About
Hi, I'm Senthil Nayagan, hailing from India, a land of vibrant software engineers.
The day job
By profession, I'm a Data Engineer. I spend my working hours convincing data to move from one place to another in a shape someone can actually use, which is a more dramatic undertaking than it sounds. Pipelines break, schemas drift, and someone, somewhere, always insists a report is "just a quick query." It never is.
Team Rust
By interest, I'm a Rustacean — someone who has made peace with a compiler that rejects code the way a strict teacher rejects homework: firmly, and with detailed feedback. I've come to appreciate it. Where other languages let you tiptoe past a mistake and discover it in production, Rust stops you at the door and explains, at length, exactly what you did wrong. Character-building, if nothing else.
Currently buffering: AI and math
More recently I've wandered into AI and ML, which meant first wandering into the math underneath it — calculus, linear algebra, probability — the part everyone skips and then quietly regrets. I'm building that foundation properly rather than pattern-matching my way through it, and writing up the notes as I go, partly for you and mostly so future-me doesn't have to relearn this a second time.
Open source made me do it
I like open-source software. It's free, it's transparent, and it runs on the fairly radical idea that people will improve things for each other without being asked twice. It's also where I've learned most of what I actually know — by reading other people's code, arguing in issue threads, and occasionally submitting a fix instead of just complaining. Contributing back — code, docs, or just a well-timed explanation in a GitHub issue — feels like the least I can do for a system that's given me so much.
How this blog happened
This blog exists because I am, at heart, a chronic note-taker. It started with physical notebooks, because writing things down in my own words is the only way they actually stick. Then the notebooks became inconvenient (you cannot, it turns out, carry a stack of notebooks everywhere), so the notes moved to Google Drive. Then I tried WordPress and Medium, which worked, right up until the ads and the "subscribe to keep reading" walls made the whole thing feel less like sharing knowledge and more like a toll road.
So I built my own. No ads, no paywall, nothing between you and the post. Just the internet the way I remember liking it.
Why I keep saying "we"
If you read enough of my posts, you'll notice I lean on "we," "us," and "our" more than "you." That's on purpose. I like to think of a post less as me lecturing at you and more as the two of us working through something together — because most of the time, that's exactly what learning a new concept actually feels like.
Life outside the terminal
As a kid I collected stamps, coins, and old paper money, the way kids do right up until they discover other kids exist. As an adult, apparently undeterred, the list of hobbies just kept growing instead of shrinking:
- Street photography — chasing the ordinary, unposed moments a city produces without trying.
- Composing short jingles — small musical ideas that will probably never leave my hard drive, and that's fine.
- Collecting brass and bronze idols — for the craftsmanship, the history, and yes, I'm aware of how this sentence reads next to "Rust programmer."
If you made it this far, thank you for reading about a stranger's hobbies on the internet. That's either genuine curiosity or an excellent avoidance tactic for whatever you were supposed to be doing — either way, I appreciate the company.
Say hi
I read everything that lands in my inbox, even if I'm slow to reply. You can find me at:
Best wishes,
Senthil Nayagan