About Me

Hello, I am Gaurav.

I love software. I have been working as a software engineer in different capacities for the last 10 years and have dabbled in fullstack and infrastructure engineering.

Before the era of tech influencers came up, software was mainly worked on via well thought out white papers, RFCs and open source contributions. Having seen those days, today's world seems like a rapidly changing world with extremely less attention spans. At the end of the day, basics are what matters and lasts through eras.

I started writing because those principles changed or improved my understanding of software. There is still tons to learn and write about and I hope my blog can provide someone else the "Aha" moment — the adrenaline kick you get after chasing a notorious bug or a complex topic.

My real software journey started in my 2nd year of college when I was introduced to jQuery, PHP and MySQL. I had loads of fun building apps for second hand books, note sharing apps for our department, ride hailing taxi apps, and more.

After my internship, I joined a small Software Defined Networking startup. I was one of the first engineers to join as a fresh college graduate and left as a technical lead/architect, having worked closely with the executive team leading the entire SD-WAN controller vertical.

After that early-stage experience, I moved to VMware to operate at larger scale, focusing on building products and frameworks to support Tanzu, the Kubernetes platform.

For the last 3 years, I have worked on MongoDB and Kafka at Rippling and Stripe — a good glimpse into how hyper-growth companies handle unbelievable scale.

Learning whatever I can and whatever I want — that's the mantra that has kept my love for software alive 10 years in. I have never tied myself to a single language or framework because understanding the system and the decisions behind those frameworks matters more than any particular tool.