About
I'm a software engineer who has a difficult time leaving things unexplained. When I encounter something interesting, I tend to take it apart until I understand what is actually happening underneath the abstraction: what the pieces are, why they exist, how they interact, and what happens when they fail. These days, that usually leads me into AI, software architecture, distributed systems, and the machinery underneath modern software. I also find that the same way of thinking applies surprisingly well to engineering organizations and the people inside them. Systems are systems, whether they're made of software, infrastructure, incentives, or humans. This site is where I distill some of that learning into writing.
What this site is
Kean Neng Lim is a personal engineering publication, not a company blog. Every article starts from the same approach — fundamentals first, then mechanism, assumptions, and failure modes — before landing on the simplest solution that actually holds up. The subject varies; the approach doesn't.
Areas of technical focus
- AI — Accurate mental models for the core concepts behind modern AI systems — written for software engineers, not beginners.
- Architecture — Architectural reasoning about boundaries, state, interfaces, and failure modes in systems that combine deterministic and probabilistic components.
- Systems — Generalizable engineering principles about how systems behave in production, independent of any single project.
- Organizations — Engineering teams and organizations viewed as socio-technical systems.