The guestbook was the first comment section
Before threads and upvotes, visitors signed a page and left. What we lost when replies became the point.
Hi, I'm Chiemeka.
I'm a software engineer working on cloud security infrastructure, and I write about the early internet.
NOWupdated Sep 2026
working onPlatform services and deploy tooling at Palo Alto NetworksbuildingGemSearch, semantic search inside YouTube videoswritingAn essay on guestbooks and the first comment sections
Blog
6 essaysTwo kinds of posts: personal reflections, and technical notes from work and side projects. Basically, ars-chemechnia.
Sep 2026Jul 2026May 2026Mar 2026Jan 2026
All posts →Aug 2026
Designing policy engines that fail closed
Notes from building authorization checks for cloud workloads, and why the boring default is the right one.
When directories were edited by hand
A look at human-curated web indexes, and the librarians who decided what the internet was about.
In defense of the RSS reader
A chronological feed you control is still the calmest way to read the web.
Queues all the way down
What payments infrastructure taught me about idempotency, retries, and sleeping through on-call.
From keywords to links to intent
Three eras of ranking a page, told through the queries people typed into them.
Projects
Things I've built outside of work.
GemSearch
↗A Chrome extension for semantic search inside YouTube videos. It embeds chunked transcripts and matches natural-language queries to the most relevant moments.
Chrome extension · Embeddings · RetrievalBrewin Interpreter
↗An interpreter for Brewin, a Java subset, with a lexer, parser, and AST evaluator supporting closures, recursion, nested scopes, and dynamic typing. Validated on 1,000+ test programs.
Lexer · Parser · AST evaluationExperience
The short version. Full resume (PDF).
Palo Alto Networks
Aug 2026 — nowSoftware Engineer, NetSec R&DBuilding internal platform services used by 6+ engineering teams, including a release portal, CI pipelines, and a deployment ledger that tracks deploys across 36 repos. Terraform, Python, Go, and Kubernetes on GCP.
PayPal
Jul 2025 — Aug 2026Software Engineer IBuilt LLM-powered code review in CI/CD that cut review turnaround from about two days to four hours, plus GraphQL APIs and React flows for credit card products serving 3M+ daily users.
Mercor
Jan — Jul 2025Software Engineer (Contract)Python tooling for LLM fine-tuning datasets, and prompt design and output evaluation alongside AI researchers.
Veeva Systems
Summer 2024Software Engineer InternRebuilt an enterprise login flow in Swift, cutting login times 20%, and set up snapshot testing for 200+ UI components.
UCLA
— 2025B.A. Computer Science and LinguisticsAfter starting out at Las Positas College, where I earned an A.A. in Computer Science with honors.