Hybrid.Chat conversational platform
2023–2026
Hosted self-serve platform where businesses build chatbots from visual blocks and deploy them on web, WhatsApp and Mattermost with human handover.
Architecture
C4 Modelling
I documented the architecture of complex distributed systems through hierarchical models showing system context.
See its threads in the worldUsed on
NLX entity-extraction API
2022–2023
Natural-language API that returns entities, facts and a parse tree from domain-specific text such as ingredient declarations and medical supply descriptions.
Internal engineering estate
2022–2024
Smarter.Codes' internal estate: a MediaWiki and Wikibase documentation portal, public website and engineering consoles used by staff.
Omnichannel agent inbox
2021–2025
A shared agent inbox where support teams answer customers from WhatsApp, email, Telegram or a custom API in one queue.
Company-location extraction at web scale
2021–2023
A web-scale crawler that finds a company's office address from its hostname, built for an external client.
Kray store rollouts
2023–2026
Work that puts Kray, an AI e-commerce search product, into real stores: a store cloner, demo store and grocery rollouts.
Stories where it mattered
2021 · Hybrid.Chat conversational platform
High availability for a bot runtime that insisted on being in memory
- Situation
- The chatbot platform's runtime holds conversation state in memory, so under high availability any pod restart dropped live conversations.
- Task
- Survive pod churn without rewriting the conversational runtime the product was built on.
- Action
- I checked alternative frameworks, found the same limit, and kept the runtime: sticky sessions, state persisted to Mongo, and Redis pub/sub to close duplicates.
- Result
- The platform ran multi-container with state surviving restarts, and the design documented its failure modes, including those the fix introduced.
2023 · Hybrid.Chat conversational platform
Wanting to build it in house and buying instead
- Situation
- The bot platform needed web push notifications, and my instinct was to build it in house for future flexibility.
- Task
- Decide between building and buying, separating engineering reasons from personal preference.
- Action
- I wrote down what I wanted from in-house, weighed it against what the release needed, and recorded the preference and the decision against it.
- Result
- We shipped on the vendor, and the recorded trade-off made later customisation questions easy to answer.
2023 · Omnichannel agent inbox
Taking a component out of the stack instead of adding one
- Situation
- A messaging product ran Keycloak for identity, yet users, roles and organisations already lived in Dgraph, so every write landed twice.
- Task
- Remove the dual write and its compensating code, and get to one store of record.
- Action
- I checked which Keycloak features were used, found none beyond authentication, which NestJS covers, and wrote a decision record proposing its removal.
- Result
- The dependency and its rollback logic came out, leaving the backend with a single store of record.
Goes with
Architecture Decision Records
Distributed Systems
Microservices
SaaS Architecture
API Design
Infrastructure ProvisioningThrow me a paper plane
Write a line; I’ll find it in my inbox.