I love exploring a wide range of ideas and observing where they converge. Useful conceptual patterns can sometimes emerge from their intersections. Just as globalization and trade accelerate innovation at a rapid scale thanks to lower friction for the imports and exports of goods and services, so the imports and exports of ideas between various domains foster creativity.

For instance, good architectural decision strategies are sometimes best explained with ideas imported from the field of finance (like selling options). Likewise, a book on city design patterns influenced how we think about software engineering. Exploring diverse ideas and their intersections can be intellectually stimulating and even practically valuable!

On this blog, I write to make sense of ideas—especially where software, data, and systems thinking collide. I muse, discuss, or rant about all things, but mostly on tech. Some posts are technical deep-dives, others are reflections on how abstract concepts shape real-world practices, along with occasional thoughts on related topics.

Let’s explore and learn together.

Who am I?

I’m Amirul Menjeni from Brunei 🇧🇳, the little petrostate on the northern coast of Borneo island in Southeast Asia.

To be honest, Who am I? is a tough question and might get too tiring (and boring) to write. So here’s my (poor) attempt for a TL;DR version:

At present, I work at Brunei Shell Petroleum(BSP) to focus on data governance and the data architecture that enables and empowers data governance at scale. I used to be a software engineer, and though I don’t do much coding to deliver software products nowadays, I still like to think like one. Data delivery at the organizational level is a fun systemic problem to think about and solve, and thinking like a software engineer helps me make architectural decisions and understand their implications.

I love reading about a wide range of subjects and connecting the dots between ideas. This has helped me in a number of ways. For one, developing this habit has helped me reason about the day-to-day problems that I’ve experienced at work. It has helped me make sense of why things are the way they are and how, at least in theory, we can nudge things to be better. And since not all ideas are mutually exclusive (sometimes different ideas share the same patterns), I think it makes me better at absorbing new ideas!

Okay, all that really makes me sound boring. Sometimes, I go into “hibernation mode”, where I don’t do anything productive most of the time for a few weeks time—just playing video games or binge-watching Netflix—no reading books, writing, or working on a hobby project. During that time, I usually went on to play my favorite childhood game, Old School Runescape, while watching YouTube videos on the second monitor until this routine bores me to death. Then, back to “productive mode”.

I started this blog to take interesting notes from my readings, thoughts, ideas, and musings. I hope you find value in this little corner of the Internet.

Cheers.