Writing
On building software for operational systems.
Company-building, operational software, applied AI and travel — the work of automating exception-heavy, high-consequence operations. Organized by series and subject.
Featured series
Company-Building Under Real Constraints
Concrete founder decisions from operational software companies — concentration, automation, exception handling, services, enterprise risk, exits.
Building Routespring
Notes from betting the company on airline crew operations — the pivot, the acquisition offer, the gates a pivot has to clear.
Systems That Almost Work
Home network, cameras and automation as a laboratory for interoperability, observability and reliability under real failure modes.
Latest
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Pivot gates
How founders can distinguish a slow strategy from a broken premise before sunk cost makes the decision for them.
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Routing optimization isn't a shortest-path problem
The hard part of flight routing was never finding the cheapest itinerary. It's that 'cheapest' and 'best' are different questions, and one of them is a hard rule while the other is a matter of taste.
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The first question in any outage: whose system is it?
Most production failures in integrated systems aren't yours or theirs. They're the handoff between the two, and that's exactly where nobody looks first.
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Build versus buy is really a question about who owns the interface
The standard framing — compare the cost of building to the cost of buying — misses the question that actually decides it: does the vendor's product expose the interface you need, or just the outcome?
Archive
The original tarun.me blog — 2009.
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Why web designers are over-rated
Wired did a competition inviting designers to improve craigslist .
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when good people resign (to join you)
You make an offer to an A+ player at a big company, they accept — and then their employer rolls out the red carpet to keep them. Mark Suster calls it the counter-offer, and it's an all too familiar phenomenon worth planning for before you extend the offer.
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2 things every good startup needs
Robert Scoble has a great article today on his take on mistakes startups make .
Browse by subject
Company building
Founder decisions from real systems — concentration, services, exits, when to pivot.
Operational software
Enterprise systems, exception-heavy workflows, integrations and the handoffs between them.
AI and automation
Applying AI to operational work — what it removes, and what it only moves.
Travel
Corporate and airline crew travel — routing, policy and high-consequence operations.
Technology
The occasional wider read on technology, leadership and product.
Older blog archive
Earlier writing, recovered from the original tarun.me blog.