Biraj's

i'm an average competent software developer. i am a chess amateur (roughly 1700 on chess.com) and i like reading Sherlock Holmes.

Biraj Patel

work experience

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

LaneSquare Technology Pvt. Ltd. feb 2023 - present
- software developer sept 2023
  engineering 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).
  - 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 component that i built to consume these events and perform some actions.
  - created Zapier, Slack and WhatsApp integrations for Thinkstack. also built its API key management system for authentication.
- 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

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

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

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

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