Karampal.

Writing — 15 essays

Field notes.

Long-form thinking on the projects above, what worked, what broke, and the boring measurements that decided which was which.

20 May 2025·12 min·C++17 / Signal Processing / Radar / CFAR / Real-time

I Built a Real-Time Radar Signal Processor in C++17. Here's Exactly How It Works.

An end-to-end FMCW radar pipeline, Hann window, FFTW3 range FFT, CA/GO-CFAR detection, Doppler map, streamed to a React dashboard at 50,000+ frames/second.

15 May 2025·10 min·C++17 / Concurrency / Lock-Free / Real-time / Cache Architecture

Why I Spent a Week Writing a 150-Line Header File (And What It Taught Me About Modern CPUs)

A wait-free SPSC ring buffer in 150 lines of C++17: 3.1× throughput over mutexes, sub-87 ns p99 latency, and the cache-line lesson that changed how I think about concurrency.

04 Sept 2025·10 min·Embedded / Control / Safety-critical

Closed-Loop Actuator Control for Cochlear Surgery: Lessons from the Lab

PWM, potentiometer feedback, and the ±2 mm tolerance that decides whether a control loop is honest, plus why the documentation is the product in regulated medtech.

21 Jul 2025·11 min·Python / Automation / CRM

Shipping a Zoho CRM Automation That Saved 45% of an Ops Team's Day

GDS PNRs in, structured CRM records out, three to five seconds each. Here's what broke on the way, and how to put a pound figure on the work.

15 May 2025·10 min·AI / Accessibility / Hackathon

Accessibility-First AI: Building Glucolily for the Eli Lilly Hackathon

A diabetes companion that listens, reads photos of plates, and never assumes the user can see the screen clearly, and why designing for the edge is the commercial play.

08 Jun 2025·11 min·WebSockets / Python / Real-time / FastAPI

From Bench to Browser: Streaming 1 kHz Sensor Data Without Dropping a Sample

How to push high-rate sensor frames from a C++ binary through a Python FastAPI bridge to a browser, without back-pressure killing you. Lessons from the radar pipeline, generalised.

12 Aug 2025·13 min·C++17 / MISRA / Safety-Critical / Defence

MISRA C++ Without the Misery: Writing Safety-Adjacent Code as a Student

What MISRA, AUTOSAR and DO-178C actually demand, the rules that matter, and how I refactored the CFAR pipeline to pass a clang-tidy MISRA profile without losing my mind.

22 Oct 2025·12 min·C++17 / Concurrency / CPU Architecture / Performance

The Cache Line Is the Unit of Concurrency: A Visual Tour of False Sharing

Why a single missing `alignas(64)` can make a lock-free queue 4× slower than its mutex-guarded equivalent. A perf-counter walk through MESI, cache contention, and the padding that fixes it.

15 Dec 2025·10 min·WebGL / Visualisation / Radar / Frontend Performance

Designing a Range-Doppler Heatmap That Renders in 6 ms on a Laptop GPU

Canvas 2D vs WebGL2 vs WebGPU, benchmarked on a 512×64 radar heatmap at 30 fps. Why I stayed on Canvas, the exact frame budget, and the moment I will switch.

04 Feb 2026·14 min·Kalman Filter / Signal Processing / C++17 / Tracking

Kalman Filters Explained by Tracking a Single Radar Target

From the state-space equations to a 60-line C++17 implementation, applied to my CFAR detections to turn noisy single-frame measurements into smooth multi-frame tracks.

18 Apr 2026·13 min·Engineering / Reflection / C++ / Career

Six Months of Building in Public: What 30,000 Lines of C++ Taught Me About Engineering Judgment

Reflections from a year of shipping radar pipelines, lock-free queues, Kalman trackers and a hackathon-winning health app. The opinions I changed, the heuristics I now reach for, and what I would tell my year-one self.

15 Jan 2026·14 min·Claude API / Multi-Agent / Python / ChromaDB / Tool Use

Five Agents in a Trench Coat: What I Learned Building a Production Multi-Agent Orchestrator

A walk through the autonomous multi-agent system I shipped on top of Claude, where a researcher, analyst, writer, QA, and output agent collaborate via typed JSON contracts to turn one prompt into a full briefing pack in under ninety seconds.

02 Mar 2026·13 min·RAG / Claude API / ChromaDB / Embeddings / Python

Retrieval Is a Product Problem: Building a RAG Agent That a Small Ops Team Actually Uses

How I built a Retrieval-Augmented Generation knowledge agent on Claude and ChromaDB that ingests messy organisational documents, answers cross-document questions with inline citations, and keeps session memory without poisoning new conversations.

20 Apr 2026·15 min·Web3 / Zero-Knowledge / Product / React / Scrum

EquiHire: Building a Job Board That Forgets Your Name

How we built a Web3 anonymous job board around SDG 10, using zero-knowledge-style credentials, verifiable certificates, and an in-app learning track that lets candidates prove skill without ever revealing identity.

10 May 2026·14 min·Next.js / FastAPI / WebSockets / Solidity / Hackathon / Full Stack

Slipstream: Shipping a Verifiable Real-Time Platform in 48 Hours

How a four-person team built and deployed a Next.js + FastAPI + WebSocket platform with on-chain decision logging, end to end, in a weekend, and walked out with 1st place at Encode AI Hackathon.