About
The unfiltered version.
Welcome to my corner of the internet
Data engineer by day, generalist the rest of the time. I've written code for games, for clients, for backend services, and now for data pipelines. Staying in one lane never really appealed to me. Away from the terminal I rewrite history in grand strategy games, get far too invested in anime, and lose evenings reading about black holes. I also built a robot that shot fire once, which nearly got me expelled. None of that belongs on a resume. That's more or less what this page is for.
Passions
There's still something absurd about typing and having a thing exist. This site is where I try new tech out, mostly animation and design ideas that have no business being here.
The sheer scale of it does something to me I can't really argue with, and our place in it makes less sense the longer I look. Black holes most of all. Objects heavy enough to bend time, which I think about more than is healthy.
Fun Fact
Final semester, 2015. I'd already built Android apps, web apps, desktop apps, server apps, anything with a screen and a compiler. I was bored out of my mind. So I took on 7 final year projects at once. Not mine. My classmates'. Every one of them shipped. I got paid in pizza and food parties, which at the time felt like a fair rate.
For my own project I wanted to see how hardware and software actually shake hands. Wozniak was the reason. I built a warfare robot. Yes, a robot. That shot fire. On purpose. The demo went well right up until I aimed it at my instructor. In my defense, I was demonstrating range. In everyone else's defense, yeah, fair enough.
The aftermath was cinematic. Case went straight to the HOD. Project nearly cancelled. Grades took a hit. My academic career flashed before my eyes, which did not take very long, since I was still a student.
Somehow I survived it. Some luck, some talking, and I suspect the HOD found the whole thing quietly funny. I still finished in the top 10 of my batch. Full marks would've put me in the top 5. Nobody remembers the guy who got a 3.9 GPA though. They remember the guy who set his instructor on fire. (allegedly)
Views & Philosophy
On Code
Simple scales, complicated hurts. That's most of what I believe about code.
Code gets read far more often than it gets written. If the person next to you can't follow it in thirty seconds, it needs another pass.
Most overengineering I've seen came from someone trying to prove something. The code I'm happiest with is the boring kind. You read it, you understand it, you move on.
On Learning
I lean hard on the Feynman Technique. If I can't explain something plainly, I haven't understood it yet. Teaching is what drags the gap into the open.
I'm a generalist on purpose. Game dev, then client engineering, then backend, then data. Not being loyal to any one stack, and saying plainly when I don't know something, is what let me keep moving between them.
Go wide first, then deep. Look around, find the thing you can't stop thinking about, then go all the way down on it. A thin layer across a lot of fields keeps turning up connections a specialist would have no reason to look for.
When I don't know something, I go and find someone who does. An hour with a specialist saves you from the holes they already fell into. I've never once regretted asking.
You can't teach a closed mind. What you actually need first is curiosity, and enough patience to feel stupid for a while.
On Life
Live like it's your last day, and make the day worth it. Steve Jobs said it. It reads differently every year I get older.
Failure stings. The retro afterwards is where anything useful comes from. I try to trace the whole path back to whatever put me on it.
Relationships are a two-way street. Give and take. Once it only runs one way, it's already finished.
Success is overhyped. People ask successful people about where they are now and almost never about how long it took. Then they go looking for a shortcut that was never there.
Influences
“Then I swear by the setting place of the stars,
and indeed, it is a mighty oath — if you could know.”
Surah Al-Waqi'ah · 56:75-76
Think about this. Over 1,400 years ago — no telescopes, no theory of relativity, no understanding of gravity, no concept of spacetime — a text describes the setting places of stars and the weight of invisible cosmic structures with a precision that should stop any scientific mind in its tracks. It took humanity until April 10, 2019 to capture the first image of a black hole — M87*, 6.5 billion solar masses, 55 million light-years away. We needed eight synchronized telescopes spanning the entire planet, decades of theoretical physics, and the combined effort of 200+ scientists just to photograph what a single verse already pointed to. Let that sink in. We built the most advanced observation network in human history to confirm something that was written when people navigated by the stars with their bare eyes. That gap — between what was known then and what we're still struggling to understand now — is what keeps me up at night.
Khalid Bin Waleed (R.A)
Leadership & WillUndefeated as a commander, though that's the part I think about least. When Umar (R.A) became Caliph and removed him from command, he didn't protest and he didn't walk away. He stepped down into the ranks and kept fighting the same war as an ordinary soldier. The rank was never what he was in it for. Centuries later I'm still turning that over, which says something on its own.
Sun Tzu & Machiavelli
Strategy & ForesightThe Art of War and The Prince changed how I approach a problem. Think three moves out. Understand the ground before you stand on it, and move first wherever you can. Both were written about war and statecraft, and both keep turning out to be about engineering as well.
Steve Jobs
Product & DesignSimplicity takes more work than complexity does, which took me embarrassingly long to accept. His obsession with minimalism and with how a thing feels to use changed the way I look at products. Reading the biography, the part that stuck was how much of design is deciding what to leave out.
Steve Wozniak
Hardware Meets SoftwareHe wrote the software and built the hardware underneath it. That command of both worlds is what made the early Apple machines what they were. Understanding a stack all the way down to the circuits is the idea that put me in a university lab building a robot, just to feel with my own hands where the electronics stopped and the code started.
Interstellar
Wonder & PerspectiveA film rather than a person. I've watched it more times than I'd admit to and it still hasn't worn out. It gets the scale right, and it gets what time costs you. It's most of the reason I'm still up at 2 AM reading about black holes and doubting everything we think we know.