I write about technology and engineering leadership — from how LLMs work under the hood to how to grow as an empathetic, high-performance leader.
Subscribe on Substack ↗Deep dives into how technical systems work — LLMs, cloud infrastructure, and engineering practice.
How multi-head attention, normalization, and feed-forward layers assemble into the transformer block that powers modern LLMs.
How transformers learn which tokens matter for understanding each other — the mechanism that makes LLMs actually work.
Why transformers need explicit position information, and how positional encoding injects sequence order into a model that otherwise treats tokens as a bag of words.
How text gets broken into tokens, and how those tokens become the dense numerical representations that models actually compute on.
A practical guide to setting up Google Cloud for an organization — resource hierarchy, IAM structure, billing, and decisions that are hard to undo later.
What a VPC actually is, how it controls network traffic, and the key concepts — subnets, routing, firewall rules — every cloud engineer should understand.
Running a Java application in production using Supervisor for process management, with log rotation to keep your server healthy long-term.
How to access Google Cloud's Vertex AI to build AI-powered applications — authentication, API setup, and making your first calls to PaLM2.
Cloud Run vs App Engine — a comparison of tradeoffs in flexibility and management, with a walkthrough of deploying containerized apps on each.
From the explosion of ChatGPT to the rise of GLP-1 drugs — five developments that defined 2023 and their implications across tech, health, and society.
A curated collection of resources for preparing system design interviews — architectural patterns, distributed systems concepts, and interview strategies.
A practical entry point into iOS development with Swift — setting up Xcode, understanding the project structure, and building your first app.
A curated list of private companies across productivity, HR, finance, and enterprise worth monitoring — pre-IPO picks with strong growth signals.
Reflections on what it means to lead well — the mindset, the hard parts, and the things that don't show up on a career ladder.
How to read envy as a signal, not a flaw — and what it can tell you about what you actually want from your career.
Power operates at both personal and organizational levels. A framework for identifying your sources of influence and using them constructively as a leader.
A seven-step framework for communicating with clarity and impact — drawn from Stanford research on how people actually process and retain information.
Finding greatness in your work starts with aligning what you do with what you love and what matters — a reflection on building a meaningful career.
Real change begins with willingness — not motivation, not planning. An examination of what it actually means to commit to growth.
Evaluating a job requires more than compensation. Seven dimensions to assess whether your role truly aligns with where you want to go.
Building influence as a leader depends on credibility, relationships, and consistency. The elements that make someone genuinely trustworthy and persuasive.
A framework for the technical and behavioral dimensions of growth for software engineers — drawn from experience across six companies including three Big Tech firms.
15 principles built around customer impact, ownership, and continuous improvement — a personal operating manual for professional effectiveness.
The most effective feedback givers adopt a growth mindset — believing people can develop and change. How to avoid fixed mindset traps when coaching others.
Feedback comes in three forms: appreciation, coaching, and evaluation. Understanding which type to give — and when — changes how it lands.
Herzberg's two-factor theory distinguishes hygiene factors from true motivators — a practical lens for creating work environments where people actually want to do their best.
Seven graceful methods for declining requests in professional contexts — protecting your time and priorities without damaging relationships.
Essentialism is the disciplined pursuit of less — a comparison of essentialist and non-essentialist approaches to how we allocate our most limited resource: time.
Ikigai — the Japanese concept of finding purpose — rests on ten principles that balance passion, skill, contribution, and sustainability.
Personal reflections, book notes, and writing on ideas worth sitting with.
How mindfulness practices help manage the constant stream of thoughts and worries — developing presence, reducing stress, and improving mental clarity.
16 books that shaped thinking throughout 2022 — spanning learning science, product management, leadership, and personal development.
Mindful conversation goes beyond exchanging words — it creates genuine connection through authentic sharing, reflective listening, and discussing what actually matters.
The 2022 World Cup surfaced timeless lessons about handling pressure, persisting through adversity, and working as a cohesive team — applied to leadership.
Moving from idea to impact requires validation, quantifying potential, and willingness to fail fast. A framework for taking ideas seriously without getting lost in them.
A curated list of thought leaders across product, leadership, and hiring — people whose posts consistently challenge how you think about your career.
The PAPER framework — Problem, Anecdotes, Principles, Evidence, Recap — a systematic approach to organizing your ideas into a full book.
Why sleep quality matters more than quantity, and how aligning with your natural circadian rhythms is the highest-leverage health habit you can build.
Habit-forming products follow a five-stage hook cycle that creates loops users return to. A breakdown of Nir Eyal's framework for designing for engagement.
A reading list spanning software engineering, leadership, and personal development — the books that shaped thinking across two pandemic years.
Excalidraw, Notion, MinimaList, Notability, and OneNote — five tools that serve different purposes across the writing and thinking process.
A behind-the-scenes look at architecting the AppDynamics IoT monitoring platform — the technical decisions, scalability challenges, and lessons from building IoT observability from scratch.
Most IoT projects fail not because of hardware but because of missing visibility. A guide to the metrics that actually matter for keeping connected applications healthy in production.
Why monitoring IoT applications requires tracking both technical performance and business outcomes — and how to bridge the gap between the two for meaningful observability.