about

About

I didn't get interested in systems by reading about them.

It happened at 2 AM during my third year, tracing a memory issue in a service I'd written myself. The application was leaking — not catastrophically, just a slow climb that took six hours to matter. I'd already checked the obvious places: the connection pool, the cache, the goroutines. Everything looked clean.

So I went one layer down.

What I found was that glibc's allocator was maintaining separate arenas per thread — a performance optimization that turns pathological under specific thread-to-core ratios. The memory wasn't leaking. It was being held in per-arena free lists that weren't being returned to the OS because the arenas were never quiescent long enough. The application was fine. The allocator was doing exactly what it was designed to do. The problem was that nobody had told me that design existed.

That's when I understood what backend engineering actually is: a series of contracts between layers, most of which are never documented because the people who wrote them assumed the people using them would read the source.

I've been reading source code ever since.

At Repos Energy I worked on migrating two critical services — identity and order placement — from a Django monolith to Go microservices. The p99 on the identity service went from 1.25 seconds to 80 milliseconds. That number is satisfying, but what I remember is the pprof flame graph the week before the cutover, where the goroutine spike source was finally obvious once you looked at the right layer of the profile.

I write to make that layer visible. Not because systems are obscure, but because they don't have to be.

I'm finishing a B.E. in Computer Science at TIET Patiala. Before that, Rajasthan.

Get in touch

The best way to reach me is email: vp2005rawal@gmail.com. I'm also on GitHub and LinkedIn.

Credentials

IEEE Xplore — Zero-Trust Security in Distributed API Infrastructure (InC4 2025)

Google DeepMind OpenSpiel — merged PR #1426 · Windows wheel support for C++ extensions

B.E. Computer Science, Thapar Institute (TIET) · advised by Dr. Parteek Bhatia · May 2026