About

Dungeon Books

Carrie and I met across a D&D table. A few sessions in, we were sketching what eventually became Dungeon Books, a sci-fi and fantasy bookstore we opened in Jersey City in 2024. Carrie came from a career in bookselling; I came in with a background in software and a personal collection that had been slowly taking over my apartment.

The idea came from Appendix N in the original AD&D Dungeon Master's Guide, the reading list that inspired the people who wrote the game. The store is built around that premise: the same shelf can feed the novel you read at home and the campaign you run on Saturday. We wanted it to feel more like a friend's living room than a retail space, where someone could walk in for one book and leave with the one they didn't know they were looking for.

We run it a little differently than most indie shops. The business side gets treated like a small product: we look at what's working, try things, and try to be honest with ourselves when something isn't. Year one came in at roughly 29% growth without loans or outside investors, which still feels surreal to type. The part I'm prouder of, though, is that every book on our shelves was picked by a person who reads them.

Weekly D&D sessions in the back of the store are non-negotiable. A lot of our regulars met each other across a table of dice.

Outside the shop, I teach AI and technology workshops at the Jersey City Free Public Library and give occasional presentations on technology and tabletop games at Liberty Science Center. Most of what I earn goes back into the store and the programs we run around it.

Press: IndieBound, Jersey City Times, Shelf Awareness.

The pivot trail

I wanted to be a surgeon. At 18 you only know what a career looks like from the outside. By sophomore year of college I had pivoted to computational neuroscience, modeling how networks of neurons give rise to decisions. That thread pulled me into computer science without my noticing.

I took a gap year to dig into graph theory and dynamical systems. The math that describes brains also describes most of the complex systems I was curious about, and I wanted to understand it properly before committing to a field. Then I went to grad school in Boston for hardware engineering. It was a big jump from a biology degree, but by then it made more sense to me than any other direction. I worked on brain-computer interfaces, wrote high-performance CUDA kernels for computer vision research, and spent my last two years teaching Linux kernel drivers and embedded systems to MS and PhD students.

After grad school I pivoted once more, from hardware to cloud and distributed systems. At RapDev I built observability tooling for Fortune 500 companies. At Rokt I shipped distributed systems powering millions of upsells.

If there's a through-line, it's the space between layers of abstraction. Logic gates into microarchitecture. Microarchitecture into OS. OS into distributed systems. The interesting problems live at those intersections.

Elsewhere

• Reading. hardcover.app/@panat
• Boardgames. kallax.io/u/PXNGH-Panat
• Music. last.fm/user/ptaranat
• Code. ptaranat, script-wizards, dungeonbooks
• Social. x.com/ptaranat, linkedin.com/in/taranat