About Harīṣh
I’m a performance engineer — the kind of work where you stare at profiler output until something clicks. On weekends, I chase good times on mountains far far away. I write about both: the technical problems I’m working through, and the adventures in between.
‘m Harīṣh Tummalachērla — most people call me Harry.
I’m a performance engineer currently working on LLM inference. Before this, I worked on query engines and deep learning compilers — the kind of work where you stare at flamegraphs until you finally see what’s wrong. I write here to think through problems in public — partly to share, partly to remember what I did six months from now.
Outside of work: cycling around the Bay (mostly for the coffee stops), powerlifting (poorly), strong opinions about croissants (unearned), and training for one or two adventures a year that I’ll underprepare for.
What You’ll Find Here
Deep dives on the problems I’m working through — the why behind techniques, not just the what. New posts roughly twice a month. Subscribe via RSS.
Engineering
- Accelerated computing — GPUs, custom silicon, and making AI go fast
- Systems performance — flame graphs, bottlenecks, and the joy of profiling
- Distributed systems — scaling, consistency, and the tradeoffs that define real systems
Adventures
- Mountain adventures — chasing summits, good times, and type 2 fun
- Cycling — bakery hopping and coffee stops around the city
- Photography — capturing the views, the food, and the moments
The Path Here
I grew up in Visakhapatnam on India’s east coast, where I first discovered that programming meant I could make the family computer do my bidding. That discovery led me to IIT Bombay for Computer Science, and I’ve been chasing faster code ever since.
The thread has taken me through more codebases than I can count: search systems, petabyte-scale data pipelines, deep learning compilers, and now LLM inference. It’s also moved me through Bengaluru, Gurgaon, Seattle, and eventually San Francisco. Along the way I picked up enough languages to order food in most of South India (Telugu, Hindi, Tamil, Kannada).
I left for Vancouver for a bit — picked up some French, learned to appreciate the rain. Then came back. SF is the only city I’ve chosen twice. I’m still not sure if that means I finally found the right place or just got tired of packing boxes.
Outside the Editor
When I’m not at a keyboard, I’m either moving weight in the gym or moving myself through mountains. A few big objectives each year — here’s what that’s looked like:
Garibaldi Summit — 18 miles of glacier travel, 18 hours moving. The weather held just long enough. We got the summit; the summit got us back.
Needle-Markor Traverse — Linking two peaks via a knife-edge ridge in the North Cascades. Class 4, no ropes, and the kind of exposure that makes you very polite to the rock.
Grand Canyon South Rim — Down South Kaibab, up Bright Angel, 20 miles through a billion years of rock. The descent was a museum; the ascent was a negotiation with my legs.
The Fine Print
How I run this site and what you can expect.
Ethics
No tracking, no invasive analytics — your browsing is your business. If I mention a product, it’s because I actually use it, not because someone paid me. No affiliate links, no sponsored content.
All content and code on this site is public domain with attribution. Take what’s useful, credit where it came from, and pass it on.
Colophon
I built this site as its own engineering project — a TTS pipeline that generates audio for every post, content-addressed caching that never invalidates unnecessarily, and a custom build system that handles images, search, and maps. SvelteKit, TypeScript, Cloudflare R2.
Design aims for “luxury academic” — inspired by The Atlantic, Gwern, Edward Tufte, and Maggie Appleton. Source on GitHub.
Contact
No comments on this site — they’re not worth the privacy tradeoff. Email is the way. If you share thoughts worth including, I’ll add them to the post with credit.
Email: harry@harryzorus.xyz
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Languages & Places
I’ve lived in more cities than I can count on one hand, picking up languages along the way. The map shows regions where I speak the local language and the cities I’ve called home.