Hi, I'm Onkar Sawarna.

I'm a software engineer at Acceldata, where I've been for about five months. Before that I spent four years at Menlo Security — I joined as an intern and left as an engineer, which means most of what I know about production systems I learned inside one codebase, slowly, usually the hard way.

Moving from an established company to a startup reset a lot of my assumptions about how software gets built. Alongside that, I'm working through Arpit Bhayani's system design masterclass, which is the first time I've studied this material deliberately rather than absorbing it by osmosis from whatever I happened to be on call for.

This site is where both of those land. Notes on system design as I work through it, write-ups of problems I've actually hit, and the parts of a software career nobody puts in a job description. It's a working log, not a highlight reel — written while I'm still figuring it out rather than years after the fact.

If something here is useful, wrong, or worth arguing about, I'd like to hear it.