There’s a lot of engineering content out there. Most of it stays at the surface — what something does, how to configure it, when to use it.
INTERNALS.md goes one level deeper.
Each write-up takes one system and opens the hood. A distributed database. A transformer model. A piece of infrastructure that millions of services depend on. Not the API, not the tutorial — the internals. How it actually works, what trade-offs were made, and why it behaves the way it does under pressure.
I started this because I kept wanting to go deeper than most resources would take me. Writing is how I learn properly. If I can explain how something works from the inside out, I actually understand it. This is that process, made public.
The reader I have in mind is an engineer who already knows how to use these systems — and wants to understand them. Someone who finds the internals interesting, not just the interface.
I’m Lakshmanan Meiyappan (aka Laxmena). I work on distributed systems, agentic ai and cloud infrastructure. This is where I share about what I learn.
If something resonates, or if there’s a system you’ve been wanting to understand — hit reply. I read everything.
What happens inside the systems you build on.
