Blog & Insights

write to think clearly — share to think further.
Systems

How Does a 10GB File Become 3GB When Zipped?

April 2026  •  12 min read

The full technical answer: LZ77 sliding window, Huffman coding, Shannon entropy, and why your JPEG won't compress at all — with SVG diagrams and real code.

Read More
AI Engineering

Building a Real-Time Job Dashboard with Claude + Apify

April 2026  •  10 min read

Use Claude's Apify connector to scrape 100+ LinkedIn jobs in real time and render a fully filterable, sortable HTML dashboard — with the complete prompt included.

Read More
Career

Building a Portfolio That Shows Up on Google

April 2026  •  6 min read

Getting your portfolio indexed is harder than building it. I'll walk through sitemap setup, Schema.org Person markup, canonical tags, and the exact steps I took to get srikanthbadavath.com indexed.

Read More
Distributed Systems

Consistent Hashing: The Algorithm That Keeps Distributed Systems Sane

April 2026  •  8 min read

When you add or remove a node from a distributed cache, naive modulo hashing remaps almost every key — causing a thundering herd. Consistent hashing fixes this by moving only K/N keys on average. I'll break down the ring structure, virtual nodes, and how systems like Amazon DynamoDB and Apache Cassandra use it under the hood.

Read More
Distributed Systems

CAP Theorem in Practice: Why Your Database Has to Choose

March 2026  •  9 min read

Consistency, Availability, Partition Tolerance — you can only guarantee two. But most engineers have never actually seen a network partition happen in production. This post walks through what the CAP theorem really means with real-world examples from Cassandra, DynamoDB, and Zookeeper, and why the choice is rarely as clean as the textbook makes it sound.

Read More
NLP

Teaching NLP at Virginia Tech: Lessons from the Classroom

January 2026  •  6 min read

Stepping into the GTA role for CS 5664 Social Media Analytics opened my eyes to how graduate students approach text mining and classification problems — and where they consistently get stuck.

Read More
Data Science

Fine-Tuning LLMs for Enterprise Growth Analytics

October 2024  •  7 min read

At Blenheim Chalcot, building GenAI products meant more than calling an API — it involved careful dataset curation, instruction tuning, and regression-based evaluation to track growth KPIs.

Read More
Machine Learning

Forecasting Used Phone Prices with ML

November 2023  •  8 min read

Published at IEEE ICAISS 2023, this paper explores regression and ensemble methods to predict secondhand smartphone prices. I'll walk through dataset construction, feature engineering, and what the model actually learned.

Read Paper
Machine Learning

Open Source in 31 Days: My Hacktoberfest 2022 Experience

October 2022  •  4 min read

Four merged pull requests, two open-source projects, and a lot of code review feedback — here's what contributing to real production repositories taught me in my first Hacktoberfest.

View GitHub
Cloud

100+ Qwiklabs: What I Learned from the Google Cloud Facilitator Program

July 2022  •  5 min read

Completing 100+ Qwiklabs in a summer forced me to work end-to-end with GCP — from BigQuery to Kubernetes to Vertex AI. Here's what actually stuck and what I'd do differently today.

Read More
Back to Home