Writing
Engineering & Building 4
How I Built a 22K Audience With One Repeatable Format (and Why Consistency Beats Creativity)
In a few months one short-form format took me past 22,000 followers and roughly 14.7 million views in a single 90-day window. I'm a backend engineer by day. This was a side experiment in distribution.
March 2026₹2 Lakh in Month One: What a Backend Engineer Learned Building a Physical Brand Solo
I write smart contracts and payments backends for a living. So when I decided to build a consumer cleaning brand — NAMELESS, under my company KuruX Enterprises, with a sponge-wipe line called WipeZill
October 2025From Codeforces Expert to ~8,000 Problems: The Practice System That Actually Worked
Over the years I've solved close to 8,000 problems across Codeforces, CodeChef, LeetCode, UVa, and other judges, and made Codeforces Expert in university. Pre-2022, before AI assistants, every solutio
April 2023What I Learned Taking a Liquid-Staking Protocol Past $500M+ TVL as a Founding Engineer
I joined Stader Labs as an intern in my final year at DTU. Somewhere between my first CosmWasm contract and the dashboards ticking past half a billion in staked assets, the title "founding engineer" g
July 2022On Building & Life 22
The Engineer-Philosopher
People find it weird that the same guy who's solved eight thousand competitive programming problems also reads Kafka and the Stoics for fun. They file engineering and philosophy as two unrelated hobbi
March 2026The Discipline of Shipping
Every project hits a moment where the thing is good enough to be embarrassing in public but not good enough to satisfy you, and what you do in that moment decides whether you're a builder or just some
August 2025The Founders Were Deists
What if the people who built America mostly didn't believe in a god who answered prayers?
June 2024Why I Read
People who know me as a backend engineer grinding competitive programming get mildly confused that I also read Kafka and Seneca and Paine for fun. The assumption is that reading philosophy is a self-i
February 2024Taste Is the Last Edge
For most of my life taste sounded like a soft word. The thing people reach for when they can't measure something. Engineers distrust it because it never shows up in a benchmark. I've come to think tas
October 2022Schlep Blindness and the Jobs Nobody Wants
Paul Graham has an essay on schlep blindness. The way your brain quietly hides the businesses that involve tedious, unglamorous, terrifying work so you never even see them. Stripe sat in plain sight f
May 2022Money Is Stored Freedom
People who say money doesn't matter usually never went without it. People who say money is everything usually never had enough to find out it isn't. The truth sits somewhere less quotable: money is st
April 2022Why I Keep Starting Things
I've started a lot of things. A cleaning brand that did two lakh in its first month. A trading simulator that got featured by YC's Startup School. A couple of products that now exist only as graveyard
June 2021Distribution Is the Only Moat You Have Alone
Engineers love to believe the product is the moat. Build something good enough and the world beats a path to your door. Comforting lie. I believed it through a few dead projects before it stopped bein
February 2021What the Agents Can't Take
I keep telling people that anything repeatable gets eaten by agents eventually. They hear a horror movie. I mean it as a map.
January 2021The Job-Versus-Potential Trap
I once wrote a line I keep coming back to, because it diagnosed me before I understood the diagnosis. When I have a job, it feels like I'm wasting my potential. When I'm unemployed, it feels like I'm
December 2020Credentials Are a Receipt, Not the Meal
A credential is proof that you paid. That's all it is. A degree proves you paid four years and some tuition. A certification proves you paid an afternoon and an exam fee. None of it proves you can do
December 2020Ambition Without a Map
Everyone who gave me career advice assumed a map existed. Pick the destination, find the established route, walk it. Senior engineer, then staff, then director. The ladder's right there, just climb. G
February 2020The First-Generation Wealth Mind
There's a specific psychology to being the first person in your line to build real wealth, and almost nobody describes it right, because the people who write about money usually inherited the operatin
January 2018What Paul Graham Got Right (and the One Place I Disagree)
If you build things, Paul Graham already had most of your good ideas a decade ago, wrote them more clearly than you will, and put them somewhere you can read for free. Honest thing to do is admit the
November 2017On Writing Under a Borrowed Name
For years I posted under Durden. If you know the reference, you know what it was promising — the part of you that doesn't care what the room thinks, the one willing to burn the comfortable thing down
May 2017Building the Rails
I've spent my career on payment rails. First moving money across borders the old way, then helping take a crypto staking protocol past $500M+ in deposits, now on the unglamorous plumbing that lets a c
May 2017Do Things That Don't Scale, Forever
