five and a half. The slowest step sets the pace, and context leaks at the handoffs.

· 6 min read

My Chinese AI Is Learning From an American One

Dobby, my family's assistant, runs on Alibaba's Qwen. Its first training data came from OpenAI's Codex. US labs say China free-rides. Here is what China gave.

· 5 min read

Thyagarajan Kumararaja: What We Notice, What We Use

Thyagarajan Kumararaja admires a building with no film in mind. A colleague says AI can find answers on demand. So what is reading widely for?

· 5 min read

My Mac Studio Order: Five Months and a Refund Offer

iPlanet promised my Mac Studio in 45 days. Five months later, the order was cancelled. Tracing it through Redington brought me to Apple Executive Relations.

· 7 min read

Convenience Is the Product

From wedding seating software to AI-built applications, the software stack keeps moving responsibility upward. The enduring product is convenience.

· 4 min read

Life Is Long Enough

Jeff Dean helped build the systems beneath Google. His calendar still made room for yoga, football, and a 30-minute meeting with an intern.

· 4 min read

Antarctica Is the Largest Desert

A fifth-standard boy corrected my geography. Another family used one plain AI question to find an opportunity for their son's book.

· 8 min read

Companies & OSS

Kailash Nadh, Zerodha, Cloudflare, and Shopify show the discipline behind a costly choice: inherit, extend, fork, or build a production system from scratch.

· 17 min read

Companies & Languages

Jane Street, Ericsson, NeXT, Google, Meta, Roblox, and Apple show when a company can justify years of investment in a programming language.

· 4 min read

Craft Does Not Retire

A director near 80 and a composer in his nineties shipped a 2026 movie. Work stays alive when you enjoy the process and keep learning.

· 10 min read

Doom Is Cheap. Mastery Is Not.

Why doom scenarios are easy to imagine and flourishing scenarios are hard, and what the May 2026 tech layoffs show about the work that actually matters.

· 3 min read

The Math Doesn't Exactly Math

A lifelong Vijay fan tries to explain an election result that defies explanation.

· 8 min read · Understanding LLMs · Part 3

How LLMs Answer

How LLM inference works step by step: prefill, decode, the KV cache, sampling, tool use, and the engineering that makes it economical.

· 10 min read · Understanding LLMs · Part 2

How LLMs Get Built

Inside the months-long pipeline that turns trillions of words of text into a deployable LLM: data, tokenizer, pre-training, alignment, and shipping.

· 11 min read · Understanding LLMs · Part 1

Understanding LLMs: The Map

From raw text to streaming response - every step of how large language models are built and how they process your prompts.

· 18 min read

How Programming Languages Actually Work

From the text you type to the binary that runs - the full compiler pipeline, type safety ladder, and patterns every developer should know.

· 7 min read

Naval on Health: The Priority That Orders Everything Else

Naval's framework for making health non-negotiable - from concentric circles to daily practice

· 8 min read

A Third Path, Paathuklam

Sridhar Vembu says programmers should consider alternative livelihoods. He's right about the disruption - but how you sit with this moment matters more than what the moment is.

· 4 min read

Naval on Happiness: A Practical Philosophy

Naval's framework for training happiness - from desire as a contract to peace as the goal

· 6 min read

The Jevons Paradox of AI

A documentation project that grew into an MCP server, a competitive landscape analysis, and a realization about what AI actually does to software demand.

· 5 min read

The Hidden R&D Giants of Tamil Nadu

A fan buying experience led me to discover local companies doing world-class engineering that most of us don't know about.

· 3 min read

The River That Came Back

A city forgot its river was a river. Then it remembered.

· 5 min read

The Leader Makes the Difference

Two stories from different worlds - a startup ecosystem and a Christmas carol competition - that reveal the same truth about leadership.

· 4 min read

Two Tales of Marketing: A Tourist Trap on the Way to Mysore Zoo and a Sweet Surprise in Madurai

What a Diwali trip taught me about the extremes of marketing - from deception to delight.

· 4 min read

590x More Test Code Than Production: Is SQLite Insane or Genius?

SQLite has 92 million lines of tests for 155K lines of code. A Twitter debate made me rethink what balanced testing really means.

· 1 min read

Hello World

Welcome to my blog! This is where I'll share my thoughts, learnings, and things I'm building.