a living notebook
things I broke, rebuilt, and finally understood
Notes from the trenches — distributed systems, language models, and everything in between. Written the way I wish someone had explained it to me the first time.
Why this exists
“I’m a year into being a software engineer. That’s not very long — barely long enough to know what I don’t know. But it’s exactly long enough to still remember how every tutorial felt like it was written for someone else. Every ‘simply’ and ‘just’ was a small wall I had to climb. This is the notebook I’m keeping for myself, and I’m leaving it open in case it helps. The posts here will get better as I do. Some of them I’ll get wrong, and I’ll come back and fix them. None of them will assume you already know the answer.”
— shambhavi · @nebulatris · software engineer
what you’ll find here
the fundamentals, revisited
DBMS, operating systems, networks, and the under-the-hood bits of how programming actually works — plus the small CS curiosities I can't stop digging into.
explore →the architecture beneath everything
Distributed systems, databases, caching, queues — with diagrams that show you why, not just what.
explore →prompts, evals, and production lies
What the papers don't tell you about shipping language models. Context windows, hallucinations, and how to measure what actually matters.
explore →agents, tools, and controlled chaos
Multi-step reasoning, tool use, memory systems — and the surprisingly hard problem of knowing when to stop.
explore →computer science
on the horizon