I go deep on the why before I'm satisfied I understand the how.
CS student, exploring backend and systems — I've spent time building at a startup (RTN Zero) and shipping production code at scale (Roku). What ties it together: I'm not happy just using something, I want to know what's underneath it.
- SnapTrace — a URL shortener that went further than it needed to: real-time analytics via Server-Sent Events, write-behind buffering, cache-aside reads, deployed on Railway. The interesting part isn't the redirect, it's everything happening around it.
- Working through DSA patterns properly — not memorising solutions, but building actual pattern intuition
- Studying system design fundamentals — caching strategies, rate limiting, message queues — and connecting the theory back to my own projects
TypeScript Node.js PostgreSQL Redis System Design Distributed Systems
Next up: Go, and getting properly into cloud infra ☁️
Check out my pinned repos below — SnapTrace is the one I'm most proud of, and the README in there breaks down the architecture decisions in more depth.
I'd love to hear from anyone who feels the same way about diving into how things really work.