Shashank Joshi

I'm fan of numbers since my childhood — back when I played cricket it was about keeping my strike rate high, now it's about keeping latency low.Backend engineer, ~8 months in. Most of what I've actually learned has come from going down rabbit holes that didn't strictly need to be gone down. Why is this endpoint slow. Why does this scheduler drift over a week. Why does the easy fix feel wrong even though it works.A few things I've picked up along the way:– the obvious solution and the right one are usually different by one constraint you didn't notice.– "it works" and "I understand why it works" are two different states. most bugs live in the gap.– the hard parts of a system are rarely the parts that look hard.– if a fix takes 5 minutes, the bug usually took someone else 5 hours. respect that.On the side I build small things just to understand a tool properly — an AI backend project right now, something with geospatial queries before that. Different stack, same reason. Also do DSA, because problem-solving is a separate muscle and I want to keep it sharp.Interested in backend, distributed systems, AI infra — anywhere there's a system to understand deeply. Open to chats with people who've been doing this longer than me.