Hello, world, and why I built this site

Welcome, and thanks for stopping by.

I’m Arnav, a Python focused software engineer based in London. For the last few years I’ve been at PrivateCircle, where I joined as the third engineer and ended up leading a team of ten across backend and DevOps. In that time I’ve built real time data products, a matching engine, and a research platform that now serves more than 500 enterprise customers. I’ve also broken plenty of things along the way, which is usually where the lessons worth keeping come from.

Why this site exists

For a long time my whole online presence was a GitHub profile and a portfolio I never quite finished. I wanted one place that is actually mine, somewhere to send people who ask what I work on and to write things down properly instead of letting them rot in private notes.

What I’ll write about

There’s no strict plan, but these are the things I keep circling back to:

• Backend and distributed systems. Python with asyncio and FastAPI, MongoDB, Elasticsearch, RabbitMQ, and the messy reality of scaling them.
• DevOps and infrastructure. Kubernetes, Terraform, Ansible, and the slow work of making deployments boring in the good way.
• Data platforms. Change data capture, streaming, search, and the pipelines that feed them.
• AI and MLOps. What actually holds up once you put LLMs into a product people depend on.

Some of it will be writing and some will be short videos. Either way I want to write the version of the post I wish I’d found when I was working the thing out myself.

If something here is useful, wrong, or worth a conversation, reach out. See you in the next one.