https://shanitvannala.org/ Thoughts on systems, data, and how complex things — from production ML to entire cities — actually behave. en-us Sat, 06 Jun 2026 12:00:00 GMT https://shanitvannala.org/blog/measuring-new-york-04-daily-needs/ https://shanitvannala.org/blog/measuring-new-york-04-daily-needs/ Sat, 06 Jun 2026 12:00:00 GMT Chapter 4 of Measuring New York. The geography of getting groceries, medicine, a doctor, a school, a childcare seat — without a car. Proximity turns out to be the easy part: in most of New York you can walk to almost everything in ten minutes, and the three access dimensions correlate so tightly they're really one signal — built density. The hard question is whether what's nearby is enough. On childcare it isn't: New York has licensed slots for about half its under-5 children, and being close to a day care barely predicts having a seat in one. The chapter is about the gap between within reach and enough. noreply@shanitvannala.org (Shanit Vannala) https://shanitvannala.org/blog/measuring-new-york-03-environment/ https://shanitvannala.org/blog/measuring-new-york-03-environment/ Sat, 30 May 2026 12:00:00 GMT Chapter 3 of Measuring New York. PM 2.5, green-space access, and the volume of environmental 311 complaints split into three semi-independent dimensions — no pair of them co-ranks tightly enough to collapse into a single 'environmental quality' score. The chapter is about what that independence means, and about a metric trap on the third dimension: one zip code in the Bronx accounts for 11% of NYC's noise complaints, almost all of it from a small number of addresses. Counting blocks instead of calls makes the burden ranking change. noreply@shanitvannala.org (Shanit Vannala) https://shanitvannala.org/blog/measuring-new-york-02-housing/ https://shanitvannala.org/blog/measuring-new-york-02-housing/ Sun, 24 May 2026 12:00:00 GMT Chapter 2 of Measuring New York. Median rent points away from housing stress, not toward it. The community districts with the highest rents are the ones with the lowest rent burdens; the CDs with the highest burdens are also where eviction filings and housing-code violations stack up — three signals that point the same way, and a fourth (the headline-rent number) that points the opposite way. noreply@shanitvannala.org (Shanit Vannala) https://shanitvannala.org/blog/measuring-new-york-10-methodology/ https://shanitvannala.org/blog/measuring-new-york-10-methodology/ Sat, 23 May 2026 12:00:00 GMT A living reference companion to the Measuring New York series. Per-chapter algorithms, scoring frameworks, and the caveats that don't fit inline. Updated whenever a new chapter ships. noreply@shanitvannala.org (Shanit Vannala) https://shanitvannala.org/blog/measuring-new-york-01-mobility/ https://shanitvannala.org/blog/measuring-new-york-01-mobility/ Sat, 23 May 2026 12:00:00 GMT Chapter 1 of Measuring New York. The 45-minute AM-peak transit isochrone, computed for all 2,303 NYC census tracts. From Midtown East the median resident reaches 3.06 million jobs — 68% of all jobs in the city. From Tottenville, 13 thousand. The variance between CDs is 229×; the variance inside some CDs is 5×. A neighborhood's true size is measured in minutes, not blocks. noreply@shanitvannala.org (Shanit Vannala) https://shanitvannala.org/blog/measuring-new-york-00-what-is-livable/ https://shanitvannala.org/blog/measuring-new-york-00-what-is-livable/ Sat, 23 May 2026 12:00:00 GMT Opening the Measuring New York series. Why 'livability' is a slippery word, why NYC is one of the most measurable cities anywhere, and a first look at where the daily friction concentrates — across 296,426 311 calls in a single month. noreply@shanitvannala.org (Shanit Vannala) https://shanitvannala.org/blog/lessons-from-building-a-baby-monitor-with-ml/ https://shanitvannala.org/blog/lessons-from-building-a-baby-monitor-with-ml/ Mon, 13 Apr 2026 12:00:00 GMT Part 2 of a series on BILBO, a home-built baby monitor. Six opinions about privacy architecture and shipping ML under real constraints, the bugs that cost me a morning each, and the new failure modes coding agents introduce that nobody is talking about yet. noreply@shanitvannala.org (Shanit Vannala) https://shanitvannala.org/blog/building-a-privacy-first-baby-monitor/ https://shanitvannala.org/blog/building-a-privacy-first-baby-monitor/ Mon, 13 Apr 2026 12:00:00 GMT A $25 IP camera, an old Mac mini that was about to be e-waste, a 3-stage MobileNetV3 cascade, and a dashboard that never leaves my LAN. Here's what I built, how it's put together, and the tradeoffs I can back up with numbers. noreply@shanitvannala.org (Shanit Vannala) https://shanitvannala.org/blog/failure_probability_modeling_blog/ https://shanitvannala.org/blog/failure_probability_modeling_blog/ Sun, 30 Nov 2025 12:00:00 GMT A practical guide (with examples) to using statistical modeling to understand, predict, and prevent mysterious failures in modern distributed systems. noreply@shanitvannala.org (Shanit Vannala) https://shanitvannala.org/blog/eight-stories-about-engineers-using-statistics/ https://shanitvannala.org/blog/eight-stories-about-engineers-using-statistics/ Sun, 23 Nov 2025 12:00:00 GMT Most software engineers spend years sharpening their coding skills but go surprisingly far without understanding the statistical forces shaping their systems. Here are eight stories of engineers solving real problems with stats. noreply@shanitvannala.org (Shanit Vannala)