“I write the explanations I wish someone had given me when I was learning, so my future self can come back to them when he's stuck.”
Kishan
Kumar
Senior Software Engineer · PhonePe
Senior software engineer at PhonePe. I write long explainers on distributed systems, language models, Java and blockchains.
- Now
- Senior Software Engineer, PhonePe
- Studied
- B.Tech, IIT Roorkee (best B.Tech project award)
- Writes about
- Distributed systems, language models, Java, blockchains
- Off work
- Art, music, books on the cosmos and philosophy
Profile
I've spent over six years building systems at scale. At PhonePe I lead the logging charter, which handles around 65 TB of logs a day.
I built Gatekeeper from the ground up and took it to production. It streamlines how new services and APIs are onboarded onto our API gateway. I also made that gateway reload its configuration without restarts, at roughly a million requests per second.
By moving IO-heavy work onto worker threads, I cut our internal API fleet from 150 instances to 20, an 86.67% reduction.
I studied at IIT Roorkee, where my B.Tech project, a smart navigation system for visually impaired people, won the best project award.
Outside work I love art and music, and I read about the cosmos, philosophy and sometimes fiction.
Projects
Algorythms
Learn data structures and algorithms through patterns (sliding window, two pointers, fast and slow pointers) so a new problem looks familiar.
SayIt
A community discussion platform with interest-based spaces and fully nested comments, built from the ground up.
Currently reading
- 2017 · Vaswani et al.
Attention Is All You Need
- 2003 · Ghemawat, Gobioff, Leung
The Google File System
- 2007 · DeCandia et al.
Dynamo: Amazon's Highly Available Key-value Store
- 2011 · Yuval Noah Harari
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind