About

I grew up in Maithon, a small town in Jharkhand that exists because of a dam. It sits on the Barakar, at the edge of the Dhanbad coal belt. The power station is underground, cut into rock beneath the embankment — the first of its kind in this part of the world. Open-cast mines start a few kilometres out in every direction. The town is green. Nothing around it is.

The power never went out. It took me years to understand why. We weren't near the grid. We were on top of it. Years later I interned at the corporation that built the dam.

My first five years were enterprise integration. Business documents moving between companies whose systems were built decades apart and had no reason to agree on anything. The format was UN/EDIFACT — a standard maintained by a United Nations body. Nobody could change it. Not us, not the company on the other end. The only thing you controlled was your side of the wire.

The clients ran from one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world to a family-owned lingerie manufacturer in the Alps. Different scale, same protocol, same consequence when it broke. An order that fails validation at three in the morning is a shipment that doesn't leave, and a warehouse somewhere that stops. I was the youngest person in most of those rooms. Some of the engineers had been doing this longer than I'd been alive, and they taught me the thing you only learn on systems that touch money: a change small enough that you don't think to test it can stop a truck on another continent by morning.

Nobody puts this work on a slide. It's still the best training I could have had. Nothing interesting happens on the happy path.

After that I co-founded a company with a friend. We built a point-of-sale system for small restaurants. It ran on whatever Android tablet the owner already had, talked to a Bluetooth printer, and kept taking orders when the connection dropped in the middle of dinner service. Orders written offline had to reconcile with everything that had happened elsewhere once the tablet came back — a problem I'd spend the next several years running into in other forms. It cost a fraction of what the established systems did. About fifty restaurants used it. Then COVID closed the restaurants, and a product for restaurants has nowhere to go. We shut it down. I learned more in those two years than in the six before them.

Then several years on cross-platform mobile at scale. A trading app where market data arrived faster than the device could render it. A lending tool for auto loans in semi-urban and rural districts, where connectivity was a suggestion and the forms were governed by regulation — so the screens had to be defined on the server and change without the app being updated. Both were distributed systems problems that happened to have a screen attached.

For the last two years I've been working on residential energy systems. A heat pump, a battery, solar, ventilation, a car charger — separate products that share a platform and decide between themselves where the power goes. I work on that platform: the field app technicians use to commission the system, and the connectivity that carries it back to the cloud once it's running. The decisions are local. Surplus solar has to be spent the moment it exists — into the battery, into the hot water tank, into the car — and the right choice can depend on a weather forecast that comes from the cloud, in a house that still has to keep choosing when the cloud isn't there.

Commissioning happens in a utility room or a basement — the worst-connected room in the house, on a homeowner's network, where the phone has to leave that network to pair with the unit and then find its way back. A technician does this several times a day, across sites an hour's drive apart, on one phone battery. Radios are expensive. If the app is careless with power, the last appointment doesn't happen. The company has been building heating equipment for a century. Mechanical, electrical, thermodynamic and software engineering meet in the same product, and three of those disciplines have far longer memories than mine. You can't ship a hotfix to something bolted to a wall. When the software is wrong, someone is cold.

The through-line, if there is one, is that I keep choosing the version of the problem where the network is unreliable, the hardware is fixed, and nobody is coming to help.