Medicine, science, and the spaces in between

I’m a medical doctor. I trained in clinical practice, worked in the ER, and now work in medical coding. Somewhere along the way — between night shifts and ICD codes — I started writing.

What I write

This blog has been my notebook since 2014. Some posts are clinical dispatches: the patient whose breath I literally held in my hands, the limits of medicine when all we can do is wait and see, the strange thing medical education does to empathy. Others are science writing: Carl Sagan’s star-stuff, Rosetta landing on a comet, R0 and epidemic mathematics, consciousness as “the gorgeous fever” of matter. Still others are personal: hiking alone, being 24 and restless, learning not to rush to the next room.

I write in Indonesian and English, sometimes mixing both in the same sentence. It reflects how I actually think.

Why broca?

Broca’s area. It’s a region in the frontal lobe — responsible for language production, for turning thought into speech. Damage it, and you get Broca’s aphasia: you know exactly what you want to say, but the words won’t come. The thoughts are intact, the language is not.

For years, I felt a version of this. I knew what I wanted to build. I could see it clearly — the shape of it, how it should work, why it mattered. But I lacked the language to build it. The frameworks, the tooling, the sheer volume of syntax between idea and execution — it was a different kind of aphasia. I had thoughts I couldn’t express in code.

Then LLMs arrived. And suddenly, the language barrier dissolved. I could describe what I wanted in plain words — the same words I’d been using in my head all along — and watch it become real. The gap between thought and creation closed. Ideas, given language.

In a strange and unexpected way, LLMs have become something like Broca’s area for humanity — a bridge from thought to expression that didn’t exist before. It feels fitting to name this space after the part of the brain that does the same thing: turning what we mean into what we say.

My background

I studied medicine, worked as a physician, and eventually moved into medical coding. The transition taught me something: structured clinical data is the foundation of everything downstream — reimbursement, research, analytics, AI. Getting the coding right matters. And the people who understand both the clinical reality and the technical systems are rare.

Why this blog exists

The early posts were tagged ntsf — notes to self, and to friends. That’s still what this is. A place to think out loud about medicine, science, and the spaces in between. If you’re a clinician who wonders about the bigger questions, a technologist curious about the clinical domain, or just someone who also stares at the stars — you’re in the right place.