Biraj's

i am a software developer. i play chess (roughly 1700 on chess.com) and badminton. i am currently reading Sherlock Holmes (not consistently tho).

Biraj Patel

work experience

(you can click on the role summary to see the details)

Outspeed sept 2024 - present
- backend engineer sept 2024
  backend engineering and managing cloud infra at Outspeed.
  - set up log shipping pipeline: sending logs generated by users' jobs on EC2s (Nomad client nodes) to Loki hosted on Grafana. then used Loki's /tail websocket endpoint to stream logs from Grafana to the backend, which then forwards them to the frontend using server-sent events.
  - created Terraform configurations for management of AWS infrastructure - a bunch of EC2 instances set up with with cloud-init user-data scripts, S3 buckets and files, Redis ElastiCache, ECR, etc.
LaneSquare Technology Pvt. Ltd. feb 2023 - sept 2024
- software developer sept 2023 - sept 2024
  built thinkstack.ai, a platform where businesses can create customer support chatbots.
  - developed backend services for ThinkstackAI - GraphQL with Node.js, REST APIs with Flask (Python), Redis for caching and S3 for file management.
  - implemented Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) for LLM in Thinkstack: chunking user data, generating embeddings, and storing them in Pinecone (and later querying them with similarity search of course).
  - built user intent detection system using GPT's function calling. gvien a set of intents, it identifies appropriate action to be taken, such as collecting user details, creating tickets, handing off to a human, etc.
  - developed Thinkstack's frontend (app.thinkstack.ai) in React.js and Tailwind CSS, while optimizing for performance through the use of memoization and debouncing.
  - created an event notification system using pub/sub to send backend events (e.g., website crawling completion) to the frontend, which uses a React context provider i wrote to consume these events and perform some actions.
  - built sub-users, roles and permissions management system for the app - both backend and frontend. same for human handoff flow.
  - created Zapier, Slack and WhatsApp integrations for Thinkstack. also built its API key management system for authentication. users can use their API keys to authenticate themselves at Zapier's Thinkstack integration.
- software developer intern feb 2023 - aug 2023
  migrated Pickcel's backend codebase from node 12 to node 18. also learnt Docker.
  - worked with TypeScript, Node.js, and Mongoose based codebase to update and optimize existing REST APIs, creating new ones, and overall improving the code quality.
  - optimized Dockerfile for our on-premise setup by properly reordering layers, reducing consecutive build times and improving cache utilization. also added redis to the stack.
  - set up integration testing from scratch using Jest, SuperTest and GitHub Actions.
  - built a custom Ubuntu 20.04 ISO featuring automated installation and Docker setup, facilitating swift deployment of containers on system startup.
  - introduced semantic git commits, coding conventions, and structure, which is now embraced by all developers in the organization.

projects

TCP Server

a single-threaded TCP server written in C with an event loop using the poll() system call, without any third-party library. the server listens on a port and echoes back received data. i've also written a simple client to test the server.
source code

focker: linux containers

Focker is a toy container runtime written in Go. it is based on Ubuntu 22.04 rootfs. this was an attempt to understand how Docker works internally.
source code

NumPy from scratch in Go

i am implementing Neural Networks from scratch in Go and as a byproduct of it, i also created my own version of NumPy for tensor operations like +, -, *, /, matrix multiplication, transpose etc. it also supports broadcasting.
source code

web wanderer

web wanderer is a multi-threaded web crawler written in Python. it uses concurrent.futures.ThreadPoolExecutor and Playwright to crawl and download web pages. it handles dynamically rendered websites, making it capable of extracting content from modern web applications.
source code

JSON parser

a JSON parser written in Go from scratch. it prints error message with line and column number. Phil Eaton's blog post helped me write the lexer and parser. it was fun.
source code

texterm

it is a very minimal, nano-like text editor written in C from scratch, using only the standard library. i followed Build Your Own Text Editor tutorial. i learnt a lot about C and linux terminals while implementing this.
source code

array (or tensor) visualizer

it's a simple tool that helps you visualize multi-dimensional arrays. it uses HTML canvas for rendering the image. i wrote this when i was trying to understand neural networks.
source code | try it

findREp

a simple GUI tool written with Tkinter in Python to find and replace all the matches of a regular expression in files. you can either select the files directly or select a folder, in which case it will recursively look for matches in files inside the subfolders. i wrote this because i wasn't aware of VS Code's search functionality at the time.
source code

brainfuck interpreter

a Brainfuck interpreter written in C. it can also transpile Brainfuck programs to C. this interpreter takes about 45 seconds to run Erik Dubbelboer's Mandelbrot program.
source code

welcome to Biraj's

Biraj Patel

work experience

Outspeed sept 2024 - present

backend engineer sept 2024

LaneSquare Technology Pvt. Ltd. feb 2023 - sept 2024

software developer sept 2023 - sept 2024

software developer intern feb 2023 - aug 2023

skills