I’ve been meaning to start a blog for years. I kept putting it off for the usual reasons — not enough time, not sure what to write about, who’s going to read it anyway. But here we are.
A bit of context
I moved from India to the United States at 18 to study Computer Science at Arizona State University. That’s a big move to make alone, and it came with a steep learning curve that had nothing to do with algorithms or data structures. I had to figure out healthcare, taxes, credit scores, banking, investing — all the adulting infrastructure that nobody includes in a CS curriculum. I made plenty of mistakes. I’m still figuring some of it out.
At the same time, I was learning how to build software seriously. I interned at Visa twice during undergrad, stayed at ASU for my Master’s, and joined Visa full-time after graduating. I now work as a Senior Software Engineer building real-time incident alerting systems, AI agents for automated server health checks, and observability infrastructure with ClickHouse and Kafka. It’s the kind of work I find genuinely interesting — the systems that keep everything else honest.
What this blog is for
Two things, mostly.
Software engineering. I work on distributed systems, real-time infrastructure, and production reliability every day. There’s a lot I’ve learned through trial and error that I wish someone had written down — not the textbook version, but the “here’s what actually happens at 2am when something breaks” version. I want to write that.
Personal finance. Moving to a new country with no financial history and starting from scratch teaches you a lot about money. Some of it the hard way. I want to write about what I’ve learned — investing, building credit, navigating finances as someone who wasn’t born here — because I think it’s genuinely useful and almost nobody writes about it from this angle.
Occasionally I’ll write about other things too (hmm, maybe tasty recipes?). But those are the two threads I care most about.
A note on honesty
Everything here is written by me. If I’m writing about something, it’s because I’ve lived it or worked through it myself. I’d rather write less and mean it than publish constantly and say nothing.
If any of this is useful to you, that’s enough.