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 experience 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, which is the adrenaline kick you get after you chase 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 in college building apps for second hand books, note sharing apps for our department, ride hailing taxi apps, etc. Me and a couple of friends also thought of starting a service company and we had some college and alumni who hired us to build and deploy products. I earned enough from my side gigs to enjoy college life.

After my internship, I joined a small Software Defined networking startup. I was the one of the first engineers to join the startup as a fresh college graduate and left the company as a technical lead/architect having worked closely with the executive team, leading the entire SD-WAN controller vertical. As is true for any early age startup, I had to don multiple hats as an engineer, a leader, a product manager and customer support. It was hard work with a lot of all nighters to prevent customer churn, but it was all worth it as I experienced “founder” mode as an engineer. In layman terms, it was the company that taught me how to learn and how to work hard. It was a great 5+ years and the company had grown to 150 members by the time I left.

After a very early age startup, I decided it was time to do things at a larger scale and I joined VMware. Things operate very differently in a startup compared to a MNC. I would suggest everyone to experience the differences. During the years I worked in VMware, I focussed on building products and frameworks to support Tanzu, the Kubernetes platform by VMware.

For the last 3 years, I have worked on MongoDB and Kafka in Rippling and Stripe. Working at these companies is a good glimpse of how hyper growth companies handle unbelievable scale. In fact, working on one of the largest Mongo clusters in the world also introduced me to a world of never seen before issues. It has been definitely frustrating, but very interesting in understanding how WiredTiger works and how these bugs can be avoided.

It has been an exciting ride through startups and MNCs but one thing has always been consistent. Learning whatever I can and whatever I want! This mantra has allowed me to keep my love for software alive and kicking even 10 years down the lane and I don’t feel the flame to deliver extinguishing any time soon. I have never tied myself down to a single language or framework because at the end of the day, understanding the system and the decision behind those frameworks is more important than to sit on a high horse all day long.

This year, I am planning to increase my contribution to open source databases and maybe learn mathematics to a reasonable extent.

I would love to collaborate or consult on any projects that you think you would suit me. If you want to connect, please do drop me a message here.

You can read my blogs here.