Hi, I'm Prathap.
I've spent 14 years building distributed systems: real-time ad exchanges doing 100K requests a second, data platforms for hedge funds, fraud systems for an online grocer, and now identity and access architecture at Salesforce. This site is where I write down what production taught me.
distributed systems · real-time platforms · data engineering · identity & access
Recent writing
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A deep dive into building an AI voice interviewer: the STT/LLM/TTS pipeline, why we took interview-ending away from the LLM, shipping on a three-person budget, and what the YC application and Product Hunt launch actually felt like.
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Why the two-database habit is expensive, what HTAP vendors actually do under the hood, and how far plain Postgres goes when you load a decade of stock data into it.
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Moving a six-year-old ad platform from IBM to AWS in four weekends, watching the bill go from $180K to $400K, and the unglamorous work of getting it back to $200K.