The Journal

I finally benchmarked Narad against Kafka, RabbitMQ, NATS, Redis, and Pulsar on identical hardware, ran a Jepsen-style test against my own broker, stole a ten-year-old trick from RabbitMQ's source code, and shipped a 2× speedup that evaporated the moment it touched production hardware. A story about measurement, humility, and standing on shoulders.

A CGDCT anime about girls fishing off a pier brought back my childhood summers in the village: bamboo rods, taro-stem floaters, leech bites, and my uncle who taught me all of it.

The v1.0 post ended with an honest column of three things Narad refused to claim. Four days later, one of them fell: the cluster can now rebalance and shrink itself. This is how you move the only copy of a partition between machines without losing a record, plus a CLI, a fuzz harness, and eight releases in two weeks.

Today marks five years since my first day at Razorpay, my first and only job. People keep asking how I stayed this long. I think it comes down to five rules.

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.