About

Hello!

I am Raj. Thanks for checking out this corner of the internet where where I post about various recipes for tinkering with servers, software & knowledge.

I am a software engineer by profession. I am very passionate about technology & Physics. Since childhood I have been curious about how things work. It was easy to mentally comprehend the parts of a spring-powered toy car, electrical appliances like fan, fridge, radio, plastic moulding etc - by asking dad. However, at some point it became really disturbing - it was when calculators & digital diaries came along & finally that windows 95 big box of a computer - I realised with a broken heart that my teachers or dad had no clue wtf is going on inside these devices.

The basic question - What all happens from the moment one touches a mouse - down to the motion of electrons inside the tiny silicon megastructures - back to the response on the screen has troubled me for a long time - and since 8th grade or so - I have been learning about it. It's hard to say if I understand it even 1% today - given number of levels in this infinite knowledge fractal where each subquestion has now become a sub-discipline of computer science.

I consider myself very lucky to be taught a high level introduction to all aspects of Computer Science for 5 yrs at Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi (Bachelors + Masters). It was in my sophomore year - I fell in love with computer systems and code. After graduating, I have been designing, writing & reviewing code for my silicon valley employers - Facebook & Databricks.

Apart from that, I spend a lot of time browsing developer blogs, tutorials & copy-pasting from stackoverflow. I am also a fan of notion.so, self-hosting of autonomous media servers & other tools.

The field of computing is moving extremely fast - so much that human intelligence has not been scaling up so well to understand all the layers of action going on inside even the simplest of chips & software we use daily. I believe that drilling down on exactly this gap of human-intelligence & knowledge would present an evolutionary advantage for humankind. I would argue that the true core principle of software engineering has been to make engineering software easier. Which would conclude that by 2040, the process of creating software would be done by a wand than a keyboard.

Wish you a great stay on earth,

Raj