Paul Graham's most famous advice is do things that don't scale. Recruit your first users by hand. Do the work manually. Embarrass yourself in strangers' inboxes. The usual reading treats this as train
April 2017Keep Your Identity Small, Especially as a Builder
Paul Graham has a short essay called Keep Your Identity Small. The argument: the moment a belief becomes part of your identity, you stop being able to think clearly about it. You defend it like territ
February 2017The Four-Month Problem
I've started many things and finished fewer. If I'm honest, my motivation has a half-life of about four months. Around month three the idea stops being a mystery and starts being a maintenance schedul
January 2017The Case Against Hiring
The default startup story has a moment everyone treats as graduation. You hire. Headcount, an office, an org chart. The press calls it scaling. I want to make the unfashionable case that for a certain
November 2016Cities, Ambition, and Leaving
Paul Graham has an essay arguing that cities send you a message. New York whispers you should be richer. Silicon Valley whispers you should be more powerful and build something that matters. The city
April 2016The Greeks 16
Diogenes Lived in a Barrel and Feared No One
Alexander the Great, the most powerful man alive, came to visit Diogenes the Cynic, who was lying in the sun outside the barrel he lived in. Alexander offered to grant him anything he wanted — anythin
January 2026You Are What You Repeatedly Ship
Aristotle has a line the self-help industry stole and ruined: we are what we repeatedly do, excellence is not an act but a habit. The ruined version is a motivational poster. The original is a theory
October 2025Every Republic Needs Its Gadflies
Jefferson wrote that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and that the tree of liberty needs refreshing. Franklin spent his life puncturing the pompous, signing his sharpest writing under
May 2025Eudaimonia Is Not a Mood
We translate eudaimonia as happiness and lose almost everything in the move. Happiness, to us, is a feeling — a warm state you're in or out of, something an afternoon can deliver and a bad email can t
December 2024The Most Dangerous Engineer Knows Everything
The oracle at Delphi declared Socrates the wisest man in Athens, and he spent the rest of his life confused by it, because he was sure he knew nothing. He went around questioning the supposedly wise —
January 2024Diogenes Carried a Lamp in Daylight
Diogenes used to walk through the crowded Athenian marketplace in broad daylight holding a lit lamp. When people asked what he was doing he said: I'm looking for an honest man. The lamp was a joke and
January 2024The Mean Is Not the Middle
Most people who quote Aristotle's golden mean think it means moderation. Be brave but not reckless, generous but not a sucker, find the comfortable middle and live there. It's a misreading, and it's t
December 2023Build a Garden, Not an Empire
Epicurus didn't found a school in the grand sense — no marble academy, no lecture halls competing with Plato's for prestige. He bought a garden on the edge of Athens and lived there with his friends.
July 2023Epicurus Would Have Hated Your Growth Plan
Epicurus has the worst PR in philosophy. We turned his name into epicurean — a synonym for indulgence, fine wine, expensive pleasure. The actual man lived on bread and water, kept a garden, and taught
September 2021What Is It For
Aristotle thought everything had a final cause — a telos, the end it exists for. An acorn is for becoming an oak. A knife is for cutting. To understand a thing, he said, know what it's aimed at, not j
September 2021The Cave Has Good Metrics
Everyone knows Plato's cave. Prisoners chained facing a wall, watching shadows cast by puppets behind them, mistaking the shadows for reality. One escapes, sees the sun, comes back to tell the others,
December 2020Nobody Good Wants to Run It
Plato's Republic lands on a conclusion most people find naive or sinister: the ideal state should be ruled by philosopher-kings, people who've seen the truth and are therefore fit to govern. The usual
October 2019The Gadfly Gets the Hemlock
Socrates called himself a gadfly — a horsefly biting a large, sluggish horse to keep it awake. The horse was Athens. His job, as he saw it, was to sting the city out of its comfortable assumptions, to
October 2017The Unexamined Roadmap Is Not Worth Shipping
The unexamined life is not worth living. Socrates said it at his trial, with the option to recant and live, and he chose the line over his life. People quote it constantly and almost nobody asks the o
August 2017Plato Was the First Backend Engineer
Plato's theory of forms sounds like the most useless idea in philosophy until you've written enough code, and then it sounds like the only idea. The claim: the particular things we see — this chair, t
February 2017Knowing Is Not Half the Battle
There's a Greek word for the gap that runs your life: akrasia. It means acting against your own better judgment — knowing the right thing and doing the other thing anyway. The Greeks were obsessed wit
January 2017Stoics & Romans 16
Cicero On Why You Do The Work Well When No One Is Watching
Near the end of his life, with the Roman republic falling apart around him, Cicero wrote a long letter to his son about duty — De Officiis. It became one of the most influential books in Western histo
