Talks
A running list of conference talks, meetups, and community appearances — Kafka, vector search, Git, platform engineering, org change, whatever I was deep in at the time.
2026
Kafka & Time: The Hardest Dependency
Distributed systems are hard not because they span machines, but because they span time. A look at real production outages caused by partition keys, timestamp modes, and windowing contracts nobody consciously chose.
How Startups Transform Legacy Organisations from the Inside
How a small acqui-hired startup team, dropped into a 4,000+ person legacy organisation, actually changed the way it worked from the inside — years of setbacks, small wins, and the slow work of building trust rather than pushing best practices.
OWASP Top 10 for LLM Applications — live breaking and fixing
A live, hands-on session breaking and fixing LLM applications against the OWASP Top 10 for LLM risks — prompt injection, misinformation, excessive agency, supply chain, and more, each with a real demo and a real fix.
Vector Search & Storage in PostgreSQL with pgvector
Inside pgvector: how embeddings get stored (and TOASTed), why B-trees can't index vectors, and how IVFFlat and HNSW trade off build time, recall, and speed — plus quantization and the production gotchas that show up past the demo.
From Text to Vector: How High Dimensional Data Gets Stored, Searched & Retrieved
What actually happens after you call an embedding API — how text becomes vectors, how they're stored, and how semantic search finds the closest match. Starts with a brute-force scan across 50,000 vectors, then shows how IVFFlat and HNSW deliver 50–150x speedups, all in plain SQL you can run on your laptop.
Storing high-dimensional data at scale
What breaks when you push vector search to 100M+ rows on Postgres, how IVF/HNSW and quantization help, and why DiskANN plus hybrid BM25/vector search mattered in production.
2025
Git internals beyond add, commit, push
A practical deep dive into Git internals, for using Git with more confidence than the everyday porcelain commands give you.
Inside pgvector: how PostgreSQL stores and manages high-dimensional data
How pgvector represents and indexes high-dimensional embeddings inside PostgreSQL, and what that means for query performance at scale.
2024
Unlocking Efficiency and Collaboration: How Backstage Solves Key Developer Challenges
How Backstage, the open-source developer portal, tackles knowledge discovery, code ownership, system interfaces, dependency mapping, tech radar, and service creation.
Effective data consumption from Kafka
Configuring consumers for reliability and speed — fetch size, session timeouts, rebalancing, consumer lag, and the tradeoffs between throughput, latency, and resource use.
2023
Why, what, and how of practically working with Apache Kafka®
What problems Kafka actually solves, when to reach for it, and a long walk through common use cases — the knobs to turn and the tradeoffs that come with them.
2022
GitLab Bengaluru — first in-person meetup
Spoke at GitLab's first in-person Bengaluru meetup, alongside a full house on a rainy Saturday morning.