Welcome to the Engineering Notes

A deep dive into building modular systems with React 19, Shiki syntax highlighting, Mermaid architectural diagrams, and LaTeX mathematical rigor.

Ram Shankar

October 24, 2026

2 min read

#Architecture#React#MDX#Design

Welcome to the engineering notebook. This space documents architectural explorations, distributed system primitives, and interface mechanics built with deliberate constraints and high fidelity.

Technical Foundation

Modern technical writing demands precise rendering across three critical modalities: syntax-highlighted code with semantic tokens, architectural graphs that illustrate data flow, and LaTeX notation for theoretical foundations.

Syntax Highlighting with Shiki

Syntax highlighting in this workspace is powered by Shiki, running at build time using Dual Theme tokens. Code blocks do not flicker or incur client-side execution penalties.

typescript

interface CacheConfig<T> {
  ttlMs: number;
  maxEntries: number;
  evictionPolicy: "lru" | "fifo" | "lfu";
  onEvict?: (key: string, value: T) => void;
}

export class BoundedMemoryCache<T> {
  private readonly store = new Map<string, { value: T; expiresAt: number }>();

  constructor(private readonly config: CacheConfig<T>) {}

  public get(key: string): T | undefined {
    const entry = this.store.get(key);
    if (!entry) return undefined;
    if (Date.now() > entry.expiresAt) {
      this.store.delete(key);
      this.config.onEvict?.(key, entry.value);
      return undefined;
    }
    return entry.value;
  }
}

System Flowcharts with Mermaid

Complex topologies and sequence flows benefit from declarative diagrams directly inside Markdown.

Mathematical Formulations

Theoretical models are expressed with KaTeX. Inline formulations like $O(n \log n)$ merge seamlessly into sentences, while block expressions articulate multi-variable equations:

\mathcal{L}_{\text{seq}}(\theta) = -\sum_{t=1}^{T} \log P_\theta(y_t \mid y_{<t}, \mathbf{x}) + \lambda \|\theta\|_2^2

When evaluating time complexities across distributed nodes:

T_{\text{total}}(N) = \max_{i \in [1, N]} \left( T_{\text{compute}}(i) + T_{\text{network}}(i) \right) + \mathcal{O}(1)

Interactive Elements & Callouts

Custom components integrate directly into the prose without breaking typographical rhythm.

Cross-referencing documentation should feel natural. Check out our deep dive in the Learn React Series to see how nested sub-series are structured, or review the Next.js Documentation for underlying framework primitives.