Now

Work

Data Engineer at BILL. Most of my time goes into owning and scaling our streaming pipelines — Kinesis, Kafka, Flink — and making sure data gets where it needs to go reliably and fast. A lot of the work lately has been around cost optimization and modernizing legacy ETL jobs that have been running since before I joined.

It's unglamorous work a lot of the time, but it's the kind of thing that breaks everything else when it goes wrong, so it matters.

Building

Rebuilt this site from scratch using AI tools — Cursor and Claude. Wrote about the experience here if you're curious. The short version: vibe coding is real and it works, but infrastructure still requires humans.

Working on a couple of side project ideas I want to actually ship this year: an automated job screening tool for job hunters, and something in the gaming space. Both are still in the "thinking out loud" phase.

Learning

Spending a lot of time thinking about where AI fits into data engineering — not just as a tool to write code faster, but what it means for how pipelines get built and maintained long-term.

Also slowly getting more comfortable with the frontend side of things, mostly by doing (this site being the primary lab).

Reading

Mostly technical blogs and Hacker News. Nothing profound to report.