About

I am a software engineer who writes essays. Most of my working hours are spent inside distributed systems — designing them, operating them, and reasoning about why they fail in the particular ways they do. The rest are spent reading, thinking about machine learning as an engineering practice, and circling back to the older question of what computer science is really for.

This site collects long-form writing across three editorial pillars: distributed systems, ML & AI, and the philosophy of computer science. Each pillar has its own hub at /topics/<pillar> and a small set of essays underneath it. The premise is that engineering writing is most useful when it commits to a position long enough to be argued with — so the essays are deliberately longer than blog posts and shorter than book chapters, and they try to leave the reader with something they can disagree with on substance.

I write under the assumption that the reader is also an engineer. That means: no warm-up paragraphs, no lists of definitions everyone already knows, no careful avoidance of opinions. Where the literature gives a clean answer I cite it; where it doesn’t I admit it. The goal is to write things I would have wanted to read five years earlier in my own career.

The site itself is a small, hand-built object. It is built with Astro, styled with a custom editorial design system (no off-the-shelf CSS framework chrome), and deployed to Cloudflare Pages. The full source — including the OpenSpec change history that drove every architectural decision — lives at github.com/joctaTorres. If something here is wrong, broken, or worth arguing with, that is the right place to send it.