Vol. I · 2020 – 2026 · the released essays
Field notes,
slowly written.
Seven essays selected from a longer private file. The rest remain sealed. What survived is below.
2026 · 03 · 14
Philosophy
Mathematics, and the things it refuses to say.
On the strange country between proof and revelation — and on what kind of mind you become if you spend long enough trying to read what it has been refusing to say.
12m
2025 · 04 · 15
Philosophy
On capital goods and consumer goods.
What prestige actually is, when you look at it from the engineer's side — and why the most valuable thing you own is almost never the thing you bought.
11m
2024 · 09 · 26
Systems
Tail latency is a moral position.
On why the worst microsecond is the only honest one — and what averages hide about every system that has ever killed anyone.
9m
2023 · 04 · 22
Data
Cost is hidden until you make it visible.
Notes from a 140 TB / month pipeline rewrite: throughput is a side effect of observability.
Forthcoming · in draft
6m
2022 · 04 · 04
AI
The eval harness was the product.
How treating evals like SLOs changed what we shipped — and why grading a model honestly looks suspiciously like surveilling it.
11m
2021 · 04 · 13
Autonomy
Reproducibility as a contract.
On why a regression set that lies once is never trusted again — and what that means for everyone who tells you they have control of the thing they built.
9m
2020 · 04 · 14
Personal
Guwahati to Tempe.
On growing up around centuries-old systems and what they taught me about software.
Forthcoming · in draft
9m