unar is a software engineer in the Bay Area. This is the notebook: long-form on distributed systems and economics, shorter notes on whatever's rattling around. He writes to think; you're welcome to read along.
PlugQueue, a queue management app for Electrify America charge points. The problem: you pull up, all stations are taken, no system exists. The goal: fix that.
Nothing, which is bothering me. Next up: The Rust Programming Language (the official book). The borrow checker and I need to have a talk.
Eric Rosen on YouTube. Chess tactics dressed up as content. The man finds brilliancies in bullet games like it's nothing.
Isolating my discipline drivers. Which of my mini-OCDs are actually superpowers and which are just anxiety with better branding?
It is amusing to see artificial choke points disguised as hoomans trying to make themselves feel relevant
The past is infinite-resolution and we only ever sample a thumbnail. The present is the only full-res frame we ever see. Treat it accordingly.
The fastest way to go from confused to unconfused is a question that looks stupid. Most of my best engineering days started with one.
Open platforms reward engagement, not intent. The result? Sellers disguised as curious contributors thrive, while authentic voices struggle to compete. We've built marketplaces that look like forums.
power gives you leverage to Exploit, Shun Noise, Control the narrative, Extra Perks like Money. but Death and class-agnostic suffering are the only invariants no one can keep their power through.
A 30-minute debugging journey caused by confusing subsets (2^n) with substrings (n(n+1)/2) - a costly mental model error that created a 20x performance gap.