Aleksi

(or Alex, if you wish)

SystemsTbilisi

Intro

I work on systems, mostly the parts that aren’t visible from outside. Two projects at the moment - a video platform and a sandboxing tool - both of which started because the existing thing was wrong in a way I could name precisely.

Before that: competitive programming, freelance work, and a route into the industry I had to construct myself, since there wasn’t one where I grew up.

Work

Cabin

cabin.watch

YouTube’s problem isn’t the recommender. It’s what the recommender is ranking. Run the same algorithm over a corpus that was gated on the way in and the output changes completely.

Cabin is that gate. Every submission is watched end to end by a person before it’s let in - not sampled, not skimmed. The bar has four clauses: it promises something, it delivers exactly that, everything it attempts is good, and it’s worth the time of whoever it’s for.

Currently a test run. Embed-only, measuring one thing: whether curated discovery is a habit people repeat.

live

The gateSixty grey points on the left stand for everything submitted. Each points toward a narrow aperture between two bars; only five pass through it and arrive as amber points on the right.most infew through
Fig. 1The gate

belay

Git semantics for running systems. Fork the machine state, do anything, diff what changed, commit or discard.

Built on user namespaces and overlayfs - the overlay upperdir is already a materialised diff, so the kernel does the hard part for free. The interesting problem isn’t the isolation. It’s making the diff semantic: knowing a package was installed, rather than that four hundred files appeared.

C11, single static binary, no runtime. Open source.

CLinux namespacesoverlayfsin progress

The layer stackThree stacked planes in isometric projection. At the bottom, lowerdir: the read-only base system, holding thirteen files. Above it, upperdir: where every write lands, holding two modified files, two new files and one whiteout marking a deletion. At the top, the merged view: the base files with the whiteout's file removed and the upperdir's files on top.lowerdirro · baseupperdirrw · the diffmergedthe view

forkdiffcommitdiscard

Fig. 2The layer stack

Background

CompetitiveCodeforces Expertpeak 1719
ICPC NEERC regional finalstwice
Google Kickstarttop 300
EducationWarsaw University of Technologycoursework, no degree
WorkHuaweiML research internship
Clorofounding engineer
GoogleSRE, starting soon

Elsewhere

© 2026 Aleksi Svanidze