# dhilipsiva
> Self-taught software engineer (dropout). Rust · WebAssembly · LLMs · distributed systems · symbolic reasoning · Tamil · philosophy of mind. "The commit history is my transcript."

## About
- [About / bio & timeline](https://dhilipsiva.dev/about/): first-person bio, 2012→now timeline, skills.

## Writing
- [I compiled fifty years of hardware history into your browser](https://dhilipsiva.dev/musings/fifty-years-of-hardware/): silicon·eras is an interactive explorable of consumer-hardware history, 1975–2026 — pure Rust compiled to WebAssembly, the whole dataset parsed and embedded at build time, no server and no network after load. Why the data lives in the binary, and how one CSV becomes an era-banded chart you can pivot and share by URL.
- [I fine-tuned myself into my website](https://dhilipsiva.dev/musings/the-twin-in-your-tab/): This site's chat is a LoRA fine-tune of me, running entirely in your browser — candle compiled from Rust to WebAssembly, no servers, no cookies. How it works, what it cost, and the three lessons that made a 135M-parameter twin stop rambling.
- [On building things that outlive their meaning](https://dhilipsiva.dev/musings/outlive-their-meaning/): The universe doesn't owe your software a reason to exist. That's not despair — it's the most freeing license a builder can be handed. A note on authoring your own fixed point.
- [How I Annoyed My Way to Clash Royale's Legendary Arena](https://dhilipsiva.dev/musings/clash-royale-legendary/): Reaching the Legendary Arena at 9000 trophies with a deliberately annoying, super-defensive deck — central building kill zones, elixir math, mind games, and a Suspicious Bush.
- [Black Holes, True Vacuum, and Cosmic Fabric: An Enthusiast's Ramblings](https://dhilipsiva.dev/musings/black-holes-true-vacuum/): What if black holes are regions where vacuum decay already happened, and the event horizon is a fabric of cosmic strings? A thought experiment from a self-declared non-physicist, hedged accordingly.
- [Harnessing Solar Power for Sustainable Water Desalination](https://dhilipsiva.dev/musings/solar-desalination/): A back-of-the-envelope proposal: concentrate sunlight with a massive lens to boil seawater from the center out, settle the salt as sediment, and ask the internet to poke holes in it.
- [Analyzing Python Compression Libraries: zlib, LZ4, Brotli, and Zstandard](https://dhilipsiva.dev/musings/python-compression/): A benchmark of four Python compression libraries on a real-world dataset — compression ratio, compression time, and decompression time, with a companion repo.
- [Building an Efficient WebSocket Server with Actix Actors and Protobuf](https://dhilipsiva.dev/musings/actix-websocket-protobuf/): Why Rust's Actix actor model plus Protobuf serialization beats Python, Node.js, and Go for high-throughput real-time WebSocket servers — with a minimal implementation.
- [The Feathered Bond: Insights from Raising Birds of All Sizes](https://dhilipsiva.dev/musings/the-feathered-bond/): Years of keeping Sun Conures, Green Cheek Conures, parakeets, lovebirds, and pigeons — what hand-raising, adult adoption, and bird size taught me about avian trust.
- [Looking for a new Role](https://dhilipsiva.dev/musings/looking-for-a-new-role/): Archival, 2022 — written between Reckonsys and the next chapter. Kept for the honesty: the post where 'VP of Engineering' got corrected to 'a glorified Tech Lead that took on a part-time VPE role'.
- [Hi, I'm dhilipsiva](https://dhilipsiva.dev/musings/hi-im-dhilipsiva/): The 2017 dev.to introduction post — a small time capsule: ten years of coding, Appknox, and 'currently learning more about Machine Learning'.
- [Architecture at AppKnox](https://dhilipsiva.dev/musings/architecture-at-appknox/): The 2015 write-up of Appknox's backend: three subsystems (Client, Data, Workers), Django + Celery + RabbitMQ + Postgres, a decoupled Ember front-end — and services named after Sherlock characters.
- [Appropriate Number of Gunicorn Workers](https://dhilipsiva.dev/musings/gunicorn-workers/): The 2n+1 rule for Gunicorn workers, a one-liner to apply it on any Linux box, and the StackOverflow answer it came from.
- [Python Libraries — Django, Twisted, Tornado, Flask, Cyclone and Pyramid](https://dhilipsiva.dev/musings/python-libraries/): A 2013 field guide to picking a Python web framework — recovered from the original dhilipsiva.com via the Wayback Machine.

