Notes from
the work.
Written for engineers and the people who have to make decisions with them. Specific problems, what actually causes them, and what we do about it — not thought leadership.
Compliance
The DPDP Act as an engineering problem, not a legal one
The obligations are readable in an afternoon. Implementing them means knowing every place personal data lives — including the logs, the warehouse and the third parties.
9 minHealthcare operations
ABDM, ABHA and consent in hospital systems
The health ID is an identifier, not your patient number. Consent is an object with a lifetime, granted somewhere you do not control. Both facts change the schema.
8 minConstruction
RERA reporting and escrow accounting in construction software
The requirement is not a report. It is that money is partitioned per project, withdrawals are tied to certified progress, and what you declare publicly has to match what your ledger says.
8 minHR & compliance
Payroll that survives a PF, ESI and TDS audit
An auditor does not ask what an employee was paid. They ask how the figure was arrived at, for a month two years ago, under the rules in force then.
9 minLogistics
E-way bills in a logistics system: the integration nobody scopes properly
Scoped as one call at dispatch, it is a fortnight of work. Scoped as a document with a lifetime that moves with the vehicle, it is the integration that actually survives contact with operations.
8 minERP & procurement
GST e-invoicing: what it actually demands from your ERP
Most e-invoicing integrations are scoped as one API call. The call is the easy part. What breaks is everything that happens when it does not return cleanly.
9 minHealthcare operations
The hospital systems nobody demos
Every vendor demos the clinical system. Nobody demos the store, the equipment register or the service contract that quietly lapsed.
9 minInfrastructure
When on-premise beats cloud, and the costs both sides leave out
Cloud became the default rather than a decision. There is a specific, identifiable set of workloads where owned hardware is simply better.
9 minCompliance
Compliance by design: the seven things auditors ask for
Every one of these is a week early in a build and a quarter late in one. The list barely changes between regimes, which is what makes it worth building in.
9 minAsset management
Why your asset register never matches the ledger
Annual verification is a week of people walking around with a clipboard reconciling fiction. The register drifted because keeping it accurate was a chore.
8 minConstruction
Where the margin leaks on a construction project
Nobody loses a project's margin in a single decision. It goes in small amounts, across dozens of sites, and the report arrives after the money is spent.
9 minHR & compliance
Designing an HRMS that survives an audit
HR systems hold salary, performance, medical and disciplinary records. Most treat access control as a screen-level concern, and that is not enough.
9 minAI agents
Shipping AI agents to production: evaluation, guardrails and a cost ceiling
The demo runs once, on a clean input, with someone watching. Production is a thousand runs a day on messy inputs at three in the morning.
10 minRetail
Why your stock count is wrong in three places at once
Every channel holds a number. None of them agree. The usual fix — syncing them to each other — is what guarantees they never will.
8 minERP & procurement
ERP: build or buy, modelled over five years
The question is never 'build or buy'. It is which parts to buy, which to extend, and which are genuinely worth building.
7 minManufacturing
Why the production schedule still lives in a spreadsheet
The suite could not model changeovers, so planning left it. The spreadsheet is now the real system, and it has no access control and no history.
9 minLogistics
What breaks in a fleet operation when you open the third city
One city runs on WhatsApp and one spreadsheet. Two is uncomfortable. The third is where operators discover what they were relying on.
9 minEngineering practice
Rescuing an AI-generated codebase without rewriting it
It runs. It reached production. Nobody understands it, and every change breaks something unrelated. This is fixable, and almost never by starting over.
9 minFleet & telematics
Why fleet telematics databases fall over at a thousand vehicles
The live map was fine at fifty vehicles and unusable at eight hundred. The cause is almost never the map — it is what is underneath it.
8 min
Recognise one of these problems?
If an article described something happening in your systems right now, that is usually a good moment to talk. We start with an audit, not a proposal.