Debanjan Basu

Where theoretical physics meets practical AI

Berlin, Germany

I'm a Senior Python Developer working at the intersection of AI systems, distributed computing, and backend infrastructure. My path here wasn't linear—it wound through five years of theoretical physics research at TU Clausthal, data science at an IoT startup, and eventually into building production AI systems.

What I carry from physics isn't just mathematical fluency. It's a particular way of seeing: finding the minimal description that captures a system's essential behavior, recognizing when a problem has hidden symmetries, knowing when to zoom in on details and when to step back and look for universal patterns.

These days, I build AI agent systems, web scraping infrastructure, and observability pipelines. I'm fascinated by the emerging discipline of making AI systems that are not just capable, but observable, debuggable, and composable.

Series

Production Django Task Queue

5 posts · Dec 2024–Feb 2026

Building a ~300 LOC task queue on Django ORM from prototype to production — memory leaks, fork pitfalls, pessimistic locking, and security hardening.

Terminal Power User

4 posts · Oct 2025–Nov 2025

Kitty terminal, kittens, shell integration, Starship prompt, and turning the terminal into a complete development environment.

Wayland Desktop Mastery

4 posts · Dec 2025–Jan 2026

Niri's scrolling paradigm, unified shortcuts across compositors, DankMaterialShell, and building a cohesive Wayland desktop.

Berlin's Transit Crisis

5 posts · Jan 2026–Feb 2026

How reunification, austerity, broken funding, and low wages created BVG's crisis — and what proven European models show about the way out.

A Deep History of Bengali Culture

8 posts · Feb 2026–Jan 2026

আদি বাঙালি ইত্যাদি — A personal journey through the deep history of the Bengali language: the people, migrations, and forgotten civilizations folded into the words we use every day.

Standalone Posts

Two Claude Code Power Features You Should Be Using

Custom status lines for ambient awareness and git worktrees for parallel AI-assisted development sessions.

SSH in 33 Seconds? Optimizing for India-to-Bulgaria VPN Connections

Diagnosing and fixing SSH latency over high-latency VPN links, with focus on the TCP-over-TCP problem and connection multiplexing.

What I Write About

The Practical Side

Development environment deep-dives, agent harness architectures, LLM orchestration patterns, and observability for AI systems.

The Theoretical Side

Physics-inspired approaches to understanding neural networks—phase transitions, renormalization group theory, information geometry.

Other Wanderings

Ancient history, travels to places where the past feels tangible, and whatever else I find worth thinking through in writing.

Get in Touch

I'm always interested in conversations about AI systems, physics-informed machine learning, or elegant solutions to hard problems.

Read the Blog View CV