About

Thailand to Jersey City

I moved from Thailand to the US alone at 13 for boarding school at Choate. Showed up in Connecticut with a bag full of clothes. Figuring out an unfamiliar environment with no safety net became the template for how I work: drop somewhere new, clock what needs to happen, execute.

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. These days I'm consulting.

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.

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/fantasy bookstore that 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 my consulting income goes back into the store and the programs we run around it.

Press: IndieBound, Jersey City Times, Shelf Awareness.

Elsewhere in my head

• Reading. hardcover.app/@panat
• Boardgames. kallax.io/u/PXNGH-Panat
• Code. ptaranat, script-wizards, dungeonbooks