Every blog starts somewhere. This one starts here.
I want to be upfront about something: I am not a quantum physicist. I’m a programmer who got genuinely obsessed with quantum computing and decided to document the journey publicly.
This blog is my attempt to learn in the open. Every post is a record of something I read, understood, misunderstood, or found worth thinking about. If you’re an expert and I get something wrong — and I will — I’d rather know about it than not. If you’re also at the beginning of this journey, maybe what I write will save you some time.
I find that writing forces clarity. You can fool yourself into thinking you understand something until you try to explain it. This blog is how I’m going to find out what I actually know versus what I only think I know.
I’ve been following quantum computing seriously for about three years. Long enough to remember when every headline was “quantum supremacy achieved” followed by a paper that showed a quantum computer doing something a classical computer couldn’t replicate — except it could, with a better algorithm, two weeks later.
That era is ending. The results coming out now are different. They’re messier, more specific, harder to dismiss.
Fujitsu cutting molecular simulation times from millennia to 35 days. Google moving Q-Day estimates to 2029. Post-quantum cryptography shipping in Android 17. Xanadu becoming the first publicly listed photonic quantum company. These are not theoretical developments. They are happening in production systems, in corporate earnings calls, in government policy documents.
And yet most of the coverage is still either breathless press release summaries or dense academic papers with no bridge between them. I want to build that bridge — at least for myself, and hopefully for whoever ends up reading this.
For the past decade, quantum computing has been a “ten years away” technology. A useful punchline. The kind of thing that gets funding because it sounds impressive, not because it’s delivering results.
That’s shifting. Not for everything — general-purpose quantum computers that outperform classical hardware on arbitrary problems are still far away. But for specific applications — molecular simulation, optimization, cryptography — the gap is closing faster than most people outside the field realize.
If you work in cybersecurity, the timeline for post-quantum migration is not theoretical anymore. If you work in pharmaceutical research, quantum chemistry simulations are already changing what’s computationally feasible. If you work in finance, quantum optimization algorithms are being tested on real portfolios.
The decisions being made right now — about standards, infrastructure, investment — will matter for the next twenty years. I’d rather understand them than be surprised by them.
I don’t have a fixed curriculum. I’m not working toward a certificate or a degree. I’m following curiosity — reading papers, watching talks, running code in Qiskit, breaking things, understanding why they broke.
Some weeks I’ll go deep on a single algorithm. Some weeks a paper will take me two hours to get through and I’ll write three paragraphs about what I learned. Some weeks nothing will make it past my drafts folder.
That’s the format. Honest, imperfect, ongoing.
Life has taught me that expectations are mostly a way to be disappointed on a schedule. So I’ll skip the promises.
What I can say is that this blog will be a mix of a few things:
Deep dives — when a paper, an announcement, or an algorithm deserves more than a headline, I’ll dig into it properly. I’ll try to be technical without being unnecessarily obscure.
Linkblog — sometimes a thing is interesting enough to share but not interesting enough to write a thousand words about. A link and two sentences is a perfectly valid post format and I will use it without shame.
This Week in Quantum — I publish a weekly digest of quantum computing news at this-week-in-quantum.org . When a story from that digest deserves a deeper look, it’ll get one here.
Corrections — I will get things wrong. I’m learning in public, which means my mistakes are also public. When it happens, I’ll fix it and explain what I got wrong. No stealth edits.