· 5 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.
Blog
Thoughts, ideas, and things I've learned.
· 12 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.
· 4 min read
The Math Doesn't Exactly Math
A lifelong Vijay fan tries to explain an election result that defies explanation.
· 13 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.
· 14 min read · Understanding LLMs · Part 1
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.
· 18 min read · Understanding LLMs
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.
· 25 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.
· 10 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
· 11 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.
· 6 min read
Naval on Happiness: A Practical Philosophy
Naval's framework for training happiness - from desire as a contract to peace as the goal
· 8 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.
· 7 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.
· 5 min read
The River That Came Back
A city forgot its river was a river. Then it remembered.
· 6 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.
· 5 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.
· 6 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.