Personal operating system
I’m Shiben, a software engineer in Bangalore. I like systems, thoughtful interfaces, photography, tennis, philosophy, and tools that make life feel more navigable.
§0 · About
I’m drawn to systems that make messy real-world decisions clearer: where to live, what to build, how to debug, how to spend, and how to keep attention clean.
I’m a software engineer based in Bangalore. I like thinking from first principles, building side projects, understanding infrastructure, and documenting what I learn. The through-line is simple: make the invisible structure visible, then make better choices from it.
§1 · Projects
The projects I care about tend to start as personal friction, then become small operating systems for a specific decision.
Open projectsName
Native flows and app-state discipline
Auth, Postgres, Storage, Realtime
Locality intelligence and map queries
Reports, risk scoring, Kannada roleplay
Name
Transaction alerts and receipt parsing
Categories, months, merchants, amounts
Trends, deltas, and purchase fit
Money decisions made inspectable
Name
Clean path under the main domain
For those obssessed with monitoring the situation.
Available from the portfolio project index
Make operational context visible
Name
Clean path under the main domain
< 200 days remaining!
Linked from the project index
Make time feel concrete
Name
Built for new policy authors
Practice rules, inputs, and evaluation
Learn by solving small exercises
Hosted as a standalone learning tool
§2 · Engineering Notes
Notes are where the portfolio becomes a lab notebook: less about announcing expertise, more about preserving useful mental models.
Open notesKubernetes → Prometheus → Cortex → Grafana / Logs → Loki / Traces → OpenTelemetry → Tempo
A stack is only useful when it helps you ask sharper questions during stress. Metrics explain shape, logs explain texture, traces explain path.
TAKEAWAYI prefer systems where each tool has a clear boundary and the architecture can be reasoned about under stress.
Runbooks as tools, incident tickets as memory, deterministic exploration maps, and MCP servers as controlled action layers.
TAKEAWAYGood agents do not replace judgment. They compress the distance between question, evidence, and reversible action.
Frontend, backend, database, auth, deployment, observability, and product thinking are not separate rooms. They are pressure points in the same machine.
§3 · Systems I Understand
This is the part of the site that should feel scannable under pressure: labels, boundaries, and the pieces I can reason about.
Open systemsPods, deployments, services, ingress, config, secrets, observability, security contexts, and Pod Security Standards.
clusters / workloads / networking / policy
Metrics, logs, traces, dashboards, alerting, SLOs, incident debugging, Prometheus, Loki, Grafana, and OpenTelemetry.
signals / dashboards / incidents / SLOs
Tool boundaries, memory, deterministic workflows, evaluation, human approval loops, and agentic debugging surfaces.
tools / memory / evals / control
SwiftUI, navigation, app state, local models, Supabase clients, maps, and humane interaction details.
SwiftUI / state / maps / mobile UX
Auth, validation, database contracts, background work, integration edges, rate limits, and deployable service boundaries.
contracts / auth / jobs / reliability
Schema design, indexes, RLS, migrations, analytics queries, Postgres extensions, and data modeling from product behavior.
Postgres / RLS / indexes / analytics
Secrets, least privilege, input boundaries, data access rules, transport assumptions, and operational blast radius.
trust / secrets / RLS / blast radius
Expense ledgers, transaction parsing, category drift, compounding habits, and software that makes tradeoffs visible.
ledger / parsing / habits / wealth
§4 · Photography / Travel
Photography is how I practice noticing. It softens the engineering brain without turning it off.
Open field notesbirds / water / morning light
Birds, morning light, urban nature, and the slow discipline of noticing what the city hides in plain sight.
history / games / landscapes
A long-running dream shaped by history, games, landscapes, and the atmosphere of places that feel almost mythic.
streets / cafes / attention
Cafes, streets, weather, architecture, and the small texture of city life when you are not rushing through it.
§5 · Experiments
A few parts of life are better treated as experiments: define the signal, observe honestly, adjust the system.
Open experimentscompound rate
Reducing unnecessary expenses, increasing income, investing consistently, and using software to make better money decisions.
attention quality
Meditation, attention, emotional resilience, and learning how to act from a higher mental plane without becoming abstract.
energy baseline
Strength, energy, sports, and sustainable physical confidence that supports the rest of the system.
study surface
Japanese, art, systems, and deep technical understanding treated as a long, compounding notebook.
§6 · Contact
Software, systems, AI agents, infrastructure, photography, side projects, and the occasional first-principles detour.
I like conversations where curiosity is concrete: what are we trying to understand, what evidence do we have, and what small thing can we build next?