Arun Balachandran

Writing

Notes and essays on whatever I am trying to understand. Pick a topic or read down the page.

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
Being wrong about a place

I arrived with a theory about a city and left without it. A short note on that.

Places/12 Jun 2026
How I keep a reading list I actually read

One file, one rule, no app. It has held up for eleven months, which surprises me.

Habits/24 May 2026
What a p-value is not

I got this wrong for two years. Here is the version that finally stuck.

Data/9 Apr 2026
Notes from a month of no notifications

Mostly good, occasionally embarrassing. I missed one important message.

Habits/18 Mar 2026