Shri writes about the architectures, systems, and teams behind modern engineering. Cloud infrastructure, AI systems, blockchain networks, security, and the messy middle where strategy meets plumbing. Most of these articles come from time spent inside engineering floors across India and elsewhere, sitting with the people who build and run these systems.
The writing here is deliberately practical. No marketing abstractions. No “leverage synergies.” Real numbers, real companies (sometimes renamed for confidentiality), and real failure modes. If you are an engineer, a CRO, a founder, or a curious generalist trying to form a clear-eyed view of how production systems actually work, this is the blog for you.
If you spot a mistake, want to push back on a claim, or have a scenario you think would make a good article, get in touch via the Contact Us page.
Recent Posts by Shri
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We Broke WordPress for 30 Minutes. Nginx Cache Kept Google From Noticing.
A WordPress directory migration, a missed Apache vhost config, a pre-warmed Nginx proxy cache, and a Coraza WAF in between. This is the story of how a cache warmer saved a blog from an SEO disaster when the backend silently broke for 30 minutes.
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What AI Actually Does in a Firewall
(Part 2): Where It Breaks and What to AskPart 2 of the AI firewall walkthrough. What Palo Alto and Fortinet claim against what the independent tests show, the four evasions our red team used against the firewall we bought, the IoT problem at the scale we found it, and the three questions to ask any “AI-powered” vendor before signing.
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What AI Actually Does in a Firewall
(Part 1): The ArchitectureHow an AI-powered firewall actually works, from a year of running two of them side by side for a 6,000-seat enterprise. The signature-only stack it replaced, where the ML sits in the dataplane, which model does which job, and one Cobalt Strike beacon followed from first packet to block.
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What AI Actually Does in Insurance Claims
(Part 2): Where It Fails and What the Regulator AsksPart 2 of the insurance AI walkthrough. The numbers Markel, Tractable and Daido Life publish, what continuous underwriting does to a premium, the four ways our claims stack failed, what the state examiner asked, and what to do if you are about to file a claim.
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What AI Actually Does in Insurance Claims
(Part 1): The ArchitectureHow the AI claims engine we rebuilt with a mid-size insurer actually works: the legacy flow, the six-lane architecture, which model does which job, and a walkthrough of one fender-bender from photo upload to payout in seven minutes.
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What AI Actually Does in Bank Fraud Detection
(Part 2): Where It Breaks and What the Regulator SeesPart 2 of the bank fraud detection walkthrough. The numbers DBS, JPMorgan, HSBC, Danske and Standard Chartered actually publish, the brutal arithmetic of false positives on a 0.04% base rate, the four ways our stack still loses, what SR 11-7 and the EU AI Act ask of a fraud team, and what the senior analyst…
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What AI Actually Does in Bank Fraud Detection
(Part 1): The ArchitectureA walk through the real-time fraud detection stack we rebuilt with a US mid-size bank: Kafka ingest, Flink features, a three-model ensemble, the analyst’s alert queue, which model does which job, and why the card decline you hate at the grocery store still happens.
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What AI Actually Does in Loan Underwriting
(Part 2): Where It Breaks and Who Still Signs OffPart 2 of the AI loan underwriting walkthrough. The numbers lenders like to quote, the three ways our stack broke in production, and what a senior underwriter still owns when 88% of loans never reach their desk.
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What AI Actually Does in Loan Underwriting
(Part 1): The ArchitectureA walk through the AI loan underwriting stack we rebuilt with a mid-size NBFC over 14 months: what each model really does, what the rules engine decides, and what still lands on a human underwriter’s screen.