About

Hi, I’m P!

I’m a software engineer working at the intersection of data processing, ML infrastructure, and the messy systems that make machine learning useful in production.

Growing Bits is my public notebook: a place where I turn scattered notes, hard-won lessons, and half-formed ideas into something more useful over time.

If the idea of a digital garden is new to you, Maggie Appleton’s A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden, Joel Hooks’ Digital Garden, and Tom Critchlow’s My blog is a digital garden, not a blog are good starting points.

What you’ll find here

• Notes on ML infrastructure, data processing, feature platforms, serverless systems, and AI inference and much more.
• Long, in-depth articles that favor substance over superficial takes, SEO-driven content, marketing copy, or AI slop
• Practical patterns from building and operating production systems
• Interview notes, engineering reflections, and things I wish I had known earlier
• Occasional detours into cooking, economics, and finance. Because systems thinking apparently follows me into the kitchen too.

Why “Growing Bits”?

Because this site is not meant to be a polished magazine. It is a garden. Some notes are finished, some are seedlings, and some are connected fragments waiting to become something larger.

I started this after collecting 400+ notes over 4 years in Obsidian. Publishing them is a way to make the thinking sharper, more searchable, and maybe useful to someone else.

How I write

I try to write with the lessons from On Writing Well in mind: be clear, be useful, and respect the reader’s time.

Most of these notes start as writing for myself. Publishing them helps me sharpen my thinking, share ideas earlier, and create room for discussion, feedback, and disagreement.

I usually start from first principles and try to decompose a problem into its fundamental building blocks. That approach helps me understand systems from the ground up, it also means I sometimes get lost in rabbit holes along the way, and that’s awesome… sometimes.

Privacy

This website has no ads, referral links, or tracking cookies, and it never will. At most, I may use Cloudflare Web Analytics to understand which pages are being read.

LLM disclaimer

I do not use LLMs to write my notes, not even individual sentences. I do, however, use them for proofreading and to generate simple images or diagrams.

Contact me

Questions, corrections, and related ideas are welcome. You can email me at [email protected].

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