## Projects
- [Appknox ×2](https://dhilipsiva.dev/things-i-built/appknox/): Two tenures. 2014–17: architected the mobile-security scanning platform from scratch, built the team 1→5, ran an iOS/Android device farm. 2022–23: a Rust microservice generating CycloneDX SBOMs from mobile binaries — no source required.
- [awesome-programmer](https://dhilipsiva.dev/things-i-built/awesome-programmer/): A collection of resources to learn from and become a self-taught awesome programmer — the path I actually took, written down for the next dropout.
- [awesome-rust-ml](https://dhilipsiva.dev/things-i-built/awesome-rust-ml/): A curated map of the Rust machine-learning ecosystem — frameworks, kernels, and LLM runtimes. Curation is also building: someone has to keep the index honest.
- [botwork](https://dhilipsiva.dev/things-i-built/botwork/): A single-binary Rust automation framework for acceptance testing and RPA — plain-text human-readable syntax, extensible via Rust, Python, and JavaScript.
- [Colligence Research](https://dhilipsiva.dev/things-i-built/colligence/): Principal Architect, Distributed Systems/Rust (2023–25). The first MVP of a distributed WebRTC media server in Rust, plus the entire DevOps lifecycle with Pulumi infrastructure-as-code.
- [dhilipsiva.dev](https://dhilipsiva.dev/things-i-built/dhilipsiva-dev/): This website — a Zola static site that ships its own AI: two LoRA fine-tuned twins and the real nibli engine, all running in your tab via Rust→WASM. The site is its own demo, and the source is open — training pipeline included.
- [fanva](https://dhilipsiva.dev/things-i-built/fanva/): An agentic English→Lojban translator that produces *verified* Lojban: an LLM drafts a translation, three real Lojban compilers reject anything invalid, and the exact compiler error is fed back to the model until the output passes every gate. Runs entirely in your browser — bring your own LLM key, no server, and the grammar/semantics gates run on-device with zero network.
- [hostscli](https://dhilipsiva.dev/things-i-built/hostscli/): A Python CLI to block and unblock websites straight from /etc/hosts — ad lists, trackers, malware domains, or just the feeds at 2am. Simple and easily extendable.
- [nibli](https://dhilipsiva.dev/things-i-built/nibli/): A zero-hallucination symbolic reasoning engine — a hallucination firewall for the LLM era. nibli KR in — a human-readable predicate-call language — first-order logic out; every answer derived, never guessed, with a proof trace on every conclusion.
- [Nitimis](https://dhilipsiva.dev/things-i-built/nitimis/): CTO for five years (2018–23). A company with a non-profit ethos: RobotFramework QA services, and teaching people with zero tech background to start QA-automation careers — unpaid, on purpose.
- [NuFlights](https://dhilipsiva.dev/things-i-built/nuflights/): Principal Architect, Platform (2023–26) — on the airline-retailing platform I originally built from scratch at Reckonsys. Highlight: rewriting the NDC adapter from Python to Rust.
- [The Reckonsys years](https://dhilipsiva.dev/things-i-built/reckonsys/): VP of Engineering (2019–22), ~70% hands-on by choice. Django/GraphQL/React for startups, teams of 2–10; open-sourced 'bigga' and the cookiecutter templates everything was scaffolded from.
- [ReWire](https://dhilipsiva.dev/things-i-built/rewire/): An iOS mindfulness app (2012, at Tataatsu) — meditation and attention training, with an API server for scores and leaderboards. Designed, developed, and deployed as a one-person team.
- [STGI](https://dhilipsiva.dev/things-i-built/stgi/): Technical Architect, since May 2026 — backend engineering for niche tech initiatives.
- [voksa](https://dhilipsiva.dev/things-i-built/voksa/): A pure-Rust, rule-based Lojban speech synthesizer that runs entirely in the browser — Lojban text in, natural speech out, no server and no network after load. Ships a tuning console for crowdsourcing the voice; every config replays bit-identically on the native CLI.
- [webapp-checklist](https://dhilipsiva.dev/things-i-built/webapp-checklist/): The technical details a programmer should consider before making a web app public — security, performance, operations. My most-starred repository.

## Books
- [Gödel, Escher, Bach](https://dhilipsiva.dev/books/godel-escher-bach/): Hofstadter's strange loop — the book that taught me self-reference is a feature, not a paradox.
- [The Fixed Point of Thought](https://dhilipsiva.dev/books/the-fixed-point-of-thought/): A working book on symbolic reasoning for builders — how logic, recursion, and self-reference become real systems. Equal parts Gödel, Rust, and lab notebook. Drafting in the open.
- [Ultimate WebAssembly for High-Performance Apps](https://dhilipsiva.dev/books/ultimate-webassembly/): Srinivas Shanmugam's 2026 guide to building fast, secure, portable apps with WebAssembly — across browsers, servers, and the edge. I was one of its technical reviewers.
- [Utopia, Reimagined](https://dhilipsiva.dev/books/utopia-reimagined/): A from-first-principles re-derivation of what a good society could compute. Optimistic nihilism applied to economics, coordination, and freedom.

## Interactive (client-side WASM, no server)
- [chat — on-device AI twin (LoRA via candle→WASM)](https://dhilipsiva.dev/chat/)
- [nibli — in-browser symbolic-reasoning engine with proof traces (Rust→WASM)](https://dhilipsiva.dev/nibli/)

## Optional
- [now](https://dhilipsiva.dev/now/)
- [uses](https://dhilipsiva.dev/uses/)
- [talks](https://dhilipsiva.dev/talks/)
- [contact](https://dhilipsiva.dev/contact/)