About — Kashish Sahu
I build backends,
read a great deal of
other people's code,
and keep a small server running.
$ whoami
> backend engineer, builder, self-hoster
> Who
Kashish Sahu — backend engineer, working in Node and Go against MySQL and Redis. Most of the work is schema and query performance, caching, and the failure modes that only turn up under load.
Much of the week goes to reading code rather than writing it. The rest goes to PlutoLab — an old laptop under a desk running this site, a Git forge, and whatever I am currently taking apart. Renting infrastructure teaches you to fill in a form; running it teaches you what happens at three in the morning.
> Open Source
Patches to projects far larger than anything I maintain. Each started as a problem I hit while using the thing.
Rewrote config loading to decode lazily, taking most of the allocations out of the path.
Documented a browser cache behaviour that silently desynchronizes page state after a back navigation.
Fixed a Firefox back-navigation bug that left forms stuck mid-submit. The hard part was why the test suite could never have caught it.
> How I Work
- 01
Read before writing. The explanation is usually already in the codebase.
- 02
Prefer subtraction. My better changes removed something.
- 03
Measure, then argue. A profiler settles in a minute what two people debate for a week.
- 04
Boring technology, chosen slowly, outlives clever technology chosen quickly.
- 05
If it cannot be rolled back, it is not finished.
- 06
Write it down. Documentation outlasts your memory of the work.
I do not always manage it; that is rather the point of writing them down.
— Kashish