I'm Kartik.

I work on distributed systems, data infrastructure, performance, AI, and whatever else manages to hijack my brain hard enough to become a project.

I like software where the hard parts are actually hard: latency, scale, reliability, correctness, weird production failures, and the endless comedy of a system behaving perfectly in theory and then immediately acting possessed in real life.

A lot of my work has been around Apache Pinot and large-scale data systems. I care about building things that are fast, clear, and real. Not fake-clean. Not abstraction-pilled. Not "works in the demo" and then explodes the moment traffic shows up.

I'm also drawn to tools, explainers, and experiments that make dense ideas feel direct. I like taking something that looks impossible, peeling back the nonsense, and turning it into something you can actually reason about without needing to ascend into a higher state of distributed-systems consciousness.

This site is where I write, build, and collect the artifacts. Deep dives, side quests, technical notes, experiments, and occasional posts from whatever rabbit hole currently has me in a chokehold.

The vibe here is simple: serious curiosity, good taste, real technical depth, and just enough internet damage to keep things interesting.