Essays

Longer arguments than a consulting page has room for.

Start here

Zomato was a PHP shop, and a proud one

A PHP monolith that was maintained on purpose rather than tolerated: APCu tuning, CI gates against known bad patterns, XHProf on the bottlenecks, and Go services only where one team's load diverged from the rest. The argument is about what actually earns an extraction — a piece that turns out orthogonal to the spine — rather than a monolith that has simply started to feel old.

2 September 2026

Read on Substack →

When business rules contaminate our recommendation model
A sponsored-placement rule engine layered on a production recommender, and the closed feedback loop it creates: pin an item to rank one, harvest the clicks that position alone produced, retrain on them, and the model learns that whatever it was forced to show is what people love. Names the two mechanisms underneath it — MNAR removal and position bias — and what actually corrects for them.
20 June 2026
Read on Substack →

Everything else is on the Substack. Shorter notes from work in progress go up on LinkedIn.

Essays

Zomato was a PHP shop, and a proud one

When business rules contaminate our recommendation model