About

I’m a backend engineer in India. Four years, mostly Node, Kafka and Postgres, mostly on systems where being approximately right is the same as being wrong.

My degree is in hospitality. There is no computer science credential anywhere in my education, which is not an oversight — I taught myself to program in 2022, while I was still at university for the other thing, and every line on the timeline below came after that.

I don’t have a story about the moment I decided. I had a laptop and a lot of evenings, and the work turned out to be more interesting than the thing I was already halfway through paying for.

What the hospitality years actually left me with is narrower and more useful than a lesson: I’ve spent a lot of time in rooms where something went wrong in front of the customer and going quiet was not one of the options. That is most of what I know about incident handling, and all of what I know about telling someone bad news early.

Async by default. I write things down. Decisions go somewhere you can read them later, and I’d rather send you a long message than book a call to say the same thing more slowly. I’m in IST — the overlap numbers are on the front page rather than described here, because a number is harder to fudge than a paragraph.

I take the whole problem. Including the part where the thing you asked for is the wrong shape. I’ll say so once, clearly, with what I’d do instead, and then build whichever one you choose.

I stay findable. The most common thing a freelance client is actually afraid of is being ghosted, and the only honest evidence against that is a record of not doing it. Ask me for references and I’ll give you the people whose systems I ran.

I’m modest about taste, not ability. If you have opinions about API shape or naming, they’re probably fine and I’ll follow them. If you have opinions about whether a write needs to be atomic, we should talk.