About Me

How I Think About Things

I see the world as a network.

Not metaphorically - literally. Everything is nodes and edges. Routers connected by fiber. People connected by relationships. Chess pieces connected by possible moves. Movie plots connected by thematic threads. Technologies connected by protocols.

This isn't just how I approach technical problems. It's genuinely how my brain works. When I look at any system - a distributed network, a security architecture, a movie's narrative structure, human institutions - I'm mapping the graph. Where are the nodes? What are the edges? How does information flow? Where are the bottlenecks? Where are the trust boundaries? Where does it break?

Understanding the graph means understanding everything else.

What Fascinates Me

Infrastructure most people never think about.

Submarine cables routing petabytes of data across oceans. How does a packet know which path to take through thousands of routers? How do CDNs serve 4K video to millions simultaneously without melting? How do protocols like QUIC rewrite the rules of low-latency communication?

These aren't abstract questions. These are the systems that enable everything else. When routing protocols fail, entire regions lose connectivity. When streaming infrastructure bottlenecks, services collapse. When security fails, real damage happens to real people.

I'm drawn to problems that affect humanity at scale. Not because I have delusions of grandeur, but because the leverage is there. Making infrastructure work better - faster, more securely, more reliably - means serving billions of people who'll never know your name.

That alignment between technical curiosity and serving people - that's what I'm looking for.

The Journey So Far

Started skating in high school. Learned that falling is just part of the process. What matters is whether you get back up.

Bounced around in undergrad. Built ML projects (face detection, malware classification). Randomly learned 3D modeling and created a digital twin of my entire college. That last one was objectively useless for my career, but I learned how to visualize complex systems in three dimensions. Sometimes the detours teach you more than the direct path.

Got serious about networks and security in grad school. Penn State's cybersecurity program taught me to reverse engineer binaries, design secure LANs, understand how attacks actually work versus how academic papers say they work. The gap between theory and practice is where interesting problems live.

Picked up certifications (Security+, CCNA) because that's the game you play to prove you know the basics. They're useful foundations - how encryption actually works, how routers make forwarding decisions, what companies use for security architecture. But the real learning happened breaking things and trying to build them better.

Still play chess (badly, but consistently). No rating, just games on chess.com and a lot of terrible endgames. Turns out pattern recognition from chess helps with network traffic analysis. The ability to see three moves ahead, to recognize patterns, to understand position over material - it all translates.

What I'm Working Toward

I want to work on the infrastructure that keeps the internet running.

Whether that's:

The specific problem matters less than the scale and the stakes. I want to work on things where getting it right means people's lives work better, and getting it wrong means real consequences.

What Makes Me Tick

Curiosity about how things actually work at the lowest levels. Not the abstraction - the reality. How do bits traverse through submarine cables? How do routers decide in microseconds? How do you design systems that fail gracefully under attack?

The gap between theory and practice. Academic papers describe perfect security. Reality is messy network traffic, zero-day exploits, users clicking things they shouldn't. That messiness is where the interesting problems are.

Understanding systems from multiple angles. That's why I went from ML to 3D art to network security. Each lens shows you something different. The graph thinking connects it all.

The philosophy behind the technology. I read a lot. Watch a lot of movies. Think about how technologies reshape human relationships, institutions, possibilities. Write about it on my blog. The technical problems don't exist in a vacuum - they're embedded in human contexts, human needs, human consequences.

The Bigger Picture

We're living through something unprecedented. The internet, distributed systems, AI, the infrastructure that connects billions of people - this is the precipice of our century.

I'm not naive about it. Technology creates problems as much as it solves them. Surveillance, misinformation, concentration of power, environmental costs - they're real.

But the problems don't go away by ignoring the technology. They get solved by people who understand the systems deeply enough to see where they break, where they harm, where they could work differently.

I want to be one of those people. Not because I think I'm special, but because the problems are interesting and the stakes matter.

What I Believe

Everything is interconnected. Actions ripple through networks in ways you can't always predict. Understanding those connections - the graph - is how you navigate complexity.

Alignment matters more than credentials. What you're trying to accomplish, whether your interests align with serving people, whether you're solving problems that matter - that's what counts. The certificates and degrees are just signals in a game we all play.

Falling down is part of the process. Skating taught me that. Chess teaches me that. Every failed project teaches me that. What matters is getting back up and trying again with better understanding.

The best work happens at intersections. Between security and ML. Between infrastructure and algorithms. Between technical depth and philosophical breadth. The interesting problems aren't neatly categorized.

Right Now

Finishing my MS in Cybersecurity at Penn State (May 2026, 3.8 GPA). Building an ML-based intrusion detection system. Simulating QUIC routers to experiment with queue scheduling. Reading, watching films, playing chess, thinking about graphs.

Looking for roles in network engineering, streaming infrastructure, ML engineering, or security starting June 2026. Specifically places where people are solving real infrastructure problems that affect humans at scale.

If you're working on protocols, queues, security systems, ML applications, or any infrastructure that needs to work when millions of people depend on it - I want to hear about what you're building.

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Let's talk: lokeshlks01@gmail.com

Other places: GitHub | Blog | Chess games

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"We used to look up at the sky and wonder at our place in the stars. Now we just look down, and worry about our place in the dirt."

I'm still looking up.