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 my first Node.js project — a fitness platform's APIs, bulk Excel ingestion, and the MySQL queries behind its reporting.
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 worked on LLM systems running in production — multi-agent pipelines, retrieval, and natural language to SQL. 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.