Blog

Follow whichever thread catches your attention.

Latest

The most recent notes, across both trails.

  1. Things I notice The Golden Road: What William Dalrymple Made Me Notice My review of William Dalrymple's ancient-history book, sparked by a Roman cargo record, a Kushan coin, and a monk's search for Buddhist books.
  2. Things I notice Nothing Retires Early in an Indian Household From bedsheets to smartphones, Indian homes have always found one more job for old things. But modern products are making that harder.
  3. Things I notice The Chores of Grief Most modern advice tells us to sit with our feelings. Traditional hindu last rites do the opposite: they hand you a broom and force you to work.
  4. Things I notice The Indian Clothes Relegation System In India, clothes do not just get old; they get relegated, season by season, through a rigorous hierarchy until they eventually serve as rags.

Things I build

Products, technology, and the decisions behind them.

  1. Building Fortuna: A Better Way to Plan for Financial Goals Moving beyond simple spreadsheets to a robust, probabilistic model for financial planning. Here's how we built Fortuna's goal and retirement planning engine.
  2. Building Fortuna: Planning for Retirement Without Predicting the Future How to build a retirement plan that survives sequence-of-returns risk using bucket withdrawals and probabilistic modeling.
  3. Building Fortuna: how we built the core Expense Tracking Design and feature choices that we made while building the core expense tracking features of Fortuna
  4. Building Fortuna: How I used AI to speed up the development A look into the decisions and technology philosophy used to build the Fortuna personal finance application along with AI
  5. Building Fortuna: A personal finance app Why I built personal finance app that works for me and my wife

Things I notice

Cities, rituals, habits, and everyday systems.

  1. The Golden Road: What William Dalrymple Made Me Notice My review of William Dalrymple's ancient-history book, sparked by a Roman cargo record, a Kushan coin, and a monk's search for Buddhist books.
  2. Nothing Retires Early in an Indian Household From bedsheets to smartphones, Indian homes have always found one more job for old things. But modern products are making that harder.
  3. The Chores of Grief Most modern advice tells us to sit with our feelings. Traditional hindu last rites do the opposite: they hand you a broom and force you to work.
  4. The Indian Clothes Relegation System In India, clothes do not just get old; they get relegated, season by season, through a rigorous hierarchy until they eventually serve as rags.
  5. Your City Invented Your Commute How bad urban planning makes hybrid work impossible, and why the real problem isn't the work arrangement—it's the city that forces the commute.
  6. Annual Review, 2026 Two goals, the habits to support them, and the underlying logic that connects them.
  7. About My Pocket System Every guy has a pocket system. Mine has only been disrupted twice: once by a work phone, and once by shorts.