Thoughts, mental models, and notes.
March 24, 2026
13 min readWhat Each Building Block in a System Actually Costs You
Load balancers, databases, caches, queues, CDNs. Every system design resource lists them as a menu you pick from. None of them tell you what each one adds to your operational surface. I am working through each building block not to memorize what it does, but to understand when it earns a place in a design and what you are signing up to maintain once it is there.
March 24, 2026
14 min readHow Architecture Patterns Actually Differ When You Have to Run Them
Microservices, event-driven, CQRS, sharding. Every pattern looks elegant in a diagram. The difference between them only becomes real when you ask who gets paged at 3 a.m. and what the failure mode looks like. I am mapping each pattern to the operational trade-off it introduces, because that is the part the diagrams leave out.
March 24, 2026
10 min readHow I Am Learning to Walk Through a System Design Without Jumping to Solutions
The instinct when someone asks "design X" is to start naming components. That instinct is exactly the failure mode. Clarifying requirements, estimating scale, and defining APIs before touching architecture is a discipline, not a formality. I am trying to internalize a sequence that keeps the thinking ahead of the drawing.
March 21, 2026
18 min readWhat Speciality Should a Software Engineer Chase in the AI Era
The default instinct is to study AI. But the engineers thriving right now are not the ones who learned to train models. They are the ones who own the layers AI cannot touch: systems, security, infrastructure, product. Picking a master’s degree that builds a defensible speciality instead of a generic credential is the decision that actually compounds.
March 21, 2026
12 min readHow I Prepared for the LPDP Scholarship
Most LPDP applications fail at the framing, not the credentials. The selection is not looking for the highest GPA or the strongest English score. It is looking for a specific argument: why you, in this field, at this institution, will produce a concrete outcome for Indonesia. Getting that argument right before you touch the application form is the preparation that actually matters.
March 21, 2026
11 min readHow I Prepared for the IELTS Exam
IELTS is not a language test. It is four separate formats, each with its own mechanics, scoring logic, and failure modes that have nothing to do with how well you speak English. Most points people lose are not lost because their English is weak. Understanding the structure first and practicing the right things for each section is what actually moves the score.
March 12, 2026
10 min readWhy Your AI Agent Is More Expensive Than It Needs to Be
The cost of an AI agent session has almost nothing to do with how hard the task is. Output tokens cost 3 to 5 times more than input, and it is ambiguity, not complexity, that makes sessions expensive. Here is how I use that to keep costs predictable.
March 10, 2026
18 min readHow I Evaluate IHSG Stocks Before Making a Move
Knowing why a company is worth owning, then checking whether the market is actually agreeing with you right now. That is the combination I use before I commit to anything on the Indonesian market.
March 8, 2026
8 min readWhy I Cut Losing Positions Early
The story we tell about a losing position is almost always more interesting than the position itself. I have held on through broken signals and bad momentum because the narrative still felt alive. It rarely was. Knowing when to stop believing your own story is the actual skill.
March 2, 2026
12 min readHow AWS Lambda and SQS Actually Work
Most misconfiguration in Lambda and SQS comes from skipping the mental model. Visibility timeouts, partial batch responses, idempotency, reserved concurrency. Getting these wrong is easy and the failures are subtle. Getting them right before you ship is not complicated once you understand what the queue and the function are each responsible for.
How I Think About Monetizing an App
Most apps fail at monetization not because the options are unclear, but because the sequencing is wrong. Subscriptions on one-time utilities, freemium gates that block value instead of extending it, ads too early for the traffic to justify them. Working through this before you ship changes which model you choose and when you introduce it.
I Just Started Going to the Gym and I Can Only Make It 3 Times a Week
Starting from zero, I had to pick a handful of movements and commit to them. These are the workouts I chose, and why I think they are the right ones for building an aesthetic body when time is limited.
How I Think About Staying Relevant as AI Gets Better at Writing Code
The threat is not AI writing code. It is engineers who only write code. Understanding user problems, making trade-offs, and owning outcomes rather than just tickets is what keeps an engineer valuable when the code-writing part gets automated.
What Is Actually Happening Under Your Database Queries
Most performance problems I have seen are not the database's fault. They are how it is being used. Missing indexes, long-held transactions, unbounded scans. ACID, query planning, and locking stop being mysterious once you understand what the engine is actually doing.