Hi, I'm Zain — welcome to my little corner of the internet. My day job is building the infrastructure used by millions of developers around the world. Right now I'm at Meta, working on the systems behind PyTorch and helping bring machine learning to the masses. Along the way I've had the chance to work on some fun things:
- AI Platform Notebooks at Google Cloud
- Azure App Service at Microsoft
- Internal infrastructure at Stripe
- Windows, way back when I was a wee lad
Why this blog exists
I read a lot. Like, the-librarian-knows-me-by-name a lot. But the insights I picked up had a nasty habit of trickling out of my brain by the next morning.
Then I discovered one trick that made them stick: writing them down. Once I started, the ideas not only stuck around longer, they got sharper — when you have to write "I believe A because B is true," you immediately start wondering whether B is actually true.
It felt a little selfish to keep those notes to myself, so I turned them into essays and a newsletter. A few of them have made the front page of Hacker News and Reddit's /r/programming, which still feels surreal.
"Most secrets about how the world works aren't secrets, they're just knowledge unevenly distributed." — Patrick McKenzie
Here's to playing a tiny part in distributing knowledge a little more evenly.
What I write about
Software engineering, business, and psychology — and the surprisingly interesting places they intersect. Topics that come up a lot:
- Engineering effectively at scale and learning through rapid experimentation
- Productivity, introspection, and the psychology of getting unstuck
- Business strategy and seeing problems from the customer's point of view
Elsewhere on the internet
- Twitter / X: @zainrzv
- Podcast: The Nonintuitive Bits, which I co-host
- LinkedIn: /in/zainrizvi
- GitHub: @ZainRizvi
If you'd rather have the good stuff land in your inbox, the newsletter is the best way to follow along — there's a signup box just below. At most one email a week, promise.
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