Arun Balachandran

Figuring things
out in public.

I am learning most of this as I go — data, systems, attention, a few places I got wrong. When something finally makes sense, I write it down here.

Start readingSee what I'm building
~/who-is-this

What I'm building

All of it
In progress
Microservices consolidation

Working out when splitting a system into services stops paying for itself — and how you would prove it. My MSc dissertation, currently mid-measurement.

Jun 2026 —
Paused
A dashboard I use every morning

Ugly, undocumented, genuinely useful. The write-up is mostly about why I stopped adding features to it.

Nov 2025 — Feb 2026
Abandoned
The one I gave up on

Two weeks in, the idea did not survive its first real user. It stays here because the post-mortem was the useful part.

Apr 2025 · 2 weeks

Lately, in writing

Everything I've written
Why I stopped optimising my system and started shipping badly

Three years of tuning notes and reviews taught me less than two months of publishing things I wasn't ready to publish.

Habits/5 Sep 2026
The two-minute version of eventual consistency

An explanation I wish someone had given me before I read three papers about it.

Systems/21 Aug 2026
Leaving the GUI: six weeks on the command line

What actually got faster, what I broke, and the four commands that did most of the work.

Systems/30 Jul 2026

Who is writing

Engineer by training, curious by default. Aerospace, then an MBA in business analytics, now an MSc and a dissertation I talk about too much.

More about me

Stay in touch

Leave your email and I'll send the next piece when it's ready. That's the whole arrangement — no schedule to keep up with.