I'm Alen Kottaram, a software engineer from Kerala in the south of India. I've had a lifelong interest in computers and technology — the machines, the ideas, the whole sprawling world around them — long before I ever wrote a line of code.
These days I work mostly on the backend, around three years into it, which means I spend a lot of time thinking about data, structure, and the quiet plumbing that makes software actually work. I like problems that have a satisfying shape to them.
Away from the keyboard I'm just as happy reading about a new CPU launch, getting far too invested in a strategy game, or arguing with myself about which X-Men film is secretly the best. I enjoy the technical and the creative in roughly equal measure, and I don't think you have to pick.
This site is the overlap of all of that — part notebook, part scrapbook, part playground. Poke around.