Internal engineering estate
2022–2024
Smarter.Codes' internal estate: a MediaWiki and Wikibase documentation portal, public website and engineering consoles used by staff.
Cloud and Platform
SRE
I applied site reliability engineering practices to build robust.
See its threads in the worldUsed on
Cloud estate management
2020–2024
Smarter.Codes' internal effort to audit its cloud servers and cut hosting cost.
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.
Paid trading community platform
2020–2024
A paid community for stock traders: a membership site plus a chat server with in-conversation price charts.
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.
Medical-device monitoring for hospitals
2019–2021
Monitoring and remote-access system for hospital medical devices: live dashboards and alerts for staff, browser-based remote access for service engineers.
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
Observability
Kubernetes
CI/CD
Infrastructure Provisioning
Terraform
DockerThrow me a paper plane
Write a line; I’ll find it in my inbox.