I started my career as a backend engineer at a startup in Chandigarh when cloud-native was still a buzzword nobody had fully unpacked. We ran on-premise, managed our own servers, and shipped code by FTPing files to production. It was chaotic and I loved it.
Over the next five years, I moved through increasingly complex environments — a fintech scale-up handling billions of transactions, a SaaS platform with a global microservices footprint, and eventually a consulting role where I was parachuted into engineering teams mid-crisis. That last job was where I learned what I actually know about production systems.
"You only learn what a system actually does when it breaks in ways the designer never anticipated."
Around 2022, I started getting asked to speak at conferences. The talks I gave were different — I wasn't selling a product or a methodology. I was just describing what I'd seen. Engineers connected with that honesty in a way that surprised me.
The podcast came from the same impulse. I wanted conversations that weren't sanitised for vendors or optimised for LinkedIn likes. Two shows later and a growing community of engineers who've told me the podcast changed how they think about their work — that's what drives me.