About

Builds things. Breaks things. Writes about both.

I'm Ace Vinayak. I have a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Surrey, and I've spent most of my career trying to build useful things and learning from the many times I got it wrong.

I'm currently co-founder at Pluto, where we're working on AI-powered personal finance coaching. I co-founded PerchPeek, a relocation platform where I was CTO for nearly six years — three co-founders, a lot of late nights, and we were lucky enough to end up working with some great companies along the way. I'm still an advisor there and continue to do data engineering and data science projects with them. I also run Fly My Cloud, a data engineering and data science consultancy. We've been building a semantic firewall for AI agents — essentially making sure LLMs respect your access controls when they interact with your data.

Day to day, I write code — mostly Python for data work, TypeScript when it makes sense, and occasionally Laravel. My PhD was in mathematical modelling and evolutionary algorithms, but these days I spend more time on LLMs, data pipelines, and figuring out which AI problems are genuinely worth solving.

Outside of work, I go for long runs along the canals. Not fast — I take about eight hours to do 50K, which by any serious runner's standards is a leisurely walk. I'm not really interested in racing. I just like being out there.

What I Write About

Data engineering, AI, scaling businesses, personal finance, and neurodiversity. I have Asperger's and I write about it openly — I think more people in tech should.

Every post starts with a dad joke. This is non-negotiable.

Books That Shaped My Thinking

Determined by Robert Sapolsky
The Deficit Myth by Stephanie Kelton
Utopia for Realists by Rutger Bregman
Fluke by Brian Klaas

Elsewhere

This Site

Built with Next.js, TypeScript, and Tailwind CSS. Hosted on Vercel. The /terminal page runs a language model entirely in your browser — no API calls, no tokens, no cloud. Just WebGPU and patience.