Senthil Nayagan

The Day Job

By profession, I’m a Data Engineer—which mostly means I spend my days convincing data to go where it’s supposed to go, in the shape it’s supposed to be in, without causing a small fire along the way. Pipelines break, schemas drift, and data occasionally develops a mind of its own. And then, inevitably, someone says, “Don’t worry, it’s just a quick query.”

By Interest: Rust

By interest, I’m a Rustacean, which basically means I chose a programming language that treats my code the way airport security treats my luggage: “Let’s take a closer look at that.” Rust checks, questions, and occasionally refuses to let things through. It can be frustrating at first, but most of the time, it catches trouble before trouble catches you. So I’ve learned to stop arguing with the compiler, fix what it finds, and trust that whatever finally boards the plane is packed properly—nothing loose, nothing likely to fall apart mid-flight.

Open Source

I have a soft spot for open-source software. It's free, transparent, and built on a wonderfully simple idea: strangers on the internet can work together to make things better—and somehow, it actually works. It's also where I've learned much of what I know: reading other people's code, falling down GitHub rabbit holes, asking questions in issue threads, and occasionally fixing something instead of just complaining about it. These days, I try to give a little back too—code, documentation, bug fixes, or simply a useful comment at the right time. After all, if I've learned so much from the open-source community, the least I can do is leave it a little better than I found it.

Currently Learning: AI & Math

More recently, I’ve wandered into AI, which quickly led me to the math behind it—calculus, linear algebra, and probability. You know, the part most people try to skip until they realize they actually need it. So I’m taking the slower route: learning the basics properly, understanding the “why” instead of just memorizing the “how,” and writing down what I learn along the way. It’s partly for anyone else on the same road—and partly so I can find my way back when I inevitably forget something.

How This Blog Happened

This blog exists because, at heart, I’m a chronic note-taker. It started with physical notebooks because, for me, writing something down in my own words is the best way to make it stick. Then I discovered an obvious problem: notebooks don’t travel very well when you start accumulating them. So my notes moved to Google Drive, and eventually to WordPress and Medium.

They worked well enough—until ads, pop-ups, and “subscribe to keep reading” started making sharing knowledge feel a little too much like running a toll booth. So I decided to build my own little corner of the internet. No ads, no paywalls, no barriers. Just the post, the ideas, and hopefully something useful for you to take away.

Why I Say "We"

You’ll also notice that I tend to use “we,” “us,” and “our” more than “you.” That’s deliberate. I don’t think of these posts as me standing at a whiteboard telling you how things work. I’d rather think of them as the two of us sitting down with a cup of coffee, taking something complicated apart and figuring it out together. Because, most of the time, that’s what learning really feels like.

Life Outside the Terminal

As a kid, I was the collecting type — stamps, coins, you name it — as kids often do, until life got busy and other interests took over. Apparently, I never really stopped.

My hobbies include — this is the highlight reel, not the full list:

• Collecting old Indian banknotes — especially paper money from the British period through the years that followed. There’s something special about holding a small piece of paper that has travelled through decades and somehow ended up in my hands.

• Street photography — chasing ordinary, unposed moments that a city creates without even trying.

• Composing short jingles — tiny musical ideas that may never escape my hard drive, but I enjoy making them anyway.

• Collecting brass and bronze idols — for the craftsmanship, the stories behind them, and the simple pleasure of owning them.

• Collecting original music album CDs — constantly hunting down originals and converting them into lossless audio for the best possible listening experience.