About

👋🏻 Hi, I’m Junaid

I am a senior at KIIT, Bhubaneshwar studying Computer Science and Engineering.

I did not enjoy college that much during the pandemic so I kind of quiet quit my degree and started working, I am currently working as a SWE in the Platform team at Atlan.

At Atlan, I work in the platform orchestration team, it’s responsible for building all the integrations available on the platform, all these integrations are basically composable data pipelines. Lately, I’ve been working primarily in backend and systems development but I dabble into a bit of frontend as well from time to time. Currently working and learning a lot in the data engineering space with argo workflows, kubernetes and graph databases.

You can find my side projects on my github. This blog is just me trying to document various ideas, projects and learning experiments.

My Story

I have enjoyed creating things since I was a little kid.

I got my first computer when I was 10, I spent a lot of time designing stupid flyers, cards, e-vites etc. made some money as well doing it. I genuinely enjoyed it, computers and the internet gave me the infinite canvas I always wanted.

I started programming when I was 13, I taught myself python watching youtube tutorials to build some hacky scripts and UIs using Tkinter, I moved on to teach myself how to build websites and android apps. This is when I discovered linux and got into that whole world – learnt about open source, the kernel, how the internet works, systems engineering etc.

This is what I wanted to do as an adult.

Like most type A kids brought up in India, I spent three years of my teenage trying to get into an engineering college so I could study computer science. That’s how I landed in KIIT, Bhubaneswar.

First 9 months of college were super fun, I learnt a ton, attended hackathons, joined clubs, did some freelance work, met amazing people.

And then covid happened, online classes started and I had to move back home, discord and cs:go was my social life for two years. But this gave me a lot of time for myself to learn and build with my friends.

I managed to get an internship as a backend engineer at Atlan in June 2021. It was remote so I could manage it with my “online” college. I really enjoyed the work and the team here, I could see a path of growth here – both technical and personal, so I decided to stick around.

Apart from work, I love writing, cycling, swimming and traveling. I am a huge nerd about PKM systems, hmu if you need app suggestions.

I simp for long form content, I try to spend a lot of time with podcasts, well-filmed yt vids, books, pdfs and my RSS feed. I love reading/listening about psychology, history, society, tech, design and economics.

You can find me on twitter @junaidrahxm