Software engineer, indie hacker, food enthusiast.

I'm Ian, a software engineer and entrepreneur in The Netherlands. I'm an engineer at Mercury, a financial technology company building bank products for startups. I write about engineering, cooking, and life.

Essays

36 entries. Longer-form, opinionated writing across engineering, personal, and cooking.

  1. Sex, AI, and the Apocalypse

    How a community devoted to thinking clearly incubated salvation stories, abusive experiments, race science, and an affection for autocracy, and why that history matters now that its alumni are asking for the public trust on AI.

    personal stable
    16 September 2026
  2. Getting Freaky in the Age of AI

    The only way to have a competitive edge in the age of AI is to be aggressively weird with what you build.

    engineering stable
    7 August 2026
  3. The Mathematics of Build Queue Optimization and Auto-Scaling

    A deep dive into queueing theory and auto-scaling for CI/CD build fleets, exploring when and how to optimize build infrastructure for both cost and developer productivity.

    engineering stable
    16 July 2026
  4. Deconstruct the Monolith: Composable App Bootstrapping with Fractal Layer

    How fractal-layer attacks the compilation bottleneck and initialization chaos of the monolithic App datatype by treating startup as a composable graph of resource-managed layers.

    engineering stable
    29 June 2026
  5. Brief aan de Eerste Kamer over box 3 · A letter to the Dutch Senate on Box 3

    Waarom de vermogensaanwasbelasting slecht uitpakt — voor de belastingplichtige, de schatkist en de economie. · Why the accrual tax is bad for the taxpayer, the Treasury, and the economy.

    personal stable
    12 June 2026
  6. What's in the Box? A Field Guide to AI Models

    A beginner-friendly tour of parameters, quantization, MoE, context windows, and other LLM jargon.

    engineering stable
    9 June 2026
Older essays

Notes

Loose, unpolished thinking from my knowledge base. Working with the garage door open.

Workbench

Tools and libraries under active development.

Ian K. DuncanEssays, notes, and experiments. Written from The Hague.
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