Arun Thundyill Saseendran
I build software,and I find myself in the wild.
Software engineer AI & NLP researcher Ireland
- NowApple
- ResearchPhD · Trinity College Dublin
- Experience16 years
The shape of me
The Naturalist & Philosopher
The Companion
The Family Man
From the writing
All writingRunning Postgres Yourself on Fly.io, with repmgr
I ran a three-node postgres-flex cluster on Fly for a year, drilled a failover that half-broke, and costed it against Managed Postgres.
Fly.io vs DigitalOcean for Small Projects
You vibe coded a web app over a weekend and it runs on your laptop. Now it has to live somewhere. I've used GCP, AWS and Azure for enterprise work and DigitalOcean for everything personal, and I've moved my side projects to Fly.io — machines that stop when nobody's looking, Anycast, managed Postgres and Redis, a deploy that fires on merge to main, and what each one actually costs.
Four Injuries, Two Medals — Coming Back to Badminton
I started playing badminton at thirteen in Ooty, stopped because of a shoulder injury, and spent years being sedentary. This is what happened after a friend pushed me back onto a court in April 2025 — the first medal in October 2025, the four injuries that followed, and the recovery that led to a second medal.
The heights by great men reached and kept were not attained by sudden flight, but they, while their companions slept, were toiling upward in the night.