Tech Journey
4 years of building backend systems — the tools I picked up, the ones I dropped, and why.
About
I build and run backend systems in Node.js and TypeScript — APIs, async workers, message queues, and the data layers under them. Most of what I have shipped I owned end to end, including two platforms I architected alone from an empty repository to a live product. Lately that has extended into LLM systems running in production rather than in demos.
The story
I started in April 2022 as a junior front-end developer, building React components for client projects on an apprenticeship. Six months in I joined Appycodes, and the first thing I was handed was the company's first Node.js codebase — a fitness platform's APIs, bulk Excel ingestion, and the MySQL queries behind its reporting. Being first meant there were no conventions to follow, which was equal parts terrifying and the fastest way to learn.
Through 2023 I had a stretch of genuinely full-stack work — a multi-carrier courier platform fanning out to three shipping APIs in parallel with a zone pricing engine behind it, and a CMS-driven blog on Next.js and Sanity. I am glad I did it and I have not gone back. It clarified that the part I actually want to be responsible for is the backend.
The work I would point at started after that. I was the sole backend engineer on an analytics platform for an IPL franchise, which meant owning the API over a BigQuery warehouse, the deployment pipeline, and the conversations with their data team. Then a two-sided marketplace I architected alone from an empty repository to launch — a ledger-derived wallet so concurrent charges could not race, and a live payment gateway migration that left the transaction history untouched. After that, a year on the core backend team of an AI-native sales platform, from inception to launch.
Most recently I have been building with LLMs in production rather than in demos — agent orchestration, retrieval, and natural language to SQL where the hard part turns out to be schema introspection and query security, not prompting. On my own time I built a short-form video platform to work through distributed-systems problems properly, and I keep notes on Node.js internals and DSA because the depth shows up later whether or not anyone asks about it.