December 2025Rehearse The Crash Before You Launch
The Stoics had a practice that sounds, on first contact, like a recipe for a panic attack: premeditatio malorum, the premeditation of evils. You deliberately imagine, in detail, the things going wrong
September 2025Hold Money Loosely Or It Holds You
Seneca is the most useful Stoic on money for one annoying reason: he was rich. Scandalously rich, one of the wealthiest men in Rome — which means when he writes about wealth he isn't a monk romanticiz
September 2025No One Can Actually Insult You
Epictetus says something that sounds absurd until you sit with it: "If anyone tells you that a certain person speaks ill of you, do not make excuses about what is said of you, but answer: He was ignor
February 2025The Bug Is The Work
There's a Marcus line that gets quoted to death, usually badly: "The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way." People turn it into a motivational poster, which is
December 2024Memento Mori Is A Shipping Strategy
The Romans had this thing where a general riding in triumph, crowd roaring, had a servant behind him whose only job was to keep whispering: remember you will die. Peak day of his whole life, and someo
June 2024The Only Question That Matters In An Incident
Epictetus was born a slave. He controlled basically nothing about his external life — not his body, not his freedom, not his circumstances. So he built a whole philosophy out of the one thing nobody c
February 2022Time Is The Only Thing You Can Go Bankrupt On
Seneca wrote a short, brutal essay, On the Shortness of Life, and the thesis isn't the one the title sells. He doesn't say life is short. He says we make it short. "It is not that we have a short time
January 2022Build A Republic, Not A Kingdom
Cicero loved the Roman republic the way some engineers love a good system — not for any one ruler, for the design. Res publica, the public thing, a machine for governing that wasn't supposed to depend
November 2021Write Letters To The Person You're Becoming
The best thing Seneca wrote wasn't a treatise. It was a long run of letters to a younger friend named Lucilius — over a hundred of them — where he worked out his philosophy not as doctrine but as one
May 2021The Discipline Of Wanting Less Than You Can Get
Marcus Aurelius was, by accident of birth, the most powerful man alive. He could have had anything — every pleasure, every luxury, every indulgence the world could produce, on command. And he spent hi
March 2021Busy Is The Cheapest Way To Feel Productive
Seneca had a special contempt for a type he called the occupati — the preoccupied, the perpetually busy. Not the lazy, he had less to say about them. His real target was the guy in constant motion, sl
December 2020Build For The Spec You Were Given
Marcus had a habit of accepting his materials. "Accept the things to which fate binds you," he wrote, "and love the people with whom fate brings you together — but do so with all your heart." The Stoi
June 2019The Inner Citadel
Epictetus had an image the later Stoics loved: the inner citadel. There's a part of you no external event reaches unless you open the gate yourself. Take the money, the reputation, the job, the freedo
August 2018Do The Next Thing In Front Of You
There's a passage where Marcus, clearly tired, gives himself the simplest possible instruction. Don't let your imagination get crushed by picturing the whole of your life at once — every trouble, all
August 2017The View From Above
Marcus Aurelius had a trick for when things got loud. He'd zoom out. Picture the whole earth from way up — the cities, the wars, the marriages, the festivals — and watch the thing eating him shrink to
August 2016Founders & the Enlightenment 16
Locke's Rule: You Mixed Your Labor, You Own It
John Locke had a theory of where property comes from that I think about constantly, because I work in an industry obsessed with the question and rarely honest about the answer. Locke said the world st
September 2025Design for Your Own Irrelevance
The deist God's most impressive act was leaving. He built the machine, set the laws, and then — this is the part that scandalized everyone — stepped back and never intervened again. No miracles, no re
August 2025Jefferson Took a Razor to His Bible
Thomas Jefferson literally cut up the New Testament. Sat there with a blade and physically removed every miracle, every resurrection, every supernatural claim, and pasted what was left — the ethics, t
July 2025Paine Said the Universe Was the Only Scripture
Thomas Paine, in The Age of Reason, made an argument that should be tattooed on every engineer's wrist. Don't trust the book. Books are written by men, copied by men, edited by men, translated by men,
August 2024The Watchmaker Argument, Inverted
The deists loved the watchmaker argument. Find a watch on a heath, the analogy goes, and you'd never believe it assembled itself — the intricacy implies a maker. The universe is more intricate than a
March 2024Jefferson Wrote 'Pursuit' on Purpose
Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. We've read that phrase so many times it goes transparent, and the most important word disappears. Jefferson didn't write a right to happiness. He wrote a r
