Jayesh Vyavahare

Tech lead(8 months+)

Here I worked with a llm centeric application a chat interface for the users with llm, learned about markdown rendering, katex rendering, iframes, streaming and much more. Learned a lot about being an engineering lead as well. Its an active effort and requires contribution from all aspects technical and non-technical. Communication and avoiding ambiguity is key, more is better. We scaled to 400k+ user and DAU of 10k+ users I think. It was a fast paced environment. We also faced quite interesting challenge when streaming we were if we were not streaming anything from backend, the stream would end after around 90 seconds, this took us some time to debug, it was an implementation of QUIC protocol on HTTP3, we solved that by sending heartbeat at regular interval to keep the stream alive. Also I was really excited about oxlint and tsgo, so I did a small poc with both of them, oxlint worked pretty well, it was small codebase but lint time went from 12 seconds to 3 seconds, this will scale well, but not sure what happened with tsgo could not get the expected performance, maybe I did something wrong. Tech stack was kinda same React, Chakra UI, NestJS, Redux + RTK, React Query, MySQL, Nx, SSE.

IC(6 months)

Worked as an IC on Labeling tool, which is used to train AI models via RLHF and SFT methods. Here I worked on making dashboards, caching, api optimizations, features and bugs in general. This was my introduction to NestJS which is one of the most underrated JS backend development framework. I had very little backend knowledge but NestJS made it very easy, except for the very cryptic errors(skill issue lol). But other than that NestJS is pretty amazing. Also got to work with React query and growth book. Man they need work on GrowthBook UI and backend, its stupid slow. Also, I will never understand why Jira is so slow. Here scale of problem was very different than what I know. Learned a lot about distributed systems. Tech stack was kinda same React, Chakra UI, NestJS, Redux + RTK, React Query, MySQL, Nx, SSE.

Tech lead(9 months)

As much as I got to learn from every mentor about leadership I was not ready for the wrecking ball that is transition from IC to lead role, at least this soon. As one of my closest friend Richeek says the people who work under first time managers are unfortunate. It took me some time to learn but in the end I did get a hang of it. More meeting and design discussions, little less of writing code and a lot of code reviews. In this time, I led many projects and had a team of 7 people to manage, worked on real time communications between devices, mobile app, lot of POCs, building more internal tools and AI integration. Reading lot of open source code, better CI/CD, and integrating new and better tools. I also had a lot of fun with my team. We had planned going out once, that still hasn't happened.

Frontend developer(1 year)

As part of the frontend team, our primary focus was creating pixel-perfect UI and smoothest UX, we can deliver. Stack hasn't changed, mostly worked with React, MUI, TypeScript, Postgres,Hasura, Apollo, Graphql, REST, Websockets, Subscriptions, Redux + RTK, flags management. We were facing new challenges like scaling, at that point, fixes needed to go fast with lot of monitoring on the field issues. I implemented auth, OTP login, algolia for better search, graphql optimizations, lot of CDN optimizations. Solving lot of bugs, implemented lot of features(if you don't keep a brag doc, please start keeping one, brain forgets at astonishing speed not skills and all things that you ever did) and started doing peer reviews. We also worked on lot of internal tools. Working more closely with product and CX teams. Oh! got to work with Vibhav Gupta and Dharmesh Rajput as tech leads and Chaitanya Hegde as product manager, at different times. Leveled up hard after working closely with them. I still carry lot of principles of software and product development learned from them. Also I broke production on few occasions.

Internship(3 months)

First internship was about 800km away, to a new city Bengaluru. upliance was a startup then, with high energy and really fun people. Everyone had every role, on my first day I went to a demo of the product with Mahek(Founder and CEO), got to see how product works. Also had a ride back on Ather with Mohit(Founder and CTO), got to know a lot about how things worked and well fun and intimidating chat, kidding. Really innovative product if you haven't seen it yet. My experience as an intern was asking lot of questions to everyone and doing more and more whatever I can, mostly software but I also did enjoy occasional product demos, talking to people about product. Mostly worked with React, Retool, Postgres, Hasura, and fighting people that Linux is better. I think the best thing I learned here is user experience, users come first and all effort is towards creating better experience for user, anything else and it just doesn't work. While the whole upliance experience was completely different than what I was expecting from a "job", working in so close quarters with founders and so many brilliant people was a whole amazing experience in itself. Thanks to founders and whole upliance family for making it one of best starts one can ever hope for.