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I'm a product-minded Software Engineer, specializing in data systems, with a hacker's mindset crafted over a lifetime of tinkering.

Have trained myself on a plain and simple principle - I should be able to bootstrap companies from the technical side.

I grew up with computers and electronics. Later started building products for others since 2011 (started out with Android ROM development), and have been working for companies on and off since 2018.

What I do

I typically work around data systems and infrastructure.

• Systems for data ingestion, processing, storage
• Serving data to other teams
• Data pipeline performance optimization

My technical edge is particularly on 2 fronts:

• Rapid prototyping for initial problem-space exploration
• Building synthetic load simulations, to check and prove architectural/systemic feasibility

My solutions generally come with proofs of correctness - reports with numbers, not soft intuitions with feelings.

My edge

The edge is simple - I've learnt how to learn. A result of being a lifetime autodidact.

My speciality is not what I already know. It actually is my violent rate of learning and adaptation - a gigantic appetite for information, and ability to string out a solution out of the ingested data, sometimes borrowing ideas from across domains. Everything connects to everything else. This tendency is also reflected in my sense of humor - the jokes generally come from connecting seemingly unconnected things.

Am particularly good at the discovery and prototyping phases of development. Rapidly iterating through initial prototypes, collecting numbers, and arriving at final architectures empirically.

I generally get contacted by other engineers (majorly past colleagues), some execs etc when:

• They are starting out new projects, and don't know who to call initially.
• They are in some hairy problem, and need some pointers on how to approach it (cut down scope and arrive at the root cause).

Nature

I truly come alive in the face of unknown and during crisis.
When the problem is open ended/ambiguous, and path to solution is unknown. 0 to 1.

I'm a fun loving guy, and am easy to work with. Keep things pretty chill within the team.

Am a self-sufficient person and typically don't need oversight and hand-holding. Can manage execution and delivery if needed. Am good at things like setting direction, talking to stakeholders to set development priorities. A good definition might be "Manager of one".

I care deeply about engineering and take intensive care about things like tech debt, maintainability, on-boarding speed, extensibility, performance etc.

Background

Like most programmers, I'm largely self taught. Most of what I know came from around the internet - from places like forums, hacker news, facebook groups etc. The remaining came from laziness and solving personal problems and frictions through computers.

I grew up with computers. By the time I was older, I simply knew how to program, design systems etc. Software engineering was never an intentional choice. This was simply the only thing that seemed fun. I have zero idea how to learn this stuff from scratch. All I know is that it simply happens. Over time, as I've worked with people outside of my bubble, I've realized just how much of programming is knowledge that cannot be put into words or directly taught. It is simply a way of thinking.

This got to such an extent, that when choosing college major, I thought "I can learn computing by myself anyways, so let me use university to learn electronics" (I've also had a very serious electronics hobby since childhood). Had an amazing time at college with 2 like-minded colleagues. One runs a company now, and one is into automobile engineering.

As you can guess, I simply love working with computers. This is what I do for fun, this is what I do to improve mood when I'm not having fun. And having a career in it, and being paid for it? Holy shit! That sounds like incredible fun.

I've been asked a lot of times to quantify my years of experience. I honestly can't. All I know is that I'm pretty mature as an engineer who has been doing this for a long time now, and have been paid by companies for 3 years to do this commercially, and can build out most stuff (mostly irrespective of difficulty level).

Future

I've always been heavily into platform engineering, and looking at Andras Bacsal build coolify makes me feel jealous.

If there is a windfall, I'll just go purely open source and just build out the vision I've developed over the years (what I now call as "liquid computing").

Hire

Want to connect or hire? email me - niraj[at]thenira[dot]com

However be warned - If you're going to be asking trivia questions, I won't fare well.
Take the interview as if you're dealing with a consultant - simply state your problem, and judge me by my approach towards the solution.