Writing

The blog

Daily notes on cloud architecture, AI engineering, and the craft of building things — one post at a time.

📚 Ongoing series

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☸️3 parts · 6 min

Kubernetes from Zero

A hands-on, step-by-step path from "what even is a container?" to confidently running workloads on Kubernetes. No prior K8s experience needed.

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🧩2 entries · 5 minCollection

LeetCode Notebook

Problems I've solved, with the reasoning spelled out — pattern recognition, the naive approach, the optimization, and the complexity math.

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🏗️1 entry · 3 minCollection

System Design Case Studies

Designing real systems on paper — requirements, back-of-envelope math, architecture, trade-offs, and what breaks at scale.

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✍️ All posts

2 min read

How I built this site: 3D, static, and nearly free

The architecture behind dhayalram.com — Next.js static export, React Three Fiber, and S3 + CloudFront for a bill measured in cents.

#aws#nextjs#threejs#serverless
2 min read

A WordPress-like writing experience with zero servers

How a local-first studio plus Git gives you a daily blogging habit without paying for hosting.

#writing#local-first#ai
1 min read

Hello, world — why I'm writing every day

Kicking off a daily writing habit: what this blog is for and what to expect.

#meta#writing
2 min read📚 Kubernetes from Zero · Part 3

Deployments & Services: self-healing apps with stable addresses

Replicas, rolling updates, rollbacks, and giving your Pods a stable address — the workhorses of everyday Kubernetes.

#kubernetes#devops
2 min read📚 Kubernetes from Zero · Part 2

Pods: the atom of Kubernetes

Hands-on with Pods — what they are, why containers share them, and your first kubectl commands.

#kubernetes#devops
2 min read📚 Kubernetes from Zero · Part 1

Why Kubernetes exists (and when you actually need it)

Before touching kubectl, understand the problem Kubernetes solves — and whether you even have that problem.

#kubernetes#devops
3 min read📚 LeetCode Notebook🔀 Remix

My remix: Two Sum, but it's 100M numbers and you get 512 MB

I made up my own follow-up: what happens to the hash-map solution when the array doesn't fit in memory? Duplicates, negatives, and external partitioning.

#leetcode#algorithms#memory
3 min read📚 System Design Case Studies

Design a URL shortener (the interview classic, done properly)

Requirements, napkin math, the encoding decision, and why the read path dominates everything — a full walkthrough of bit.ly-style design.

#system-design#architecture
1 min read📚 LeetCode Notebook

LeetCode #1 — Two Sum, and the hash map reflex

The classic warm-up: from O(n²) brute force to a one-pass hash map, and the pattern it teaches you to spot everywhere.

#leetcode#arrays#hash-map