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A year ago I set out to build a message broker to learn distributed systems properly. Two posts ago it was a design sketch that kept turning into Kafka. Today it's v1.0 — 300 million soaked messages, a chaos matrix, and a release tag I had to delete within the hour. This is the story of proving it.

Over the years, especially while working on payments systems, I have become much more cautious about code itself. Writing it is cheap. Owning it is not.

From barely surviving cardio in 2022 to squatting 120 kg — and then getting knocked flat by typhoid. Starting over, one 2.5 kg plate at a time.

A few weeks ago I wrote about how every distributed event streaming system converges on the same shape. This is about the lessons I learned standing inside that shape — the ones you can't get from a design sketch, only from the act of building.

I sat down to design a lightweight and durable message queue system from scratch, the way you do when you want to learn distributed systems properly. Every decision I made pushed me closer to the shape of Kafka. Turns out there's a perfectly good evolutionary metaphor for that.

My favourite anime movie is about an immortal girl raising a human child she'll outlive. It made me think about my mother — and everything she gave up so I could be here.

Nine shows. One grid. A small attempt to explain why each one made the cut — and why the last one is in a category of its own.

I have been writing webnovels, on and off, since 2018. I have never finished one. This is what I learned from not finishing.

A travel-comedy YouTube series about two people making each other suffer in Japan gave me something unexpected — the urge to get off my couch and go somewhere strange.

I found Laid Back Camp when I was lost and possibly depressed. Years later, after finishing season 3, I think it might be my all-time favourite anime — and I finally understand why.

A month to build, a year to actually get right. A local app that scrapes Chinese, Japanese, and Korean web novels and translates them with AI — and yes, I built it entirely for myself.

A quiet corner of the internet — an introduction to this space and the person behind it.