Essays, notes, lessons.
What I'm learning, in public.
Curated long-form on AI, finance, distributed systems, and forward-deployed engineering — sorted newest first.
Essays · 20
2026-05-02
Writing my Neovim config from scratch
A two-part Medium series on building a Neovim setup from a blank init.lua — bootstrap, options, keymaps, lazy.nvim, then the plugin layer that makes it a real editor.
2026-04-28
The Complete AI Hardware Stack — Layer by Layer
From silicon atoms to generated tokens — every layer that makes modern AI inference possible, and where the bottlenecks hide. With deep dives on SRAM vs HBM, co-packaged optics, and EDA.
2026-04-26
Why TypeScript Strict (Even for a Personal Site)
The argument for TypeScript strict mode in projects that 'don't need it,' from someone who just migrated a personal site.
2026-04-26
Why This Site Exists: O-1 Evidence Hub
The site is a personal portfolio, but it is also a deliberately built canonical evidence hub for an O-1 extraordinary-ability visa application.
2026-04-15
The FDE Feedback Loop
Forward deployed engineering compounds when each engagement makes the next one easier. The loop has four steps.
2026-04-10
Claude Code as an Operating System
Why I think of Claude Code as an OS for engineering work — skills as installed apps, hooks as services, MCP as syscalls.
2026-03-09
AI Hardware Stack Deep Dive
From TSMC N3 shortages to HBM constraints — what the silicon shortage means for frontier AI.
2026-02-14
Why Forward Deployed Engineering Beats Consulting
The unit economics of FDE vs. traditional consulting, and why Palantir cracked it before anyone else.
2026-01-18
Aggregation Theory in 2026
Ben Thompson's aggregation theory, applied to AI dev tools, CRM, and the next category of platform consolidation.
2025-12-04
Optimizer Intuition: SGD → Adam → Lion
The 60-second mental model for the optimizer ladder you actually need to know.
2025-09-01
SpatialDINO Lessons: 3D SSL on Lattice Light-Sheet Microscopy
A detailed log from building SpatialDINO — a 3D self-supervised vision transformer for label-free segmentation and tracking of subcellular dynamics in lattice light-sheet microscopy.
2025-08-30
Convergence Intuition: Why Adam Works
The geometry of why per-parameter learning rates dominate vanilla SGD on transformers.
2025-06-10
FSDP vs Tensor Parallel: Which Sharding Strategy
When to reach for FSDP, when to reach for tensor parallelism, and why the answer depends entirely on your interconnect.
2025-03-15
Raft in Five Minutes
Raft is Paxos that you can actually explain at a whiteboard. The mental model in five minutes.
2024-10-22
RocksDB Write Amplification
Why your RocksDB-backed database writes 10× the bytes you asked it to, and what the levers are.
2024-09-01
Why I Left Physics
After my first paper in chemical physics I didn't pursue a PhD. Here's the honest reason.
2024-08-12
Flink Checkpointing — What Actually Goes Wrong
A field guide to the failure modes I hit during my BU thesis on adaptive Flink checkpointing.
2024-05-02
Adaptive Checkpointing in Apache Flink
A summary of my undergraduate thesis on driving checkpoint cadence from backpressure signals.
2023-08-21
A Merkle Tree POC in Rust — ZeroSync, 2023
A from-scratch Merkle tree in Rust over JSON records, built as a proof-of-concept for tamper-evident sync at ZeroSync. SHA-256, deterministic field hashing, and what the borrow checker forced me to learn.
2022-11-15
Supercritical Fluids: First Paper, in Plain English
What we actually did in the 2022 Journal of Chemical Physics paper, without the jargon.