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A lens into the entropy of being

Last updated: March 14, 2026

Who am I?

My name is Pooya. I'm 30, originally from Tehran, Iran. I live in Canada now. I use the Starbucks name "Pedro" to avoid having to spell out my name, but ironically they still ask me to.

My mind has a tendency to dig deeper and dig and dig and never stop. Maybe that's why I became a software engineer. Or maybe the other way around. Not sure if this is curiosity or ADD/ADHD, or maybe something else, but whatever. Doesn't matter.

I've maintained different blogs over the years, on and off. I never had a specific intention. Earlier I wanted to look cool, and later on I didn't bother that much, I suppose. Now I think it's more about expressing my inner thoughts. My worldview. It's about feeling some sort of connection. To feel human. Or maybe still an impartial attempt to look "intelligent" and feed my ego. But whatever.

My Journey

Since the age of 8, I've always wanted to become a software engineer. I don't quite remember where the first trigger or glimpse of this interest showed up. But I can clearly remember the first weekend morning that I was able to connect to dial-up on my own and saw the front page of MSN.com. I'll never forget the feeling of discovering a vast unknown world waiting for me to explore.

When I was 10, my dream job was creating an operating system where you could install two antivirus programs and they wouldn't fight each other. I got interested in hacking and computer security when I was 11.

Back then my parents were religious and they would fast during Ramadan. They had to wake up at 4 am to eat before they started fasting. I would get up with them so that I could connect to the internet. There was this myth that dial-up would be faster in the middle of the night. Then I would query "how to write a virus in notepad" on Google.

Fast forward: I studied software engineering in undergrad and got my MSc after that.

Work

Nowadays I'm a senior software engineer at Google, working on efficient training and serving of open-source LLMs on TPUs. I feel some sort of passion toward performance optimization, making things faster or more efficient. Too bad performance optimization is such a closed loop. Perfect for recursive AI improvement. I'm happy I'm from a generation that got to experience a few years of it. Too bad future generations probably won't deal with it directly.

Hobbies