I build things quietly. That stops today.
I have shipped award-winning AI products, production cloud systems, and seven websites of my own. Almost none of it is written down. This blog fixes that.
For the last two years I have been heads-down building. Cloud-native data platforms and backend systems by day. AI products by night: RetainIQ, a customer-retention platform that won the Innovation category at Amazon AIdeaS 2026. Seven production sites shipped end to end. A research paper on wheat-disease detection published in Elsevier's Procedia Computer Science.
The work is real. The problem is that it lives in private repos, internal wikis, and my own head. When someone asks what I actually do, I do not have a good link to send.
So I am starting here.
What this blog is
This is where I show my work. AI and the tools I build with it. The cloud and backend systems underneath. Breakdowns of things I have shipped, the tradeoffs I got wrong the first time, and the ones I would defend in a design review. Plus the parts of the field moving fast enough that they are worth writing about while they are still fresh.
No think-piece filler. If I write about something, I will have built it, broken it, or shipped it.
What you can expect
Build logs and architecture breakdowns from real projects: RetainIQ, the sites, whatever I ship next.
Practical AI engineering: RAG that survives production, agents, LLM tooling, and the boring plumbing that actually decides whether a demo becomes a product.
Cloud and backend notes: Azure, Terraform, Kubernetes, Kafka. The patterns that saved me time and the ones that cost me a weekend.
What I am learning as I rebuild my CS fundamentals in public, from data structures to system design.
The cadence
One post a week, starting now. Short when short is enough. Long when the topic earns it.
Why now
The best engineers I follow all have one thing in common. They build in the open. The compounding is real: a year of writing turns scattered work into a body of work. I would rather start today with one imperfect post than keep waiting for the perfect one.
If you build things, or want to, follow along. I am posting the same journey on Instagram at @samyak.space and on X at @_samyakk.
First real breakdown drops next week: how RetainIQ went from a weekend idea to an Amazon AIdeaS winner, and the architecture that made it work.
Let's build.