About

We're Arcturan Labs. We build things, break things, learn things, and write down what we learned so the next person doesn't have to.

This blog is where the writing-down happens. The posts here are the things we wish existed when we were debugging production incidents at 2am, arguing for the boring solution in design reviews, or trying to figure out why a system keeps misbehaving in ways nobody documented.

We're partial to the things that are actually interesting — counter-intuitive findings, hard-won lessons, the gap between how a system is supposed to behave and how it behaves at 3am with real users. If we shipped something and learned something on the way, we'll probably write about it here.

What we write about

• AI — what works and what doesn't when you actually ship it
• Distributed systems & reliability engineering
• Architecture decisions and the trade-offs behind them
• Platform engineering & developer experience
• Engineering leadership from the IC perspective

Why "Arcturan"?

We draw our energy and motivation from Arcturus — the orange giant 36 light-years out, fourth-brightest star in the night sky, racing across the galaxy at 122 km/s like it's perpetually late for something. Old enough to have ignited before our sun. Bright enough that in 1933 they used its light to switch on the Chicago World's Fair — the photons that triggered the ceremony had been in transit since the late 1890s, give or take. We like that detail. A star can keep that pace for seven billion years; we can probably keep shipping for another quarter.

Get in touch

Find us on GitHub or reach out at sarathyennamani@gmail.com.