Ash ZarifA personal field guide

Software engineer. Photographer. Curious person.

Ash Zarif

I build things, chase good light,
and follow what makes me curious.

A few things I've made. Some things I've noticed.
A place for the connections in between.

A little about me Surprise me
Sunlit coastal rocks beside breaking waves and a blue horizon.
OUTSIDE, LOOKING CLOSERA photograph by me ↗
A few recurring curiositiesPhotographyThings that moveMusic & late nightsQuestions worth following

01 / Follow a question

One photo. A whole rabbit hole.

A dense star field and dark dust clouds across the Milky Way.Photography → astronomy → software

A photograph that became a project

What am I actually
looking at?

I took a picture of the Milky Way. Then I wanted to know what all those points of light were. That question led into star catalogs, image matching, and a little sky explorer.

Follow the stars

Original photograph · Field note · Interactive Sky Map

02 / Away from the keyboard

There’s a lot to notice.

All photographs
A small yellow wildflower growing in coastal sand.

Small discoveries

Along the coast ↗
An extreme close-up of translucent pink flower petals.

A closer look

Color & texture ↗
A sandy path through low coastal plants beside the ocean.

The scenic route

Outside ↗

03 / From the notebook

Things I’m thinking about.

All field notes

Leaving room to look

A museum visit, too much to see, and the case for giving one interesting thing more time.

Out in the world1 min read

One ingredient, a different moment

A kitchen note about adding yogurt to curry—and the next question it raised.

Kitchen notebook1 min read

Can you do arithmetic with words?

A small word-vector toy, a larger set of experiments, and what happens when language meets addition and subtraction.

Things I wondered3 min read

04 / A little backstory

The interests changed.
The making stuck.

I started building software in high school. Since then, the projects have wandered through textbooks, photography, recipes, and everyday experiences on Android.

Outside the code: museums, something on the stove, a camera in hand, or music worth dancing to.

How I got here

Looking

Good light, small details, and the frame I almost walked past.

Listening

EDM, a reason to dance, and the occasional detour into how sound works.

Making

Software you can play with. Questions you can turn around in your hands.