July 2023Spinoza's God Is Just the System Running
Spinoza got excommunicated for an idea that sounds, to a modern engineer, almost boring. God and Nature are the same thing — Deus sive Natura, God or Nature, pick one, they're identical. No being outs
July 2023Franklin Ran A/B Tests on His Own Soul
Benjamin Franklin wanted to become a better person, so he did the least romantic thing imaginable. He made a list. Thirteen virtues — temperance, silence, order, resolution, the rest — and a little gr
May 2023Reason Over Revelation, Especially About Yourself
The deist creed, stripped to the core, was: reason over revelation. Don't accept a claim because an authority revealed it, because it's in a sacred book, because it's tradition, because everyone aroun
March 2023Voltaire's Last Word Was 'Cultivate Your Garden'
Voltaire spends all of Candide dismantling the idea that this is the best of all possible worlds. He drags his hero through earthquakes, war, betrayal, every horror he can invent, specifically to mock
November 2022Franklin Only Cared About Useful Virtue
Benjamin Franklin had a test for ideas, almost rude in its simplicity: does it work. He didn't much care whether a belief was elegant or orthodox or pleasing to authority. He cared whether it produced
June 2022Franklin Never Finished School Either
Benjamin Franklin had two years of formal schooling. Two. Pulled out at ten to work in his father's shop, then apprenticed to a printer. That's the entire credential. From that he became a scientist t
June 2022Natural Rights Were Just Good Protocol Design
Locke's big idea was that some rights are natural — they don't come from the king, the government, any authority. They exist prior to all of it, by virtue of what you are. Life, liberty, property: you
August 2021Locke Said You Came In Blank. Good.
John Locke argued the mind starts as a blank slate — tabula rasa — no innate ideas, nothing pre-written. Everything you know got there through experience, through sense and reflection writing on the e
April 2019The Clockwork Universe Already Survived This Panic
When the deists started describing the universe as a clockwork mechanism — lawful, predictable, running on its own without a hovering God — a lot of people panicked. If the world is just a machine fol
March 2019Hume's Guillotine and the Metric That Lies
David Hume noticed something so simple that for centuries nobody had said it out loud. Writers would reason along comfortably about what is — how the world works, what happens, what causes what — and
June 2017The Existentialists 16
The Metamorphosis of the Employee
Gregor Samsa wakes up as a giant insect, and here's the detail everyone gets wrong. His first thought is not what happened to me. His first thought is the train. He's worried he'll be late for work. T
February 2026The Absurd Is a Contract
People think the absurd, in Camus, is a property of the universe. That the world is absurd. Not quite. Camus is careful here, and the carefulness is the whole insight. The absurd isn't in the world an
October 2024Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom
Kierkegaard has a line about anxiety that reorganised how I think about my own. He says anxiety is the dizziness of freedom. The vertigo you feel not when you're trapped but when you look down and rea
December 2022Would You Ship It Forever?
Nietzsche proposes a test, and it's the most useful decision tool I know that nobody uses. A demon visits you at your loneliest hour and says: this life, down to the smallest detail, you'll live again
December 2022The Trial With No Judge
Josef K. gets arrested one morning. Nobody tells him the charge. He spends the entire book hunting for the court, the document, some official who can explain what he did. There is no such official. Th
December 2022The Rock Is the Product
Camus closes his Sisyphus essay with a line that reads like a paradox and isn't: one must imagine Sisyphus happy. A man sentenced to roll a boulder uphill forever, watch it roll back forever, walk dow
September 2022Bad Faith in the Org Chart
Sartre tells a story about a waiter. The guy is a little too much of a waiter. Movements too precise, too eager, too perfectly waiter-ish, like he's performing the role from outside. Sartre's point: t
August 2022The Castle You Never Reach
In Kafka's last novel, a man called K. shows up at a village to start a job as a land surveyor. The job was offered to him by the authorities up at the Castle. All he has to do is reach the Castle, co
July 2022The Leap Before the Proof
Kierkegaard noticed something uncomfortable about big decisions. The evidence you'd need to make them well only shows up after you've already made them. You want to know the marriage works before you
June 2021The Underground Engineer
Dostoevsky's Underground Man makes an argument that sounds insane until you've worked inside a big enough system. He says: give a man a perfect world, a glass palace where every need is met and every
February 2021Self-Overcoming, Not Conquest
Will to power is the most misread idea in philosophy. People hear it and picture a boot on a neck. Dominate, win, crush. That reading is so popular it's basically a cottage industry, and it gets Nietz
March 2020The Single Individual
