The Life Cycle of Money
I wanted to understand how money actually works. Not the metaphors about printing presses or vague explanations about central banks, but the actual accounting entries, balance sheets, and institutional mechanics. Every explanation I found either treated money as a physical commodity or skipped over the details with hand-waving. So I traced the full lifecycle myself: where does legal authority to issue currency come from, how do central bank balance sheets expand, what happens when a commercial bank makes a loan, how do payment systems actually move money, and why do trade deficits result in foreigners holding Treasury securities. This is what I found.
Replace Cloud Hosting With a Raspberry Pi
Turn a Raspberry Pi into your own personal cloud server accessible from anywhere on the internet. This guide shows you how to set up a fully functional platform for running your own services using your own domain name, with automatic security and minimal complexity. It's a practical, hands-on project that proves you don't need cloud subscriptions to host your own software, just open-source tools, a small device, and straightforward setup steps.
GPU ML Pipeline on AWS with Terraform
I built this Terraform-managed AWS ML pipeline to run GPU and CPU jobs on demand without paying for idle compute. In this post, I walk through the architecture, the key design choices, and the operational pitfalls to watch for before using this pattern in production.
Approved Is Not Paid
Starting from the simplest possible model, two parties and one ledger, this post derives the full architecture of cross-bank payments through a series of questions. It maps the 7-layer execution pipeline, identifies the cross-cutting concerns that prevent it from breaking, shows who controls each layer and why the settlement layer is intentionally closed to private actors, and traces a single card payment end to end. The central insight is that authorisation and settlement are different events, that regulation is load-bearing rather than incidental, and that the system runs on delayed consistency held together by institutional trust.
Easy Markdown to HTML with Pandoc
This project keeps my Markdown-to-HTML workflow simple. It moves the Pandoc options I use all the time into defaults files, includes a local diagram filter, and makes it easy to generate either a full HTML page or an embeddable fragment from the same Markdown source.
I Failed an Interview. Fair or Not, I Built This Workbook
I missed a fintech offer despite years of experience because I was underprepared for the exact Java exercise format used in that interview. It changed how I view interview fairness: many rounds optimize for who can solve a specific task, in a specific format, under pressure. That can let a less experienced but better-prepared candidate outperform a stronger but less format-ready one. Some interviewers use broader, experience-led evaluation; others use strict syntax execution. This workbook is for the latter case, so you can train for precision, speed, and direct implementation when it matters.
Alpine Linux Installation on Raspberry Pi
This guide walks through installing Alpine Linux on a Raspberry Pi 4, from image flashing through to a secure, containerized system ready for workloads. It covers a practical five-stage installation workflow, including ARM-specific bootloader and filesystem configuration required for reliable boots. The result is a minimal base system with Docker, SSH hardening, firewall rules, and static networking configured.
Arch Linux Installation from Scratch
This guide provides a comprehensive walkthrough for installing Arch Linux from a live disk, configuring GRUB as the bootloader, and selecting the recommended filesystem. Beginning with booting from the live disk, users are guided through partitioning, mounting, and installing the base system. Configuration steps cover timezone, localization, network settings, and the installation of GRUB.
The Veil and the Spark
This exploration is not about theology but about ontology and consciousness architecture. Across mystical systems, the "Unknown God" functions as a model of ultimate source reality, while the "divine spark" represents consciousness embedded within material structure. The real inquiry concerns the barriers that prevent awareness from recognizing itself as originating beyond the systems it inhabits. What follows is an attempt to map ancient cosmological models onto modern frameworks of systems theory, cognitive science, and consciousness studies. The goal is not to validate mysticism, but to extract the architectural insights embedded within these traditions.