What fuels
the thinking.

Music

Daily ritual

Passionate listener. The listening is the real skill.

Music is the one thing I consume daily without ever wanting to produce it. It's a complete experience. I don't need to hold the instrument to feel it fully. From Carnatic classical to ambient electronic. The mood dictates the genre. Twenty One Pilots is the artist I return to most. Deliberate, layered, structurally unusual. Music that rewards attention.

Audio Engineering

Obsession in progress

The architecture of sound.

Beyond just listening. I want to understand what is actually happening: frequency, timbre, signal flow, the physics of how a mix sits in a room versus headphones. The same question I keep asking in hardware, just in a different domain: what is going on at the layer you cannot see? Compression, reverb, stereo imaging are engineering decisions dressed as aesthetics. That overlap is what pulls me in.

Watches

Obsession

Mechanical precision made visible.

A watch is the most honest form of engineering: everything is exposed, everything serves a function, and there is nowhere to hide bad craft. I think about hardware the same way. If it needs to be hidden, something is probably wrong.

Bikes

Kinetic thinking

Controlled chaos at speed.

Motorcycles demand the same full-system thinking as hardware design: you are managing dynamics, thermodynamics, attention, and risk at the same time, and you cannot defer any of them. There is no passive mode on a bike, and I think that is actually the point. My sister was the first person I knew who rode. She never asked whether it was appropriate. I noticed that.

Steins;Gate

Favourite anime

Time, consequence, and the cost of knowing.

The only anime I keep coming back to, and not for nostalgia. It asks a real question: if you could change the past, what would you actually sacrifice? I think about that more than I expected to. Each iteration of the loop reveals something the previous one missed, which is also how debugging works.

Fantasy world-building

Creative practice

Coherent systems, invented from scratch.

A well-built fantasy world is a systems design exercise. Consistent physics, cultural logic, economic constraints, power structures. All of it has to cohere. I think about this the same way I think about architecture.

Martial Arts

Foundation

Discipline before technique.

Ten years of training gave me something engineering school did not: proof that consistency under discomfort is learnable, not innate. I do not train formally anymore. But I still think about it, because the lesson generalises. You show up when you do not want to. You do the work before you feel ready. The mat was where I first understood that, before I could have named it.

Running

Thinking practice

The only meeting I never cancel.

Running is where I think. Not idly. About everything that matters. Problems I've been avoiding, ideas I haven't articulated yet, decisions I already know the answer to but haven't faced. The run forces the answer.

Civilization VI

Strategic thinking

Long-horizon thinking with consequences.

Turn-based strategy is systems design with consequences. Resource allocation, long-horizon planning, knowing when to expand and when to consolidate. I play Civ the way I approach most things: patiently, with a plan, and with an unreasonable attachment to seeing it through.