Hello World

Welcome to my little corner of the internet.

Recently, I've been spending an unusually large amount of time reading, which I have come to realize I essentially never regret. Amongst countless hours spent on my trusty kindle late into the night, one book in particular caught my attention: Show Your Work by Austin Kleon.

One of the central themes of the book is about the importance of sharing your process and ideas with the world.

a short but impactful read

Almost all of the people I look up to regardless of their profession, have built sharing into their routine. They’re cranking away in their studios, their laboratories, or their cubicles, but instead of maintaining absolute secrecy and hoarding their work, they’re open about what they’re working on, and they’re consistently posting bits and pieces of their work, their ideas, and what they’re learning online. -- Austin Kleon

I've always wanted an outlet to express my thoughts, and now have some much-needed additional time on my hands as I recover from surgery after tearing my ACL while bouldering (more on that in a future post).

Seldom do I get to dabble in web development. Right now, I work at Google improving the storage engine within Spanner. The vast majority of my career has been spent building distributed systems libraries, database engines, and other infrastructure.

Fun stuff (really) - that being said, it is pretty refreshing to work on something "visible" for a change.

Google Spanner, the Largest Single Database on Earth - WIRED

Web development has come a long way since my university days. This site is built on top of vercel + next.js, and the blog posts are written directly in markdown mixed with javascript (mdx). This means live reload while editing and automatic deployment after each push which gets most of the barriers other than "just writing" out of the way. Other than spending way too much time deciding on a domain name[1], everything was fairly straightforward.

For now, I have a few goals in mind for this site:

• Bring awareness to various topics I'm interested in.
• Share updates and progress on current projects.
• Improve my writing skills.

Let me know if there are any topics you'd like me to explore, and thanks for reading.

• Alex