Writing
Notes on technology and travel.
Long-form when it deserves it, short when it doesn't. Filter by what you came for.
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04 Sep 2026
Transformer internals: attention without the mysticism
A mechanical look at scaled dot-product attention, KV caching memory geometry, and rotary embeddings without the hand-waving metaphors.
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28 Aug 2026
The Svaneti traverse: towers, mud, and Caucasian silence
Four days walking from Mestia to Ushguli through Georgia's high Caucasus. Medieval stone towers, glacial mud, and guesthouse hospitality.
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18 Aug 2026
Evaluating LLMs when benchmarks are gamed
Public leaderboards suffer from severe data contamination and metric hacking. How we design calibrated, private eval suites for production systems.
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12 Aug 2026
Rate limiting without a distributed lock
Token buckets, sliding windows, and why the simplest correct answer is usually the one you can reason about at 3am.
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05 Aug 2026
Manali to Leh by road: five passes and thin air
480 kilometres across the high Himalayas. Crossing Rohtang, Baralacha La, and Tanglang La, altitude sickness, and the logistics of the road.
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22 Jul 2026
Why the last 1% of autonomous driving is the hard 99%
Highway lane keeping is solved. Long-tail occlusions, dynamic hand gestures, and ambiguous right-of-way make full autonomy an open frontier.
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08 Jul 2026
Local LLMs on Apple Silicon and consumer GPUs
Quantisation schemes, unified memory bandwidth vs PCIe bottlenecks, and the practical economics of running 70B models at your desk.
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24 Jun 2026
Kyrgyzstan on horseback: Song-Kul and the nomad highlands
Riding through the high Tien Shan jailoo pastures to the alpine lake of Song-Kul. Yurt life, fermented mare's milk, and horse trekking logistics.
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11 Jun 2026
Production RAG: where the textbook architecture fails
Chunking illusions, vector similarity blindspots, and context poisoning. Why naive RAG fails in production and how hybrid retrieval fixes it.
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27 May 2026
Japan in late November: the shoulder-season gamble
Avoiding the peak Kyoto foliage rush by heading into the Japanese Alps. Kanazawa gardens, Matsumoto timber, and empty mountain onsens.
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15 May 2026
Vision-only versus lidar in autonomous vehicles
An engineering breakdown of depth estimation from monocular photons vs direct time-of-flight spatial point clouds on their technical merits.
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02 May 2026
Three weeks with 8 kilograms: a packing postmortem
One 32L backpack, three weeks across variable climates. Fabric choices, laundry workflows, and the ruthless art of what stayed home.
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18 Apr 2026
Distributed consensus without the hand-waving
Raft, Paxos, and the mechanics of replicated state machines. Leader leases, split-brain resolution, and read-index optimisation.
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04 Apr 2026
Julian Alps and the Soča trail: Slovenia on foot
Trekking the limestone karsts of Triglav National Park and following the emerald waters of the Soča river from Vršič Pass to Bovec.
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20 Mar 2026
The economics of LLM inference
GPU cluster utilisation, speculative decoding, continuous batching, and why latency requirements destroy token-per-dollar economics.
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06 Mar 2026
Oaxaca beyond the zócalo: mole, smoke, and highland markets
Tasting seven moles across Oaxaca's Central Valleys, navigating the Sunday market in Tlacolula, and artisanal mezcal in Santiago Matatlán.
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19 Feb 2026
Observability beyond three dashboards
Why pre-aggregated metrics fail during novel outages. High-cardinality wide events, structured tracing, and debugging without guesswork.
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05 Feb 2026
Kumano Kodo: walking Japan's ancient pilgrimage
Five days along the Nakahechi route through the mossy cedar forests of Wakayama. Sacred grand shrines, mountain ryokan, and thermal onsen baths.
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21 Jan 2026
B-Trees and LSM-Trees under the hood
Read amplification, write amplification, and page layouts. Why Postgres uses B-Trees while RocksDB and Cassandra bet on Log-Structured Merge-Trees.
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08 Jan 2026
Faroe Islands in early spring: wind, fog, and empty fjords
Driving through North Atlantic gales across Streymoy, Eysturoy, and Kalsoy. Sub-sea roundabouts, basalt sea stacks, and single-lane tunnels.
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18 Dec 2025
The real cost of a microservice
Network latency budgets, distributed transaction failures, and cognitive overhead. An honest look at the unadvertised costs of service decomposition.
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03 Dec 2025
Sri Lanka hill country: tea, trains, and the Knuckles Range
Slow travel through Sri Lanka's central highlands. The colonial railway from Kandy to Ella, cloud forest treks, and tea estate bungalows.
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17 Nov 2025
Code reviews that actually change outcomes
Why most pull request reviews degenerate into syntax nitpicking, and how small PR limits and architectural checklists improve engineering velocity.
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31 Oct 2025
Tour du Mont Blanc: ten days around the massif
170 kilometres and 10,000 metres of elevation gain across France, Italy, and Switzerland. Alpine refuges, col crossings, and trail logistics.
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14 Oct 2025
On-call rotations that don't burn people out
SLO-based paging, actionable alert hygiene, and blameless postmortems. How to design sustainable on-call shifts that protect engineering morale.
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28 Sep 2025
Travelling well on 25 days of leave
A strategic framework for maximizing standard corporate vacation time. Anchor weekends, open-jaw flights, and deep single-region travel.
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12 Sep 2025
Technical debt as a deliberate financial choice
Framing technical shortcuts as leverage. Principal vs interest, calculating refactoring payoff curves, and avoiding technical bankruptcy.
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26 Aug 2025
What went wrong on the Pin Parvati Pass
A 5,319-metre Himalayan crossover that went sideways. Glacial crevasses, whiteout route-finding errors, and the hard lessons of high-altitude retreat.
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10 Aug 2025
Post-quantum cryptography migration in practice
ML-KEM (Kyber) key exchange, ML-DSA (Dilithium) signatures, TLS 1.3 hybrid handshakes, and packet fragmentation overhead in real networks.
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24 Jul 2025
The myth of the perfect itinerary
Why over-optimised travel spreadsheets destroy curiosity. The cognitive case for leaving half your schedule open to contingency and serendipity.
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08 Jul 2025
Over-tourism and the places we love to death
An honest examination of visitor quotas, housing market distortions, and algorithmic travel hotspots from Venice to Hallstatt.