About the Captain

Hey, I'm Akshay. My friends call me AB.

I trained as a petroleum engineer. Then I watched AlphaGo play Move 37 and that was basically it — I spent the next few years pivoting hard into AI, went back to first principles, and ended up as Director of AI/Data Science at a post-Series A startup. The path is not obvious in retrospect either.

I've spent the last several years building at work while quietly going deep on things nobody asked me to — distributed systems internals, local model inference, fine-tuning pipelines, whatever I was genuinely curious about that week. These expedition logs are where that ends up. Not tutorials. Field notes. The difference matters: tutorials clean up the mess, field notes keep it in.

What I Write About

Active series right now: Ray's distributed architecture (7 parts in, still going), local AI image generation on Apple Silicon, and fine-tuning techniques I've actually run. The throughline across all of it is systems thinking — I want to know why something behaves the way it does, not just that it works.

Beyond the series: I'm deep in agent orchestration — MCP servers, multi-agent systems, getting these things to actually coordinate reliably. Automation is an obsession, personal and professional. I've been hosting on Railway, wiring up databases, and constantly asking how to do the same thing for less. Cost optimization is not a constraint I resent — it's a design problem I enjoy.

I also read papers. A lot of them. Data architectures, data lakes, model efficiency research — and I have a thing for pattern recognition across domains, finding the same structure showing up in places that aren't supposed to be related. When I see one of those, I write about it.

Every post has real commands, real benchmarks, and the failures that happened before the thing worked. I'm not interested in writing content that could have been generated without running the code.

Outside the Terminal

I DJ — mostly for myself, occasionally for people willing to tolerate my taste in techno. I follow F1 with the kind of attention I should probably reserve for more productive things. One Piece has been part of my life for 14 years — I've caught up, I can talk about it for hours, and yes, the blog being called Expedition Logs is not a coincidence.

I got into hardware before I got into software. Digit magazine — and I think Chip — both came bundled with CDs full of games and software demos, and I read through them obsessively until I designed my first PC build in 7th standard. Got my first graphics card that year — Cricket 07 and GTA Vice City, if I'm being honest. That wiring never really left.

Outside of that: I love food and I have a system for finding the good spots in any city. I dance — salsa specifically, which I took up as deliberate embarrassment training and ended up genuinely enjoying. I read poetry. I'm deep into anime. And I have a weakness for a well-written self-help book, which I will defend aggressively if pressed.