Kierkegaard wanted exactly one phrase on his gravestone: that individual. He spent his life attacking what he called "the crowd," and his charge against it was strange and specific. He didn't say the
January 2020Rebellion Is a Yes
We use the word rebel lazily. We picture someone tearing things down, saying no to everything, the angry contrarian who's just against. Camus spent a whole book correcting this, and the correction is
December 2019Master Morality Without a Master
Nietzsche draws a distinction that gets him in trouble because people read it as a class system. It isn't. Master morality and slave morality aren't about who has power over whom. They're about where
May 2018Freedom Over Comfort
Dostoevsky stages a confrontation in The Brothers Karamazov that I'd put on the wall of every company. A returned Christ gets arrested by the Grand Inquisitor, an old cardinal, who explains, almost te
October 2016Condemned to Be Free
Sartre has a phrase that sounds like a contradiction: we are condemned to be free. Condemned, like a sentence, a punishment. Why would freedom be a punishment? Because, he says, we didn't choose to ex
February 2016Power & Strategy 16
Feared or Loved Is the Wrong Question
Everyone quotes the line: is it better to be feared or loved? And everyone stops one sentence too early. Machiavelli's actual answer is that it's best to be both, but since that's hard, it's safer to
April 2026Chanakya's Lesson: Build the System, Not the Hero
Most people know Chanakya, if at all, as the cunning advisor who installed an empire. The Indian Machiavelli, two thousand years early. What gets lost is that the Arthashastra, his manual of statecraf
March 2026Sun Tzu's Deception Is About Your Own Mind First
"All warfare is based on deception." Sun Tzu's most quoted and most misused line. People take it as licence to lie, scheme, misrepresent. But read it in context and something subtler is going on. The
July 2025The Best Leader Is the One the Team Forgets to Credit
Lao Tzu ranks leaders, and his ranking is upside down from everything LinkedIn teaches. The worst leader, he says, is the one the people despise. Better is the one they fear. Better still is the one t
April 2023Act Without Attachment to the Result
The most quoted line of the Gita is also the most misread by ambitious people: you have a right to your action, never to its fruits. Krishna tells Arjuna to do his duty and let go of the outcome. The
March 2023Wu Wei: The Best Code Looks Like It Wrote Itself
Lao Tzu has a concept that ruins your relationship with effort once you actually get it: wu wei. Usually translated "non-action," which is misleading, because the Tao Te Ching is not telling you to do
December 2022Your Own Work, Done Badly, Beats Someone Else's Done Well
There's a line near the end of the Gita that sounds almost reckless: better your own dharma imperfectly performed than another's dharma performed perfectly. Swadharma. Krishna is telling Arjuna it's b
March 2022Confucius on Why Clear Roles Beat Heroics
Confucius has an idea that sounds like the most boring advice possible and is secretly one of the highest-leverage concepts in org design. It's called the rectification of names, zhengming. Asked what
October 2021The Best Engineers Win Without Fighting
Sun Tzu's most famous claim reads like a paradox until you've shipped a few things: the supreme excellence is to win without fighting. Subdue the enemy without battle. He rates the general who wins a
October 2021Terrain Decides the Battle Before You Show Up
There's a whole chapter in The Art of War about ground. Accessible ground, entangling ground, ground where you should never camp, ground where you should never fight, ground so desperate you fight or
March 2021Never Outshine the Master Is Really About Generosity
The first of Greene's 48 laws is the one that sounds the most cynical: never outshine the master. Make those above you feel comfortably superior. To ambitious people it reads like a recipe for dimming
August 2019Conquering Others Is Strength. Conquering Yourself Is Power.
Lao Tzu draws a distinction that cuts under this entire series. He who conquers others is strong, he says. He who conquers himself is mighty. In the original spirit the second is a higher word than th
May 2019Read Reality As It Is, Not As It Should Be
The most useful sentence in The Prince is the one most people misread. Machiavelli says he writes about how men actually live, not how they ought to, and that a ruler who insists on the ought gets des
June 2018Virtù and Fortuna: Build the Dam Before the Flood
Machiavelli ends The Prince with a striking image. Fortune, he says, is like a violent river that floods the plains, tears down trees, sweeps everything away. And yet, when the weather is calm, men ca
March 2018The Empty Boat: Most of What Angers You Has No Pilot
There's a parable from the Taoist tradition, from Zhuangzi, I keep coming back to. A man is crossing a river in his boat when another boat slams into his. He turns, furious, ready to shout, and sees t
February 2016I Make Content About the 48 Laws. Here's Why It's Self-Defense.
I make short videos about The 48 Laws of Power, and people sometimes assume that means I'm teaching manipulation. It's the opposite, and the distinction is the whole point. Robert Greene's book isn't
February 2016